Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The jailing of CEO Peter Murrell exposes the true character of the Scottish National Party
Former chief executive of the Scottish National Party (SNP), Peter Murrell, was sentenced to five years and three months in prison on Tuesday for embezzling party funds. In a case postponed until after the recent Scottish general election, Murrell pled guilty in May to robbing £400,310 from the SNP between August 2010 and October 2022.
Married until January 2025 to former Scottish First Minister and then SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, Murrell admitted fraudulently acquiring over 600 items ranging from DVD box sets to luxury watches, Lalique salt and pepper grinders priced at £2,618, a £4,225 James Bond fountain pen, two cars and a £140,000 Niesmann+Bischoff motorhome. Sturgeon denied all knowledge of the illegal behaviour patterns of the magpie she was living with, arguing that his annual salary as SNP CEO, around £100,000, was high enough for her not to suspect anything amiss. Sturgeon’s own salary in 2023 was over £165,000.
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The leading party of Scottish nationalism, whose long-term goal is the creation of an independent Scottish capitalist state, has been exposed as a corrupt, anti-democratic, and right-wing instrument of an aspiring and grasping clique of the Scottish bourgeoisie and upper middle class. Murrell’s excesses, and eagerness to fleece supporters of his own party, personify the SNP’s attempts to facilitate the operations of the global financial aristocracy and super rich in pursuit of international investment in Scottish resources, while offering several million workers up as cheap labor.
The SNP was only able to sustain a veneer of representing some form of alternative to the Tories and Labour Party because of the role of the pseudo-left.
For decades, a bewildering collection of parties, and party factions—claiming some allegiance to socialism—think-tanks, and campaigns, newspapers, reviews and blogs sought to portray Scottish independence as something other than a reactionary and dangerous dead end. Scottish nationalism was hailed as a means to challenge British imperialism, reversing right-wing policies in Westminster, advancing democratic rights being imperilled in London, and taking steps towards socialism. This deceit saw the pro-independence pseudo-left continually deepening and maintaining national divisions in the working class across Britain.
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Scotland and England voluntarily united over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, thereby creating a broader platform for the huge expansion of capitalism, the emergence of the first industrial working class in the world and the rise of British imperialism, of which Scotland was a crucial component. Thereafter only the struggle for the abolition of capitalism, for socialism and workers’ government in Britain and internationally represented and represents a way forward. This is what the pseudo-left promotion of Scottish, and Welsh, nationalism, rejects.
The pseudo-left groups across Britain promoted the Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn (2015-2020), presenting this as a means of reviving national reformism but still argued for Scottish separatism which Corbyn did not. In the years immediately following, Labour in Scotland—one of the party’s most right-wing outposts—recovered some of the support lost to it during the period of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Thatcherite leadership.
When Corbyn allowed his supporters and then himself to be driven out under Keir Starmer’s leadership of the party—despite the hundreds of thousands who joined Labour to back Corbyn—the pseudo-left turned to promoting Corbyn’s Your Party, and a Your Party Scotland, as the next vehicle for the same reformist aspirations. Both have now collapsed, due to the impossibility of reviving national reformism under conditions of globalized production.
It took Your Party Scotland all of two months to split from Your Party on the basis of Scottish separatism—with its entire 12-member Interim Scottish Executive Committee declaring the project “over”.
In consequence, beneficiaries of the successive pseudo-left debacles have been albeit much discredited SNP, the Greens who also support Scottish independence and Reform UK which had never before held seats in the Scottish parliament. The Tories were also able to win a recent by-election from the SNP in Aberdeen South, exploiting concerns among those dependent on the rapidly declining oil industry.
Workers and young people seeking a genuine socialist party, opposed to all forms of nationalism and seeking an end to militarism, social inequality and war should attend next month’s SEP public meeting in Glasgow–“Your Party’s collapse – time to build the Socialist Equality Party”.
2. Resident doctors in England oppose BMA sellout deal with government
Resident doctors have been speaking out against the “new offer” they are being balloted on by the British Medical Association (BMA) in a referendum running from June 18-26.
The snap vote follows the cancellation by the BMA’s Resident Doctors Committee (RDC) of the four-day strike in England by around 50,000 doctors in the National Health Service (NHS) which was due to start on Monday, June 15. After a year of threats by the Starmer government and media smears, resident doctors were preparing to take their sixteenth round of strike action since March 2023, demanding full pay restoration and action to resolve the mounting jobs crisis.
The RDC leadership, headed by Dr. Jack Fletcher, called off the walkout before members had any opportunity to examine the proposed agreement. Doctors were informed by email on Saturday evening, barely 24 hours before the scheduled strike action and only provided highlights. The RDC executive had spent a week in closed-door discussions with Labour Health Secretary James Murray.
The WSWS article stated in its call for a mobilisation of resident doctors against the RDC sellout: “As a matter of principle, no offer should be used to call off mandated strike action before BMA members have been given time to scrutinise its contents and determine whether it meets their demands.”
Rather than a “new offer”, the proposals are a repackaging of a deal already rejected that led to six days of strike action in April. It offers nothing meaningful on real-term wages, still down 21 percent compared with 2008. It accepts the 3.5 percent award imposed by the government for this year and combines this with a reform of the pay progression structure to dress up an average increase of 6.6 percent by April 2027. The new “nodal points” are linked to productivity demands, meaning more work with less staff.
The deal recycles the government’s earlier promise of 4,500 specialty training places spread over three years. This does nothing to address the immediate crisis facing the profession, with around 20,000 doctors currently unable to secure specialty training posts.
The RDC spin of a “new offer” has met a scathing response by resident doctors who have taken to social media in support of a No vote. Replying to the BMA’s video announcement from Fletcher on X, one doctor wrote: “Pack your bags, this is an embarrassingly bad offer. It speaks volumes that you would try and trick the membership into taking it.”
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NHS FightBack calls on resident doctors to deliver an emphatic No vote in the referendum. They should demand a motion of no confidence in Fletcher and the RDC executive and fight to establish rank-and-file control over their dispute.
New democratic organizations, independent of the union bureaucracy, are required to place decision-making power in the hands of resident doctors.
3. Kenya’s President Ruto threatens June 25 Gen-Z anniversary protests
Kenyan President William Ruto has issued a deadly threat ahead of the June 25 anniversary of Gen-Z protests this week.
