Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. ICE murder in Houston: Trump’s war against the working class
The killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, shot down by an agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Tuesday morning on Houston’s east side, was a state-sanctioned murder.
Salgado was 52 years old. Born in Mexico, he moved to Houston at 17 and spent his entire adult life building hundreds of houses, according to his family, including the one they live in. There are thousands of people in Houston who have a roof over their heads because of Salgado and his co-workers.
Salgado and his wife have three sons, all of whom graduated from college. One is now a schoolteacher in Houston, another an engineer in Washington DC. Ronaldo Salgado, the teacher and oldest son, has given a series of moving statements honoring his father’s memory as a hard worker, provider and caring parent, while spelling out the family’s demands for an investigation into his killing and the punishment of those responsible.
At least two witnesses reported hearing moaning or gurgling from the fatally wounded man, and one heard him call out in Spanish, “They’re killing me.” Ronaldo Salgado said he learned of his father’s death, not from the authorities, who did not contact the family, but from a social media video an hour after the shooting. He told the press, “I recognized him immediately, not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street, bleeding out.”
Salgado’s second son, Lorenzo, also saw the video. “Hearing him cry out in agony, and you know, seeing that he’d been shot, and they’re not providing any first aid care, they’re just on him, they’re holding him down, letting him bleed like a dog,” he told the Texas Tribune.
The Trump administration is responding to the killing with a cover-up. The acting ICE director claimed that there was no bodycam or dashcam video of the events leading up to Salgado’s death, and the agency has announced it will not make public the name of the agent who fired the fatal shots.
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have also moved to preempt any local investigation. Their first action was to suppress the most important witnesses to the killing: the three construction workers riding in the van with Salgado—Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo (Salgado’s younger brother), Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego and Daniel Tirado Pantoja. All three were taken into custody and pressured to “self-deport.” Tirado Pantoja remains confined in an ICE detention facility in Conroe, Texas.
After Trump’s return to the White House, Salgado and his family had discussed what he should do if stopped by immigration patrols. They concluded he should remain calm and present papers showing he had applied for legal residence, with his son Ronaldo, an American citizen, as his sponsor. Yet according to ICE, Salgado suddenly decided to use his van as a battering ram to kill an ICE agent.
This account is just as preposterous as the claim made by ICE in Minneapolis that Renée Nicole Good had “weaponized” her car against an agent who then executed her with three shots at close range. After that murder, Vice President JD Vance declared that the shooter was “protected by absolute immunity ... he was doing his job.”
The murder of Salgado is part of an escalating conspiracy against the democratic rights of the American people, aimed at establishing a presidential dictatorship. In ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Trump administration is assembling the shock troops of this conspiracy, exempted in practice from every law and guaranteed immunity for murder by the gangster in the White House.
Acting at the direction of Trump’s fascist deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, ICE and CBP agents stepped up the number of arrests and detentions to more than 10,000 in the first week of July. According to figures published last month by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, 52 immigrants died in ICE custody in the first 500 days of the second Trump administration.
At least 20 incidents have been reported of ICE agents firing into moving vehicles. Four people have now been killed in such attacks: Ruben Ray Martinez, in South Padre Island, Texas, on March 15, 2025; Silverio Villegas González, in Franklin Park, Illinois, on September 12, 2025; Renée Nicole Good, in Minneapolis, on January 7, 2026; and now Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Others, like Keith Porter Jr. in Los Angeles and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, were shot to death by immigration agents while on foot.
In another notorious case, Marimar Martinez was shot five times in October 2025, allegedly for “ramming” immigration officers with her car. She survived, and charges against her were dropped when video evidence emerged showing that the federal agents initiated the collision. In virtually every encounter that has been recorded on video, the federal agents have been proven to be violent thugs and liars, but they have been protected by their bosses in ICE, DHS and the White House.
The war on immigrants is an attack on the most vulnerable section of the working class, aimed at splitting workers along national lines while the oligarchy plunders society. But the machinery being assembled is directed against the working class as a whole. A force that can murder an immigrant construction worker on his way to work and face no consequences can and will be turned against strikers, demonstrators and every form of popular opposition.
Already, billions have been appropriated for a network of concentration camps, databases of protesters and legal observers are being compiled, and in Texas itself federal courts have sentenced 15 anti-ICE protesters in the Prairieland case to a combined 556 years in prison on “terrorism” charges—while every ICE killer walks free.
In this campaign of state terror, the Democratic Party functions not as an opposition but as an accomplice. Houston’s Democratic congressional delegation has responded to the murder with a letter to the head of DHS and the acting ICE director, the very officials directing the cover-up, politely requesting an “independent” investigation. Such toothless appeals, to be filed away and ignored, are the sum total of the Democratic “opposition.”
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The Democrats, a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, fear a movement of the working class from below far more than they fear dictatorship. The fight for justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo therefore falls to the working class itself.
The Socialist Equality Party calls for the formation of rank-and-file committees in every workplace, school and neighborhood as centers of resistance to the Trump dictatorship. The sentiment for a general strike that emerged in Minneapolis must be revived and organized in Houston and throughout the country.
Workers must demand the naming of the killer and his arrest and prosecution; the release of all video and forensic evidence; the immediate freeing of the three witnesses, beginning with Daniel Tirado Pantoja, and an end to all deportation proceedings against them; the dropping of the FBI’s frame-up investigation; and the withdrawal of ICE from Houston and every city. These demands must be connected to the fight to abolish ICE and CBP, close the detention camps and free all those imprisoned within them.
No appeal to the courts, the Democratic Party or the November elections will accomplish this.
The defense of the most vulnerable immigrant worker is the defense of the democratic rights of all working people, and the demand of the workers’ movement must be the right of workers to live and work in whatever country they choose.
Above all, the working class must be united—native-born and immigrant, across every industry and every border—in a common political movement against the Trump dictatorship, the corporate-financial oligarchy it serves, and the capitalist system from which fascism arises. Dictatorship is the response of the ruling class to the deepening crisis of its own system. It can be answered only by the independent mobilization of the working class in the fight for socialism. [Emphasis added.]
2. Australia: Telstra outage stops trains, blocks emergency calls
A major network outage this week at Telstra disrupted mobile phone and internet services nationally, brought regional rail operations to a standstill in two states and prevented hundreds of people from reaching the Triple Zero emergency line.
The failure at Australia’s largest telecommunications company underscores the dangers created by decades of privatization, subordinating vital public infrastructure to the profit interests of big business.
