Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: May 18-24
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
“17-point” agreement marks Chinese annexation of Tibet
100 years ago:
A shotgun vote for a new contract begins Tuesday for 42,000 University of California service and patient care workers, after their strike was canceled in the dead of night by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) last Thursday.
Voting lasts through Thursday, May 21. Workers have yet to receive the full contract; only the so-called “highlights” of the agreement have been released.
If for no other reason, workers should reject the contract on principle. They should insist they will not accept any deal before they have the full language and at least a week to read and discuss it among themselves. Workers should organize to impose rank-and-file oversight of the voting itself.
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Even the “highlights” makes clear the contract meets none of workers’ demands. There are no retroactive wage increases. In its place, management is dangling a $1,500 lump-sum payment, attempting to capitalize on workers’ hardship to bribe them into a substandard deal.
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The tentative agreement’s treatment of healthcare costs is presented as a concession to workers, but it is nothing of the sort. Premium increases are merely “limited” to 5 percent for some plans and 7.5 percent for others.
Worst of all is the complete absence of any measures to address housing. One of workers’ main demands was for $25,000 housing payments to address an unlivable cost of housing crisis—a crisis so severe that UC has itself acknowledged that full-time employees are living in their cars.
That demand has been abandoned entirely. AFSCME is attempting to cover their tracks by their support for a state ballot measure for a zero-interest loan program for first-time homebuyers.
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There is no reason workers should not have good wages, healthcare and affordable housing. The money exists, it is a question of who controls it. UC’s revenues were $60.7 billion in 2025. $10 billion sits in UC’s unrestricted reserves as of 2026. Meanwhile, the Trump administration spent $1 billion a day on the war in Iran and is requesting an extra $500 billion for next year’s military budget.
“The world has gone to hell. Housing interest is high. Credit card interests are high. Gas is high. Food costs are high,” Jaime, one of the head custodians at UC Los Angeles, told the World Socialist Web Site, “I have two children, a one-year-old and an eight-year-old.”
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On social media, angry comments flooded AFSCME Local 3299’s Instagram post announcing the deal. Officials responded by disabling and deleting all comments. Workers took to other posts to express outrage over their censorship, “Why is the union freezing comments on the new posts? Why are people being silenced?” A second worker stated, “Our union deletes comments that don’t favor them.”
Before the comments were disabled and deleted however, the World Socialist Web Site captured and analyzed them. Major issues raised by workers and unaddressed in the tentative agreement include: The demand for a 15 percent night shift differential which was conceded; anger at the toothless language that they have a “right to negotiate” on-call pay and shift differentials rather than a concrete raise; no cap on what UC can charge workers for parking fees; and the abandonment of the housing benefit.
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The key question facing workers is the development of new organs of power that give them the ability to deal not only with management, but with the union apparatus itself. The union bureaucracy is not just “folding,” but is actively colluding with UC to prevent a powerful strike which would grind the entire system to a halt. Totally integrated with the UC administration and the Democratic Party, the union bureaucrats refuse to permit a struggle that breaks out of their control—because such a struggle would expose and destroy the cozy relationship they depend on.
The UC system is a hotbed of class struggle. There have been no fewer than 14 strikes across the UC system since 2017, 10 of which have involved workers in AFSCME Local 3299. Every single AFSCME strike was confined to one or three days, each ending without workers winning their demands.
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AFSCME members must reach out to academic workers, nurses and other sections of the UC workforce, as well as to workers across California and beyond who face the same attacks on wages, healthcare and housing. Such committees, linked together as part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), are the means by which workers can build the genuinely democratic, internationally coordinated movement needed to win.
Contact the World Socialist Web Site today for help in building rank-and-file committees at every hospital and campus.
3. WHO declares Ebola public health emergency as Trump cuts cripple global disease surveillance
On May 16, 2026, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the epidemic of Ebola caused by the Bundibugyo virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). This is the third PHEIC ever declared over Ebola, following the 2014 West Africa epidemic and the 2018-2020 Kivu epidemic in the DRC, and the first involving the rare Bundibugyo strain, for which there are no approved vaccines or treatments.
The declaration was extraordinary in another respect. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus issued it without convening the WHO Emergency Committee, the first time in the history of the International Health Regulations (IHR) that a PHEIC has been determined without a formal recommendation from that body. The committee will be convened retrospectively. The bypassing of customary procedure underscores both the urgency of the threat and the scale of the institutional crisis engulfing WHO since the Trump administration completed the United States’ withdrawal in January.
Official case counts as of May 16 stood at eight laboratory-confirmed cases, 246 suspected cases, and 80 suspected deaths, including at least four healthcare workers. Local and regional reporting suggests a considerably larger burden, with sources in Ituri Province citing at least 336 suspected and confirmed cases and 87 deaths. WHO itself acknowledged “significant uncertainties to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread.” The presence of the disease in Kinshasa and Kampala raises serious concerns about transmission across international borders.
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Epidemiologists trace the suspected onset of the crisis to late April 2026, when a nurse in the Rwampara health zone presented with fever, vomiting and severe bleeding. She died before a diagnosis could be established. Africa CDC Director-General Jean Kaseya has acknowledged that the true index case remains unknown, meaning the virus circulated undetected for several weeks. The outbreak is now thought to have originated in Mongbwalu, a high-traffic gold mining hub in Ituri, with cases subsequently migrating to Rwampara and Bunia as patients sought medical care. The crisis escalated when the virus crossed into Uganda, resulting in a confirmed death in Kampala.
WHO received its first notification of suspected cases on May 5 and deployed an investigative team. Initial field samples tested negative because the regional laboratory equipment in Bunia was calibrated only to detect the Zaire species of Ebola, the strain responsible for every previous DRC outbreak. Samples were transported approximately 1,500 kilometers to the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, where on May 14 and 15 eight of 13 samples tested positive for Bundibugyo. Africa CDC formally confirmed the outbreak on May 15, and WHO elevated it to a PHEIC the following day.
In its formal advice to states not directly affected, WHO instructed that “no country should close its borders or place any restrictions on travel and trade,” characterizing such measures as “usually implemented out of fear” with “no basis in science.” In the same document, WHO acknowledged that the outbreak points “towards a potentially much larger outbreak than what is currently being detected and reported.” The agency conceded that it does not know the true extent of the outbreak while telling the world to keep its airports open as normal. It mandated rigorous exit screening at departure points in DRC and Uganda, while stating that “entry screening at airports or other ports of entry outside the affected region are not considered needed.”
The epidemiological logic is impossible to reconcile. A feverish traveler cannot board a flight in Kinshasa, yet the same traveler’s destination is under no obligation to check who has just arrived. The WHO document makes the commercial logic explicit, warning that travel restrictions “can also compromise local economies and negatively affect response operations from a security and logistics perspective.” The IHR framework, under Article 43, discourages receiving states from imposing additional measures beyond WHO recommendations, immunizing global commerce from the burden of outbreak response while concentrating it entirely on the affected, impoverished states.
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The Trump administration bears immediate and direct responsibility for the conditions that allowed this outbreak to spread undetected for three weeks. The dismantling of global disease surveillance has unfolded in deliberate stages over the past 16 months.
In late January 2025, USAID transmitted a single email terminating the $100 million STOP Spillover program, a five-year project designed to detect zoonotic spillovers of Ebola, Marburg, Lassa and other hemorrhagic fevers in Uganda, the DRC border region, Liberia and four other countries. Field teams monitoring bat reservoirs were dispersed within days. Researchers in Liberia were left with freezers of unprocessed blood samples drawn from people who had agreed to be tested for Ebola exposure. The Uganda-DRC cross-border surveillance infrastructure went dark.
USAID itself was dismantled the same month. Its functions were absorbed into the State Department, the vast majority of its staff were laid off, and thousands of grants and contracts were terminated, including PEPFAR programs that formed the operational backbone of disease surveillance across sub-Saharan Africa. By mid-2025, 71 percent of PEPFAR implementing partners reported the cancellation of at least one category of activities. Laboratory networks, supply chains, contact-tracing systems and trained personnel were gutted.
The US formally withdrew from WHO on January 22, 2026. It had been the agency’s single largest funder, contributing approximately $700 million annually in peak years. No state has stepped up to replace these funds. WHO is now shedding approximately 2,371 staff—roughly a quarter of its workforce—by mid-2026, with the African Regional Office particularly affected. This institutional crisis has directly degraded WHO’s emergency response capacity and contributed to the delayed response to both the Ituri outbreak and the concurrent Andes hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius cruise ship.
On January 26, 2025, the administration also issued a gag order prohibiting all CDC communication with WHO. Modified but never rescinded, the gag order was effectively made permanent by the WHO withdrawal itself. As Jennifer Nuzzo of Brown University’s Pandemic Center observed when a suspected DRC Ebola outbreak was reported in early 2025, “When there was the suspected outbreak of Ebola in the DRC a few weeks ago, CDC couldn’t call them and ask what’s going on.” That condition has persisted for 16 months. It was operative throughout the period of misdiagnosis in Ituri.
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The epicenter of the outbreak is Ituri Province in the conflict-affected northeastern DRC, separated by vast distances and poor infrastructure from Kinshasa, with porous borders and intense population movement driven by cross-border trade, armed conflict and small-scale mining. The spread of the Bundibugyo virus is being accelerated by the ongoing war in the region, involving the Allied Democratic Forces and the CODECO militia. Four days after the suspected index nurse fell ill, CODECO carried out a retaliatory massacre on April 28, killing at least 69 civilians. Continuous violence obstructs every basic epidemiological measure: health workers cannot safely conduct contact tracing, surveillance teams are blocked from rural communities and safe burial practices become impossible. Civilians fleeing the violence are forced into crowded displacement camps where the virus can amplify.