The protests, which erupted in June 2024 against the Ruto government’s International Monetary Fund-backed Finance Bill, rapidly developed into a mass youth-led uprising against austerity, unemployment, soaring living costs, police violence and the political establishment.
Speaking at the National Productivity and Performance Conference in Nairobi, Ruto declared that Kenya “believes viciously in order,” insisting that it is “a civilized nation” and “an organized society” which believes in “the rule of law.”
While claiming that citizens have the right “to petition or to protest,” Ruto warned, “The one thing that is not going to happen is that people will be mobilized to destroy property or to cause chaos or mayhem. That will not happen.” He repeatedly insisted that “that will not happen.”
His concern is to prevent any interruption to the generation of profits: “Workers will go to work because that’s how we raise the productivity of our nation. Businesses will open and grow our economy. Farmers too and everybody so that we can take the nation forward.”
This is a warning from a government with a bloody record of police-state repression. Since taking office in 2022, Ruto has killed over 250 protesters, carried out thousands of arbitrary arrests, overseen the abduction of at least 74 protesters—23 of whom are still missing—deployed the army, banned protests, and mobilized state-funded goons to disrupt demonstrations.
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None of the fundamental conditions that drove millions of young people and workers into opposition in 2024 have been resolved. Kenyan workers confront a crushing cost-of-living crisis. The price of fuel, transport, food and basic necessities continues to eat into already meagre wages. The recent surge in fuel costs was intensified by the disruption of oil markets by the US-Israeli war against Iran. In May, pump prices rose sharply, with diesel reaching record levels. The increases reverberate through every section of economic life: public transport fares, food prices, the cost of moving goods and the daily survival of workers and the rural poor. Millions of young people face unemployment, underemployment or casual work, while families are pushed deeper into debt and poverty.
The June 25 demonstrations are being driven above all among young people mobilised through social media by hashtags like #HakiSasa and #JusticeNow. Their immediate focus is the commemoration of those killed in the 2024 uprising, the demand for an end to police violence and the insistence that those responsible for killings, abductions and repression be held to account.
But the struggle against police violence cannot be confined to appeals for police accountability. The police are an institution of class rule: their essential function is to defend imperialist interests and the wealth of the 125 individuals who now control more wealth than 77 percent of the population, over 42 million people.
As long as capitalism survives, the state will retain armed bodies of men to enforce bourgeois rule. Every government will ultimately rely on the police to defend private property and suppress the working class. The struggle against police killings must be connected to the broader class struggle against social inequality, opposition to austerity and resistance to war. It requires the independent mobilization of workers and rural masses against the capitalist state and the financial aristocracy it serves.
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Workers and youth must reject every attempt to subordinate their struggle to the bourgeois opposition parties and Stalinist organizations seeking to channel mass anger behind police reform and parliamentary maneuvers.
The way forward in the struggle against the Ruto government is the independent organization of rank-and-file committees in workplaces, schools, universities and working-class neighborhoods, uniting the fight against police violence with strikes, resistance to austerity, opposition to imperialist war and the socialist struggle against capitalism.
4. Sri Lanka: JVP/NPP government prepares to further suppress media freedom
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government has gazetted a bill to establish a statutory body, the Chartered Institute of Media Professionals of Sri Lanka (CIMP). It will significantly undermine media freedom by imposing a framework of state-directed accreditation, oversight and disciplinary control on journalists and all media workers.
The draft legislation was released on June 5 and is expected to be presented to parliament soon. As the JVP/NPP holds a two-thirds majority in parliament, the legislation is expected to pass easily.
The government says the bill fulfils a long-standing demand by media organisations for the establishment of an independent institute to provide training, research, and other services. The bill states that its “primary objective” is to “introduce, promote and maintain high professional standards for media professionals in Sri Lanka.”
In fact, the text of the bill makes clear that the proposed CIMP would be a thoroughly anti-democratic body aimed at strengthening state control over the media and intimidating journalists.
The Sri Lanka Working Journalists Association (SLWJA) issued a statement on June 7 calling for the bill’s immediate withdrawal and criticising its anti-democratic provisions and their implications for media freedom. The SLWJA acknowledged that “discussions on creating an independent body to protect journalists’ rights have taken place for years,” but warned that the government’s proposal reveals “an agenda rooted in media suppression.”
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Since it won the 2024 election the JVP/NPP government has continued to enforce brutal IMF-dictated austerity measures, while aligning the country ever more closely with US imperialism. Its attack on media freedom is part of its preparations to suppress growing opposition among workers and the rural poor to the intensifying attacks on their living standards. That is the real meaning of statements by President Dissanayake and members of his government calling for the media to be subordinated to the government’s “economic war to develop” the country.
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The Socialist Equality Party opposes any laws that can be used against media workers and to attack the freedom of the press. The struggle against media repression and for democratic rights is a component of the political struggle against the capitalist system itself based on a revolutionary socialist perspective. No chartered institute, no ministerial regulation, and no disciplinary committee can be permitted to determine what the working class may know, say, or publish.
5. Job cuts mount across Australia
Reports last week of hundreds of job cuts at two vastly different businesses—Hancock Prospecting and Lincraft—underscore the impact of rising unemployment across the Australian working class.
Hancock sacked between 300 and 500 workers in Western Australia’s iron-rich Pilbara region, up to 10 percent of its workforce, according to the Australian Financial Review (AFR). The company said this was part of “identifying opportunities to optimize how ore is mined, processed and blended across its operations.” In other words, the remaining workers can expect to be hit with demands for stepped-up productivity.
Hancock is the world’s fifth-largest iron ore producer, owned by Australia’s richest individual, Gina Rinehart, whose net wealth is over $39 billion.
Lincraft, a homewares, fabric and craft retailer, announced it would close all of its 30 brick-and-mortar shopfronts across Australia and New Zealand, destroying some 300 jobs. The company cited changing shopper behavior, increased operating costs, and growing pressure from low-cost overseas competitors as the reasons behind its move to online-only operations.
The Lincraft closure news came just a week after Barbeques Galore announced it would shutter its 62 Australian shops, eliminating around 500 jobs. The fate of a further 27 locations owned by franchisees, and of their staff, is unclear. The company collapsed into voluntary administration in February and a new buyer could not be found to take over the business.
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A recent survey by Westpac and the Melbourne Institute found consumer sentiment declined 2.9 percent from May to June, to among the lowest levels in half a century, with “inflation” and “international news” major areas of concern. The study noted that “Purchase attitudes remain downbeat,” with the willingness of respondents to “buy a major item” at historically low levels.