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Telstra said the outage was caused by a software bug introduced through a firmware update. “There was a software fault that… changed the time and caused the time desynchronization,” the company’s chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, said on Wednesday afternoon.
The error reportedly set the date on some of Telstra’s hardware back by almost two decades, causing problems with security authentications and preventing customers’ phones from connecting to the network.
The glitch was caused by a well-known limitation of the way older GPS systems store dates, with a counter that resets to zero after 1,024 weeks—19.6 years. This was at the centre of a 2020 outage at Jersey Telecom that took down phone services in the Channel Islands.
Regional rail networks in Victoria and New South Wales were thrown into chaos as the outage hit the National Train Communications System, which relies on Telstra’s 4G network for real-time monitoring and voice communication with control centres.
The crisis was particularly acute in Victoria because other aspects of the public transport network, including passenger information screens, ticketing and security also relies on Telstra, according to RMIT University public transport systems specialist Koorosh Gharehbaghi.
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The shutdown of large parts of the country’s communications system, even for a matter of hours, reveals how vulnerable society has become under capitalism’s domination of every sphere of life. A single software failure in a profit-driven network was enough to jeopardize emergency medical care, immobilize rail operations across multiple states and disrupt the daily lives of millions.
This poses the urgent need to fight for a socialist alternative, which includes placing public utilities, such as communications, and the major banks and corporations under public ownership and democratic workers’ control.
3. United States: Montefiore moves to eliminate 12 Bronx nursing positions in AI restructuring
Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx is moving to eliminate the positions of 12 utilization review nurses through an AI-driven restructuring of their work. The nurses received letters dated May 28 informing them that their positions would be eliminated after 45 days, on July 12. They work across Montefiore’s Moses, Einstein and Weiler campuses; one of them, registered nurse Marilyn Shuler, has worked at Montefiore for 39 years.
The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) identified the software provider as the health data company Datavant. They report that Montefiore began automating the utilization review process earlier this year. Montefiore called the union’s account “inaccurate and misleading,” while refusing to explain the reorganization, identify who will perform the work or answer questions about its relationship with Datavant. The elimination letters say management will determine whether suitable alternative positions are available, without guaranteeing any of the nurses continued employment.
The job eliminations come less than five months after the largest nurses strike in New York City’s history, with 15,000 participating. NYSNA ended the strike at Montefiore in February under a contract it publicly celebrated as providing “safeguards against artificial intelligence for the first time.” In reality, the layoffs prove the signed agreement contains no meaningful measures.
Utilization review nurses examine medical records and treatment plans, assemble the clinical justification for care and work with insurers to obtain authorization and payment. They identify missing information, answer insurers’ questions and appeal denials of treatments, surgeries and extended hospital stays. Their work protects patients from being billed for prescribed care or losing access to it and protects the hospital’s reimbursement.
These nurses operate inside an insurance system organized around restricting payment. Insurers impose standardized criteria for “medical necessity,” demand prior authorization and deny claims that physicians have ordered. Clinical experience is particularly important in complicated cases that do not fit neatly into a template. Eliminating 12 nurses necessarily removes decades of accumulated knowledge from the work of recognizing those cases, assembling the evidence and challenging a denial.
Management is replacing paid clinical labor with a system intended to process a larger volume of cases at lower cost. Whatever human supervision remains, fewer licensed nurses will examine records, recognize exceptions and decide which denials require a challenge.
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Management is imposing the costs of a health care system dominated by private insurers, government reimbursement formulas and financial markets on nurses and on the largely working-class and low-income population of the Bronx. Montefiore is the flagship of an $8.8 billion health system. In 2025, the system reported a $120.9 million operating loss after federal emergency funding fell by more than $250 million, although net patient-service revenue increased from $7.8 billion to $8.2 billion.
4. Utah book banning spree part of a broader, preemptive campaign of censorship and oppression
Earlier this week, the state of Utah added a 36th book to the list of books that every public school in the state now has to remove from its shelves. The latest target of the Utah censors is Stephen King’s Different Seasons, a collection of novellas, three of which were adapted into films (The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me and Apt Pupil).
The statewide campaign of book-banning in Utah was given legal legitimacy by the legislature’s passage of a bill in 2024 allowing parents to challenge books they deemed “sensitive material” and requiring a book be removed from all public schools if at least three school districts determined it amounted to “objective sensitive material.” This has opened up the floodgates and allowed a relative handful of censorship fanatics to wield considerable control over every school in the state.
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Kelly Jensen at Bookriot makes two salient points about the removal of the books.
First, the average publication date of the books banned in Utah is now 2008. (The King book came out in 1982, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in 1970!) “Many of the books removed are titles likely sitting on shelves when the people who are banning them were themselves students. That they weren’t a problem then only speaks to the manufactured panic around ‘inappropriate’ books.”
Second, only nine school districts in Utah (out of 42) have accounted for the book bans. Davis and Washington Counties have been involved in 35 and 31 of the bans, respectively. “In other words, two school districts in the whole state account for the vast majority of bans.”
This notion of a “manufactured panic” and the relative handful of book banning advocates driving the process are quite significant. They point to the important political and social facts surrounding this filthy business in Utah, which has nothing to do with saving the children of the state from “pornographers.”
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In April, the American Library Association came out with its annual report on the State of America’s Libraries and it revealed “how far and how deeply the attacks on democratic rights and freedom of thought and expression have gone and how determined the right-wing, fascistic elements are to suppress truth on various fronts.”
As we noted,
This is not the result of some sudden upsurge in public morality or even prudishness. This is a concerted, organized campaign driven by ultra-right elements dedicated to forcing their anti-democratic and unpopular views on a largely unsuspecting public. It is part of the preemptive assault on popular consciousness, driven by fear of the growing radicalization materialized in the “No Kings” demonstrations of millions and other indications of public hostility to the entire political establishment.
In response to the book-banning crusade, a coalition of LGBTQ organizations and independent bookstores have joined forces to hand out free copies of the books that have been targeted. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the giveaways “will continue, they say, until the state ends its practice of removing titles from school shelves statewide. Organizers of the ‘Read Between the Bans’ campaign include The King’s English Bookshop, Under The Umbrella bookstore, The Legendarium bookstore and Weller Book Works, along with Utah’s LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce and Safe Zone Utah.”