Intertwined with this violence is the brutal exploitation of the region for its mineral wealth. The town of Mongbwalu sits at the center of Concession 40, a 2,000-square-kilometer gold-bearing zone whose industrial exploration was carried out by AngloGold Ashanti through its subsidiary AngloGold Ashanti Kilo. The South African mining giant suspended the project in 2013 amid falling gold prices and later sold its interest. The abandoned concession is now worked by an estimated 100,000 small-scale miners, many of them ex-combatants from Ituri’s ethnic wars, under conditions of extreme insecurity.
To the north in Haut-Uélé Province, the Kibali Gold Mine—owned by Barrick Mining Corporation and AngloGold Ashanti at 45 percent each, with the DRC parastatal SOKIMO holding 10 percent—extracts approximately 700,000 ounces of gold annually, making it one of the largest gold operations on the African continent.
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Bundibugyo is a filovirus closely related to the Zaire and Sudan strains. After an incubation of two to 21 days, the disease progresses from a nonspecific febrile phase to severe gastrointestinal symptoms with massive fluid loss, and ultimately to a hemorrhagic phase leading to multiple organ failure. Transmission requires direct contact with infected bodily fluids, and the virus is shed only after symptoms appear. Patients carry the highest viral loads in late illness and at death, which is why understaffed medical centers and traditional burial ceremonies become amplification hubs.
The Bundibugyo strain carries a historical case fatality rate of roughly 25 to 40 percent—lower than Zaire (up to 90 percent untreated) or Sudan (around 50 percent), yet still catastrophic without vaccines or specific treatments. Existing Ebola medical countermeasures were developed exclusively for the Zaire strain following the 2014 West Africa epidemic. With only two prior documented Bundibugyo outbreaks, pharmaceutical corporations calculated that developing a targeted vaccine would not generate adequate returns. Clinicians are left with basic supportive care, guaranteeing elevated mortality and leaving affected populations defenseless.
The dismantling of public health and pandemic preparedness did not begin with Trump’s second term. In May 2018, National Security Adviser John Bolton dissolved the White House’s NSC Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, the body created after the 2014 Ebola outbreak to coordinate a whole-of-government pandemic response. Its senior director was pushed out and not replaced. Beth Cameron, the directorate’s founding director, later wrote that disbanding it “left an unclear structure and strategy for coordinating pandemic preparedness and response.” COVID-19 confirmed her warning. Capitalist governments responded to the pandemic by normalizing mass infection and accelerating the defunding of institutions designed to stop future outbreaks.
The WHO withdrawal was the centerpiece of a broader America First Global Health Strategy released in September 2025, which cut annual US global health spending by nearly 70 percent and replaced multilateral commitments with bilateral agreements that reframe African disease surveillance as a commercial asset and geopolitical lever against China. Under this framework, viral specimens and genomic sequences from outbreaks like the one in Ituri are to flow first to American pharmaceutical companies, with affected African states given no enforceable claim on vaccines or treatments developed from them.
The MV Hondius hantavirus outbreak illustrates the same institutional collapse. In a closed environment with a known passenger manifest and the resources of wealthy Western nations behind the response, 30 passengers were allowed to disembark at Saint Helena and disperse globally without testing or quarantine instructions. The same gag order, defunding and rupture with WHO underlie both failures. If the world’s wealthiest health systems cannot manage a localized cluster on a single vessel, they are vastly less capable of managing a hemorrhagic fever epidemic moving through the population centers of eastern DRC.
The DRC possesses vast reserves of gold, cobalt and copper, extracted at enormous profit by corporations headquartered in Toronto, Johannesburg and London, with concessions at the epicenter of the outbreak, while its population suffers under chronic public-health underfunding and brutal poverty. Rampant deforestation, relentless mining and the systemic neglect of medical infrastructure produce the precise conditions that drive zoonotic spillover.
A rational, science-based response requires massive global investment in public health infrastructure, an immediate end to the extractive practices and imperialist wars that produce the ecological conditions for viral spillover, and the governance of vaccine development by human need rather than the profit calculations of pharmaceutical monopolies or Wall Street speculators.
The current emergency is a harbinger. The defense of human life requires the independent political mobilization of the international working class to reorganize global resources and medical research under democratic, socialist control.
4. Long Island Rail Road workers strike; Mamdani supports scabbing operations
Around 3,500 workers on the Long Island Rail Road, the largest commuter rail in the United States, launched a strike Saturday morning for the first time in 32 years. The strike coincided with the expiration of a contract for 40,000 subway and bus workers in New York City’s transit system in Transport Workers Union Local 100.
The strike is a major political confrontation in the center of world finance, pitting workers against Wall Street and its political agents, above all the Democratic Party. It raises the question: Who runs New York, the financial oligarchy or the working class?
Workers are striking against intolerable conditions. “By the time you look, a $1,000 check just dropped down to almost $300—for a company or organization that’s making billions of dollars,” station worker Kristen told the WSWS about runaway living expenses. “It’s unfair in one of the richest cities in the world.”
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The Metropolitan Transit Authority, which operates the LIRR and the New York City subway and bus system, is responding ruthlessly, threatening to fire probationary workers if they take part in the strike. It is also attempting to break the strike using city buses.
MTA bus drivers in the Transport Workers Union must reject this attempt to force them to scab on the strike. Not only does this undermine their own contract struggle, it violates the principle that “an injury to one is an injury to all” and allows management to divide and conquer. Significantly, the TWU has not released an official statement opposing the strikebreaking operation.
Transit workers, who have a long history of militant struggle, must halt the strikebreaking operation and launch their own strike, linking with LIRR workers in a common fight to win the demands of all MTA workers.
Winning the strike requires the support of the whole working class. City workers must rally behind the strike and prepare joint actions. Rank-and-file committees must be built uniting LIRR workers with workers in transit and other sectors, developing into a broader movement fighting for the redistribution of the oligarchy’s wealth and funding for affordable housing and other pressing social needs.
That political energy exists. Over one million New Yorkers voted for Zohran Mamdani for mayor, a candidate calling himself a socialist, because of their deep hatred of inequality and capitalism. But Mamdani is actively collaborating with pro-business Governor Kathy Hochul on a strikebreaking operation, without offering even verbal support for the striking workers.
His only public statement directed positive attention to the MTA’s strikebreaking shuttle buses: “City Hall and agencies across the administration are actively coordinating preparedness and contingency efforts to help maintain continuity for commuters and support New Yorkers as conditions evolve … The MTA has announced that limited weekday bus service will be available for essential workers and others who cannot telecommute.”
Mamdani and the political establishment do not care about “essential workers.” What they fear is that a joint LIRR-New York City transit strike would encourage a broader movement of workers against the corporate and financial elite.
Mamdani’s statement follows the abandonment of his free bus fare proposal, continuous meetings with Wall Street executives, and visits to Trump’s White House to reassure corporate America. He has kept billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch as NYPD commissioner, oversaw the arrest of 13 striking nurses in January, and worked with ICE to carry out raids in hospitals and other parts of the city.
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The claim that decent pay must be offset at riders’ expense is absurd. The MTA pays around 15 percent of its entire operating budget to service $49 billion in bond debt, with the largest positions held by BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity. Wall Street bonuses alone reached a record $49.2 billion last year. Cancellation of this debt would be the first step toward providing free transit to commuters.
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The state’s infamous Taylor Law bans all strikes by public employees, including MTA workers, and its threat is likely being used by politicians and union bureaucrats to frog-march shuttle bus drivers into scabbing on the LIRR strike. LIRR workers themselves fall under the separate federal Railway Labor Act, a century-old law designed to prevent the powerful national rail strikes that shook American capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Victory requires that workers establish their own initiative, independent of the union bureaucracy, which is integrated with the political establishment at every level. Workers must be on guard against any attempt by the bureaucracy to shut the strike down before their demands have been met, as happened when officials ended a three-day New Jersey Transit strike last May.
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The strike can be won, but it depends on the degree of unity workers can build and their ability to act against interference from the union bureaucracy and the state. Transit workers have a history of defying anti-strike laws, which have always been deployed against every attempt to win fundamental rights, including in 1966, 1980 and 2005.
Transit workers also have a rich tradition of anti-capitalist politics, including Trotskyist transit workers Ed Winn and Edwin Soto. In 1980, Ed Winn was the only member of the TWU Local 100 Executive Board to oppose the union’s premature shutdown of the strike at the point where Mayor Ed Koch was on the verge of surrender.
The rebellion against the union apparatus must take the form of rank-and-file committees at every depot, line and station, uniting workers across the transit system and drawing in support from nurses, teachers, municipal workers and riders. TWU bus drivers must refuse to operate scab shuttles.
These committees must fight for immediate, substantial wage increases with a full cost-of-living allowance; the elimination of all inferior pension tiers; two-person crews on all passenger trains; and free transit for all—paid for through the cancellation of the MTA’s $49 billion bond debt, redirecting funds currently extracted by Wall Street bondholders to improved wages and fare reductions. Workers must also prepare a political fight against the Railway Labor Act and the Taylor Law, which are instruments of class rule.
We urge LIRR and transit workers to contact the WSWS and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) for information on forming rank-and-file committees.
