Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: July 6-12
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
Korean War truce talks begin at Kaesong
100 years ago:
Nationalist Northern Expedition begins in China
2. Trump’s fascist tirade at Mount Rushmore: Anticommunist hysteria and the conspiracy for dictatorship
Beyond the hysterical denunciations, Trump’s speech is a declaration of political intent, a conspiracy to overturn the results of the midterm elections and consolidate a presidential dictatorship. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms,' he told the crowd, 'if we are foolish, stupid and unwise.' He demanded the immediate passage of the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register and photo identification to vote, disenfranchising millions of working class voters.
If this were done, Trump declared, 'we will not lose an election for 100 years,” echoing Hitler’s proclamation of a “thousand-year Reich,” albeit diminished to one-tenth. An election whose outcome is guaranteed in advance for a century is not an election. And a governing party that can lose only by “allowing” itself to lose has announced, in advance, that any defeat will be treated as illegitimate.
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The lesson Trump drew from 2020 was not that coups fail, but that they must be prepared more thoroughly. Trump now commands a purged military that he has already deployed against American cities, a paramilitary force in ICE operating outside all legal restraint and a largely pliant Supreme Court majority.
In 2020, the pretext for overturning the election was phantom fraud in the counting of ballots. Now, the framework for the attack on democratic forms of rule is openly political, the struggle against socialism. Trump is not merely claiming that votes will be miscounted. He is asserting that certain votes, those cast for candidates he brands communists, are illegitimate in themselves.
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Trump’s tirade, delivered on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, amounts to an official proclamation that the principles embodied in that document are, for the ruling class, a dead letter.
Trump speaks not just for himself, but for the capitalist oligarchy that he represents. Democratic forms of rule are incompatible with a society in which nearly 1,000 billionaires command $8.4 trillion, in which the top 1 percent holds as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent combined and which has just minted its first trillionaire.
The same crisis that drives the oligarchy toward dictatorship is driving the working class into struggle. In the past year, workers have shut down the Long Island Rail Road, struck the schools of San Francisco and walked out of hospitals in New York, Chicago and New Jersey. And at the stroke of midnight on July 4—in Philadelphia, the city where the Declaration of Independence was adopted—1,600 electrical and gas workers walked off the job at PECO, the first strike in the utility’s 145-year history.
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in its statement marking the 250th anniversary, the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is “entirely bound up with the struggle for social equality.” The crisis of capitalism has reached the point, the statement concluded, where “the defense of democratic rights can be carried forward only through a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system itself.”
3. California governor signs 2026–27 state austerity budget
On June 29, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a $352 billion state budget for the 2026–27 fiscal year. Passed by the Democratic-controlled legislature, the budget imposes deep cuts to healthcare, welfare and education, shifts the tax burden onto working people, and contains a trailer bill, AB 181, stripping the independently elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction of managerial authority.
This is not routine austerity: it is an instrument of class warfare, designed to immiserate the population and suppress democratic resistance in anticipation of the explosion of social conflict that the deepening crisis of American capitalism and the escalating US drive toward war with Iran will inevitably produce.
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The budget crisis is manufactured. California is home to nearly 200 billionaires. The wealth exists to fully fund healthcare, education, housing, and a dignified life for every resident. The claim that “there is no money” is a political choice.
The same political establishment that insists schools cannot be funded is lavishing hundreds of billions on the war machine, with its current focus on the US war with Iran. The assault on public education and healthcare is inseparable from the drive to war. The ruling class is consolidating executive power, dismantling democratic checks, and impoverishing the population in anticipation of the explosion of class conflict that the deepening crisis of American capitalism will inevitably produce.
This budget is a class weapon. The Democratic Party is not a “lesser evil” to be pressured leftward: in California, it is the main architect of this assault. The union bureaucracy is not a flawed ally: it is the mechanism that blocks working-class opposition. The DSA and the broader pseudo-left are not misguided socialists: they are the left wing of the apparatus that manages the suppression of the working class.
Workers must break decisively from the Democratic Party and all its pseudo-left adjuncts. Rank-and-file committees, independent of the union bureaucracy and capitalist parties, must be built in every workplace and community. These committees must link up across industries and state lines, in alliance with workers internationally, to fight for a socialist program: the expropriation of the capitalist class, the establishment of democratic workers’ control over the economy and the full funding of all social needs.
4. Tanzanian regime bans Gen-Z Saba Saba protests, deploys army and police
The crackdown follows calls by Gen-Z activists and protesters, circulated on social media, to use Saba Saba Day to demand constitutional reform and accountability for the massacre that followed last October’s fraudulent election. Security forces killed as many as 3,000 protesters after Hassan was declared the winner with an implausible 98 percent of the vote. The official underestimate is 518 dying from “unnatural causes”.
The movement has no visible leadership and no single organization behind it. Since October it has organized through decentralized WhatsApp and Telegram networks whose users avoid public profiles, aware that identifying themselves invites arrest, as happened to several WhatsApp group administrators detained in November on charges of “organizing and promoting crime.”
Justifying the crackdown before parliament, Home Affairs Minister Patrobas Katambi Katambi ranted, “We have arrested some people with weapons and others with petrol containers,” adding that the government did not want a repeat of “what happened” last October.
The official narrative is that the October protests were sparked by outside agitators, rather than the real driving forces: soaring living costs, austerity measures and police-state violence, pushing workers and youth into struggle.
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The ban reveals a regime terrified of its own population. After stealing an election and unleashing the bloodiest repression in Tanzania’s post-independence history, the CCM state cannot permit even the slightest sign of opposition from workers and the rural poor. Even anniversaries, public holidays and official celebrations—rituals it has staged for decades to sanctify its own rule—have become intolerable.
Opposition parties have denounced Tuesday’s ban. Chadema’s head of foreign affairs, John Kitoka, wrote on X that “the regime’s answer to growing public demand for freedom is fear, intimidation, and repression,” branding the directive unconstitutional. The party’s chief legal counsel, Rugemeleza Nshala, said the ban was intended to “muzzle political freedom,” and confirmed that Chadema was weighing legal challenges.
Chadema’s own chairperson, Tundu Lissu, remains in detention after more than fourteen months, facing fraudulent treason charges that carry the death penalty, while the party remains barred from electoral participation until 2030.
ACT-Wazalendo, Tanzania’s third-largest party that claims to be the true inheritor of Nyerere’s “African Socialism”, likewise announced it would challenge the ban in court. Its shadow minister for Defence, Internal Affairs and Security, Rashid Ali, said, “This directive is not only an attempt to continue pushing the country further into darkness and to prevent the lawful activities of political parties; it is also a continuation of the rulers’ violation of Article 20(1) of the Constitution of the United Republic of Tanzania and Article 23(1)(a) and (b) of the Political Parties Act”. The party pledged to take legal action to challenge the directive.