This points to the likelihood of further job losses and business closures in the retail sector, exacerbating a process that is already underway, highlighted by the collapse last year of Mosaic Brands, owner of chains such as Noni B, Rivers and Millers, resulting in the closure of around 700 stores and the destruction of close to 3,000 jobs.
The impact of job cuts in retail will be most sharply borne by younger workers. While the median age of workers across all industries is 39, in retail it is 23. Already, youth unemployment was at 11.1 percent in April, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). This is more than twice the overall figure, which is itself at an almost five-year high of 4.5 percent.
In reality, the ABS figures are a gross underestimation, primarily because the agency defines anyone working even one hour a week as employed.
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Similarly, finance, technology and other white-collar professions have featured prominently in recent job cut announcements.
Officeworks, a nationwide office supplies retail chain, is making hundreds of customer service and back-office employees redundant while shifting many functions to offshore hubs in India and the Philippines.
In March, software company Atlassian announced the slashing of 10 percent of its global workforce, around 1,600 jobs, including almost 500 in Australia. Chief executive Mike Cannon-Brookes—number 22 on the AFR’s Rich List—bluntly said “it would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas.”
The previous month, WiseTech Global, one of Australia’s largest technology companies, announced it would slash up to 2,000 jobs over the next 18 months. Highlighting the impact of agentic AI, CEO Zubin Appoo declared, “The era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over.”
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The wholesale slashing of jobs is being directly spearheaded by the federal Labor government, which is set to axe some 28,000 public sector roles over the next four years, after Treasurer Jim Chalmers vowed in December to “unlock the full potential of AI in public service delivery.” Numerous government departments and agencies are already trying to push staff out through “voluntary” redundancies, while others have imposed hiring freezes.
The $38 billion in cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) contained in last month’s budget will mean the destruction of vast numbers of jobs in the care sector, as hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities are deprived of funding for essential day-to-day support.
The response of the unions to Labor’s austerity budget—celebration of its less than meager cost-of-living relief and minor, since-abandoned, tax changes, and silence on its brutal social spending cuts—underscores that these organizations cannot be relied upon to defend a single job or social program.
Instead, workers will have to take matters into their own hands and build independent rank-and-file committees, as part of the fight to mobilize the working class in a political struggle against Labor and the capitalist system itself.
6. Another industrial inferno in Los Angeles working class neighborhood
The catastrophic industrial fire that erupted June 17 at the Lineage Logistics cold-storage facility in Boyle Heights has become one of the most significant industrial disasters in Los Angeles in recent years. The inferno, which continued smoldering for days, exposed major failures in industrial safety systems, triggering toxic air-quality alerts across eastern Los Angeles County and creating an ongoing environmental and public health emergency for surrounding communities.
At approximately 2:35 p.m. on June 17, a fire broke out on the roof of the 491,000-square-foot warehouse at 1400 S. Los Palos Street. Lineage has stated that the fire appears to have begun during solar panel testing by contractors, though the cause remains under investigation.
Because the solar panels continued generating high-voltage direct current after the building’s electrical disconnects were activated, firefighters could not safely mount a direct rooftop attack. As heat penetrated the structure, it ruptured a pressurized anhydrous ammonia refrigeration line. The release of highly toxic and flammable ammonia triggered localized explosions, forcing the Los Angeles Fire Department to abandon interior operations.
LAFD deployed helicopters for aerial water drops on the commercial structure, a tactic normally associated with wildfires. Chief Jaime Moore noted it was only the second time in his 31-year career that aerial suppression had been used on a structural fire. The size of the warehouse rendered conventional firefighting methods largely ineffective.
With refrigeration systems disabled, roughly 85 million pounds of frozen meat, poultry, pork and bread began decomposing inside the damaged structure. Building walls reportedly leaned inward by as much as two feet due to heat damage and the weight of accumulated water, making safe entry impossible.
Firefighters subsequently detected hydrogen fluoride, a highly toxic gas associated with thermal runaway in lithium-ion batteries, traced to dozens of battery-powered forklifts inside the facility. Changing wind conditions reignited smoldering debris, producing renewed plumes of smoke and requiring deployment of a structural firefighting robot.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District and Los Angeles County Department of Public Health issued unhealthy-air alerts covering Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, Montebello and downtown Los Angeles. Sensors detected elevated levels of bromine and chlorine compounds. Shelter-in-place orders were issued and millions of N95 masks made available.
The Boyle Heights fire follows a decades-long process through which successive administrations, led in California by the Democratic Party, have transformed working-class communities into free-fire zones for logistics, warehousing and industrial development.
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The failure to prevent the Boyle Heights disaster was not simply a matter of incompetence. It reflects deliberate political decisions made over decades.
A 2025 California state audit found that Cal/OSHA operated with a vacancy rate exceeding 30 percent and routinely failed to conduct on-site inspections following serious accidents and injuries. In numerous cases, investigators relied on correspondence instead of physical inspections, while employers frequently ignored requests without consequences. Even when citations were issued, penalties were often dramatically reduced after appeals.
This is the regulatory apparatus overseen by Governor Gavin Newsom and the California Democratic Party. Following the Boyle Heights fire, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Newsom declared a state of emergency. Yet their administrations preside over the same enforcement system that repeatedly documented hazards while allowing dangerous conditions to persist.
Newsom also vetoed Senate Bill 674 in 2024, legislation that would have required statewide fence-line air monitoring, real-time public alerts during toxic releases and independent audits following major industrial incidents. Even those limited reforms were incompatible with the interests of the corporate oligarchy the Democratic Party represents.
As the World Socialist Web Site recently documented in its analysis of the Garden Grove chemical emergency, the Democratic Party does not fail to regulate corporations. It regulates on their behalf.
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The trade union bureaucracy plays an essential role in maintaining this arrangement. Organizations such as the Teamsters, representing workers throughout the logistics industry, have accepted conditions that leave workers and surrounding communities exposed to dangerous workplaces while suppressing any independent struggle against the corporations.
The working class cannot entrust its safety to corporations, regulatory agencies or the Democratic Party. Workers and residents must build independent rank-and-file organizations, democratically controlled and free from the influence of corporate management, the union bureaucracy and both capitalist parties. Such organizations must fight for workers’ control over safety conditions, investigations, the shutdown of dangerous facilities and the prosecution of corporations and officials whose negligence places lives at risk.