5. Trump-backed “Rededicate 250” rally: Christian nationalism in the service of dictatorship
Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, held Sunday on the National Mall in Washington D.C., was a state-sanctioned Christian nationalist rally. Lasting nearly nine hours, the event consisted of a steady stream of sermons, prayers, musical performances and speeches by top Republican officials and religious figures, all advancing the false and reactionary claim that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation.
The event marked a blatant repudiation by large sections of the ruling class of the longstanding constitutional principle of separation of church and state. It was not an isolated expression of religious sentiment, but part of the Trump administration’s effort, together with the Republican Party and its allies in the Christian fundamentalist right, to cultivate a fascistic movement within the United States.
The rally was organized under the banner of the approaching 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But its political content was directed against the democratic and egalitarian content of that revolutionary document. Speaker after speaker asserted that rights do not arise from human equality, popular sovereignty or social struggle, but from submission to the Christian God. The implication, stated again and again in religious language, was that those who reject this framework stand outside the moral and political community of the nation.
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Trump appeared by video message, invoking 2 Chronicles 7, a passage long favored by the Christian right. While the often-cited verse promises that God will “heal” the land if his people humble themselves and pray, the broader passage warns that if the people “turn away” and serve other gods, they will be uprooted, their temple reduced to rubble and disaster brought upon them. In the context of a government-backed rally to “rededicate” the United States as “One Nation Under God,” the message was clear: Americans must submit to the Christian God or face destruction.
At the very moment his message was being played before the assembled crowd, Trump was using Truth Social to threaten Iran with annihilation. “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking,” he wrote, warning that Tehran had “better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them.” The juxtaposition exposed the real content of the event’s invocations of divine blessing and national repentance: Christian fascism at home, imperialist violence abroad.
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Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, delivered a video message in which he complained that “the Bible has been removed from our schools” and declared that America had become “morally rotten, completely sick with sin,” citing “transgenderism,” same-sex marriage and “opening women’s locker rooms to men” as examples. Graham’s message was delivered remotely because the theocrat was in Minsk, Belarus, preaching to evangelical Christians with the blessing of President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled the former Soviet republic for more than three decades.
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The real purpose of Rededicate 250 was to rewrite the American Revolution as a Christian nationalist founding myth and to enlist religion in the service of dictatorship. Trump and the oligarchs he speaks for are turning to Christian fundamentalism not out of spiritual conviction, but because it provides a reactionary ideological weapon against the working class, socialism, historical truth and democratic rights.
The event made clear that the danger of fascism in the United States is not confined to militias or fringe movements. It is being cultivated from the highest levels of the state, financed by major corporations, promoted by Republican officials and sanctified by religious entrepreneurs. Against this, the defense of democratic rights requires the independent political mobilization of the working class, rejecting both theocratic nationalism and the capitalist system that produces it.
6. After Trump’s China trip, White House plans new attack on Iran
Just two days after US President Donald Trump’s return from Beijing, the White House is making active preparations for a renewed onslaught against Iran.
The New York Times reported Friday that the United States and Israel are “engaged in intense preparations—the largest since the cease-fire took effect—for the possible resumption of attacks against Iran as early as next week.”
Trump’s state visit to Beijing, the first by an American president to China in nearly a decade, was dominated by the crisis triggered by the war on Iran. Despite a public show of goodwill between Trump and Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping, no public agreement was reached on the resolution of the Iran crisis, and no official communique was issued.
Despite the massacre of more than 3,000 Iranians and the destruction of 81,000 civilian structures, the United States has achieved none of its goals. It has neither overthrown the Iranian government, nor broken Iran’s military, nor gained control over the Strait of Hormuz.
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In escalating the Iran war, Trump speaks not only for himself but for the entire financial oligarchy. Having launched the war, Trump has staked the prestige of American imperialism on subjugating Iran. Failure to achieve that aim is seen by the ruling class as a catastrophe that would accelerate the collapse of the dollar-denominated financial order on which American capitalism’s solvency depends.
Dominant sections of the US media are openly agitating for a US ground invasion of Iran. In a Sunday op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, titled “How to Finish the Job in Iran,” Seth Cropsey—a former deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations—wrote that Trump must “follow through on the threat of catastrophic force.” He continued: “That means preparing for a multistage operation, including boots on the ground, that forcibly reopens the Strait of Hormuz to accelerate the collapse of the Iranian state.”
Cropsey pointed to the desperate crisis facing US imperialism: “If oil remains around $150 a barrel for the rest of the year, inflation will accelerate, while key industries see their supply chains derailed. Mr. Trump has a narrow window in which to end this crisis favorably, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and ensure an economic rebound while securing American interests and prestige. But that requires deploying the full spectrum of American power.”
The push for renewed strikes continued on the Sunday talk shows. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Trump’s most prominent foreign policy ally, in an appearance on “Meet the Press,” called for the United States to resume bombing Iran’s energy infrastructure. “What President Trump has done has been amazing militarily,” Graham said. “But there’s still more targets to be had. And there’s things we can do to hurt. The energy infrastructure is their soft underbelly. If you go back to the fight, I’d put energy on top of the list.”
The Democratic Party offered no opposition to the planned escalation. Instead, the Democrats who appeared on the Sunday talk shows largely devoted their foreign policy remarks to condemning what they considered an insufficiently belligerent posture by Trump toward China at the Beijing summit.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared: “For the sake of democracy and the stability of the global economy, Trump must not sell out Taiwan.” The Democrats’ complaint is that the war Trump launched against Iran has distracted the United States from the conflict with China.
The war against Iran is at the same time a war against the American working class. The inflationary crisis triggered by the war has produced a massive surge in the cost of energy and food. NBC News reported that fresh vegetable prices have risen more than 44 percent on an annualized basis over the past three months. Gas is at a national average of $4.51 a gallon, and Brent crude has jumped roughly 50 percent since the start of the war.
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The costs of the war are mounting on the Treasury as well. Pentagon Comptroller Jay Hurst conceded in congressional testimony last week that the war has cost $29 billion, a figure that excludes damage to American bases. Harvard public policy economist Linda Bilmes told Fortune in April that she was “certain we will spend $1 trillion for the Iran war.”
The escalation of the war on Iran comes amid a major upsurge of the class struggle. Some 3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers walked off the job at midnight Friday, shutting down the busiest commuter line in the United States in the first LIRR strike since 1994.
The 1,300 United Auto Workers members at Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan have twice rejected concessionary contracts in the past six weeks and are pressing the union for an immediate strike. The 1,000 UAW members at American Axle’s Three Rivers, Michigan plant voted by 98 percent on May 12 to authorize a strike when their contract expires on May 31.
The immediate trigger of these struggles is the cost-of-living crisis created by the war. The defense of workers’ living standards cannot be separated from the fight against the war.
Trump’s threats to annihilate Iranian society must be treated with the utmost seriousness. The administration is a criminal, gangster regime that will stop at nothing—including the use of nuclear weapons—to advance the interests of the American ruling class.
The struggles in transit and the auto industry show the way forward in the fight against Trump’s schemes for war and dictatorship. The murderous Trump regime, and its enablers in the Democratic Party, must be opposed through the method of the class struggle and the program of socialism.
At an explosive meeting of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 699 members held Sunday, rank-and-file workers at the Nexteer parts plant in Saginaw, Michigan, chased UAW International Representative Jason Tuck from the meeting room and forced the union local to schedule a strike vote for Wednesday, May 20.
The meeting came two days after Local 699 members voted down by more than 73 percent the second sellout tentative agreement brought by the union bureaucracy. On March 31, Nexteer workers rejected the first TA by more than 96 percent.
Nexteer, which employs 1,300 workers, produces critical parts such as steering panels and components for some of the Big Three automakers’ best-selling models. Under conditions of “just-in-time” delivery of parts to assembly plants, a Nexteer strike could quickly shut down production at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. It could ignite a wave of strikes at US auto parts companies. Last Monday, workers at American Axle’s Three Rivers, Michigan plant voted by 98 percent to authorize a strike. Workers at Dana, Bridgewater Interiors and Magna have contract expirations over the next several weeks.
This is precisely what the UAW bureaucrats, at both the national and the local level, are desperate to prevent. Their six-figure salaries and expense accounts depend on suppressing the class struggle and imposing ever more onerous conditions on the workers, who are forced to pay them tribute in the form of dues deducted from the workers’ paychecks.
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Workers must be absolutely clear-eyed about the intentions of the union leadership. It will block a strike if possible, and, if not, will work relentlessly to isolate and sabotage it. The entire membership must be mobilized to ensure that there are no further contract extensions or delays and a strike is called on Wednesday, May 20.
The Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee calls for workers to remove the current bargaining committee and replace it with a committee of trusted rank-and-file workers, chosen by shop floor workers, accountable to shop floor workers and negotiating openly on terms set by the workers themselves. This is part of a struggle to remove the bureaucracy and place the union in the hands of the rank and file.
The Committee calls on Nexteer workers to actively engage the full support of autoworkers across the US, in Mexico, Canada and internationally, including the honoring of Nexteer picket lines and refusing to handle scab parts.
The Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee urges workers to adopt the following demands:
- Abolition of all tiers. Equal pay and benefits for equal work.
- Immediate, substantial wage increases that exceed the rate of inflation, with cost-of-living adjustments.
- A living starting wage and rapid progression to top pay, not 24 or 48 months of poverty.