Legal appeals to a constitution the regime tramples at will offer no way forward. Nor do Chadema’s and ACT-Wazalendo’s repeated appeals to the “international community”—by which they mean the imperialist powers and institutions such as the United Nations, South African Development Community and the African Union—to impose sanctions and install a transitional government.
This is the program of a capitalist faction that fears mobilizing workers and rural masses against the CCM regime and seeks to have imperialism install it in office. Chadema, no less than ACT-Wazalendo, represents sections of the Tanzanian business elite seeking a larger share of the spoils of foreign investment. Its program of tax cuts and a “conducive environment for investors” in mining, oil and gas offers the youth no way out.
Hassan is desperately maneuvering to secure her regime through deepening ties with China and Russia.
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Washington and Brussels have escalated pressure on Hassan. In May, the State Department designated Tanzania’s Senior Assistant Commissioner Faustine Jackson Mafwele, banning him from the US over his role in the abduction, torture and sexual assault of Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi and Ugandan activist Agather Atuhaire, both seized in Dar es Salaam while observing Lissu’s treason trial.
Days earlier, Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Ted Cruz introduced the Reassessing the US-Tanzania Bilateral Relationship Act, which passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 17 and now awaits a full Senate vote. The Senate’s press release makes explicit the geopolitical calculation underlying all the human rights rhetoric. The bill claims to respond to “democratic backsliding, political repression, human rights abuses and growing concerns about Chinese influence in Tanzania,” and it directs the State Department to “evaluate the extent of the People’s Republic of China’s military, economic and political engagement in Tanzania, including cooperation that could undermine democratic institutions and U.S. interests in the region.”
When the Senate advanced a substitute version to drop the original bill’s proposed cut to security and military cooperation, it broadened this mandate into a review of Tanzania’s “growing diplomatic and commercial ties with China and Russia.”
Brussels has moved on a parallel track. In November, the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning the killings and demanding Lissu’s immediate and unconditional release. David McAllister, chair of the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said that the European Union (EU) should “use every tool at our disposal to hold those in power accountable,” and separately demanded that “all EU funds must be stopped immediately.” In June 2026, after Dodoma refused entry to a European Parliament human rights delegation, the Parliament voted to keep €156 million in EU funding frozen.
The very same imperialist powers now posturing over Tanzanian lives arm and finance the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, wage a proxy war against Russia that has killed hundreds of thousands, and operate a Fortress Europe that has turned the Mediterranean into a mass grave for African migrants. Their sudden concern is a cover for their scramble for the country’s nickel, graphite, uranium and rare earths, and to deny China and Russia a firmer foothold in East Africa.
Moreover, even as the sanctions and aid freezes were being debated, Tanzanian and US officials continued negotiating three flagship American-linked projects: a $42 billion LNG export terminal led by Shell, Equinor and ExxonMobil; the $942 million Tembo Nickel project, developed with Kabanga Nickel to supply battery-grade material for the electric vehicle industry; and the $300 million Mahenge graphite project run by Australia’s Black Rock Mining. The EU flagged its own interest in the Epanko graphite project.
The imperialist powers are clearly cultivating Chadema, and Lissu personally, as their preferred vehicle inside Tanzania. Every EU resolution on Tanzania since May 2025 has named Lissu and demanded his release. Lissu lived for six years of exile in Brussels and enjoys personal ties to European officials. The American Shaheen-Cruz bill contains an equivalent mechanism, conditioning any restoration of US aid on a “national reconciliation process” with Chadema.
The Tanzanian working class and youth confront a corrupt bourgeois state defending itself through terror, an opposition tied to the same capitalist order, and imperialist powers competing against rising capitalist powers like China to loot the country’s resources under whatever political arrangement best serves them. None of these forces offers a way forward.
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Courage in the face of tanks, curfews and internet blackouts must be coupled with a revolutionary socialist program and leadership. One that links the fight against the CCM dictatorship to the struggle against imperialism across the continent, as part of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Only the building of such a party, rooted in the working class and committed to the fight for the United Socialist States of Africa, can politically arm Tanzania’s Gen-Z so that it can end, once and for all, sixty-four years of capitalist rule.
5. Hundreds of Patriot Front fascists march in Washington during US 250th anniversary celebration
The spectacle was a stark expression of the political reality in the United States 250 years after the Declaration of Independence. Fascists were allowed to march openly in the nation’s capital, under conditions in which the White House is preparing further attacks on immigrants, socialists, protesters and all opponents of dictatorship. The same state that treats anti-ICE speech as a potential federal crime invoked “First Amendment” protections for an organization that openly advocates a white ethnostate.
Patriot Front is a neo-fascist and white supremacist organization founded by Thomas Rousseau after the deadly August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where anti-racist protester Heather Heyer was murdered. The group emerged as a split from Vanguard America, a neo-Nazi organization involved in that rally. Its founding manifesto calls for “American Fascism” and makes clear that non-whites are not “Americans.”
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Patriot Front and similar fascist organizations are able to fester because the social force capable of sweeping them aside, the working class, is politically blocked by the Democratic Party and its allied trade union apparatus. The Democrats issue occasional statements of concern about “extremism,” while funding the police, ICE, the military and the intelligence agencies that cultivate, protect and make use of the far right. They do not seek to mobilize workers against fascism because such a movement would immediately come into conflict with the capitalist system and the state institutions both parties defend.
6. Fired drinking water adviser files suit against EPA
Michigan water expert Elin Warn Betanzo, who played a key role in exposing the Flint water crisis, announced on June 22 that she was filing a complaint against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for her illegal dismissal from its National Drinking Water Advisory Council. “Today I am continuing my fight for safe water by suing the Trump administration for violating my First Amendment right to free speech,” she stated. “The administration fired me and my EPA colleagues to scare public servants into silence. I’ve fought for safe drinking water before, and I will not be intimidated.”
One year ago, on June 30, 2025, Betanzo, along with hundreds of EPA employees, signed a public “declaration of dissent” in protest of sweeping attacks on environmental protections.
In response, the Trump administration announced a “zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda.” An investigation was launched to identify the signatories, including those who signed anonymously. Some 140 employees who signed by name were placed on administrative leave in early July 2025. By the end of the summer, most had been cleared, issued letters of reprimand or suspended without pay for two weeks, while at least 15 were fired outright, including probationary employees.
According to an analysis by Inside Climate News, more than 4,000 EPA employees were axed in the first year of the second Trump administration, bringing the total to 12,849, the lowest number of staff at the EPA since the Reagan administration.
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The methodology of the assault on the EPA and all public services was prepared well in advance of the 2024 elections under the imprimatur of Project 2025. The right-wing Heritage Foundation produced the 900-page document with significant input from leading figures in Trump’s coterie.
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Anchored in the right-wing “unitary executive” theory of unchecked presidential power, Project 2025 aims to usurp congressional control over the budget in order to “deconstruct the Administrative State,” i.e., to destroy agencies created by acts of Congress and enforce personal loyalty of government employees to the president.