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The Democratic Party and the Utah AFL-CIO, along with the teachers’ unions, are officially on record opposing the book banning, but they have done little more than issue indignant statements and organize a few protest stunts.
This reactionary crusade does not come out of some right-wing surge in public opinion. On the contrary, polls indicate far more tolerant views of homosexuality, interracial marriage and other once “controversial” orientations or statuses. The fascistic elements naturally do what they can to encourage every ounce of backwardness in the population. In reality, however, the big movement of the masses in the US at present is to the left.
The book bannings, which are widespread in America, occur on the same “historical plane” as the efforts to block youth from social media, the anti-immigrant chauvinism, the promotion of religious bigotry and superstition and the Trump administration’s anti-communist hysteria.
As far as the powers that be are concerned, everything must be done to block young people, above all, from being able to look honestly and objectively at their society and–as they inevitably will–draw radical, far-reaching conclusions.
The feverish anti-democratic actions in Utah are also a concrete response to the growth of political opposition and radicalism in that state. The No Kings rally in Salt Lake City March 28, which attracted 15,000 to 20,000 people and ended at the State Capitol, was widely estimated to have been the largest protest in the state’s history.
5. Trump bombs Iran for third day amid Khamenei funeral
The Trump administration continued its bombing of Iran for a third day on Thursday, striking the rail lines to Mashhad, as mourners buried Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader assassinated by US and Israeli forces on the first day of the war.
The strikes delayed the burial by eight hours, the Telegraph reported Thursday. Khamenei was laid to rest at the shrine of Imam Reza in the city of his birth, at the end of six days of funeral processions through Iran and Iraq that Iranian state media said drew up to 43 million people. Mourners carried red flags symbolizing revenge and banners reading, “We Will Kill Trump.”
The turnout demonstrated the failure of the American effort to overthrow the Iranian government and subjugate the country by force.
Khamenei, who had served as supreme leader since 1989, was assassinated at the age of 86 on February 28, in a US-Israeli strike on his compound in Tehran. The US and Israel also murdered his daughter, daughter-in-law, son-in-law and 14-month-old granddaughter.
The strike that murdered Khamenei came in the middle of negotiations, two days after US and Iranian diplomats held nuclear talks in Geneva. To assassinate an adversary under the cover of negotiations is an act of perfidy, illegal under the laws of war.
The Iranian government said US strikes hit a bridge 55 kilometers from Mashhad on Thursday, blocking passenger trains from Tehran, and that cruise missiles struck a second bridge near Aqqala, in Golestan province, on a line that carries the country’s overland trade with Russia and China. The Financial Times reported Thursday that these were “the first attacks on Iranian infrastructure in months.”
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The rail strikes followed two nights of heavy bombing. The fighting began Monday, when projectiles struck three commercial ships near the Strait of Hormuz—a Qatari gas carrier, a Saudi oil tanker and a third vessel. The US military blamed Iranian forces; Tehran did not claim responsibility.
US warplanes struck more than 80 targets Tuesday night and about 90 more on Wednesday, hitting the ports of Bandar Abbas, Chabahar, Konarak and Sirik and, the Iranian government said, the perimeter of the Russian-built nuclear power plant at Bushehr. More strikes took place Thursday night.
The US military said the targets included air defenses, coastal radar, missile and drone depots and more than 60 Revolutionary Guards boats. Iran’s health ministry said the bombing killed 14 people and wounded 78 across five provinces, including three dead at the port of Sirik.
Iranian forces fired missiles and drones at US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar and, the Revolutionary Guards said, 10 ballistic missiles at the Azraq air base in Jordan, of which the Jordanian military said it intercepted eight. The price of Brent crude jumped more than 5 percent Wednesday to $78 a barrel, and the United Nations shipping agency urged shipowners to keep their vessels out of the strait, citing the danger to nearly 6,000 sailors in the region.
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The ceasefire Trump broke had taken effect June 17. Under it, the United States lifted the naval blockade it had imposed on Iran’s ports in April, and the Iranian government agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz toll-free for 60 days. On Tuesday the U.S. Treasury revoked the waiver permitting Iranian oil exports, the agreement’s central benefit for Tehran.
Congress had twice voted to end the war—the House on June 3, the Senate on June 23—the first war-powers resolution ever to pass both chambers. But the votes were non-binding, and Trump resumed the bombing without the authorization they demanded. Asked what the war had taught him about the limits of his power, he answered, “There are no limits.”
The war on Iran is only one front in a global eruption of imperialist violence. Trump oversaw the attacks from the NATO summit in Ankara, which was given over to expanding wars, above all, against Russia.
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NATO’s leaders cheered the widening war on Russia. They praised Ukraine’s drone strikes deep inside the country, among them the attack on Russia’s largest oil refinery, at Omsk, 2,500 kilometers from Ukraine, which the Financial Times reported this week had cut Russian refining by a fifth to two-fifths. The US bombing of the Iranian rail line belonged to the same offensive. In a single week Washington struck the infrastructure binding together Iran, Russia and China.
At the same time, Israel is continuing its onslaught on Gaza and Lebanon. An Israeli drone murdered at least four people in Lebanon on July 6, among them a school principal and her mother. In Gaza, Israeli forces have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Thursday Israeli forces would not leave Gaza, Lebanon or Syria.
6. Sri Lankan government abandons cyclone-affected tea plantation workers
More than seven months after Cyclone Ditwah struck Sri Lanka on November 28, 2025, thousands of families remain in dire conditions. The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government’s much‑touted compensation program has done little to resolve the hardships faced by victims.Cyclone Ditwah devastated much of the country. According to official data, the death toll stands at 649 and 173 people remain missing. About 2.3 million people—nearly 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s population—were directly affected by flooding. The World Bank estimated direct physical damage at $US4.1 billion—equivalent to 4 percent of Sri Lanka’s GDP—with total economic losses projected at between $6 billion and $7 billion.
Soon after the disaster, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake announced compensation, promising up to 5 million rupees ($US16,300) for fully destroyed homes, 500,000 rupees for partial damage and compensation for deaths and livelihood grants. He announced a record 500 billion rupee disaster relief allocation, the largest in the country’s history.
An article in the Daily Mirror on July 3, however, titled “Dismay for Ditwah victims,” reported that although 97 percent of people received initial payments of 25,000 rupees and 50,000 rupees for cleaning and fixing damaged property and equipment, “thousands of affected individuals remain on waiting lists to receive compensation for both partially damaged and fully destroyed houses.”