7. Insurance companies use rate shopping to boost returns from private credit
The analysis of the use of private ratings to boost the value of risky assets might be dismissed as being of marginal significance in and of itself because the amount of undercapitalization of $4.5 billion a year is not a large amount in relation to the overall market. The same thing, it should be recalled, was said of the subprime market before the [2008 global financial] crash.
And like the subprime situation, the increased use of private rating must be placed in its broader context—one of increasing instability in the global financial system.
This was pointed to by US president Trump in remarks to reporters at the G7 meetings in France last week. He said that he had pushed for an agreement with Iran because the alternative—a resumption of the military onslaught which he has threatened and may well carry out—would have crashed the market.
If military action had resumed the market “would go down to levels that nobody ever saw before, maybe except for 1929,” he said. The alternative to the deal would be “a world-wide depression” and the one president he did not want to be was Herbert Hoover.
Trump is given to daily bluster, bluff and a continuous stream of lies and falsification with his eye firmly fixed on Wall Street. But his words, on this occasion, should be taken seriously because they indicate the extreme fragility of the stock market boom and the financial system more broadly, based on speculation and the accumulation of vast quantities of debt and the existence of a number of potential triggers for a crisis.
Elevated ratings of highly dubious financial assets were one of the triggers for the 2008 crash and may well be so again.
8. The scum rises to the top: Reflecting Pool fiasco epitomizes Trump’s Washington
... The Reflecting Pool project is a case study of Trump’s governing style: a gaudy makeover of a national symbol, driven by vanity and the aesthetics of an ignorant real estate swindler, routed through secretive and anti-democratic means, providing a financial bonanza for Trump cronies, and collapsing in an incompetent mess while Trump scapegoats supposed enemies rather than take responsibility.
Trump ordered the renovation of the Reflection Pool as part of his effort to put a personal stamp on every aspect of the celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. He described the pool as “filthy” and “disgusting” and proceeded to make it so. He short-circuited the normal processes of review, bypassing groups like the Commission of Fine Arts, National Capital Planning Commission and Advisory Council on Historic Preservation even though he had fired their previous members and replaced them with his own nominees.
The contracts for the renovation were steered without competitive bidding to companies linked to Trump personally, including Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which had no previous federal contracting work, but Trump asserted it had done pools for his resorts. Watchdog groups said that its contract had a built-in profit margin far higher than usual for federal projects. The water purification system went to a company owned by John Cafaro, a Trump donor who has pleaded guilty to two felonies.
Costs ballooned from $1.8 million, the initial estimate, to more than $14 million, and the final total, after the pool is again drained and resurfaced, is likely to be far higher.
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For their part, the Democrats have treated the affair as a matter of “waste, fraud and abuse,” reducing a case study in oligarchic looting, fabricated sabotage and the deployment of troops against the public to a complaint about value for money.
The debacle on the National Mall is the work not of the “radical left” but of the vandal-in-chief in the White House and the social layer he represents. The Reflecting Pool was meant to mirror the Washington Monument. It has instead returned a faithful image of the American ruling class and its political system. This is the financial oligarchy that has enriched itself beyond measure while the society around it rots, and that now, on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, drapes itself in a heritage it has betrayed in every particular.
There is a fitting irony in the setting. The ground running from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument is where, again and again working people and youth have assembled to fight for democratic and social rights. The genuine heirs of the revolutionary traditions being invoked this July 4 are not the swindlers who have fouled this place,but the millions who are entering into struggle against them.
9. Türkiye: Mass protest on Prinkipo against arrest of Mayor Ercan Akpolat
On Sunday a mass march and protests were held on Büyükada (Prinkipo) to demand the immediate release of Mayor Ali Ercan Akpolat and others.
Thirty-nine people—including Republican People’s Party (CHP) Mayor Akpolat, who was detained in the police operation mounted against Adalar Municipality on Friday morning—were referred to the Anadolu Courthouse on Monday. Under a detention order issued against 47 people on allegations of corruption, 42 were taken into custody, three of whom were released on the instruction of the prosecutor’s office. As this article was written, the decision of the criminal judgeship of peace—whether for arrest or for release under judicial control—was still being awaited.
The operation targeting Adalar Municipality is part of a broader politically motivated judicial campaign by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan against the CHP. The World Socialist Web Site and the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi–Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party–Fourth International) oppose this political repression, which violates basic democratic rights, and demand the immediate release of those detained and other political prisoners.
The political character of this operation, like those before it, is obvious to broad layers of the population. According to a survey conducted by AREA Research at the end of March, only 23.7 percent of the public believes the allegations regarding operations targeting CHP-run municipalities are true, while 61 percent believe they are “politically motivated.”
From its very first hour, the operation led to mass outrage on Büyükada and beyond. On the afternoon of June 19, island residents gathered on their own initiative at Clock Square. According to a report in the Gerçek, the head of the Islands Volunteers Association, attorney İrem Berksoy, pointed out that figures associated with corruption within President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) had been left untouched, underscoring that the claim of “fighting corruption” was hollow.
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Aside from the political character of the operation targeting the Adalar Municipality, Büyükada is an island of historical significance. It is the island where Leon Trotsky—who, together with Vladimir Lenin, led the October Revolution of 1917—spent the years of his exile between 1929 and 1933, where he wrote My Life and The History of the Russian Revolution and his unparalleled warnings against the rise of fascism in Germany. He issued the call to found the Fourth International in 1933 on this island.
Since 2023, the World Socialist Web Site has conducted a principled collaboration with Adalar Municipality for the preservation and commemoration of Trotsky’s historical and cultural heritage; the “International Leon Trotsky Commemoration” has been held every August since 2023. The Akpolat administration became an important supporter of the project to restore the house where Trotsky lived on Büyükada and transform it into an international cultural center.
On Monday, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius visited Lithuania to take part in the first major exercise of the Bundeswehr’s Armored Brigade 45 stationed there. That the visit took place precisely on the 85th anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union is more than a provocation. It demonstrates the character of NATO’s war offensive against Russia in Ukraine, which is increasingly being led by the European powers and, in particular, by Berlin.
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The German brigade is to be fully operational by the end of 2027, with 4,800 soldiers and 200 civilian employees. Around 1,800 Bundeswehr personnel are already permanently stationed in Lithuania. It is the first permanent stationing of a German combat formation abroad since the end of the Second World War. In Rūdninkai, near the border with Belarus, a German military town is being built: barracks, ammunition depots, logistics areas, maintenance halls for tanks and other combat vehicles, as well as firing ranges and training facilities.