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The “declaration of dissent” was hosted by Stand Up for Science. Calling itself a “grassroots organization,” it planned coordinated protest demonstrations on March 7, 2025 and March 7, 2026. Its stated purpose is “building the political machinery to fight for science and take back Congress.” In plain English, its objective is to mobilize opposition to Trump’s fascist agenda behind the Democratic Party.
The document itself is framed in the most collegial of terms, professing a shared commitment to the environment with Trump’s then newly appointed flunky, Lee Zeldin. Zeldin served 22 years in the Army as a military intelligence officer and prosecutor, then spent eight years in Congress as a staunch Trump supporter before being named EPA administrator. He has zero expertise in or concern about environmental science, serving only as a loyal pawn of Trump and the oligarchy he represents.
On its face, the Declaration of Dissent outlines “Five Primary Concerns” that are, of course, valid. But in the year since the letter was made public, not a single firing has been reversed. On June 23, a group of 21 Democratic senators signed a toothless letter to Zeldin, calling on him to “reverse course.”
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In a statement titled “The defense of science requires a fight for socialism!”, distributed at the March 2025 Stand Up for Science demonstrations, the Socialist Equality Party wrote:
The fight for science and human progress can only take place through the building of a socialist movement in the working class. Scientists are experiencing the same process of proletarianization now affecting doctors, teachers and other professionals. Scientists must recognize their common interests with all workers facing attacks on their living standards, jobs and democratic rights. No matter your education level or salary, to the oligarchy that rules America, you are as expendable as any other worker.
A genuine defense of science requires the preparation of mass strike action by all federal workers, including those in scientific agencies, against job cuts, funding freezes and attacks on working conditions. This must be connected to a broader movement of the entire working class, in the US and internationally, against inequality and exploitation.
The Trump regime is not an aberration occurring within an arc of societal progress. It is the product of decades of social decline centered in the American capitalist system, whose hallmarks are global wars, poverty, disease and climate catastrophe. The only social force capable of defending science, public health and democratic rights is the international working class, mobilized in a common struggle against the capitalist system that is the source of this decay.
7. Open letter from Lula and Tedros: Preparing the next pandemic under capitalism
On June 15, on the eve of the G7 summit, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party (PT) and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus issued a joint open letter addressed to the leaders of the G7, G20, BRICS and “all nations.”
The letter’s stated aim is to press for the conclusion of negotiations on the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) Annex—the “final piece” needed for the WHO Pandemic Agreement, adopted in May 2025 at the 78th World Health Assembly, to enter into force.
With the next round of talks set for July 6–17, the outstanding negotiations center on the intellectual property provisions contained in the PABS Annex. The letter itself underscores their significance:
To respond to future pandemics in time, countries must be able to quickly identify pathogens with pandemic potential and share their genetic information and material so scientists can develop tools: the tests, the treatments, the vaccines that decide who lives and who does not. The system that makes this possible, fairly and on equal footing, is the PABS annex.
As the WSWS has extensively documented, the Agreement—whose adoption was originally slated for May 2024—is a hollowed-out instrument. Provisions that would have recognized the connection between environmental, climatic, social and economic factors and pandemic risk, along with international cooperation in scientific research aimed at pandemic preparedness, were stripped from earlier drafts.
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What is missing from this framework, and from the whole edifice of capitalist multilateralism, is any recognition that public health is by its nature an international condition. A pathogen recognizes no border, and the health of the population in any one country cannot be secured apart from the health of all. Genuine preparedness would demand that nation-states subordinate their interests to the needs of the global population, the very subordination that the profit system and the rivalry between capitalist powers make impossible. It is in this sense that the WHO has always been an instrument of capitalism, a body obliged to plead with governments over which it wields no authority and to package their competing appetites as cooperation. In the deepening breakdown of the postwar order, the organization now confronts its own crisis and, ultimately, its demise.
The underlying logic driving “cooperation” between states is made clear in the letter’s own citation of the IMF’s estimate of the toll of the COVID-19 pandemic: it “cost the world economy over thirteen trillion dollars in lost output, a loss borne in every nation, in shuttered businesses, broken supply chains and a generation of disrupted schooling.” In this context, it is worth recalling that when hospitals and morgues in New York City, the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States, reached their breaking point in March 2020, it was workers themselves who forced the initial shutdown of the economy, launching a wave of wildcat strikes that began on the shop floors of the auto plants and compelled the closure of workplaces across the country.
The Pandemic Agreement must be understood in this light: its priority is not the protection of life, but the construction of a framework that allows production to continue uninterrupted through future pandemics.
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Even as Lula and Tedros peddle a false “cooperative” solution built on reforming multilateralism, they cover up the real state of the imperialist crisis and their own role in sustaining this order, along with its policies of austerity and public-health negligence—subordinating human life to the imperatives of capital.
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When the Pandemic Agreement was adopted in 2025, the NB.1.8.1 variant was emerging in multiple countries. Today’s calls to conclude negotiations on the PABS Annex come precisely as fresh outbreaks of hantavirus and Ebola threaten global public health.
The escalating threat is driven by two connected developments. The first is the global expansion of capital, which pushes ever deeper into previously isolated ecosystems through deforestation, unplanned urbanization and climate disruption, breaking down the barriers between human populations and animal reservoirs and multiplying the conditions for zoonotic spillover. Both the Ebola and hantavirus outbreaks stem from such spillovers, which have been occurring with growing frequency, and mpox and avian flu have stoked mounting concern in recent years.
The second development is that, even as this danger is well understood, the institutions capable of containing it are being dismantled rather than strengthened. It is in this context that the response of the Trump administration, which withdrew the United States from the WHO and carried out sweeping cuts to international health programs, along with that of the WHO itself and of governments across the globe, has been rhetorical and political rather than substantive. The repeated and rapidly escalating outbreaks of Ebola, together with the emergence of a rare hantavirus on the global stage, are the expression of these developments.
Even as it acknowledges these factors, the Lula-Tedros letter lends credibility to the Wuhan lab-leak fraud. Its warning that “advances in biotechnology, matched unevenly by biosafety, raise the risk of accidental or deliberate release” is not a scientific observation but a political gesture, and a familiar one from this Director-General. Against the conclusion of his own Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens, Tedros has repeatedly insisted that “all hypotheses must remain on the table, including zoonotic spillover and lab leak,” most recently in June 2025, when that same panel found the weight of the evidence points to zoonotic spillover. The letter’s language is a nod to the lab-leak current, a conspiracy theory manufactured by imperialism to justify its war drive against China.
They declare that “the world must finish what it started,” but they are not speaking of ending the current pandemic: they treat COVID-19 as a closed chapter and today’s outbreaks as a dress rehearsal for capitalism’s next homicidal response to the coming global pandemic.