Plantation estate workers are among the worst affected. According to Plantation and Community Infrastructure Minister Samantha Vidyarathna, 10,310 estate families were impacted by the cyclone in several districts, including Badulla and Nuwara Eliya. While 431 line rooms were completely destroyed, 2,152 were partially damaged.
For these workers, who are among the most oppressed in Sri Lanka and endure slave-labor conditions, Ditwah meant falling from the frying pan into the fire. Hundreds, if not thousands, are unable to return to their line rooms—cramped and overcrowded housing units on the plantations—because the cyclone turned them into death traps.
The government provided these workers with only three months’ rent (75,000 rupees). Many plantation workers moved to rented houses far from the tea plantations where they had originally been employed, lost their jobs and were unable to find new work. Others were forced to return to unsafe, storm-damaged line rooms.
More than six months after the cyclone, the government was still discussing whether the estate workers should receive any housing compensation. In an attempt to placate rising anger, Minister Vidyarathna told Parliament on June 9 that Cabinet had decided estate residents would be eligible for 5 million rupees and a 10-perch plot of land even if they did not own their line rooms or the land where they work. One month later, however, nothing has been done.
Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) recently visited the Eskdale Division of Park Estate, Kandapola, in Nuwara Eliya District, which is managed by Udapussellawa Plantations, a subsidiary of Browns company.
All 280 families in Eskdale Estate remain at risk if another cyclone or climate-related disaster occurs. Water supplies and roads were severely damaged by the cyclone and the estate school remains closed. While 135 families’ houses were partially damaged, 20 houses were completely destroyed. Six people died on the estate. The estate management says land was allocated to 62 workers in the Park Division, but no one has actually received it.
[The following is from a statement of a Rank-and-File Committee on behalf of Will Lehman, the rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker and socialist who is running for UAW president.]
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Brothers and Sisters,
It has been two weeks since UAW officials narrowly rammed through the fourth Tentative Agreement (TA) by resorting to the most underhanded methods, including holding the vote in the plant and lying to us about the content of the four-and-a-half-year deal. Now everyone in the plant is living with the consequences of this illegitimate vote: stolen vacation time, bonuses promised to new hires that never materialized, new threats to our jobs, and speedup.
The last three months made one thing clear: the UAW apparatus, from the International and Region 1D down to the Local 699 stooges, serves Nexteer, not us. That is why we formed the Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee and why we urge you to join our committee and build a movement to put power in the hands of shop floor workers.
The last three months have also shown us we are not alone. Other workers--at Dana, American Axle, Bridgewater Interiors, and other parts suppliers--are revolting against the UAW bureaucrats too. And, like parts workers, GM, Ford and Stellantis workers are sick and tired of constant job threats, inflation and a union that sells them out.
From the beginning of our struggle, Will Lehman, the rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker who is running for UAW president, warned us that there are two distinct forces in the UAW: the workers who do the work and pay the dues, and the UAW apparatus (the bureaucracy), which is made up of hundreds of highly paid officials who live off our dues and are bribed by the companies to sell us out. Management wouldn’t get what they want if they didn’t get cooperation from the union leaders.
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The immense gulf between the rank and file and the UAW apparatus was demonstrated at the UAW convention last month. While refusing to lower our dues and voting against any substantial raise in strike benefits, the UAW bureaucracy increased the salaries of UAW President Shawn Fain and other International Executive Board members by $10,000 to $30,000. They also voted to divert more money from the strike fund for their own purposes.
But something else happened at the convention: the voice of the rank and file burst through the bureaucratic dam and Will was nominated to run for UAW president. The Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee fully endorses Will and calls on workers to vote for him. Will is not running to get a cushy job at Solidarity House. He has already said he will stay on the line if elected. He is running to abolish the corrupt, pro-company bureaucracy and transfer power and decision-making into our own hands.
The Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee is not going away. We want you to join us because our struggle is only beginning. We are demanding:
- Reinstate Antwiane Sanders, who was victimized for opposing the sellout and criticizing UAW International Servicing Rep Jason Tuck. He must get full back pay, with no strings attached. Recall Tuck. No official who uses management to fire a worker belongs in our union.
- Restore our 32 vacation hours. ESTA sick time in addition to, not stolen from, what we already had.
- Zero layoff policy. If management brings in automation to boost productivity, then reduce the workweek to 30 hours with no loss of pay.
- Rank-and-file control of health and safety, including our right to stop production in oppressive heat.
- Make the bonus whole for every worker whose vote was solicited, including the new hires, who got nothing.
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At every turn, our rank-and-file committee and Will Lehman called out what was coming and explained what to do. That is why Local 699 officials and Region 1D continually complained about the rank-and-file committee and “unauthorized” social media platforms. There is nothing these bought-and-paid-for officials fear more than workers having information and organizing to defend our interests.
Everything we have been through proves what Lehman warned from the start: the apparatus cannot be reformed. It must be dismantled and replaced by rank-and-file committees in every plant—accountable to the membership.
His campaign is not about one election. It is the organized form for building a network of rank-and-file committees connecting workers in every workplace and every country. This is a campaign of workers, for workers, and by workers.
[A statement issued by the VW Action Committee, an independent organization of workers formed in Germany to fight both management and the pro-corporate bureaucracy of the German autoworkers union, IG Metall.]
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Unless we take the defense of our jobs into our own hands, VW management’s slash-and-burn policy will know no bounds. The IG Metall union and the works council it leads are trying to cover their tracks. Yet everyone knows that they work hand in glove with management and have long been informed, via the supervisory board and the economic committee, of all plans for plant closures and redundancies. The feigned indignation of some union speakers is pure hypocrisy, and the call for “more protests!” is a bluff.
The fact is that at the end of 2024, IG Metall and the works council had already agreed to the destruction of 35,000 jobs, 15,000 of them at Wolfsburg (site of VW’s global headquarters and the largest auto plant in the world) alone. They signed an agreement allowing wage cuts of up to 20 percent, reduced working hours without full wage compensation, more than halving training places and abolishing holiday pay, or rather converting it into an “IG Metall member bonus.”
The union apparatus and works council (in German labor law, a committee of elected employee representatives that co-manages workplace relations) have become so desperate that they are trying to lure members with such “bonuses.” But even that no longer works. Resistance is growing in the plants. IG Metall officials and works council reps are being seen for what they are: the biggest obstacle to organizing a serious fight to defend jobs and wages.