During his visit, Pistorius made clear that these war plans are to be realized through forced recruitment. Although the federal government claims that it wants to build up the brigade mainly with volunteers, the defense minister admitted that there would “probably” be soldiers who would have to be compelled. The inspector of the Army, Lieutenant General Christian Freuding, was more explicit: An army does not function only through voluntary service, he said. He added it would be ensured that the soldiers “receive their mission at the right time and in the right place.” He then said: “And we will be operational by the end of 2027. Period.”
This language is unmistakable. The federal government is not preparing for an abstract “deterrence,” but for war against Russia. The Bundeswehr is being stationed on the Eastern front, society is being militarized, conscription is being reintroduced, and soldiers are to be forced, if necessary, to deploy to the Russian border.
The timing of Pistorius’ visit is of enormous historical significance. On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. This marked the beginning of the greatest war of annihilation in history. Three million German soldiers, 600,000 motor vehicles, 3,350 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces and 3,900 aircraft crossed the border. The invading army carried not only weapons, but detailed murder plans. It was accompanied by Einsatzgruppen, whose task was to systematically murder communists, partisans, Jews and Sinti.
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Lithuania was one of the countries where the Nazis and their local collaborators committed particularly gruesome crimes. Before the war, Vilnius was a major center of Jewish life. After the German invasion, Lithuania’s Jews were deprived of their rights, ghettoized and murdered with breathtaking speed. In Ponary, near Vilnius, German units and Lithuanian auxiliaries shot tens of thousands of Jews, communists, Soviet prisoners of war and Polish intellectuals. The extermination of Lithuania’s Jews is among the most horrific chapters of the Holocaust.
That German tanks are once again rolling up to the Russian border precisely in this country shows that German imperialism is again expanding eastward 85 years after the beginning of the war of annihilation. What was invoked after 1945 as “Never again” has long since been turned into its opposite. The crimes of German imperialism are being downplayed, relativized or suppressed, while Germany once again seeks to become Europe’s leading military power.
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This policy is inseparably bound up with the escalation of NATO’s war in Ukraine. During Zelensky’s visit to Berlin in April, Germany and Ukraine signed a “strategic partnership” that drives forward the fusion of the German arms industry with the Ukrainian war apparatus. Germany supports the production of drones, air defence systems, ammunition and long-range weapons systems.
During his visit to Kiev in May, Pistorius announced that Germany and Ukraine intended jointly to develop and produce drones and other unmanned weapons systems with ranges of up to 1,500 kilometres (932 miles). This enables attacks on Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as industrial centers, ports, airfields and command centers deep inside Russia—which is already happening with increasing frequency.
The claim that this is about defending Ukraine or Europe against a Russian aggressor is a political lie. NATO provoked the war through its decades-long eastward expansion, the 2014 coup in Kiev backed by Washington and Berlin, and the systematic transformation of Ukraine into a military outpost against Russia. Since the Russian invasion in February 2022, the NATO powers have escalated the war ever further. They supply weapons, train Ukrainian soldiers, provide reconnaissance and targeting data, coordinate logistics and enable attacks deep inside Russia.
In doing so, Berlin is working with a regime in Kiev that openly relies on fascist forces and rehabilitates the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators of the Second World War. The veneration of Stepan Bandera, Andriy Melnyk and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) is not a marginal phenomenon, but part of official state ideology. These forces collaborated with the Nazis during that war and were involved in antisemitic pogroms, ethnic cleansing and mass murder. Today they are honored as “national heroes,” while the imperialist powers claim to be defending “democracy” and “freedom.”
This propaganda itself has an eerie historical continuity. Hitler, too, did not openly justify the invasion of the Soviet Union with conquest, plunder and extermination. In his proclamation of June 22, 1941, he claimed that Germany had always wanted peace, but had been forced to act by the alleged threat from Moscow. The subjugation of half of Europe was presented as a protective measure, military aggression as defense and the war of aggression as a preemptive strike. An announcement by the High Command of the Wehrmacht stated: “To ward off the imminent danger from the East, the German Wehrmacht struck on June 22, at 3 a.m., into the midst of the enormous deployment of enemy forces.”
President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit the Mack Trucks facility in Lower Macungie Township, Pennsylvania on Tuesday in a carefully stage-managed exercise to promote economic nationalism and conceal the ever-worsening conditions of workers. The visit comes just days after Will Lehman, a rank-and-file worker at the same plant, was nominated for president of the United Auto Workers at the union’s Constitutional Convention in Detroit.*****
The association of Trump, a representative of corporate oligarchy engaged in the systematic destruction of every Constitutional right, with the revolutionary and egalitarian traditions of 1776 is a travesty. Trump will not be citing Jefferson, Franklin or any of the other Founding Fathers, but will promote his filthy brand of economic nationalism, militarism and gangsterism.
The fact that Mack Trucks is a subsidiary of Volvo Group, the Swedish transnational that is itself partially owned by the Chinese automotive conglomerate Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, exposes the reactionary character of the “America-First” nationalism promoted by Trump and the UAW bureaucracy. Workers in the US are part of an international division of labor and have the same interests as workers in Europe, Asia and every region.
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Tuesday’s visit takes place amid a sweeping effort to convert civilian manufacturing for military production. Trump has invoked the Defense Production Act; GM Defense and Lockheed Martin have pooled capabilities; the Pentagon has enlisted GM and Ford in an arms buildup for the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran. UAW President Shawn Fain has backed this program along with Trump’s tariffs and “re-shoring” agenda. But where these policies have generated investment announcements, they have not generated jobs: companies are deploying automation to cut headcount, not expand it.
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Against the economic nationalism promoted by both Trump and the Fain bureaucracy, Lehman’s campaign advances an explicitly socialist and internationalist program. He calls for the abolition of the union bureaucracy and the transfer of power to rank-and-file committees on the shop floor; for opposition to both capitalist parties; for the defense of immigrant workers; and for the building of solidarity with workers in Mexico, Canada and across the world against the transnational corporations that exploit them all.
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The way forward, Lehman’s campaign insists, lies not in the economic nationalism of Trump and the union officialdom but in the independent mobilization of workers themselves—building rank-and-file committees to organize and coordinate their struggles in opposition to the bureaucracy and to the war drive of American imperialism.