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The Lula government has deepened the health crisis by consolidating the “forever COVID” policy, marked by the abandonment of universal vaccination and a blackout of public data. In February 2023, it reopened the country for Carnival before the WHO had even declared an end to the emergency. That same month, amid a fresh wave of infections, it stopped publishing daily pandemic figures, switching to weekly reports instead.
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In 2025, Brazil posted its largest increase in military spending since 2001, with outlays surpassing R$130 billion. While war preparations are funded in the name of national sovereignty, public health absorbs fresh cuts.
8. Fourth death in 50 days as Michigan Democrats protect prison profiteers
Dalephenia Jones is the latest woman to die in Michigan's only women's prison, where a profit-driven healthcare contractor and Democratic Party state government share responsibility for mounting deaths.
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The deaths of Khaira Howard, Rebecca Fackler, Ashley Hoath and Dalephenia Jones are the expression of a system operating precisely as designed. The state houses a vulnerable population in an unventilated oven contaminated by fungal growth, funds healthcare through a model that financially penalizes treatment, and deploys its legal apparatus to argue that prisoners have no established right not to be poisoned. This is social murder as defined by Marxists going back to Friedrich Engels: the predictable, inevitable production of unnatural death by systemic social conditions.
The fight against the barbarism at WHV cannot be separated from the broader struggle against the US prison-industrial complex and the capitalist system that sustains it. Resolving this crisis requires the expropriation of VitalCore and every private contractor profiting from human misery, the immediate and comprehensive remediation of all environmental hazards and ultimately the abolition of a carceral system whose function is the management of poverty and social inequality through caging and neglect.
9. Baby banks in the UK report overwhelming demand amid appalling poverty
There are 400 baby banks in the UK. According to the Baby Bank Alliance, “They are a lifeline for families who need help: providing parents with support, and children with the items they need to survive.”
Baby banks are funded by donations and run mainly by volunteers. Their very existence is an indictment of a society that cannot provide for the basic needs of its most vulnerable members and its future generations.
Video explains Baby Bank servicesTo qualify for support from a baby bank requires a referral from a professional such as a health visitor, midwife, General Practitioner, or social worker, though some charities accept self-referrals.
According to the research, baby banks supported an average of 1,096 children per day last year. Demand for essential items such as baby formula, cots and beds increased significantly. Baby formula distribution rose by 26 percent compared with the previous year.
These are heartbreaking statistics but are in line with the number of poor children in the UK. In 2015, the Conservative government introduced the two-child benefit cap, which limited universal credit payments to the first two children in a family, condemning larger families to penury.
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In the UK, poverty is determined as living in a household with an income of 60 percent or less of the national median—in the low to mid £20,000s depending on household size. By this measure, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 14.2 million people are in poverty in the UK (one in five): 7.9 million are working-age adults and 4.5 million are children.
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The Baby Bank Alliance found that, along with high housing costs, factors behind increasing demand for their help were childcare costs and rising food and energy bills—the latter exacerbated by the ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Baby formula has risen to between £12 and £20 per tub.
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Outside London and the South East, North West England has the highest number of families supported by baby banks. For example, The Little Lighthouse baby bank in Wythenshawe, Manchester, reported growing demand since it opened in 2019, particularly for baby formula.
Until he recently stood down and won the Makerfield by-election in a bid to replace Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, Greater Manchester was overseen for nine years from 2017 by Labour Party Mayor Andy Burnham.
Should he take over from Starmer, despite media attempts to portray Manchester as a booming city due to his efforts, there will be no alleviation of the poverty that blights the lives of millions of families.
The hype around the “King of the North” (a moniker for Burnham) and “Manchesterism” (his model for economic growth, based on public-private sector partnerships) cannot hide the fact that inequality and child poverty have increased.
What is booming is the property market and property values. Over the past decade, thanks to loans worth up to £1 billion from Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), 25 glittering skyscrapers (over 100m) have come to dominate Manchester’s skyline, offering luxury apartments for sale or rent but hardly any affordable rentals.
When Burnham became mayor, he made great fanfare about eliminating rough sleeping and homelessness. There were 5,915 homeless families in Greater Manchester in temporary accommodation in 2025, a figure which includes around 8,600 children.
GMCA’s housing investment fund has lent around £800 million to companies linked to developer Daren Whitaker’s Renaker property empire, which is the leading high-rise developer of luxury residential properties in Manchester.
The so-called miracle of regeneration based on public-private partnerships boosted the Renaker property empire’s profits to £9.7 million in the year to October 2025, up from £6.3 million. This boon has not trickled down to working-class families, however, or alleviated child poverty.
For more than a month after Communication Workers Union (CWU) General Secretary Dave Ward and his deputy Martin Walsh rammed through their so-called “negotiators’ agreement” with Royal Mail’s billionaire owner Daniel Kretinsky’s EP Group, both leaders have maintained a low profile.
Their silence is deliberate, as the agreement has been exposed as what the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) warned it was: a sweatshop charter to slash jobs, intensify exploitation and gut of the Universal Service Obligation (USO). Having delivered what EP Group demanded, Ward and Walsh have left postal workers to face the consequences.
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The CWU bureaucracy, which has worked hand in glove with Keir Starmer, has now swung behind Andy Burnham as his replacement for prime minister, with Dave Ward claiming, “We need to put working-class people back at the heart of government.” Burnham is a dyed-in-the-wool Blairite who has reaffirmed his commitment to fiscal rules while backing ramped up military spending.
Postal workers must instead link up their struggles with every section of workers, including in the National Health Service, in defense of the jobs and essential services under renewed threat from a deepening agenda of austerity and war.
A new leadership must be built against the union bureaucracy, which accepts that everything must be subordinated to profit and national competitiveness. This means overcoming the divisions of workers by industry or national borders, building the independent power of the working class against governments of every political stripe that are tightening the grip of the corporate billionaires.
In Canada, under the Liberal government of Mark Carney, and in the United States under the would-be dictator Trump, postal services are being cut to the bone to facilitate mass job losses and impose Amazon-style levels of exploitation in preparation for privatization. The PWRFC, through its affiliation with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, provides a vital framework to coordinate the struggles of postal and logistics workers internationally.
We urge postal workers to contact the PWRFC. End the CWU-management cover-ups, open the lines of communication for a coordinated fight back and help strengthen the international fight against privatization, exploitation and the assault on workers’ lives and livelihoods.
More than 1,500 Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO) workers went on strike July 4, the first walkout in the utility’s 145-year history, as Philadelphia and the surrounding region marked the Independence Day holiday under a punishing heat wave.
Striking on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, in the very city where independence was declared, underscores that the revolutionary conflict of the present is the struggle of the working class against capitalism.
The walkout by members of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 614, whose contract expired on March 31, has brought linemen, gas workers, mechanics and call-center employees onto the picket lines after months of talks over wages, pensions, retirement medical benefits and the demand for a unified contract.