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IG Metall is deploying its entire bureaucratic apparatus and its plant officials to prevent workers from uniting across all sites against the slash-and-burn policy. From the union’s standpoint, protests are meant to contain workers’ anger, not organize a real fight.
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A look beyond the plant gates shows that the same game is being played everywhere. Over 100,000 jobs have already been cut in the automotive and supplier industries over the past two years. The German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) has announced that a further 125,000 jobs are on the line.
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The first step in the fight against the jobs massacre is to continue building and strengthening the rank-and-file Action Committee. We need this new organizational structure in order to break the dictatorial control of the union officials and works council, with their constant intimidation and threats.
We therefore invite you to an online meeting on Wednesday, July 15, at 6:00 p.m. Central European Time. You can register completely anonymously.
At the meeting, we want to discuss the following [items]:
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First: Prepare coordinated strikes at all sites—and of further industrial action, up to and including the occupation of plants and departments threatened with closure—with the aim of defending every job.
When our opponents say that this is utterly impossible, they are merely making clear that the capitalist profit system is no longer compatible with the population’s basic needs, because it uses every change in production to increase profits and enrich the owners and investors. But the right to work and to a wage is a fundamental right. It stands above the enrichment of the wealthy.
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Second: Prevent the conversion of production to armaments and war goods.
There is a close connection between the wave of mass redundancies—whose scale is comparable only to the Great Depression of the 1930s—and the policy of military rearmament and war, which is being financed by massive social cuts.
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Third: Cooperate internationally at all sites.
VW and all other car manufacturers are global companies. Our allies are the workers at all other sites. Our central strategy is internationalism. Trade war and war are justified with hysterical nationalism and chauvinism. The trade union bureaucrats spread the poison of nationalism with their demands for national industrial policy and securing production sites. They divide workers and pit those in one country against workers in other countries and other regions. We counter this reactionary policy of division with the unity and close cooperation of the global working class.
Workers have no fatherland. Workers everywhere have the same problems. They are confronted with the same global corporations and with governments that deepen exploitation and suppress all resistance to it.
We are building the VW Action Committee as part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). Anyone who doubts whether and how the domination of IG Metall can be broken should look at the campaign of American autoworker Will Lehman.
Lehman is a socialist and works at Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania. Last month, he was nominated as a presidential candidate at the United Auto Workers (UAW) congress in Detroit. He fights for the abolition of the union bureaucracy and the transfer of power to the rank and file.
9. Colombian President Petro accused of “coup” by Trump-backed president-elect
Colombian President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella—the fascistic lawyer backed openly and repeatedly by Donald Trump—has accused outgoing President Gustavo Petro of orchestrating a “coup d’état” after Petro refused to recognize the runoff result against his chosen successor, Iván Cepeda.
De la Espriella suspended the presidential transition process and issued a direct public appeal to the armed forces: “I ask as president-elect that you comply with your oath to protect the Constitution and democracy, and do not obey any order Petro may be giving to the contrary.” Members of the incoming government team have gone further, calling for Petro’s arrest and trial on coup and corruption charges.
The World Socialist Web Site does not support the policies of Petro and Cepeda. But the fraud allegations cannot simply be dismissed. The final preliminary result—de la Espriella at 49.66 percent and Cepeda at 48.70 percent—gave a margin of under 250,000 votes, which itself was considerably less than the 676,000 spoiled, blank, or unmarked ballots cast. This was a measure of the massive rejection of both candidates.
More than 33,000 polling stations have been formally contested, and Petro has alleged manipulation of digital vote-counting systems and pointed to ties between the company administering the rapid count and far-right political networks.
The outgoing president has claimed he has “verified proof” of fraud that he intends to bring to the relevant authorities, but as of this writing, no public evidence has been presented to substantiate these claims. He stated: “The difference that the real preliminary count gives us—0.3 percent in favor of Abelardo—has always been overcome in the formal scrutiny. There are fascist groups waiting for a confrontation today. Let’s not give them what they want—to start violence and kill.”
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Since the 1960s, the US government built up the Colombian armed forces, which was followed by Plan Colombia under the Clinton administration, which approved $1.3 billion in US military aid to turn it into one of the largest militaries in the region. US imperialism maintains a strategic interest in securing control over the Colombian state.
That history also includes a massive mercenary contingent of Colombian veterans recruited for the NATO war in Ukraine against Russia, creating a pool of trained soldiers with direct ties to imperialism.
These are the forces within and around the armed forces that represent de la Espriella’s core social base, which he is now whipping into a frenzy. He has announced “urban search blocks” against crime staffed by military reservists and veterans, the reinstatement of the ESMAD anti-riot unit under a new structure, and the construction of 10 privately administered mega-prisons. Cepeda has warned: “Colombia is beginning to take on the configuration of a paramilitary government.”
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The most revealing feature of the current crisis is not the fraud allegations themselves, but what Petro and Cepeda are doing—and not doing—about them.
Petro openly warns of fascism and calls de la Espriella’s victory illegitimate. Yet in the same declarations, he calls on demonstrators to remain “calm,” proposes a “national agreement” with the incoming administration, and addresses himself directly to Washington: “The United States government must allow this stability agreement and support it.”
This is not a contradiction. As bourgeois nationalists, Petro and the Historic Pact party have an overriding interest in preventing the working class from drawing revolutionary conclusions from the social and political crisis that their own four years of capitalist governance aggravated.
Petro seeks to negotiate his own political survival: demonstrate to Washington and the incoming fascistic government that the Historic Pact can be trusted to police the radicalization of workers and youth and to channel opposition into bourgeois politics, preventing the mass anger already erupting in the streets of Bogotá and Cali from developing into an independent working-class movement.
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Workers and youth in Colombia cannot entrust their future to these forces. The fraud allegations demand transparent and independent investigation, entirely free of the political calculations of the Historic Pact and of Washington. The threat of fascist paramilitarism, backed by US imperialism with its decades-long record of building Colombia’s repressive military apparatus, demands a response rooted in the political independence of the working class—not appeals to the imperialist power directing the operation.
10. New Zealand woman released after 73 days in ICE detention
A New Zealand woman, Everlee Wihongi, aged 37, was released on June 19 after spending 73 days in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers. On Facebook, Wihongi said that her ordeal of more than two months was “horrific.”