12. United Kingdom: Shuffling the deckchairs on Labour’s sinking ship
Starmer’s resignation was demanded by Britain’s ruling class to save his Labour government from collapse, so that its right-wing program of austerity and war can be continued and accelerated.Starmer’s failed premiership will cause consternation throughout the governments of Europe and internationally. Neither Emmanuel Macron in France nor Friedrich Merz in Germany enjoys any greater degree of popular support, yet they are tasked with pursuing the same agenda regardless.
However, what sealed Starmer’s fate was not his unpopularity but a calculation by the ruling class that he could no longer be relied on to realize its strategic aims.
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Starmer’s downfall was brought about by opposition from the right rather than the left.
A massive campaign, funded in large measure by oligarchs such as Elon Musk, and backed by the Trump administration, meant that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK emerged as the main challenger to the Labour government and the locus of a broader far-right movement—all fuelled by Labour’s own nationalist, anti-migrant agenda. This saw Labour suffer major local election defeats this May, primarily at the hands of Reform.
Senior members of the armed forces, backed by large sections of the media, meanwhile launched repeated broadsides against Starmer for failing to raise military spending fast enough.
High-profile cabinet resignations—beginning with Health Secretary Wes Streeting and then Defense Secretary John Healy—set the stage for a leadership contest. But few within ruling circles wanted the whole Labour government to fall. Reform UK is not trusted politically. It shares with the Tories a vociferously pro-Brexit agenda increasingly seen as detrimental to British imperialism’s strategic interests. A recent study suggests Britain’s economy has been left 6-8 percent smaller after leaving the European Union than would otherwise have been the case, amid trade and military conflicts which have savaged its vital relationship with the US and made the UK more dependent on European markets and military alliances.
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What the ruling class considers necessary at this point is not a new government but a new prime minister. No one outside of the party’s most unabashed Blairite right believed Streeting could replace Starmer, given his attacks on the NHS and close association with Mandelson. A campaign therefore began to bring Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham back into parliament: someone with an impeccable Blairite record—coming a distant second to Corbyn in the 2015 Labour leadership contest—but away from Westminster since 2017.
When Burnham secured a runaway victory in the Makerfield by-election Friday morning, Starmer’s number was up. Streeting read the room, announcing that he would not challenge Burnham and was “convinced that there is a place” for his ideas “under his leadership.” This paves the way for Burnham’s anointment as early as July, avoiding a leadership contest. What passes for the Labour left has signed off on the coronation, making clear earlier that it would not field a candidate.
As in every country, the key role in facilitating the maneuvers of the ruling class is played by the official “left” which keeps the struggles of the working class in check. In the UK, the Corbynites and the trade union bureaucracy, which suppressed and betrayed the major strikes which erupted against the Tory government, have sought to block the development of a working class, socialist opposition to Starmer’s Labour.
Most Corbynite MPs remained faithful to Labour, while Corbyn following his expulsion refused all attempts to form a new left-wing party. Once demands for an alternative became impossible to ignore, Corbyn agreed to lead Your Party and was endorsed by the pseudo-left, only to systematically demobilise its original 800,000 supporters to the point where the organization now exists in name only.
Burnham’s campaign for the seat in Makerfield was joined by almost every Labour MP, had the de facto backing of the pseudo-left who campaigned against a Reform vote, and the assistance of Zack Polanski’s Green Party which mounted no real campaign and supplied their voters to Labour.
Whatever criticisms these forces made of Burnham, they performed the invaluable service of presenting him as a step to the left by Labour supposedly made under popular pressure. This continues, with Corbyn’s key ally John McDonnell immediately urging Burnham to allow him back into the Labour Party.
Any illusions in Burnham will be quickly exposed. Even before taking office, Burnham made clear that he is not only a continuity Starmer candidate but one prepared to respond to every criticism of Starmer made from the right.
His campaign pledges to end 40 years of neoliberal consensus were junked as he declared himself “not squeamish” about cutting welfare, signaled his willingness to spend more on defense and told the BBC of immigration: “I do agree with what Farage is saying; what we’ve got to do is get back to a sense of order.”
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... The fundamental issue confronting the working class is the fight to develop a new, socialist political leadership opposed to the entire Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy, “left” and right. Only this can answer the descent into war, the destruction of living standards and the growth of the far right.
13. The ignominious role of the Chilean “left” in Kast’s sweeping assault on immigrants
This is the second of a two-part series. Part one was published here.
Chile’s entire political and media establishment saturated public consciousness with nightmarish scenarios of cities besieged by immigrant-driven crime for one calculated purpose: to cultivate among the population a xenophobic demand for mass expulsions and an iron fist against those the state had rendered most vulnerable.
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The nationalist orientation espoused by every party in the Chilean political establishment, from Kast’s fascistic Republican Party to Jara’s Stalinist Communist Party, is aimed at driving a deadly wedge into the working class along lines of nationality, ethnicity and legal status, precisely to paralyze its capacity to resist the broader social counterrevolution being prepared against all workers. The pseudo-left parties that today endorse immigration controls do so because of their nationalist perspective, which subordinates the working class to the supposed interests of the nation. Their betrayals are rooted in their class basis in the affluent petty bourgeoisie and will only be repeated wherever they come to power.
14. Milei aligns Argentina with Trump’s war preparations against China
A war led by the United States against China, is predicted to have a devastating economic effect on Latin America. Countries including Peru, Brazil and Argentina, depend economically on their exports to China, on investments by Chinese firms, particularly in mining and logistics, and on Chinese loans to their governments (specially in Argentina).
In Argentina, the fascistic government of Javier Milei has subordinated the country to these war preparations to a degree without precedent in Argentine history, ceding control over Argentine territory and waters to the Pentagon on the fraudulent basis of defending national sovereignty against China. A self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who has built his foreign policy persona around denunciations of China, Milei now presents Argentina as a “strategic ally” of the fascistic Trump administration in its confrontation with Beijing, even as he tries to avoid a full break with the Chinese economy upon which Argentina’s export sector depends.
When he took office in December 2023, Milei chained Argentine foreign policy to that of the Trump administration. This has included support for both Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and Trump’s war on Iran.
Trump is pressing Milei to break with China, despite the huge economic cost this will mean to Argentina’s agricultural and extractive industries, and its farmers and workers, whose livelihoods depend on Argentina’s exports to China.
