Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: December 1-7
- 25 years ago:
UN report reveals AIDs as one of the deadliest epidemics in history
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
United States military begins evacuation of Pyongyang
100 years ago:
2. US war crime exposed, as Trump escalates assault on Venezuela
Revelations of yet another horrific war crime committed by the US military in the southern Caribbean have surfaced, as the Trump administration is drastically escalating its unprovoked war threats against Venezuela.
According to multiple sources who spoke to the Washington Post, US Special Operations troops, acting on the direct orders of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, carried out a “double-tap” strike on a boat carrying 11 people near the shores of Venezuela on September 2.
“A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern,” the Post reported. “For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt. Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.”
One individual involved in the strike told the Post, “The order [from Hegseth] was to kill everybody.” This was the first in a series of deadly missile strikes that have sunk at least 22 small boats and killed at least 83 people from Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Trinidad.
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This show of force, which is wildly disproportionate to the stated aim of deterring a relative handful of fishermen allegedly smuggling cocaine in boats that could never reach the US mainland, has been further escalated over the past few days. Trump off-handedly announced that the strikes at sea would soon be joined by attacks on land and issued via social media a personal decree declaring a no-fly zone over all of Venezuela.
The clear aim of this campaign is not drug interdiction but rather regime change in Caracas and the imposition of a US puppet government that would clear the way for the major US-based oil corporations to plunder Venezuela’s petroleum reserves, the largest on the planet.
The revelations regarding the September 2 double-tap strike only demonstrate that Washington’s predatory aims are being pursued with entirely criminal methods. Rather than rescue the survivors left clinging for life to the remains of their vessel, Special Operations commanders ordered a second missile strike, blowing them to bits.
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Even if some of the victims of the Trump administration’s Caribbean murder spree were transporting drugs, this is not a crime punishable by death, and it must be proven in a court of law, not punished by means of extra-judicial executions on the high seas. Nor is it by any stretch of the imagination an act of war.
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Of course, this is not the first time that the Oval Office has been used to plot unlawful killings. Obama orchestrated drone assassinations, including of at least four American citizens, in meetings dubbed “terror Tuesdays,” while Trump ordered the 2020 assassination of senior Iranian official Qasem Soleimani, who was on a diplomatic visit to Iraq.
But there is more than a quantitative change in the current policy. What is unfolding is nothing less than the complete evisceration of the country’s political, constitutional and legal foundations and their replacement with the methods of a police state dictatorship and the law of the jungle.
Trump represents and personifies a criminal ruling oligarchy that wallows in filth, blood and obscene sums of personal wealth. He himself has weaponized the presidency for the purpose of stuffing hundreds of millions of dollars into his own pockets. According to calculations made by the Reuters news agency, the Trump family’s income has grown 17-fold to $864 million during the first half of this year, compared to the same period in 2024.
This criminality at the top finds no more telling expression than in the “full and complete pardon” Trump announced for ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison after being convicted in a US court for facilitating the importation of a staggering 400 tons of cocaine into the US. Hernandez was famously cited for telling one of his co-conspirators that he wanted to shove cocaine “right up the noses of the gringos.”
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The pardon of Hernandez makes a mockery of the Trump administration’s claims that its Latin American policy is driven by the need to rescue Americans from drug traffickers bent upon their destruction. No one in Trump’s circle or the ruling oligarchy as a whole could give a damn about overdose deaths. Rather they see drugs as a useful means of social control over the most oppressed layers of the population, as well as a lucrative source of profits for the financial sector.
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The pardon was announced on the eve of Sunday’s Honduran election, together with Trump’s endorsement of Nasry “Tito” Asfura, the candidate of Hernandez’s right-wing National Party. Trump has vilified the candidate of the ruling Libre party, Rixi Moncada, as a “communist,” in large measure because the current government has broken off ties with Taiwan and established diplomatic relations with Beijing, an action taken by Washington itself nearly half a century ago. Asfura has vowed to cut off ties with both China and Venezuela if elected.
There is an undeniably maniacal character to the policy being pursued by the Trump administration throughout the region. Reflecting the increasing desperation of a ruling capitalist oligarchy trapped by the contradictions of its own failing profit system, it is trying to reverse the loss of US hegemony and the rise of China to the position of South America’s principal trading partner by means of missile strikes and intimidation.
This foreign policy constitutes an extension of a domestic policy of war against the working class. Attempting to reverse every social gain won by workers in the course of the 20th century, the US ruling class is turning to dictatorial methods, from the fascistic demonization and savage persecution of immigrants to the deployment of US troops to major American cities to fight the “enemy within.” Just as the Trump administration is murdering fishermen and migrants in the Caribbean, it will not shrink from deploying deaths squads to carry out extra-judicial executions in the US itself.
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The war crimes being organized from the White House will be punished only by means of a conscious political intervention by the working class throughout the Americas to put an end to the capitalist system and reorganize society to meet human need, not the profits of the oligarchs.