Wihongi holds a US Green Card and has been a permanent US resident since the year 2000. When she was six years-old the family moved to Wisconsin after her father, a rail worker, was recruited by Wisconsin Central Transportation Corporation following the privatization of NZ Rail in 1993. Her Green Card has never lapsed or expired.
Wihongi posted: “I was never informed why I was being detained. I was never given official charges from ICE to why I was detained either. I was only told I violated immigration law, but never what law.” Wihongi had a conviction for possession of marijuana dating back more than a decade but had previously traveled in and out of the US several times without any issue.
Wihongi was initially detained while transiting LAX on April 10 on returning from a visit to New Zealand. Instead of passing directly through immigration, she was taken aside by ICE officers. After a seven-hour wait, family members traveling with her received a phone call from her saying there was an issue with the historic drug conviction and she was being sent to an ICE facility near Los Angeles.
After a month in ICE detention at Adelanto, California, Wihongi was transferred to the notorious Camp East Montana facility at Fort Bliss, Texas and three days later to the Eloy detention center in Arizona. Family members told New Zealand media that she was “shackled for hours, waiting in hot weather, not given food, sleeping on the ground, not being able to shower.”
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Wihongi’s drug conviction was eventually successfully challenged in a Wisconsin court on the legal grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel. Her legal team argued that her original defense attorney provided incorrect advice by assuring her that pleading guilty to the drug charge would not adversely affect her immigration status. The attorney was later disbarred for forging documents and lying to clients.
Following the successful court case, the government was forced to agree there was no legal basis to continue holding her. A joint motion to dismiss the removal proceedings was accepted by a court, but it took nearly two weeks for her to be released. Wihongi’s sister-in-law Courtney told Radio NZ (RNZ) that ICE had been “playing games,” saying she was “getting lost in the shuffle around of paperwork not being completed.” ICE authorities had not returned her passport, driver’s license or Green Card.
Christopher said NZ consular assistance could well have helped expedite her release. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) told Stuff the New Zealand government was unable to influence the immigration decisions of other governments, but that MFAT continued to provide unspecified “consular assistance” to Wihongi and her family.
In fact, throughout the ordeal, Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters refused any diplomatic assistance, bluntly declaring she would “have to be facing the death penalty” for him to intervene. Asked if MFAT had a responsibility to support Wihongi, Peters told RNZ that the ministry “does not provide legal support in that context, it never has, otherwise it would cost us an absolute fortune.”
Wihongi thanked her parents, family, friends, lawyer and supporters, saying they had gathered legal documents, raised awareness, contacted the NZ government and helped secure specialist legal representation during her detention. She also highlighted former co-workers who rallied to get endorsements for her case. “They moved mountains for me,” she declared.
Wihongi’s lawyer explained that her situation was one faced by thousands, saying: “That is a very arbitrary and strict reading of the immigration laws resulting in deportations of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people.”
Another NZ citizen, Sarah Shaw, living legally in the US, and her six-year-old son were kidnapped by ICE in July 2025 while seeking to re-enter the US after a visit to Vancouver. The pair were held for three weeks in barbaric conditions in the Dilley Processing Center in Texas before being released following an international outcry.
Thousands of innocent people are still facing interrogation, imprisonment and deportation, including many who are legal US residents or even citizens. With more than 63,000 people languishing in ICE detention centers, the Trump administration is expanding street ambushes, worksite raids and mass kidnappings across the country. More than 10,000 people were recently seized in just five days amid a major surge ordered by the White House.
The popular outrage expressed in the millions-strong “No Kings” protests across America has not abated. In Minneapolis on July 4 hundreds marched to the Justice Department with 52 coffins representing the deaths so far in ICE custody. According to government statistics, 33 people died in ICE custody in 2025. During the first half of 2026, watchdog groups and official notices indicate that 21 more deaths have been publicized.
The deepening opposition to Trump’s drive to dictatorship finds no expression in the two-party political system. The Democrats have repeatedly voted to fund ICE and other repressive agencies, while remaining silent on the persecution of left-wing and anti-ICE protesters, some of whom have been prosecuted as “terrorists.”
The experience of Everlee Wihongi underscores that nobody is exempt from the sweeping attacks on basic democratic rights by the Trump administration, regardless of their national origin or immigration status. The brutal regime in the US is, moreover, directly facilitated by Trump’s far-right accomplices in governments around the world now implementing a similar agenda.
An extraordinary campaign is underway in Canada to suppress a modest museum exhibition due to its purported “antisemitism.” At the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, a 12-metre-long display titled “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” opened to the public on Saturday, June 27. It features five artifacts, photographs, videos, and first-person testimonies from Palestinian Canadians recounting their experiences of forced displacement during and after the founding of Israel in 1948, up to the present-day Gaza war.
In 1948-49 more than 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and more than 400 Palestinian villages and towns were depopulated, destroyed or repurposed as the result of the Zionist state’s campaign of military conquest and deliberate, terror-enforced ethnic-cleaning—an imperialist-enabled crime that has come to be known as the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe.”)
The Israeli ambassador to Canada wrote to Prime Minister Mark Carney to demand he “intervene to prevent this exhibition from proceeding.” Irwin Cotler, the former Liberal justice minister and government special envoy on antisemitism, co-authored an open letter in the Globe and Mail denouncing the exhibit as “propaganda masquerading as scholarship.”
Others, adopting a more sophisticated approach, insist the exhibit be “rectified” with “historical context”—meaning it be subordinated to a Zionist narrative that would neutralize its political content. The common aim is clear: to prevent a national museum from publicly acknowledging, in however limited a manner, the foundational crime upon which the Israeli state was built under imperialist sponsorship.
Federal Heritage Minister Marc Miller—the minister responsible for overseeing national museums—visited the CMHR and declared the exhibit “should be rectified,” criticizing it for not identifying Hamas as a terrorist organization and calling this “an unfortunate error in curation.” That a federal minister is publicly instructing a national museum—a Crown corporation supposed to operate at arm’s length from the government—on how to present cultural exhibits shows how far the ruling class will go to police permissible speech on Palestine.
The ferocious denunciations of the exhibition are all the more remarkable given its thoroughly conventional character, which avoids making any explicit comment about the Zionist project being the cause of the Palestinians’ dispossession. On the contrary, the presentation refers in an inappropriately “even-handed” manner to the mass expulsion of the Palestinians and the reactionary campaign subsequently mounted by several Arab states against their Jewish populations. This even though the displacement of Middle Eastern Jews began only after the Nakba and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and was organized with Israel’s connivance to boost the newly-established state’s population. ‘
The mass dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians went hand in hand with the denial of their existence as a people and the evisceration of their national rights.