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On May 20, 2026, the Milei and Trump administrations signed an agreement authorizing the US Navy to patrol Argentine waters during the next five years. The agreement declared the Southern Atlantic a global common commodity (”Protecting Global Commons Program”) This agreement allows the US Fourth Fleet to patrol the South Atlantic coast of Latin America at will, militarizing the South Atlantic, including Cape Horn, which connects with the Pacific Ocean, and allowing the Fourth Fleet to block Chinese fishing and naval vessels.
On June 12, the last of 42 days of military exercises involving US and Argentine soldiers and sailors took place on the fields and mountains of the Cordoba Garrison, in the Argentine province by the same name. Some 400 troops from both nations participated in these war games using helicopters, tanks and other heavy war vehicles and airplanes. The series of military was code named “Atlantic Dagger 2026” (Daga Atlántica 2026).
War games also took place in the Port of Belgrano, and in the VII Airbase in Moron, both in Buenos Aires Province. This was the first joint military land exercise on Argentine territory.
The Cordoba military maneuvers elicited strong protests from human rights organizations over their being held on land that is currently being searched for the remains of people who were disappeared, victims of state terrorism, under the US-enabled Videla dictatorship (1976-1981).
“They are practicing war, where we should be planting memories,” Cordoba’s Human Rights Working Table declared. It was an “intolerable provocation.” The CIA and Pentagon played a key role in installing and backing the murderous dictatorships that ruled over Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay in that historical period.
In Argentina alone, it is estimated that 30,000 workers and youth were disappeared by the military dictatorship. The Human Rights Working Table appealed to the citizenry to support the search for the disappeared and to oppose the presence of US military forces in the country.
Argentina’s “Atlantic Dagger” maneuvers took place in preparation for the Argentine armed forces’ participation in the PANAMAX 2026 War Games, sponsored by Panama and the US Southern Command. This war games will bring together troops of 12 nations allegedly to practice how to protect the Panama Canal and to steer Latin America away from China. The list of participants includes Canada, Mexico, Peru, Panama, Paraguay, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica, Colombia, Chile, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Argentina. The Panamax War Games will involve 1,500 troops and will take place between July 1 and August 31 of this year. Brazil has declined to participate.
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These series of military maneuvers between the US, Argentina and other nations, are in line with the Trump administrations reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine—as of late also referred to as the “Donroe” Doctrine—and the recolonization of Latin America by US imperialism.
Milei did not create this trajectory. The groundwork was laid by Peronism.
In 1990 and 1991, during the Peronist presidency of Carlos Menem, naval exercises involving US aircraft carriers and Argentine destroyers, also took place, despite popular opposition, such as the mass youth protests in the city of Mar del Plata in 1993. Since then, there have several other joint naval exercises involving the US and one with France.
Under Milei’s Peronist predecessor, Alberto Fernández, the Argentine Congress voted almost unanimously to authorize the entry of US troops and Argentine participation in Pentagon-organized exercises, including the Unitas and Gringo-Gaucho operations involving US aircraft carriers.
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There is no organized working class opposition to this war drive, not because workers are passive, but because the pseudo-left channels opposition back behind Peronism and the CGT-CTA bureaucracy rather than mobilizing the working class independently.
15. Trump-backed fascist claims victory in Colombian election, sparking mass protests
Colombia’s presidential runoff Sunday has produced a razor-thin preliminary result. Abelardo de la Espriella, the fascist lawyer endorsed by Donald Trump, leads Iván Cepeda—incumbent President Gustavo Petro’s hand-picked successor—by a margin of under one percentage point.
With 100 percent of votes reported, the preliminary count placed de la Espriella at 49.66 percent and Cepeda at 48.70 percent. In the tightest Colombian presidential contest in recent history, turnout reached 63 percent, the highest since the 1998 runoff. Small shifts in the final tally of disputed polling stations—more than 33,000 have been formally contested—could still alter the outcome.
The hours after polls closed provide a prelude to what a de la Espriella administration would look like, if results hold.
Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in the hours following the preliminary count, primarily in Bogotá and Cali. In Cali—Colombia’s third-largest city and a center of the 2021 uprising—protesters burned American flags and clashed with riot police, which deployed tear gas.
Emboldened by the Trump administration’s public backing, de la Espriella threatened those demonstrating against him with accusations of “terrorism” and appealed to his fascist constituency among the security forces, reservists and veterans.
Petro, meanwhile, called the preliminary winner a fascist and alleged that foreign money had bought him votes, while simultaneously urging his supporters to remain “calm” and proposing a “national agreement” with the far right—a transparent attempt to contain opposition.
Cepeda accepted the preliminary count but declared he would not formally recognize the result until the final tally is complete.
The same dynamic is unfolding across the region—in Bolivia, Argentina, Chile and Ecuador— where pseudo-left forces and union bureaucracies whose treacherous policies facilitated the election of far-right governments are now working to quell mass opposition to them.
Far from expressing overwhelming support for any candidate, the Colombian elections have exposed a social tinder box. Spoiled and blank ballots—approximately 675,000—far exceeded the roughly 250,000-vote margin separating the two candidates. This means that any candidate elected would ultimately face opposition from the much-cited “popular majority.”
In the case of de la Espriella, his nearly 13 million votes primarily express rage against the establishment rather than a genuine endorsement of his program. Throughout his campaign, de la Espriella was marketed as the “outsider,” ignoring that he spent his career as the lawyer of choice for establishment politicians tied to fascist paramilitaries and the massacres they perpetrated, and that his running mate José Manuel Restrepo was finance and commerce minister under Iván Duque and a decades-long member of the Conservative Party.
As El País summarized based on exit polling: “Significant sectors of the lower and middle classes that had voted for [Petro] have switched sides in this election, disillusioned with his government, while hostility from the elites had been growing. The president leaves four unresolved crises behind: the expansion of armed groups, the economic deficit, the collapse of the health system and corruption scandals.”
The result is a verdict on Petro’s pseudo-leftist government. Elected in 2022 on the back of enormous social upheaval—including the National Strike of 2021, in which more than 80 people were killed and hundreds forcibly disappeared by state forces—Petro immediately proclaimed his intentions in his first public address: “We are going to develop capitalism in Colombia.”
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For the past quarter century, Colombian workers and poor have rejected overwhelmingly the traditional parties of the oligarchy and imperialism only to be served a more right-wing version of the same politics.