- Full healthcare coverage for all workers and their families. No premium hikes, no doubled weekly contributions.
- Enforceable limits on overtime, speedup and scheduling abuse.
- Job security and anti-outsourcing protections. Full transparency and the right to oppose the shifting of work to lower-wage operations.
- Workers’ control over safety and staffing, with elected rank-and-file safety reps empowered to stop unsafe work.
- Explicit, enforceable prohibitions on cycle-time surveillance and the use of tracking data for discipline, job elimination and speedup.
8. Science magazine investigates FBI’s witch-hunt against Chinese researchers
Science magazine, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed publications in the world, has published an investigative report titled “Researching While Chinese,” detailing the Department of Justice (DOJ) persecution of Chinese researchers at the University of Michigan (U-M) and Indiana University (IU). The report names the FBI operative at the center of every prosecution and exposes retaliation against IU Professor Roger Innes, a leading American plant biologist.
This witch-hunt has its roots in the China Initiative, launched by the DOJ during the first Trump administration in 2018, nominally to counter Chinese espionage and theft of trade secrets. The China Initiative targeted primarily senior faculty with established careers and institutional standing.
It produced a string of prosecutions that collapsed under scrutiny. The case against MIT Professor Gang Chen was dismissed in 2022 after the government’s charges proved baseless. Harvard chemistry chair Charles Lieber was convicted not of espionage but of lying to federal investigators about a modest research relationship. University of Kansas Professor Franklin Tao was convicted on concocted evidence.
The Science investigation documents the second phase of this campaign. Where the China Initiative targeted senior faculty, making prosecution difficult and politically costly, the current FBI campaign has shifted its focus to junior researchers—postdoctoral fellows and graduate students on temporary visas. These individuals have no tenure, no institutional protection and no citizenship rights that could complicate their removal.
The campaign has been driven from the top by fascist political operatives of the Trump administration. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have publicly advanced the narrative of widespread Chinese “sabotage” and “espionage” in US universities. Patel, in particular, sought to stoke anti-Chinese hysteria with inflammatory social media posts and statements framing routine scientific exchange as a national security threat.
This is a political operation against immigrants and Chinese scholars, an assault on democratic rights, an effort to whip up national chauvinism and racism. It is part of the erection of a presidential dictatorship and the preparation for war against China, a nuclear power.
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It must be noted that the Science article, for all its detail, does not mention the suicide of Danhao Wang. A 30-year-old postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Professor Zetian Mi at U-M, Wang took his own life on March 19, 2026, the day after being interrogated by federal agents, jumping from an upper story within the G.G. Brown Laboratory on North Campus. In almost two months, President Domenico Grasso and the U-M administration have issued no statement to the campus community about his passing. It was the WSWS that first reported Wang’s name on April 2, informing the broader public of his death. Science has documented the machinery of the witch-hunt without confronting its most devastating human consequence.
The readership of Science is the scientific establishment: senior faculty, research administrators, funding bodies and academic institutions. That its editors concluded the time had come to document this campaign in such detail reflects the depth of alarm spreading through sections of the scientific establishment. They are watching the state attempt to suppress Chinese scientific advances through police state methods and concluding that the damage to American science may be irreparable.
The World Socialist Web Site and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) have opposed this witch-hunt from the beginning. We renew our demands:
• A full, independent investigation into the death of Danhao Wang
• The exoneration of all convicted researchers
• The restoration of their careers and right of return
• An end to visa revocation as a political weapon
• The immediate restoration of Roger Innes’s laboratory access
• An independent investigation into the coordination between the FBI, DOJ, USDA and the university administrations that have served as willing instruments of this purge.
The defense of these scientists is inseparable from the defense of democratic rights for the entire working class and the fight against the imperialist drive to war with China.
On May 12, federal prosecutors publicly announced criminal charges—unsealed the previous day—against the operators of the MV Dali container ship, whose collision with Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 26, 2024 killed six construction workers and caused one of the worst infrastructure disasters in recent American history.
The indictment, announced by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), names two Singapore-based corporate entities—Synergy Marine Pte Ltd., headquartered in Singapore, and Synergy Maritime Pte Ltd., based in Chennai, India—as well as Radhakrishnan Karthik Nair, 47, an Indian national who served as the Dali’s technical superintendent. All three defendants are charged with conspiracy, willfully failing to immediately inform the United States Coast Guard of a known hazardous condition, obstruction of a federal agency proceeding and making false statements.
The two Synergy corporations are additionally charged with misdemeanor violations of the Clean Water Act, Oil Pollution Act, and Refuse Act for the discharge of oil, shipping containers and other pollutants into the Patapsco River and the Chesapeake Bay.
Six workers—Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 35; Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26; Maynor Yasir Suazo-Sandoval, 38; Carlos Daniel Hernández, 26; Miguel Angel Luna Gonzalez, 49; and José Mynor López, 37—were undertaking repair work on the bridge when the MV Dali struck it. They died when the central span of the bridge collapsed 200 feet into the frigid waters below. All were immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America, employed by a contractor to do maintenance on the bridge roadway. Two other workers who fell into the water survived.
According to the indictment, the Dali lost power twice within a four-minute span as it navigated out of the Port of Baltimore, bound for Colombo, Sri Lanka.
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The criminal charges follow a series of civil settlements. In October 2024, the DOJ reached a $101.9 million settlement with Grace Ocean Private Limited, the ship’s owner, and Synergy Marine, covering the federal government’s costs in responding to the collapse—wreckage removal, dive operations and port remediation. That sum went to the US Treasury and federal agencies, not to the families of the dead. Last month, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown announced a separate $2.24 billion settlement between the state of Maryland and the ship’s owner and operator, resolving claims related to the reconstruction of the bridge, which is estimated to cost between $4.3 billion and $5.2 billion. The bridge is not expected to reopen to traffic until late 2030.
As the World Socialist Web Site has reported since the earliest days of the disaster, the framing of these legal proceedings—and now the criminal indictment—are carefully constructed to confine culpability to the ship’s operators, while shielding government officials from any accountability for the bridge’s catastrophic vulnerability. The criminal charges, like the DOJ’s earlier civil settlement, treat the disaster as a product solely of corporate misconduct aboard the Dali, and make no reference to the decades of neglect that left the bridge structurally defenseless against a collision of this kind.
The Key Bridge opened in 1977, designed at a time when container ships were a fraction of the size of modern vessels like the Dali, which displaces 95,000 tons of water. As the NTSB itself concluded in its accident investigation, the ship was nearly 30 times above the acceptable risk threshold set by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO).
That threshold had been established in 1991, following the collapse of Tampa Bay’s Sunshine Skyway Bridge under near-identical circumstances. Maryland was never required to assess the Key Bridge under those standards, because the 1994 federal rules mandating vessel collision risk assessments applied only to newly constructed bridges. State authorities never conducted such an assessment voluntarily. Had they done so, the NTSB found, Maryland would have known the bridge was catastrophically exposed and could have taken measures to reduce that risk.
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As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in the immediate aftermath of the collapse, “such disasters are inevitable in a society where all decisions are totally subordinated to profit interests.” The criminal indictment announced this week does not challenge that arrangement. It manages it—assigning criminal blame to foreign corporate defendants and a foreign national while leaving untouched the political and economic structures that made the disaster possible. Civil litigation on behalf of the families of the six dead workers is ongoing, though the indictment may cause delays.
10. Unite the New Zealand and Pacific working class against imperialism!
This speech was delivered by Tom Peters, a leader of the Socialist Equality Group in New Zealand, at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the ICFI.
11. Canadian imperialism: predator, not prey, in global war
This speech was delivered by Keith Jones, Socialist Equality Party (Canada) national secretary, at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the ICFI.
12. Berlin election: exorbitant rents, housing shortage and the role of the Left Party
“I am Elif Eralp, and I want to make Berlin affordable.” These are the words with which the Left Party’s lead candidate for elections to the Berlin House of Representatives (state parliament) in September began her speech at its last regional party congress.
The Left Party’s election program is entirely focused on the housing question. It does not address the massive rearmament program and escalation of the German government’s pro-war policy, the curtailment of democratic rights or the strengthening of radical right-wing forces, or it does so only with a few hollow phrases.
With catchphrases such as “rent cap and fair rents,” “lowering heating costs” and “combating exorbitant rents,” the Left Party is attempting to use the horrendous rental costs and pronounced housing shortage in the capital for its election campaign. For more and more households, rising rents and a lack of affordable housing are an everyday problem, while for years real estate corporations have been raking in one record result after another at the expense of society.
Rents have tripled since 2005, and the increase is even more severe for new rentals. Between 2015 and 2024, these rose from €8.52 to €17.64 per square meter, the highest figure among all major German cities.
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The expropriation of the rent sharks requires a socialist program. Housing is a fundamental right and must not serve the shameless enrichment of a narrow layer.
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That is why the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) is standing in the Berlin state election in September. It opposes all parties that stand for war and social cuts—and thus explicitly the Left Party as well. As the SGP’s appeal for the Berlin election states:
The social misery in Berlin—growing poverty, skyrocketing rents, crumbling schools and hospitals, job losses—is part of a global crisis of capitalism that can only be ended by all workers joining together in struggle around the world, especially in the United States.
We counterpose the international unity of workers to national unity with the capitalists and their parties. We reject the capitalist logic of profit and fight for the expropriation of the big corporations, banks and billionaire fortunes in order to organise the economy under democratic control according to the needs of society.