What’s more, those smearing the exhibition as “antisemitic” conveniently ignore that since the CMHR opened over a decade ago, it has displayed information noting the displacement of Jews from Arab countries following Israel’s founding in 1948, but said next to nothing, until the opening of last month’s modest exhibition, about the fate of the Palestinians.
The museum’s chief executive, Isha Khan, has made a point of emphasizing that the institution has no intention of providing an historical overview of the period. “It’s a modest-sized exhibit,” Khan said. “It isn’t an historical retrospective of 1948 and the founding of the state of Israel.”
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Canada’s ruling class has systematically smeared and repressed the broad sections of the population opposed to the Gaza genocide and Canadian imperialism’s complicity in it.
The attack on the Winnipeg exhibit is part of the campaign of censorship that has escalated steadily since October 2023, when the Palestinian uprising led by Hamas provided the pretext for the Israeli state's long-planned genocidal assault on Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of people have participated in anti-genocide demonstrations across the country, frequently met by heavily armed police interventions. Anti-genocide protesters have been smeared from the highest levels of the state, including by former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his Quebec counterpart Francois Legault as “antisemites” and “extremists.” Many activists, including most notoriously the Toronto “Peace 11,” were detained in early-morning raids on their homes.
The authorities have also directed a campaign of censorship in artistic and cultural fields. In October 2024, the Aurora Cultural Centre permanently closed an exhibition after pro-Zionist residents complained about a handwritten label reading “(Israel) Palestine” on a map. In January, the Art Gallery of Ontario rejected a work by Jewish-American photographer Nan Goldin after committee members denounced her opposition to the genocide—one even likened her to the pro-Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl. Now the same forces have trained their fire on a national museum, demanding the suppression of an exhibit four years in the making.
The witch-hunt by the Canadian government, media, and other sections of the ruling class against opponents of the Gaza genocide forms part of an international campaign by the imperialist powers, led by the United States. Its aim is to criminalize any and all opposition to Israel’s extermination and ethnic-cleansing of the Palestinians and the broader US-Israeli drive to reorder the entire Middle East.
But as far as the Canadian ruling elite is concerned, the crackdown on popular opposition to imperialist barbarism has not gone far enough. The Globe and Mail, the “newspaper of record” of Canada’s corporate and political establishment, has been at the forefront of a concerted campaign to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism — a fraudulent conflation aimed at criminalizing all criticism of the Israeli state.
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The hypocrisy of the Canadian bourgeoisie lecturing anyone about antisemitism is staggering. The same Canadian ruling class that now parades its concern for “antisemitism” blocked Jews fleeing the Nazi regime from finding refuge in Canada and has maintained a decades-long alliance with the Nazi’s Ukrainian nationalist collaborators and their political descendants. After World War II, Canada provided safe haven to thousands of veterans of the Waffen SS’s Ukrainian-staffed 14th “Galicia Division” and members of Stepan Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) who collaborated with the Nazis, including in the Holocaust of European Jews. Canada became a center for the promulgation of far-right Ukrainian nationalism, whose leading ideologues had advocated an “independent” Ukraine purged of Jews and Poles in Nazi-occupied Europe under Hitler. In September 2023, the entire Canadian parliament rose to give a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Galicia Division veteran, introduced as “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero.”
The Liberal government has massively increased military spending, provided more per capita to Ukraine in arms and money than any other G7 state, and continued to deliver military equipment to Israel as it wages war on the people of Gaza despite a supposed suspension of new permits.
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The struggle against censorship, the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and imperialist war must be led by the working class fighting for a socialist program.
The logic is perverse and deeply revealing. The pseudo-left presents itself as the true champion of security, the responsible architect of an order that the far right is too incompetent to administer. It boasts of having left behind a well-organized repressive framework. It demands that Kast deliver on the law-and-order promises that it spent four years legitimizing. In doing so, it positions itself not as an opposition to the authoritarian advance but as a more competent manager of it.
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This is not a story of individual betrayal. It is the structural function of the pseudo-left: to ensnare radicalized youth and workers with left-sounding phraseology, only to dissipate their struggles into the dead end of parliamentary reformism. At critical inflection points in the class struggle, organizations like the Broad Front and the Communist Party divert anti-capitalist sentiment back into the grip of the despised establishment parties, cultivating not only demoralization but also the most reactionary sentiments among the broader population.
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The Chilean bourgeoisie, having weathered the 2019 uprising, has constructed a repressive apparatus designed to contain the next eruption of class struggle. The far right administers what the pseudo-left built. The pseudo-left demands that the far right administer it more competently. Both are committed to the defense of capitalist property relations and the suppression of any movement that threatens them.
The working class cannot look to the pseudo-left for defense against the authoritarian advance. The parties of the Broad Front, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party are not a bulwark against fascism. They are its enablers, and, when it suits their electoral interests, its critics from the right. The task facing the working class in Chile is to build an independent political movement, based on a revolutionary internationalist program, that breaks completely with the parties of bourgeois rule and their pseudo-left appendages.
The security of the working class will come from the conscious organization of the working class against capital, against its alternating governments, and against the repressive machinery that both blocs have jointly constructed to contain the struggles to come.
13. United Kingdom: Sharon Graham and Simon Dubbins: two bankrupts face off for Unite general secretary
The election for general secretary of Unite, the UK’s second-largest trade union with more than one million members, runs from July 14 to August 11. It is contested by only two candidates: Sharon Graham, the incumbent, who was elected in 2021 with the support of just 4 percent of eligible members (on a 10 percent turnout); and Simon Dubbins, a long-serving bureaucrat who has been Unite’s international director since 2008.
Graham and Dubbins both use militant-sounding rhetoric only to maintain the bureaucracy’s grip over a restive membership employed across major sectors of the economy, while smothering political opposition to the most right-wing, pro-business Labour government in history.
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The World Socialist Web Site does not support either faction of the Unite bureaucracy who are both seeking to shore up the partnership with a Labour government enforcing austerity, driving up social inequality, witch-hunting immigrants and nationalism for its warmongering purposes.