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This appeal to Washington to sanction a managed transition—addressed to the very government that had just endorsed his fascist opponent—captures the complete political bankruptcy of bourgeois nationalism as a response to the rise of the far right. Those like Petro represent sections of the ruling class and upper middle class much more terrified of a mass upsurge of the working class that escapes their control and threaten capitalist interests than of fascist violence directed from Washington.
Mass opposition to de la Espriella cannot find its expression through Petro’s Historic Pact coalition and his allies in the union bureaucracy and pseudo-left. The construction of a Colombian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International—fighting to unite the struggles of Colombian, Latin American and North American workers under the program of world socialist revolution—is the only answer to fascism, war and the escalating social counterrevolution throughout the continent.
16. Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin: Some bluntness, and a lot of evasion
The Wizard of the Kremlin, starring Paul Dano and Jude Law, is a historical drama that traces the rise of Vladimir Putin out of the political and economic crisis that wracked Russia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The film, directed by Olivier Assayas and based on the book by Giuliano da Empoli, has certain strengths—namely, its blunt portrayal of the social forces that emerged out of the ruins of the USSR, their base economic and political interests. The portrait is, at times, crude, but then again, so were the people.
Ultimately, however, Wizard of the Kremlin does not go beyond, in either form or content, the anti-Russian, anti-Putin politics of the US and the EU. The result, which shows itself most clearly in the film’s latter half, is a limited account of modern Russia, bordering at moments on the facile, that leaves unchallenged prevailing conceptions—or rather, those conceptions that Washington and Brussels want everyone to believe.
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The scenes of late Soviet and 1990s Russia are some of the more effective in the film. The Wizard of the Kremlin recounts, albeit briefly, the scheming and thieving of Communist Party (CP) elites as they dismantled the USSR. The central role played by the Komsomol, the CP youth organization, in the vast exercise in social theft is aptly rendered. Baranov himself emerges from this layer. Their debauchery and moral bankruptcy are on full display.
One particularly grotesque event is shown. At a crazed, drunken party a screaming-singing woman rides on the back of a completely naked man chained to a leash. At the end of the “performance,” she leads him over to a dog bowl in which she pours vodka. He drinks.
The viewer simply wants to retch.
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While The Wizard of the Kremlin captures something of the ugly, brutal and deceitful nature of the new Russian ruling class, notably absent from the film is anyone else. Apart from moments in which practically mute servants serve oligarchs and politicians tea, not a single ordinary person ever appears in the film. The Russian working class simply does not exist, not as a subject of history nor even as an object of the ruling layer’s rapaciousness.
Thus, the vast wealth of the new oligarchy appears to come out of thin air, like a gift from the heavens—a reward for cunning and clever, albeit not always savory, people. By removing the Russian masses from the portrayal of the period, the film avoids having to deal with the central social and political question of the era—and no doubt one that is artistically challenging to depict. The riches of the bloated brutes in Russia did not come from their shrewdness, but rather from a savage attack on the Soviet Union’s working class, the theft of everything they had ever built and achieved through decades of struggle born out of the 1917 revolution.
The Russian masses are, in Wizard of the Kremlin, a nobody, their revolution a nothing. Thus, Zamyatin’s anti-communist novel We appears in the film as something worthy of deep admiration, and the “Russian people” as, at best, a bunch of idiots. They only merit a mention when Baranov and others wax on about the fact that the country needs a new strongman to satisfy the masses’ desire for stability. By the end of the film, some oligarchs and their prostitutes have even begun to wring their hands about democracy.
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Not everything in this historical account is wrong or poorly rendered. The filmmaker and the author haven’t made it up out of whole cloth. Jude Law generally does well in capturing Putin’s cold, calculating character, although the permanent frown he wears becomes grating and veers into caricature. But when Putin makes clear he will not accept oligarch Dmitri Sidorov’s (a stand in for the real-life Mikhail Khodorkovsky) intention to make agreements with Exxon Mobil and hand control of critical Russian assets to an American firm, Assayas captures something real. There is frankness elsewhere in the film too. In the scene dealing with the anti-Russian “color revolutions” that erupted in the mid-2000s across Russia’s sphere of influence, Baranov bluntly states that Ukraine’s “democratic” Orange Revolution was actually a US and European-orchestrated anti-Russian coup. While the Yale professor disagrees with him, Baranov’s points are delivered with seriousness.
But the major problem is that, while some events and people hew to the historical timeline, what we end up with is a political scientist’s a, b, c, d and so forth of what happened in post-Soviet Russia, in which Putin emerges as the necessary and natural product of something distinctly Russian, not the grotesque outcome of the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union, which in the Russian case was a particular manifestation of a rotting, global social order. Thus, while Yeltsin’s ugliness and buffoonery is on full display in the film, watching it one would not know that the US government was directly involved in crafting Yeltsin’s economic policies, and supported his government.
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According to press accounts, apart from the closing scenes, Assayas’ film is largely faithful to da Empoli’s book. The latter is not just a writer of historical dramas and political fiction. He is a Swiss-Italian cultural figure and politician who served as Florence’s Deputy Mayor for Culture and as a senior advisor to Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi from 2014-2016, during which time the Italian head of state reduced corporate taxes and rammed through major changes to Italian labor laws that gutted job security.
If da Empoli’s book is able to put something of a spotlight on Russia’s post-Soviet elite, it is likely because he has crossed paths with such layers. And if his book allows its Russian protagonists to make a blunt statement or two about the machinations of the CIA in Ukraine and elsewhere, it reflects the fact that the Italian elite, never too sure of its own position in relation to the greater imperialist powers, has a certain appreciation of the Russian perspective.
But in the end, this doesn’t get very far. In interviews given after his book won the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, da Empoli, whose work was written before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, explained that he “would have a harder time identifying with that type of character [Vadim Baranov/Vladislav Surkov] today. I was able to get inside a Russian’s head at a time when the atrocious conclusions of the Putin regime were not yet fully visible and unfolding. I don’t know if I would have been able, or wanted, to write this book after the war in Ukraine.”
Actually, the vileness of today’s Kremlin did not achieve its final form in 2022. Erected out of the ashes of the destruction of the Russian Revolution, it was vile from the start.
17. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Bolivia:
Canada:
British Columbia nurses vote to reject tentative contract
United States:
Port Jefferson, New York nurses vote to authorize strike over wages and unsafe staffing ratios
18. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