13. “The Forever Prisoner”: Abu Zubaydah’s testimony from Guantánamo Bay
The exhibition at the London School of Economics [LSE] of the drawings of Abu Zubaydah, still imprisoned after 24 years in Camp Delta detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, is not an artistic event. It is an indictment—of the United States, Britain and the other imperialist powers, their global War on Terror, and every institution that enabled, sanitized, or normalized the torture and indefinite detention that stand among the gravest crimes of the twenty‑first century. It is the voice of a man they have worked systematically to erase.
Opening on 12 May but lasting for barely a month, the first ever exhibition of Zubaydah’s work was introduced by his international lawyer, Helen Duffy. She explained how Zubaydah has been held in arbitrary detention for 24 years without charge, trial, or judicial review. He was brutally tortured—waterboarded 83 times in a single month, as confirmed in 2021 Supreme Court proceeding —from the moment of his capture in Pakistan in 2002, and has remained in a legal black hole ever since. His case, Duffy noted, “epitomizes the brutality, arbitrariness, and dehumanization” that defined the War on Terror.
The drawings are testimony wrested from a brutal and vindictive censorship regime. Every word Zubaydah writes is presumptively classified; his letters, reflections, even his memories must be cleared and stamped “Approved to Release” by the same government that tortured him. As Duffy explained, she was not even allowed to relay a message from him to the audience.
The only reason these drawings exist publicly is because they were declassified, line by line and image by image, after years of legal struggle—a process first brought to wider attention when a 2019 Seton Hall Law School report published Zubaydah’s forensic reconstructions of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
The drawings are precise, diagrammatic. They depict waterboarding, stress positions, coffin‑sized boxes, forced nudity, threats of rape, prolonged beatings and sleep deprivation—the full repertoire of a CIA torture program designed and authorized at the highest levels of the American state. They are forensic reconstructions: a visual archive assembled because the state destroyed or classified the original evidence. They expose torture not as the aberrant conduct of rogue operatives but as a bureaucratic system ratified across successive administrations by presidents, vice presidents, attorneys general, and intelligence directors.
*****
That the LSE now hosts the drawings of a man tortured within a system it helped make intellectually respectable is an exercise in institutional containment: the management of historical guilt in a form that indicts no one by name.
The exhibition’s final section shows Zubaydah in Guantánamo looking outward. He responds to the police murder of George Floyd. He expresses solidarity with the Palestinian people. These works show a man who, despite everything, insists upon his own humanity—and extends it to others.
Zubaydah depicts what he calls “the terrorism in the War on Terror”—a phrase capturing the brutalizing and punitive character of a quarter‑century of imperialist war. He describes how “The long daily torture period did not end until I was swamped with blood, vomit, and urine. So I started to create, fabricate, and invent terrorist operations for them from my imagination just to get rid of, and take a break from, their torture and terror.”
“When I got out of the black sites and moved to Guantánamo, I started to meet with attorneys, and knew the world news, which I had not been in contact with entirely for four and a half years in custody. Then, I knew what they had done—killing, destruction, and torture, even against civilians, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries. I realized that they used terrorism in their war on terrorism. So, the result is nothing but more and greater terrorism, from both sides.”
One of the exhibition’s most striking curatorial choices is the placement of sand within the display cases. Zubaydah is imprisoned on a Caribbean island surrounded by beaches he will never touch. He can hear the sea. He cannot reach it.
Duffy addressed the discomfort involved in viewing images of torture. But these images of suffering are also acts of resistance, memorialization, and historical record. The exhibition ends with a board asking: “What Now?” Duffy urged visitors to consider it. The essential demand is clear: Abu Zubaydah must be released.
13. As Finland’s economy hit by war on Iran, President Stubb pledges support to US military
The US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran launched on 28 February is deepening. The terror bombing and naval blockade of Iran, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have driven up oil prices globally, contributing to inflation, high unemployment and economic stagnation.
The right-wing Finnish government led by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo and President Alexander Stubb—members of the right-wing National Coalition Party (NCP)—has pursued a strategy of subservience to US militarism and support for war crimes, paid for by extensive cuts to social services and living standards at home.
Due to the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the Ministry of Finance revised its growth predictions downwards for the year from a modest 1.1 percent to just 0.6 percent. Since the beginning of the US assassination and bombing campaign in February, diesel prices have spiked by 30 percent, from €1.80/L to €2.33/L, and are now the highest in Europe.
Finland’s unemployment rate of 11.1 percent is also the worst in the European Union (EU) and has been steadily growing over the past year. The ministry’s report predicts a slight improvement in 2027 and 28, but that depends on the fantastical scenario that the Iran crisis is “resolved quickly and with little damage.”
*****
The government is likely to increase cuts to social programs significantly as the Finnish economy feels the unfolding impact of the US/Israeli war of aggression against Iran. The 2026 budget deficit is expected to grow to 4.6 percent of GDP from 3.4 percent in 2025. The government’s overall debt level is forecast to grow from 88 percent of GDP in 2025 to a full 100 percent in 2030.
*****
In recent months, several explosive Ukrainian drones have crashed in Eastern Finland in connection with attacks on the St. Petersburg region. Initial efforts to claim that Russia was using electronic warfare to direct the drones against Finland have collapsed, with the Finnish government forced to acknowledge that Ukraine has simply been reckless. Russia has warned that Ukraine may be intentionally using Finnish and Baltic airspace to carry out attacks and threatened retaliation if that is allowed.
On Friday morning, authorities issued an emergency warning to 1.8 million Finns near the Russian border after receiving reports that armed drones were approaching Finnish territory. In the end, they did not cross into Finland and the warning was lifted several hours later.
The pro-war propaganda is pushed by all political parties, from the right-wing government to the opposition Social Democrats and ex-Stalinist Left Alliance.
*****
Long after Trump threatened to seize and annex Greenland, a move seen by the European imperialist powers as an attack on their interests in the Arctic, Finland signed a €5.2 billion deal to build ice breakers for the US Navy. When the US Navy turned to piracy in the Caribbean and slaughtered fishermen in open war crimes, before kidnapping the Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, Stubb wanted to ensure that the world knew he never considered Maduro a legitimate head of state.
Far from protecting Finland, the raging militarism being whipped up by all parliamentary parties from Stubb’s NCP to the Left Alliance, and the open alignment with American imperialism, is being used to crush the standard of living of Finnish workers and threatens to destroy them in the US war against Russia and preparations for war with China.
Workers in Finland must respond by linking opposition to austerity with the rejection of militarism and war. This is possible only on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program, unifying workers in Finland and across the Nordic region with the working class in the rest of Europe and around the world.
14. Red Dawn over China: An extended exercise in anti-communist propaganda
The new book Red Dawn over China—How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity by Frank Dikötter, published in February, claims to explain how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power. It is a fundamentally flawed work that makes little pretense of academic objectivity or intellectual honesty and is nothing more than an extended exercise in anti-communist mudslinging aimed against the CCP and the 1949 Chinese Revolution itself.
That such a shoddy book should be released now and receive considerable international publicity, almost exclusively positive and laudatory, points to its political purpose. It complements the barrage of propaganda emanating from Washington and its allies to demonize China as “expansionist” and “aggressive” as the Trump administration continues the preparations to expand the wars in the Middle East and Europe to envelope China in a global conflict of catastrophic proportions.
Red Dawn is the latest in a series of similarly tendentious books by Dikötter on modern China that coincide with the shift in Washington’s attitude to Beijing from a vast source of cheap labor to a burgeoning threat to US imperialism’s global dominance. The first of his trilogy of books on Mao’s China published in 2010 found a ready audience as Barack Obama assumed office and initiated the so-called pivot to Asia—a diplomatic and economic offensive against China combined with a massive military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific that has only intensified under subsequent administrations.
Dikötter’s entire opus is based on the fundamental premise of Cold War propaganda that falsely equated socialism and communism with Stalinism in all its varieties, including Maoism in China, and lauded US imperialism as the champion of democracy. In doing so, he ignores the political struggle waged by Leon Trotsky against the opportunist policies of Stalin that led to a devastating defeat of the revolutionary movement in China in 1927, which was to shape the character of the Maoist regime that emerged from the 1949 revolution.
After graduating in history from the University of Geneva in 1985 and holding university positions in London and Hong Kong, Dikötter became a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University—the archetypal US institution for the manufacture of Cold War anti-communism. There, he collaborates with such figures as H.R. McMaster, who served as Trump’s first-term national security adviser, and right-wing British historian Niall Ferguson.
*****
Red Dawn’s explanation of “how communism conquered a quarter of humanity” involves an obvious contradiction that Dikötter cannot resolve. On the one hand, Dikötter, based on his archival research, makes the following claim: “What becomes abundantly clear in one document after another is how marginal the Communist Party was in the history of China from its foundation in 1921 to the end of the Second World War in 1945.”
The question arises: if the role of the Communist Party was so negligible, how could it have come to power in 1949? His answer is as crude as the rest of his argument: “The key word is violence, and a willingness to inflict it. Communism was never popular in China, no more so than in Finland or in the United States, and it was brought to the population at the barrel of a gun,” he declares.
Dikötter fills page after page with accounts of Communist brutality drawn from its political enemies and torn out of context: Foreign diplomats, military officers and spies determined to protect and further imperialist interests, hide their intrigues and justify their crimes. Businessmen, missionaries and landlords give horror-filled accounts of the struggles of workers and peasants. Lurid stories about “bloodthirsty Communists” taken from the yellow press in China and echoed in the international media. All this provides the grist for his mill.