PECO workers are confronting not only a profitable corporation but the entire political and corporate establishment in southeastern Pennsylvania, where PECO remains parent company Exelon’s dominant electric and gas utility. The walkout began only days after Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown workers, represented by UNITE HERE Local 274, ended a nine-day strike after reaching a tentative agreement timed to restore hotel operations before the July 4 holiday.
The strike revolves around basic questions: pay, pensions and retirement security. The union has stated it wants “fair wages that meet industry standards” along with the restoration of a universal pension plan and retirement benefits. PECO and Exelon eliminated or reduced pensions for workers hired after 2021, creating a tier system that the workers want abolished.
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Management has tried to abuse and intimidate striking workers on the picket line. IBEW Local 614 says three members were injured in incidents this weekend, including one worker allegedly pushed to the ground by PECO security at a facility and two others reportedly struck in vehicle incidents. PECO has denied the allegations and absurdly claimed that workers fell on their own and were not hit by vehicles.
Despite this, the union leadership has advanced no strategy to broaden the struggle across Philadelphia or appeal directly to other sections of workers, let alone challenge the political establishment that stands behind the company. Public radio WHYY quoted Teamsters Local 107 business agent Shawn Dougherty as declaring, “This chapter of the IBEW has been very, very tolerant. Management’s guns are blazing right away.”
The IBEW apparatus is itself part of the establishment. The career of John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty, the former IBEW Local 98 boss and longtime Democratic Party fixer in Philadelphia, exposes the real social character of the apparatus. Dougherty, widely described as a political “kingmaker” in the city, was convicted in 2023 on charges related to embezzlement and corruption. Reporting at the time showed that Dougherty, in addition to stealing members’ dues, spent union money bribing Democratic Party officials and underwriting the machine politics of the Philadelphia establishment.
In 2022, the IBEW at the national level helped block a national rail strike and collaborated with the Biden administration and Congress in imposing a contract workers had opposed. The IBEW was exposed as an industrial police force for the corporations and the state rather than an organization defending workers’ rights.
Workers in the city and the country have repeatedly shown their willingness to fight. What has blocked the transformation of this potential power into victory has been the trade union apparatus, which works to contain, isolate and betray struggles.
12. No outright winner in New Caledonia election
In a poll on June 28 marked by lower voter turnout, New Caledonia’s long delayed provincial elections leave the French Pacific territory’s Congress with a near deadlock between pro- and anti-independence parties, similar to the outgoing legislature elected in 2019.
French President Emmanuel Macron postponed the elections three times as he unsuccessfully maneuvered to impose a political solution for New Caledonia’s future. An election planned for 2024 was cancelled after Macron moved to change voter eligibility requirements, which would have diluted the indigenous Kanak vote. This ignited a seven-month uprising by alienated and impoverished Kanak youth, which France responded to with a military-police crackdown resulting in 14 dead and material damage of €2.2 billion.
Macron’s unilateral move to “unfreeze” the electoral roll, which only allowed people born in the colony or residing there before 1998 to vote, would have given an additional 37,492 French nationals voting rights. While the bill was abandoned after the riots, a month before the elections Macron’s government rushed through legislation to expand the rolls by 10,569 locally born voters who did not meet the previous definition of citizenship. The change was opposed by the pro-independence parties.
With the colony still “sensitive,” according to the French High Commission, over social and economic issues, heavy security was in force on election day. Some 2,500 policemen were involved including 16 squadrons of gendarmes plus additional officers from the French anti-crime squad and judiciary police. A total alcohol ban was in force for a week. The security forces remain posted this month.
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From a total of 192,584 registered voters there was a 63.71 percent turnout, down from 66.49 percent in 2019. The results for the 54 Congress seats saw the pro-independence side consolidate its position with 26, the same as 2019. The pro-France parties dropped one seat to 24, and Eveil Océanien, based in the Wallisian and Futunan islands community, increased from three seats to four.
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There were significant shifts within the overall votes, indicating a deepening political polarization with sharply reduced support for parties that had sought a “middle way” between the two main contesting blocs.
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The election for Congress took place in the wake of Macron’s Élysée Oudinot Accord and its predecessor, the Bougival Accord, which proposed a new constitutional future for the Pacific colony. While offering the transfer of limited powers from France to the territorial administration, both the accords kept the 170 year-old colony embedded within the French constitution.
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The Congress is scheduled to hold its inaugural sitting on 10 July, with France foreshadowing the immediate resumption of discussions. A new young leader of the FLNKS, Johanito Wamytan, said during the campaign that his party would participate. The pro-independence party represents a thin capitalist Kanak elite which seeks a deal with Paris that will give them a bigger slice of the profits extracted from New Caledonia’s workers and rural poor.
The lower election turnout and the subsequent deadlock reflect growing opposition to the entire political establishment, especially among many young indigenous Kanaks and workers who have not benefited from the indigenous “empowerment” provisions of the Nouméa Accord.
None of the new assemblies nor the discussions with France will produce any substantive measures to seriously address the desperate social crisis facing the colony’s working class and youth, marked by inequality, poverty and alienation.
13. Dana, Magna workers face critical contract fights, as UAW seeks to extend pattern of betrayals
In the wake of the United Auto Workers-engineered sellouts at American Axle, Nexteer and Bridgewater Interiors, thousands of auto parts workers at Dana and Magna Seating face continuing contract struggles over low pay and intolerable working conditions.
Contract talks for the master wage agreement covering US Dana workers are set to resume July 7 in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Dana master contract covers more than 4,000 Dana workers, who are members of the United Auto Workers and the United Steelworkers, which have a coordinated bargaining agreement.
In June, Dana workers decisively rejected a tentative agreement brought back by the UAW, but the union refused to call a strike and instead agreed to extend the contract. Under the rejected agreement, the hated tier system was preserved and expanded, new-hire pay was frozen at $20 an hour, rising to just $25 after four years, while pay for senior workers was capped at $28 an hour. Given Dana’s high turnover, this incentivizes management to continue targeting veteran workers in order to maintain a poverty-wage workforce.
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At the same time, 900 workers at the Magna Seating plant in the Detroit enclave of Highland Park, Michigan, face a looming contract expiration. Starting pay for assemblers at the plant who build seating systems for Stellantis and other automakers is $17.50 an hour.
Another 300 workers at Allison Off-Highway in Lafayette, Indiana, members of UAW Local 2317, voted by 89 percent to authorize a strike in May but have been kept on the job by the UAW. The plant was taken over from Dana by Allison Transmission earlier this year as part of Dana’s $2.7 billion sale of its Off-Highway division.
Auto parts workers are battling not only ruthless transnational corporations but also the UAW apparatus, which has colluded with management to impose contracts that fail to end the oppressive conditions in the auto parts industry, including low wages, overwork and unsafe working conditions.