A revival of working-class struggle and democracy requires the development of a rank-and-file insurgency to break the grip of the union bureaucracy: to restore power to the shop floor and enable workers to wage unified struggles across sectors, localities and borders on the basis of their needs, not what the profit demands of the capitalist oligarchy dictate. This is the socialist and internationalist program advanced by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
14. United Kingdom: SWP Marxism Festival 2026: a demoralised gathering of political bankrupts
At the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) Marxism Festival 2026 last weekend, national secretary Lewis Nielsen invited attendees to raise their hands if they felt pessimistic about prospects for the left in Britain. Among the 150 or so session attendees, dozens raised their hands.
The photo above captures the audience response to his follow-up invitation to “Put your hand up if you veer wildly between pessimism and optimism, depending on the news”. Fewer than 10 “brave souls” (as Nielsen called them) owned to being optimists.
It was a revealing incident underscoring the SWP's petty-bourgeois character. While speeches at the four-day festival (July 2-5) were peppered with references to the working class and revolutionary socialism, the event demonstrated the SWP’s organic hostility to the working class. Its members, reacting impressionistically to world events, are pushed from pillar to post by social moods, including those generated by the SWP’s wretched political line—such as its disastrous courting and promotion of Jeremy Corbyn.
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This year’s event took place in the Slough of Despond. Attendance fell by 2,000 (from last year’s 5,000), and the opening rally at Hackney EartH—whose tiered seating was packed to overflow a year ago—was in the hundreds. Throughout the festival, aside from the opening rally, attendees were mainly SWP stalwarts in their 50s, 60s, and 70s.
Yet Marxism 2026 served a critical purpose for the SWP leadership. Over the four-day event, its speakers insisted on the need to soft-pedal opposition to Labour’s leader-in-waiting Andy Burnham; advocated closer cooperation with Zack Polanski’s Greens; and blocked any criticism of the SWP’s rotten role in promoting the Corbyn project.
Despite Corbyn expelling three SWP national committee members from Your Party last November, the SWP welcomed him onto the main stage on Saturday. Nielsen (one of those expelled) sat next to Corbyn, chatting amicably, never mentioning Your Party, let alone denouncing its betrayals.
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The truth the SWP seeks to bury is that the working class has been blocked from waging any effective fight against Starmer’s right-wing government for two years. Strikes were suppressed by the trade union bureaucracy, while Corbyn sabotaged efforts to form a mass left party to challenge Labour. Despite an approval rating of -66 percent by September 2025, Starmer was given carte blanche to launch savage repression targeting pro-Palestinian activists and the left more broadly.
At the festival session, “Against pessimism: Why the left can build an alternative to Burnham”, [SWP national secretary Lewis] Nielsen described Burnham as “continuity Keir” while claiming the situation was more “complex” and “contradictory” than his Blairite pedigree would suggest. He cited Burnham’s appeal to traditional “Labourite” policies, including his council housing pledge and inclusion of Christy Moore's song “Viva La Quinta Brigada” commemorating Irish volunteers who fought Franco in the Spanish Civil War, on his campaign playlist, as evidence of a significant shift.
He concluded: “If we just stand and say Burnham will sell out, which you know, he will, if we just stand and say that, to be honest, we are not going to pull those people [who have illusions in Burnham] around us.”
Nielsen’s injunction against exposing Burnham—depicted as the height of sectarianism—is a repeat of his party’s role promoting Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. In each case, the SWP justified its promotion of pro-capitalist parties and leaders with reference to “the movement from below,” which would supposedly push these parties to the left. Now the SWP is using the same arguments to defend Blairite Andy Burnham!
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[Chairperson] Katie Coles demonstrated the SWP’s infinite malleability when she addressed the session, “Will the Greens stay radical?” Citing her article on the Greens from October 2025, written after 850,000 people had signed up for Corbyn’s Your Party, Coles quoted, “If you're a socialist in Britain, why would you be a member of the Greens?”
She told her audience, “Now I think the question on everyone's lips is exactly the inverse. If you're a socialist in Britain today, why wouldn't you be a member of the Greens?” She announced: “I voted Green [in the council elections], like many other socialists in the room.”
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During the Q&A, several SWP members explained that they too had voted Green. A lone SWP member cited the Greens’ support for NATO during the discussion, to no discernible effect. Coles later replied, “It does seem unfair to say that the Greens are imperialists, right? It's quite a heavy word to use. But I think what that comes out of is trying to manage a capitalist state.”
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Taking the prize for the most cretinous report at Marxism 2026 was Héctor Sierra. His presentation, delivered at Sunday’s workshop, “Your Party: a modern day tragedy?” sought to shield Corbyn (and by extension the SWP) from their central responsibility for this right-wing fiasco.
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Despite all their proclamations that Your Party was the “starting gun” of a mass socialist challenge to Labour, Sierra now admits the truth: the SWP never had any intention of challenging the “dominant politics of the leadership”.
Downplaying the scale of Your Party’s betrayal, he argued that unlike Syriza or Podemos, Corbyn’s party was “never tested” because it had not come to power and faced the dictates of the state. In fact, by the time of its founding conference, Your Party had also been tested to destruction. Corbyn’s witch-hunting, expulsions and purges had one central aim: the creation of a bureaucratic vehicle to sabotage and suppress left-wing sentiment in the working class.
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“The reason that reformist parties dominate,” Sierra explained, “is because they articulate the dominant form of consciousness in society, reformist consciousness”. Adding for good measure, “nowhere in the world has the collapse or demise of… social democratic parties led automatically to a surge of support for revolutionary parties. And that tells us something about how deep reformist consciousness has still run in the working class.”
Here we have it: the cause of the defeats is not the politics of the pro-capitalist parties and leaderships; rather, these simply reflect the backward consciousness of the working class, forcing the otherwise well-meaning leaders, “trapped in their reformist logic”, to betray the workers in struggle. Corbyn, Sierra insisted, was “a principled left-wing reformist”!!!
15. Workers Struggles: Africa & Europe
Africa
Democratic Republic of the Congo:
Kenya:
South Africa:
Belgium:
Brewery workers in Flanders stop work in protest at increased work and deteriorating conditions
Italy:
Thousands of flight and airport workers strike across Italy for better pay and working conditions
Türkiye:
Journalists at Agence France-Presse in Istanbul strike for a living wage
United Kingdom:
Further stoppages by local government skilled workers at several councils over pay
Teaching staff at Oxford school in England walk out over restructuring and redundancy threats
Strike by academics at Scottish university over job cuts
Stoppage by rail staff at West Midlands Railway, UK over rest day working payments
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