Insofar as Dikötter picks over the archives of the Stalinist Chinese Communist Party, it is to select bits and pieces to underscore the party’s insignificance, its vicious internal purges, its reliance on violence and its dependence on aid from the Soviet Union—in other words, his own preconceptions.
*****
However, violence, in and of itself, explains nothing. Throughout the period, China was embroiled in war—civil conflict and war with Japan. The question to be asked and answered is: who carried out the violence, and what class interests did it serve? The violence of the oppressors to maintain their exploitation and that of the oppressed fighting for their basic rights are not equivalent. Dikötter clearly sides with the former. Moreover, the willingness to inflict violence does not explain why one side wins a war, or a civil war in the case of China, and the other is defeated. Nor can it explain why the Stalinist CCP came to power in 1949, rather than 1939 or 1929.
*****
To pull apart every falsehood, half-truth, flaw and evasion in Red Dawn over China is not possible in a review such as this—that would take a volume at least as large as the book itself. But it is necessary to critically examine Dikötter’s treatment of the key turning points in China's history during the period covered by the book.
In less than 40 years, China was convulsed not by one, but three revolutions—the toppling of the Manchu dynasty in 1911, the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, and the Third Chinese Revolution in 1949.
Dikötter barely touches on the overthrow of the imperial dynasty and the establishment of a Chinese republic. Sun Yat-sen, the first republican president and founder of the bourgeois Kuomintang (KMT) or Nationalist Party, was rapidly pushed aside as rival warlords, in league with the major imperialist powers, divided up the country.
It was the inability of the Chinese bourgeoisie to unite China, to end imperialist oppression or to address the pressing social needs of workers and peasants that fed the intellectual and political ferment out of which the Chinese Communist Party arose in the aftermath of World War I and the October Revolution in Russia in 1917.
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Great expectations surrounded the post-war Versailles Conference, as many Chinese hoped that the major powers would support the return of Shandong, which had been under German control before the war, to China. Bitter disappointment at the decision to hand Shandong to Japan erupted in a mass protest by thousands of students in Beijing on May 4, 1919—a movement that rapidly spread to other cities with protests, strikes and a boycott of Japanese goods.
The May Fourth Movement was heavily influenced by the ideas of the New Culture Movement, which contended that ending China’s subjugation required the modernization of all aspects of society based on democratic ideals and the scientific advances in Europe and the United States. While it had many diverse strands, the most radical and far-sighted layers in the May Fourth Movement were drawn to Marxism and Bolshevism, inspired by the Russian Revolution.
For Dikötter, the founding of the Communist Party was all the result of intrigues by Communist agents and money from the Soviet Union. Representatives of the Third International or Comintern in China certainly and importantly assisted, but without the radicalization already underway they would have failed to achieve anything. Dikötter ridicules its founding congress on July 23, 1921 as just a dozen delegates who “squabbled over numerous issues.” Yet the party was to prove a powerful pole of attraction in the revolutionary upheavals that were soon to follow.
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For Dikötter, there was no revolutionary situation in China between 1925 and 1927. Except where unavoidable, the mass movement of workers and peasants is simply written out of his book. Questions of revolutionary strategy and tactics and Stalin’s reactionary role are of no consequence. As a result, Dikötter’s account lacks coherence or logic as it skips from one event to the next. The chief protagonist is Kuomintang (KMT) leader Chiang Kai-shek, who the Chinese bourgeoisie came to regard as their saviour from Communism and the rebellious masses. His crimes, and those of the imperialist powers, are covered up and minimized.
What happened was far more complex. In 1922, the Comintern directed the Chinese Communist Party to join the KMT and work within its ranks. Moscow provided money, arms and advisers to the KMT and established the Whampoa Military Academy to train its officers.
Trotsky, alone in the Politburo, opposed the decision to enter the bourgeois KMT. Stalin turned what had initially been justified as a temporary step towards building an independent party into a long-term policy, which, as Trotsky warned, proved fatal for the revolution and the Communist Party. The fight for the CCP’s political independence was bound up with the struggle by Trotsky and the Left Opposition in Moscow against the Stalinist bureaucracy that subordinated the interests of the working class to the preservation of its privileges and power under the reactionary banner of Socialism in One Country.
In his Theory of Permanent Revolution, first developed in 1905, Trotsky established that the bourgeoisie in countries of belated capitalist development, such as Russia, was organically incapable of carrying out the basic democratic tasks of the classic bourgeois revolutions of Europe and America, including sweeping land reform. Those tasks necessarily fell to the proletariat, leading the peasantry in a revolutionary struggle for power as an integral component of the struggle for socialism internationally.
The Theory of Permanent Revolution foresaw the essential lines of development of the revolutionary upheavals in Russia in 1917 and provided the theoretical basis for the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution. The Russian Revolution was a positive verification of Trotsky’s theory; the tragic outcome of the Second Chinese Revolution was to verify it in the negative.
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After Sun Yat-sen’s death in March 1925, a bitter power struggle had erupted inside the Kuomintang centred on the “left” Wang Ching-wei, who was the party and governmental leader in Canton, and Chiang Kai-shek, who headed the Whampoa Military Academy and had the support of the party’s anti-communist right wing. On March 20, 1926, Chiang seized control of the KMT and its government in a military coup, declared martial law, sidelined the “left” KMT leadership and detained Communist leaders and Soviet advisers.
In the next few months, Chiang, as head of the government and army, consolidated a military dictatorship. Strikes and peasant revolts were ruthlessly suppressed, including the long-running Canton-Hong Kong general strike. Communists could remain in the KMT but were barred from holding leading positions and compelled to advocate the bourgeois liberal ideology of Sun Yat-sen. Stalin ordered the Communist Party to remain inside the KMT, all but crippled politically and organizationally inside a bourgeois party.
Having gained control of the KMT, Chiang launched the Northern Expedition in July 1926—a military campaign against warlords who dominated northern China. Dikötter recounts the Northern Expedition as a series of military triumphs for Chiang, for which the CCP was not a help but a blight. The book denounces the Communists for encouraging “mobs to loot and burn the property of wealthy merchants and landowners” and attack “foreigners as agents of imperialism.”
In reality, without the support of the Communist Party, Chiang could not have postured in front of the masses as their liberator and the Northern Expedition would have been a complete failure—one warlord battling others. The uprisings of workers and peasants instigated by the CCP’s cadres not only prepared the ground for the arrival of the KMT’s troops, but in some cases drove out the local warlord in advance. That is why, for the time being, Chiang allowed the Communist Party to remain inside the KMT under his direction—something Dikötter never explains, because to do so would undermine his absurd claim that the CCP was always politically marginal.
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Chiang’s bloody reckoning with the Communist Party came in Shanghai. In advance of his arrival, the CCP instigated an armed insurrection backed by a general strike on March 21, 1927, which put China’s most industrialized city under the total control of the General Labour Union, with the exception of the foreign concessions.
But as Chiang conspired with the city’s businessmen and Triad gangs to deliver a deadly blow, Stalin disarmed the proletariat politically and materially, ordering workers to bury their arms and welcome Chiang’s troops into the city. In a notorious speech on April 5, he declared that “Chiang Kai-shek is submitting to discipline.” Just a week later, April 12, Chiang’s troops entered Shanghai and carried out a bloodbath. Hundreds of workers and communists were savagely butchered and the city’s Communist Party and General Labour Union shattered.
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For his part, Stalin declared his policy had been completely correct. He had proclaimed the bourgeois Kuomintang to be a revolutionary bloc of four classes—the progressive wing of the bourgeoisie, the urban petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry and proletariat—welding together in the struggle against imperialism as the bourgeois democratic stage of the revolution. The second stage—the struggle for socialism—was condemned to the distant future. It amounted to a resurrection of the Menshevik two-stage theory that had been utterly discredited by the Russian Revolution.
In his crushing critique of Stalin’s perspective, Trotsky replied: “It is a gross mistake to think that imperialism mechanically welds together all the classes of China from without. … The revolutionary struggle against imperialism does not weaken, but rather strengthens the political differentiation of the classes… Everything that brings the oppressed and exploited masses of the toilers to their feet inevitably pushes the national bourgeoisie into an open bloc with the imperialists. The class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the masses of workers and peasants is not weakened, but, on the contrary, is sharpened by imperialist oppression, to the point of bloody civil war at every serious conflict.”
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To cover up the catastrophes he had authored, Stalin ordered the battered, disoriented, and demoralised CCP to stage a series of ill-fated adventures. These culminated in the Canton uprising on December 11-13, timed to coincide with the opening of the 15th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and preparations for the expulsion and exile of the Left Opposition. The crushing of the Canton Commune marked the end of the Second Chinese Revolution and opened the door for the counter-revolution that followed.
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In the first two chapters, Dikötter glosses over the Second Chinese Revolution, a fundamental turning point in modern Chinese history that had a profound impact on the future course of events. The remaining six chapters of Red China are largely devoted to accounts of Stalinist violence.
Five of those chapters trace the movements and the battles involving the various CCP commanders and armies as the Communist Party tore itself away from the working class and retreated to more isolated and backward areas of China to conduct guerrilla warfare; its attempts to create secure base areas—so-called Soviets; the disastrous Long March north during which Mao Zedong assumes party leadership; the second CCP alliance with Chiang Kai-shek; and the final period of the war against Japan.