At Nexteer, the UAW forced workers to vote four times before pushing through a four-year sellout agreement that workers had rejected three times. The fourth vote was held inside the plant under the eyes of management and amid a barrage of threats from union officials. In opposition to the UAW bureaucracy’s attempts to crush opposition, workers formed the Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee to counter the lies and intimidation used by both union officials and management to crush opposition. The experience demonstrated that the only way for workers to fight and win their demands is to organize independently of the pro-company union bureaucracy.
At American Axle, after 10 days on strike, the UAW rushed through a ratification vote on the eve of the union’s Constitutional Convention in Detroit.
The UAW reported last week that workers at Bridgewater Interiors ratified an agreement after overwhelmingly rejecting an initial contract proposal in May. The UAW engineered a snap vote without giving workers adequate time to review the full contract or discuss it among themselves. The union secured ratification by offering a $2,000 signing bonus and front-loading wage increases for newer hires. The contract preserves the tier system, with starting pay set at a poverty-level $20 an hour and rising to only $29 over a four-year progression.
Workers at the Dana Toledo Driveline plant voted by a crushing 90 percent to reject the last tentative agreement, providing the margin of defeat for the contract.
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The contract battles at Dana, Magna and Allison Off-Highway are unfolding under conditions of intensifying restructuring throughout the global auto industry. Automakers and suppliers are demanding that workers pay for tariffs, slowing vehicle sales and the costly transition to electric vehicles through wage suppression, speedup and layoffs, while executives and shareholders continue to reap enormous financial rewards.
Parts suppliers are facing growing market pressures and are pressing ahead with cost-cutting. Last November, trade journal Automotive News reported that 20 percent of auto suppliers were in financial distress because of inflation, supply bottlenecks and higher interest rates. The impact of tariffs has made matters worse. The result has been layoffs, restructuring and intensified exploitation of workers.
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The largest cuts came in Europe, where Bosch and ZF cut 13,000 and 14,000 jobs, respectively. In the United States, there were at least 23 plant closures affecting auto parts workers, including the cancellation of the BlueOval SK battery plant outside Louisville, Kentucky, eliminating 1,500 jobs.
Dana recently closed its Dana Thermal Products plant in Auburn Hills, Michigan, resulting in the loss of 200 jobs. Last year, the company also closed its Driveshaft Manufacturing plant in Lima, Ohio, eliminating another 280 positions.
While crying broke to workers when it comes to adequate pay increases, last month Dana announced a $5.1 billion merger with Eaton Corporation’s Mobility business. According to a company press release, “The combination will integrate Dana’s global powertrain, thermal, and sealing technologies with Eaton Mobility’s commercial vehicle transmissions, engine and emissions products, and advanced electrification capabilities, creating a more comprehensive supplier serving commercial and light vehicle markets, as well as the associated aftermarket channels.”
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Canada-based Magna has also been engaged in restructuring and cost-cutting but remains highly profitable, reporting net income of $829 million in 2025 on sales of $42 billion. Magna CEO Swamy Kotagiri received $19.5 million in executive compensation in 2025, an increase of $2.5 million over the previous year. Magna employs approximately 24,000 workers in the United States, with a significant concentration in Michigan and other Midwestern states.
To prevent having their struggles betrayed, workers at Dana, Magna and Allison Off-Highway must take matters into their own hands by forming rank-and-file committees independent of the UAW bureaucracy. The outcome of these struggles will have implications far beyond the individual companies, setting a precedent for thousands of workers throughout the industry.
14. Twenty-five deaths across the US from “heat dome” during week of July 4th
A vast “heat dome” over the July 4 weekend has subjected much of the US to record and near‑record temperatures; killing dozens of people, straining the power grid and exposing the stark class divide between who is protected and who cannot escape the suffocating conditions.
*****The heat wave disrupted daily life and holiday celebrations across multiple regions, with authorities canceling or postponing parades, concerts and fireworks as the country marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
- In Philadelphia, a major parade commemorating America’s 250th birthday was canceled as temperatures topped 100° F.
- In Washington, D.C., Trump’s “Salute to America” event on July 4 went ahead under a brutal heat index above 110° F, leading to nearly 300 medical interactions on the National Mall, with dozens transported to hospitals.
- Public transit systems in the Northeast and Midwest, including Amtrak, SEPTA and New Jersey Transit, were forced to reduce speeds or cancel trains as tracks and equipment buckled under the extreme heat.
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The same planetary processes—rising greenhouse‑gas concentrations and warming oceans altering atmospheric circulation—are driving both the European and North American heat domes, with working class and poor populations on both continents paying the highest price.
A worker was injured at BlueScope Steel’s Port Kembla steelworks on June 30 when a 200-kilogram metal drive gear fell and landed on his feet. He was transported to Wollongong Hospital by NSW Ambulance. The man, a rigger in his 50s, was working on the plant’s hot strip mill during a maintenance shutdown.This is the latest in a series of dangerous incidents involving falling objects at the steelworks, highlighting the ongoing risk to BlueScope workers after the tragic death of 24-year-old worker Jack McGrath last year. McGrath was working as a rigger on BlueScope’s No. 6 Blast Furnace reline project when he was fatally struck by a steel beam that fell from a moving crane on November 17.
A company spokesman sought to downplay the severity of the latest incident, emphasizing that the worker’s injuries were “minor” and that he was wearing “correct PPE including steel-cap boots.” The reality is that the worker could easily have become the second to be killed on the job in eight months at a workplace where reports of dangerous conditions are all too common.
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A SafeWork NSW investigation into McGrath’s death remains ongoing. The regulator has noted that “complex matters” can take up to two years to complete, while Carlson has reportedly been told that this could stretch to more than five years if there is a coronial inquest.
Such long, drawn-out investigations—standard practice for all the state workplace safety regulators—allow the anger among colleagues, family and more broadly to dissipate, clearing the way for a finding that whitewashes the company’s culpability for killing a worker.
With opposition to unsafe working conditions diverted behind illusions in these protracted official investigations, companies are free to carry on operating and amassing profits as if nothing had happened, despite the ongoing risk to workers. The recent spate of incidents at BlueScope demonstrates just how dangerous this can be.
These cover-ups would not be possible without the assistance of the trade unions. In the immediate aftermath of McGrath’s death, both the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU)—of which he was a member—and the Australian Workers Union (AWU) declared they were working with the “relevant authorities” to investigate. The CFMEU later declared that, in addition to assisting SafeWork NSW, the union would “do our own investigation and drill down to ensure that this never happens again.”
The real purpose of these statements was to tell workers to get back on the job and leave their safety in the hands of the union officials and government authorities.
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It is through the same methods that the CFMEU, AWU and the rest of the union apparatus, together with the Labor governments... and the state safety regulators have presided over workplace deaths and serious injuries for decades.