Dikötter makes not the slightest pretence of carefully weighing the evidence for and against his litany of horror tales—who carried them out, the extent and reasons for the violence, or even if they happened at all. Peasant rebellions have a long history in China and frequently meted out rough justice to the oppressors, which the CCP no doubt encouraged and participated in. It is beyond the scope of this review to dissect each incident in detail.
Chapter 3, entitled “Red Terror (1927-51),” provides a telling example of Dikötter’s unscrupulous methodology. The opening section provides a sensational account in tabloid style of the horrors of the short-lived Hailufeng Soviet established in November 1927 in the wake of failed peasant uprisings ordered by Moscow.
The first rural soviet and its leader, Peng Pai, have been the subject of academic study since Shinkichi Eto published the first English-language work in China Quarterly in 1961-62. Fernando Galbiati’s substantial biography, P’eng P’ai and the Hai-Lu-Feng Soviet, appeared in 1985 along with Robert Marks’s book, Rural Revolution in South China: Peasants and the Making of History in Haifeng County, 1570–1930 in 1984, which studied the county’s oppressive conditions and violent peasant outbursts.
None of these works supports the thesis that Peng Pai, out of sheer bloodlust, initiated a violent rampage that claimed the lives of thousands, so Dikötter relies overwhelmingly on contemporaneous sources overtly hostile to the Communist Party. After citing CCP documents reporting some 50 landlords killed, the numbers quickly escalate.
At the Soviet’s inauguration on November 21, Dikötter declares: “Each of the 300 official delegates was enjoined to ‘kill at least ten reactionaries’ and lead the peasants to ‘kill ten more,’ amounting to 6,000 altogether.” But that is not enough. He claims that Peng Pai suggested that villagers should exterminate 40 percent of the population, not only landlords and political opponents, but “the incurably sick, prostitutes, priests, soothsayers, the blind, the lame and the elderly.” It should be noted that if this had actually been carried out, it would imply, based on a population of 400,000, that 160,000 people were slaughtered.
Dikötter’s chief source for these bloodcurdling statements is an anti-communist diatribe in Chinese: Record of the Communist Catastrophe in Haifeng and Lufeng, written by Chen Xiaobai, who fled Haifeng, published in 1932 as KMT propaganda. Dikötter provides no other corroboration for the claim that 40 percent of the population or anyone other than outright political opponents and oppressive landlords and their henchmen were targeted.
That does not stop Dikötter from proceeding with his harrowing tale of Communist savagery drawn from sensational press accounts of the day—“The Fiends of Swabue” [North-China Herald]; “Outrages by Red Troops” [South China Morning Post]; “Communist Reign of Terror” [North-China Herald]. In addition to Chen’s propaganda, he cites “Communism in South China: The Hai-Lu-Feng Soviet”, a highly coloured report by American diplomat Jay Huston, based on sources that can no longer be corroborated.
The number of alleged executions continues to climb. “By the end December,” Dikötter writes, “one estimate put the death toll at 10,000, based on figures compiled for individual towns and villages where the body count was often in the hundreds, sometimes as high as 600 or 700.” Far from being an objective survey, the source is the notoriously anti-communist, North-China Herald. He concludes several pages of gory detail by a French consul in Canton—again hardly a disinterested source—who “was estimating that 25,000 people had perished under the iron hand of the Hailufeng Soviet.”
Page after page of Red Dawn over China employs the same methodology. The book is not a work of scholarship, but a recycling of the anti-communist propaganda of the day dressed up as fact. Given the lack of direct quotes from sources, it is impossible to know how much of the book is verified by these clearly biased sources and how much is simply Dikötter’s purple prose.
Executions clearly took place in the Hailufeng Soviet but there is no way of accurately verifying the numbers. Communist Party estimates vary from 500-plus landlords and local bullies to 1,686 for Haifeng County. Moreover, Dikötter simply ignores the context. The executions took place amid a wave of White Terror that began with Chiang Kai-shek’s massacre in Shanghai. Local officials, landlords and their thugs were not passive bystanders.
It is telling that Dikötter refers only once, in disparaging terms, to The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution by Harold Isaacs, an American journalist in China who was won to Trotskyism, and whose book remains one of the most authoritative works on the Second Chinese Revolution, 1925-27 and its immediate aftermath. Issacs documents the extent of the White Terror:
For the record, there are only partial estimates and incomplete figures culled from official announcements and from the daily press. From April to December 1927, according to one investigation, there were 37,985 known dead and 32,316 known political prisoners. Between January and August 1928, 27,699 were formally condemned to death and more than 17,000 were imprisoned. At the end of 1930, the Chinese Red Cross estimated a total of 140,000 had been killed or died in prison. In 1931, a study of available cities of six provinces established that 38,778 had been executed as enemies of the regime.
It is not the intention of this review to justify the crimes of Stalinism or whitewash its use of violence, which included vicious internal purges. The CCP took its cue from Stalin’s persecution of opponents that culminated in the notorious Moscow Show Trials in 1936-37, in which Trotskyists were the chief target. Hundreds of thousands of oppositionists were executed in the Soviet Union. A number of Trotskyists in China suffered a similar fate, either directly at the hands of the Stalinists or indirectly through their betrayal by the CCP to the Kuomintang’s police state apparatus or imperialist police.
However, Dikötter’s claim that the CCP ruled through violence alone is simply false. Without the active support of layers of the poor peasantry eager for land, the CCP and the Red Armies formed in backward areas of China after 1927 simply could not have resisted the annihilation campaigns by Chiang Kai-shek’s larger and better-equipped military forces. Its policies on land reform, while inconsistent, along with the suppression of landlords and their KMT backers, encouraged the resistance of the peasantry to their oppressive conditions.
*****
It should be noted that Dikötter fails to mention Chiang’s ties with Nazi Germany and his admiration for fascism. In a notorious speech in 1935, Chiang declared: “Can fascism save China? We answer: yes. Fascism is what China now most needs. In fascism, the organization, the spirit, and the activities must all be militarized.” It was only after Nazi Germany sided with Japan, after it launched a full-scale invasion of China in 1937, that Chiang’s relations with Berlin ruptured.
Stalin’s response to the Japanese invasion was to politically subordinate the CCP to Chiang Kai-shek, the butcher of Shanghai, for a second time in the so-called anti-Japanese United Front. Its origins lay in the Comintern’s Seventh World Congress in July 1935 that abandoned the adventurism of the Third Period line for the opportunism of the Popular Front—the subjugation of the working class to the bourgeoisie that had proved fatal in China in 1927.
The Communist Party was compelled to accept all of Chiang Kai-shek’s terms: abolition of the Red Army and incorporation into government armies under the control of the Military Affairs Commission; dissolution of the Soviet Republic; cessation of all Communist propaganda; and suspension of the class struggle. Of its own volition, the CCP declared an end to the confiscation of the landlords’ land, as proof that it was not promoting the class struggle. In return, the CCP was assigned a garrison area around Yenan in northern China and received regular subsidies from Chiang’s government in Nanking throughout the war.
*****
Dikötter only addresses what his book purports to be about—How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity—in the final chapter of his book, covering the period from 1945 to the overthrow of KMT rule in 1949. He does so by denying that a revolution took place at all.
In an interview published on the Wire China website, he dismisses the work of other historians, declaring: “There is a conviction among so many of us that there must have been social, economic, political reasons for a revolution to take place. Revolutions don’t just happen for nothing. But my answer to that is: no, there wasn’t a social revolution. There was a military conquest.”
At one stroke, Dikötter pushes aside the elementary requirements of historiography. In writing about what were tumultuous and complex events in China leading up to the 1949 revolution, he makes no serious examination of the major political parties and their programs, the impact of imperialist exploitation, nor the economic backwardness and appalling poverty that repeatedly drove masses of workers and peasants into struggle.
The internal rot of the corrupt KMT, its inability to resolve China’s profound economic and financial crisis following the end of World War II, its repression of the post-war upsurge of strikes and protests, the extreme social tensions that were also reflected in the ranks of its conscript armies—all this is virtually absent from the account.
The collapse of the Chiang Kai-shek dictatorship is treated as a disconnected series of military defeats at the hands of the Communist armies. The transformation of the CCP from its supposedly marginal existence into a party commanding millions of troops is put down to coercion and its victories to unmitigated cruelty and violence.
Blame for Chiang’s defeat is sheeted home to US President Harry Truman and his administration failing to provide military aid and attempting to coerce the KMT into a coalition government with the CCP. Dikötter’s arguments recall the right-wing attacks on Truman, who was held responsible for the “loss of China” to the “Communists”. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was to preside over the anti-Communist witch-hunt in the 1950s, rode to prominence in this crusade.
In reality, US imperialism was pursuing the same policy in China as elsewhere to restabilize global capitalism in the immediate aftermath of World War II. With Europe and much of Asia in ruins, the US and its allies confronted insurgent working classes, arms in hand. Stalin was instrumental in betraying these revolutionary movements. In France and Italy, where bourgeois parties had no political credibility, Moscow directed the Communist Parties to enter coalition governments in which Communist ministers disarmed partisan fighters and suppressed strikes. Having stabilised capitalist rule, they were dismissed from office.
That was also Truman’s plan in China. Immediately after Japan’s surrender, Mao, at Stalin’s direction, had already personally engaged in weeks of talks with Chiang and his representatives over a coalition government. For the following two years, amid continuing efforts to form a coalition, the CCP abided by the terms of the United Front—no class struggle, no land reform—even as strikes and protests multiplied against the KMT dictatorship amid inflation and rampant corruption. Despite the political brake applied by the CCP, a revolutionary ferment was developing. In his report delivered to the Fourth International in 1951, Chinese Trotskyist Peng Shuzhi explained:
The first period immediately after the war, from September 1945 to the end of 1946, marked a considerable revival and growth of the mass movement in China. In this period the working masses in the great cities, with Shanghai in the forefront, first brought forward their demands for a sliding-scale of wages, for the right to organize trade unions, against the freezing of wages, etc. They universally and continuously engaged in strikes and demonstrations…. The students played a notable role, representing the petty bourgeoisie in general, in large-scale protest, strikes and demonstrations in the big cities… under the banners and slogans demanding democracy and peace.
Truman’s plans for a coalition government in China collapsed in 1947 not because the CCP was unwilling but because Chiang rejected the proposal and launched military offensives to annihilate Mao and the Red Army. Even then, the CCP held back while Chiang’s armies occupied its base area in Yenan in April, and the KMT issued a warrant for Mao’s arrest in June and promulgated a mobilization decree to suppress revolts in July. It was not until October that the CCP published a manifesto calling for the overthrow of the KMT dictatorship and the building of a New China.
As Peng explained, the KMT regime was literally disintegrating, yet the CCP relied exclusively on its peasant-based armies. While breaking the United Front with Chiang, Mao’s New China program was a continuation of the Stalinist two-stage policy that subordinated the working class to the “progressive” national bourgeoisie and put off socialist measures to the future. In its quest for bourgeois allies, the CCP made no attempt to organize proletarian insurrections in the cities but sought to block any such rebellion. That did not mean there were no strikes or other forms of political unrest—China was a nation in revolt against a hated, oppressive and corrupt dictatorship. As Peng outlined in his report:
After the surrender of Japanese imperialism, Chiang Kai-shek’s tyranny, corruption and inefficiency reach a climax. First, in the name of taking over the ‘properties of the enemy and the traitors,’ the militarists and bureaucrats stole almost all the public property to fill their own purses, and indulged themselves in extravagant luxury and dissipation. At the same time, using the pretext of proceeding with civil war, they extracted food from the peasants and imposed conscription upon them, did their best to squeeze and to oppress…
The financial base of Chiang’s government had already been exhausted in the course of the war… After peace was announced, the pace of inflation advanced from geometric progression to lightning speed, terminating in the collapse of the ‘gold yuan’ and the unprecedented economic chaos at the end of 1948.
All commerce and industry halted and disintegrated, and the living standards of the various layers among the middle and lower classes (including all the middle and lower functionaries in the government institutions) cast them into the pit of despair. Driven by starvation, the workers rose up in a universal strike wave (there were 200,000 workers on strike in Shanghai alone). Plundering of rice took place everywhere…
If the CCP had called upon the workers and the masses in the big cities to rise in rebellion and overthrow the regime, it would have been as easy as knocking down rotten wood. But Mao’s party merely gave orders to the people to quietly wait for their ‘liberation’ by the ‘People’s Liberation Army.’
*****
The final few pages of Red Dawn over China are devoted to a desultory description of the implosion of the KMT regime as PLA armies swept south, encountering little or no resistance. What Dikötter describes as a wave of defeatism and panic fails to explain the collapse of the Nationalist armies, in which officers and conscripts alike no longer viewed the Chiang dictatorship as worth fighting and dying for. Nor can he explain the rapid expansion of the PLA forces to encompass millions of troops, and their fighting capacity, except by insinuating that peasants were dragooned.
Confronted with what was plainly a revolutionary upheaval throughout China, Dikötter appears to be lost for words. As Chiang’s armies go from one defeat to another in rapid succession until Canton falls “with scarcely more than a quiet sigh,” he is incapable of providing any credible explanation. His thesis that the 1949 Chinese Revolution was not a revolution is discredited by events that he barely describes. His book fizzles out without a conclusion.
The revolution was a contradictory phenomenon that his one-word explanation—violence—does not begin to encompass. It threw off imperialist oppression, unified the country and swept away centuries of cultural backwardness. It was not simply the military victories of Mao’s armies but a nationwide revolt that brought the brutal, corrupt Chiang Kai-shek dictatorship to an end.
The 1949 Chinese Revolution is justifiably regarded by Chinese workers and youth as a huge step forward. In response to the social aspirations of the revolutionary movement of workers and peasants, the CCP was compelled to eliminate much of what was socially and culturally backward in Chinese society, including polygamy, child betrothal, foot binding and concubinage. Illiteracy was largely abolished and life expectancy increased significantly. The perennial flooding of the great rivers that caused death and destruction was minimized. Extensive land reform took place.
But the regime that emerged in Beijing was shaped by the defeats of the Second Chinese Revolution, which led to the Stalinist degeneration of the Communist Party, which was based on predominantly peasant armies rather than the proletariat. The bureaucratic state apparatus, whose leading strata were drawn from the Red Army generals and officers, provided no democratic mechanisms for the working class or rural masses. It was not until the Korean War of 1950-53 threatened imperialist intervention in China that the CCP nationalized all industry and finance, instituting bureaucratic planning along the lines of the Soviet Stalinists. The Trotskyist movement characterized the People’s Republic of China as a deformed workers’ state that rested on nationalised property relations but in which the working class had no political say.
The Stalinist perspective of “Socialism in One Country,” overlaid with Chinese nationalism, resulted in one crisis after another, as the regime sought solutions to the immense economic and social problems it confronted within this narrow nationalist framework. Less than a quarter century after the People’s Republic was proclaimed, Mao held his meeting with US President Nixon in February 1972 and accommodated to US imperialism. This set the geopolitical framework for capitalist restoration and the transformation of China into a huge cheap labour platform for foreign capital. The remarkable economic growth that resulted has only confronted the autocratic CCP regime with problems for which it has no solution: vast disparities between rich and poor, a halving of growth rates and a looming war with US imperialism, which regards China as the chief threat to its global dominance.
15. Australia: Elderly residents of Melbourne apartment complex face forced eviction
Twenty-five low-income, mostly elderly residents of the Oasis apartment complex in St Kilda—an inner suburb of Australia’s second-largest city Melbourne—face being forced to vacate what they were told would be “forever homes.”
In early March, residents in 25 Oasis apartments were doorknocked by staff from the community housing association HousingFirst and told their homes were too expensive to operate and would be sold. They were informed they would receive just two offers of alternative accommodation and that if they refused, they could end up on the street, a thinly veiled threat of homelessness.
Most are elderly or long-term low-income tenants who entered Oasis on the understanding that they could remain there for life. Located in the bayside suburb of St Kilda, the complex is close to shops, public transport, community services, parks and the beach. Oasis residents are starting to organize resistance, refusing to sign relocation papers and demanding to know why homes built and funded as low-income housing can simply be sold off.
*****
The threat to Oasis residents takes place amid a housing crisis and the state Labor government’s program to evict around 10,000 people from Melbourne’s 44 public housing towers and turn prime inner-city land over to the property market. This is the largest destruction of public housing in Australian history and is being pursued in the midst of a deepening housing and cost-of-living crisis.
Evictions from the towers have already begun, with the first estates in suburbs such as Carlton, Flemington and North Melbourne largely emptied, and demolition works under way or prepared. The government’s own plans envisage turning the estates over to private consortia, demolishing the existing towers, and building triple the number of apartments over three decades, the majority to be sold on the open market and the remainder handed to community housing providers like HousingFirst.
The Oasis complex, completed in 2006, was built on a former council depot site gifted by the then City of St Kilda to a private developer on the condition that 10 percent of the 245 apartments be reserved for low-income residents.
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Far from being a cash-strapped charity, HousingFirst holds around $130 million in investment properties, $23 million in cash reserves and takes in $28 million a year in rent. Private apartments in the same Oasis complex currently sell for around $500,000 for two bedrooms and $850,000 for three, meaning HousingFirst stands to pocket between $10 and $15 million from selling the 25 low-income units alone.
Over recent decades, successive Victorian Labor and Liberal governments have deliberately run down public housing while promoting “social” and “community” housing. In 2016–2025 (a period in which Labor has been the sole governing party) there was a net increase of just 36 public housing dwellings in Victoria, a drop in the ocean amid a deepening housing crisis.
Over the same period, community housing grew by 5,389 dwellings—from 14,236 to 19,625. Public housing is being eviscerated. To the extent that anything is being put in its place it is a grossly inadequate number of “community” and “social” dwellings managed by market-based community housing providers whose funding and operations are subordinated to financial imperatives rather than the social right to secure, affordable housing.
Rents in such housing are typically pegged at 30 percent of tenants’ income plus federal rent assistance, compared to 25 percent in traditional public housing funded by the state, while security of tenure depends on the balance sheet of the housing association.
Labor claims that demolishing public housing and replacing it with “mixed-tenure” estates, managed in part by community housing providers, will improve conditions and protect vulnerable residents. Oasis demonstrates that when profits and asset values dictate policy, tenants can be discarded whenever it suits developers and financial institutions. Any promises that public housing residents moved into community housing will enjoy long-term security are already exposed as lies by the decision to sell out Oasis tenants.
*****
Workers must organize independently to insist that housing is a basic social right, not a commodity, and that all public and community housing be taken out of the hands of developers, financial markets and corporate-style associations. Society’s resources must be directed to expanding and upgrading high-quality public housing, as well as other social programs including education and healthcare.
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