On average, 191 workers are killed on the job each year in Australia, more than one every two days. In 2024, the most recent year for which figures are available, there were 146,700 serious workers’ compensation claims.
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The fact is that workplace deaths and injuries are not truly accidents, but the sharpest expression of an economic system, capitalism, under which every interest of workers, including their health and lives, is subordinated to the profit demands of big business and the financial elite. The unions, safety regulators and Labor governments do not oppose this industrial slaughterhouse, because they represent the interests of that economic system and the ruling class that controls it.
To fight for safe working conditions, workers at BlueScope and in every industry need to take matters into their own hands. Rank-and-file committees, run by workers, not highly paid bureaucrats, must be built in every factory and job site to lead the fight against the scourge of workplace deaths and injuries.
Ahead of the NATO Summit in Ankara on July 7–8, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has not only declared a de facto 13-day state of emergency in the capital; over the past weekend it launched a new wave of repression across the country. So that the imperialist war criminals—led by US President Donald Trump, who is directing the war of aggression against Iran and who made the genocide in Gaza possible—can “rest easy,” hundreds more people opposed to war and NATO have been detained. This came on top of the hundreds of detentions and more than 200 arrests carried out over the preceding weeks.
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The imperialist war abroad—in which the Turkish ruling class takes part as a component of the US-NATO axis in pursuit of its own interests—and the police-state repression at home are two sides of the same coin. These operations, which treat legal and constitutional activities as “crimes,” are the product of the war encircling Türkiye from Ukraine to Iran, and of the drive to suppress the growing social opposition at home to war, austerity and political repression. With the approval of the capitals of the United States and Europe, the Erdoğan regime is consolidating a presidential dictatorship—one that serves as a model for every imperialist government confronting the same crisis of the capitalist system.
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal demands:
• The immediate release of all political prisoners who have been detained and arrested.
• The lifting of the de facto state of emergency and all bans in Ankara, and an end to censorship.
• The cancellation of the summit; Türkiye’s withdrawal from NATO and the dissolution of NATO. All resources squandered on militarism and war must be reallocated in accordance with the needs of society.
• An end to the attacks on Iran, Gaza and Lebanon and to NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine; the closure of all imperialist bases in Türkiye and across the region.
• An end to every form of sanction and economic warfare waged against Iran, Cuba, Russia and other countries.
• All war criminals must be held to account.
17. UK Labour government embeds arms industry in higher education through Defense Universities Alliance
Higher education internationally is being reshaped to meet the needs of the arms industry as ruling elites massively ramp up rearmament in preparations for war.
Britain’s Labour government is directly enlisting universities as part of its society-wide war drive.
On June 9, the government announced that 24 universities and colleges had won a share of £80 million in funding for defense-related student places. The money is tied to a new Defense Universities Alliance (DUA), through which the Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reorganizing teaching, research, and governance around the rearmament demands the US-led NATO military alliance.
Ministers presented it as a “student skills investment,” but this is one front the restructuring of the British state and society for great-power conflict. Two days later, the defense secretary who oversaw the package, John Healey, resigned, demanding the Treasury spend billions more on the military than Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves would sanction.
The £80 million is the largest single element of a £182 million skills package unveiled last September as part of the Defense Industrial Strategy, announced by Healey. The Defense Industrial Strategy, for the first time, formally redefined Britain’s “defense industrial base” to include universities.
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The Defense Universities Alliance (DUA), launched in April 2026, is central to reorganization of the universities to serve the militarist agenda. It is co-chaired by two MoD officials: the department’s chief scientific adviser, Professor Tim Dafforn, and its director of growth and missions, Sherin Aminossehe.
Under the DUA Charter published on April 13, member institutions commit to “actively growing research and development activity and capacity in defense and national security relevant fields and technologies to support defense aims and objectives,” to channeling graduates into defence careers, and to ongoing MoD security screening—including disclosure of their overseas research funding.
The alliance’s FAQ states that selected institutions “will be members of the DUA for life,” while the MoD reserves the right to monitor them and act should “any concerns develop over national security or behaviors against the aims of the DUA.”
This vague language enables the state to treat anti-war research and dissenting academic work as a security concern.
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Membership of the alliance has not been made public. The MoD refused a freedom of information request by Action on Armed Violence for the list, citing commercial sensitivity.
But the Defense Industrial Strategy already made clear some of the leading academic institutional players. In a section: “High-Growth-Potential Frontier Industry Clusters”, the following areas of the UK and key institutions are noted. Belfast is “Recognized as a leading cyber security hub, augmented by Queen’s University Belfast’s Center for Secure Information Technologies.” South Yorkshire is “Home to the University of Sheffield’s world-leading Advanced Manufacturing Research Center. A growing defense cluster bolstered by BAE Systems’ new artillery factory.”
The Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor is home to the “UK’s leading region for computing, data science, space innovation; home to world famous universities and the Harwell Campus, digital primes, OEMs and the National Centre for Geospatial Intelligence.”
In South Wales there is “Regional cyber security and autonomous systems expertise bolstered by the Universities of South Wales and Cardiff and Airbus’ Cyber Innovation Hub.”
In the West of England, Cheltenham and Gloucester are, “Home to several leading space and aerospace companies, including Airbus and Boeing, with renowned universities and the National Composites Centre driving cross sectoral innovation.”
Greater London is “Home to world-leading research in quantum computing, including at UCL’s [University College London] ‘Q-Biomed’”.
Plymouth has “key defence ecosystem built around Plymouth & South Devon Freeport and the largest naval base in western Europe.” It boasts “R&D strengths in cutting-edge maritime technologies and drones, at the National Centre for Coastal Autonomy, SMART Sound Plymouth, the Maritime Autonomy Centre and the University of Plymouth.”
The beneficiaries of the research carried out by the universities are the arms corporations. According to the campaign group Demilitarise Education in their Annual Report 2026, BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce are the most active private arms companies in British academia, with dozens of existing partnerships. BAE Systems reported record results for 2024: sales of £28.3 billion and underlying profit above £3 billion for the first time, citing the war in Ukraine and European rearmament. Rolls-Royce signed a roughly £9 billion submarine-support contract, the largest in its history.
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As the WSWS reported, the resignation of Healey as defense secretary was a calculated maneuver aimed at determining the outcome of the expected leadership challenge to Starmer. Former Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, set to be the sole challenger to Starmer, has declared his support for boosting rearmament. The main demand of the British ruling class on Burnham is that he fulfill his promise and slash welfare and social services at unprecedented levels to pay for rearmament.
18. Nearly 25,000 migrants flee South Africa amid xenophobic violence
Over the past month, nearly 25,000 migrants have fled South Africa amid xenophobic violence and pogroms. Thousands more have slept outside consulates, government offices, and border posts in the desperate hope of repatriation.
Governments across the African continent, including Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana have organized bus convoys and emergency flights to remove their nationals from a country now gripped by the largest xenophobic mobilization since the pogroms of 2008, in which 62 people were killed nationwide.
The immediate trigger was a self-declared “deadline” of June 30, set by the fascistic anti-immigrant group March and March, ordering undocumented migrants to leave or face violence. On that day, 20 far-right groups led by March and March and vigilante group Operation Dudula, organised 120 protests across the country.
March to March leader, former Durban radio host Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, billed the day as the launch of “a national march to freedom, a rolling mass action” that would continue until every undocumented foreign national had been deported.
The demonstrations did not enjoy broad popular support. But in Johannesburg, several thousand protesters carrying sticks and flags brought the city center to a standstill, as shops shuttered and public transport was suspended, while in Cape Town only around a hundred marchers turned out, passing a counter-demonstration against xenophobia.
In Durban, the epicenter of the mobilization, thousands of marchers turned out in full Zulu warrior regalia—the amabutho regiments in leopard skins, carrying spears, shields and whips—chanting “Abahambe,” “They must go,” as they moved through the streets stopping outside buildings believed to house undocumented migrants and ordering the occupants to leave.
The xenophobic campaign has led to at least four deaths since the protests intensified, including a migrant who fell to his death from the eighth floor of a Durban building after fearing he had been identified as a target. This followed weeks of attacks stretching back to March, including the burning of dozens of shacks in an informal settlement near Mossel Bay in the Western Cape, in which Mozambique’s government reported five of its citizens killed.
The pogromist groups act as the extra-parliamentary spearhead of the African National Congress (ANC)-led ten party Government of National Unity’s anti-immigrant policies. The fascistic vigilante organizations translate this program into direct threats in working-class neighborhoods.
The party most closely associated with the violence is the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party, which has pledged through its leader Velenkosini Hlabisa to work with all government departments to return migrants to their respective countries so that jobs held by foreign nationals could be freed up for South Africans.
The far-right Patriotic Alliance, whose leader Gayton McKenzie sits in Ramaphosa’s cabinet as Minister of Sport, has built its entire political identity on demands for mass deportation. McKenzie sought to distance his own party members from the June 30 mobilisation, formally instructing them in a livestreamed address not to assault children or undocumented foreigners while affirming days later that he would deny medical oxygen to an undocumented immigrant if a South African patient required it.
While the ANC publicly disavows their methods, it treats the demands of the pogromists as legitimate and implements their essential objective through the machinery of policing, immigration control and repression.
Together, they work to turn the anger of impoverished South Africans away from the capitalist system towards scapegoating migrants.
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The convergence of the government’s policy and the vigilantes’ demands was demonstrated immediately after the far-right protests. At a 1 July police briefing, police reported more than 900 arrests nationwide, including approximately 300 undocumented migrants for violating the Immigration Act. Thus, even as the police were compelled to intervene against the most violent protestors, they delivered on a central demand of the protestors: the mass detention of undocumented migrants.
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The role of the ANC, the SACP and COSATU must be understood in its historical context. The present violence is not a spontaneous eruption of popular prejudice as claimed by the media. It is the organized expression of a xenophobic politics cultivated over nearly three decades by the South African ruling class, led by the ANC, to divert the immense social anger produced by capitalist rule onto the most vulnerable sections of the working class.
The negotiated settlement between the ANC and the white-supremacist regime dismantled apartheid’s racist legal framework in 1994, while preserving the underlying property relations and class structure on which it rested. The SACP and COSATU, bound to the ANC through the Tripartite Alliance, functioned as its indispensable political and industrial props, subordinating the working class to the new capitalist order and suppressing any independent struggle against it.
Having come to power promising jobs, housing, land and dignity, the ANC imposed the pro-capitalist Growth, Employment and Redistribution program, privatization and fiscal austerity. Its Black Economic Empowerment policies enriched a narrow layer of politically connected black businessmen while doing nothing to alter the mass unemployment, poverty and inequality inherited from apartheid. The result is a social disaster. Official unemployment stands at 32.7 percent, unemployment among those aged 15 to 24 has reached 60.9 percent, and the richest tenth of the population controls roughly 85 percent of household wealth.
It is on this foundation that xenophobia has been systematically fostered.
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The way forward lies in the independent political mobilization of South African and migrant workers alike against the capitalist system, the state apparatus of repression and every party that defends them. Only a socialist and internationalist movement, uniting workers across national, racial and ethnic lines in a common struggle for decent jobs, housing, healthcare and social equality, can put an end to the cycle of xenophobic violence once and for all.
Born into the rubble of post-war Germany, Herma Huber belonged to a generation that demanded answers to the great catastrophe of Nazi fascism. Rejecting both Stalinist lies and capitalist hypocrisy, she found her answer in Trotskyism. Herma dedicated her entire adult life to building the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
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Although not a member of the party’s executive committee, she belonged to the large number of indispensable members who, without hesitation, through great personal commitment and great willingness to make sacrifices, enable the day-to-day political struggle of the party. Without comrades like Herma, the political life and existence of the party would not be possible.
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Those who knew her were deeply impressed by her selflessness and willingness to help others. Above all, when it came to helping younger comrades understand political questions, Herma explained them patiently and thoroughly. When support was needed so that comrades could participate in international conferences and educational events, Herma gave generously. On the donation list for the release of Bogdan Syrotiuk, the socialist opponent of war who fights for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers to end the war between Russia and Ukraine stoked by NATO, who is therefore imprisoned by the far-right Zelensky regime, there are several large contributions from Herma Huber.
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Herma was part of a generation that sought answers to the questions: How can one understand the monstrous crimes of Nazi fascism? How was such a regression into barbarism possible in a developed and cultured country? But she belonged to those who were not satisfied with cheap, simple answers and moral appeals. She wanted to get to the bottom of things.
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Herma took part in an intensive study of the writings in which Trotsky had exposed the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism. This made it possible to understand the German catastrophe. The working class had been unable to prevent fascist terror because of the false policies of the Stalinist Communist Party (KPD), which had labelled the Social Democrats (SPD) as “social fascists,” rejected a united front against the Nazis and divided the working class. Trotsky and the International Left Opposition, by contrast, had advocated a united front—joint fighting measures by the KPD and SPD against the Nazis.
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After Herma reached retirement age and left her work at the post office, she took part in numerous party campaigns, whether to collect signatures for the party’s participation in elections, to discuss with workers and young people at factory struggles, or to publicize a central party event. For example, until the coronavirus pandemic, she regularly supported the party’s meetings at the annual Leipzig Book Fair, and in doing so she achieved great things. Especially younger comrades who experienced such a campaign for the first time felt in good hands with her and today fondly remember how encouraging it was to work with her.
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Comrade Herma represented an important part of the founding cadre of our party, without whose tireless work and willingness to make sacrifices we would not be able to build the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei as the leading revolutionary party of the working class today.
We will always remember Herma Huber as a fighter for Trotskyism!
20.Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