Italy’s national general strike of November 28, followed by mass protests on November 29 coinciding with the International Day of Solidarity with Palestine, marks the third countrywide strike in as many months.
The two events express a rising movement of the Italian working class against the authoritarian, pro-war policies of the Meloni government, and more broadly of the international working class against attacks on democratic rights, imperialist war and genocide. The proposed 2026 budget law, the “Manovra 2026,” provided the immediate trigger, but the strike wave reflects far deeper opposition to social inequality, wage erosion, militarization and Italy’s role in NATO’s global war plans.
The November 28 strike, called by the base unions USB, CUB, COBAS, SGB and others, mobilized tens of thousands in transport, healthcare, education, public administration and private industry across the country. Rail and air travel were heavily disrupted, with a 24-hour rail walkout beginning the evening of November 27 and ITA Airways canceling at least 26 flights. Urban transit networks slowed or ground to a halt. Motorway workers walked out. Healthcare workers stopped work while maintaining emergency services. Schools, municipal offices and logistics hubs participated widely.
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The strike is a political eruption of the working class against a capitalist government that is dragging the population into deeper poverty while aligning the country with ever more dangerous global conflicts.
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The Italian strike wave is part of a broader international offensive by workers against inflation, inequality and war. From Germany to France, from the UK to the United States, from the Middle East to Latin America, the objective conditions for a global movement against capitalism are emerging. The potential of this movement is nothing less than revolutionary.
In Italy the events of November 28–29 represent a political turning point. The working class has entered the stage of history once again as a powerful force, challenging not only the Meloni government, but the entire trajectory of war, austerity and authoritarianism pursued by the capitalist class. The task now is to develop the leadership and organization required to unify these struggles, break free of the union bureaucracies and link the fight against war with the fight for international socialism.
4. DSA member Rae Huang announces candidacy for Los Angeles mayor
Rae Huang, a Presbyterian pastor, nonprofit executive and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has announced her candidacy for the June 2, 2026, Los Angeles mayoral election, challenging incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass.
Millions of workers and young people are searching for an alternative to the policies of austerity, repression and war offered from the two corporate-controlled parties in the US. There is growing opposition to Trump’s fascistic drive to establish a dictatorship, the war on immigrants, the destruction of social programs and the global eruption of war and genocide. In Los Angeles, Bass’s administration has become a byword for austerity, law-and-order policing and unrestrained support for real-estate developers.
Bass’s 2025-26 budget has fueled opposition among workers facing overwork, stagnant wages and crumbling services. Her response to January’s wildfires, after slashing fire department funding and leaving positions vacant, intensified public anger over the inadequate response to climate disasters.
Bass has positioned herself as a law-and-order Democrat, denouncing the slogan “Defund the Police” and expanding the LAPD budget, even as the department joins federal immigration raids—exposing the fraud of her “sanctuary” rhetoric. Her homelessness policy follows the same pattern: while declaring a state of emergency and launching “Inside Safe,” she has channeled funds to developers, cleared encampments and warehoused the unhoused in overpriced private facilities.
Under these conditions, little-known figures such as New York’s Zohran Mamdani and Seattle’s Katie Wilson have gained sudden support. Huang is of the same political type, and like Mamdani and Wilson, her campaign is a political trap.
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The DSA currently occupies key positions within the state apparatus in Los Angeles. The DSA-aligned city council members Huang points to as proof of a “new kind of leadership” have, in practice, upheld the status quo: backing developer-driven homelessness policies, supporting giveaways to big business and standing behind the union bureaucracy as it sabotaged the struggles of city and county workers in recent months.
The city has four city council members who identify with or orbit the DSA. After celebrating Mamdani’s victory in New York as a supposed triumph for the “left,” they now line up squarely behind the political establishment in Los Angeles. Nithya Raman and Eunisses Hernandez hail Bass as “the most progressive mayor we’ve ever had,” while Hugo Soto-Martínez dispenses with the pretense of independence from the political establishment altogether and endorses Bass outright.
Indeed, at the time of Bass’s rise to mayor, the DSA offered only mild criticisms and even falsely portrayed her as having once been a “socialist,” a myth used to politically legitimize her within left-leaning circles.
More broadly, the DSA functions as a faction of the Democratic Party and an increasingly critical role as a bulwark of class rule.
The experience of Zohran Mamdani in New York demonstrates the political role of these DSA-backed campaigns. After posturing as a champion of the “left,” Mamdani appointed his transition team: a roster of right-wing Democratic Party operatives, selected not from the working class but from the political establishment and corporate-aligned nonprofits.
Even more revealing was Mamdani’s meeting with Donald Trump, ushering a “partnership” and legitimizing the fascistic president at the very moment he was deepening his assault on democratic rights and confronting growing popular opposition.
5. Kshama Sawant runs for Congress posing as an independent socialist
Kshama Sawant has launched her 2026 congressional campaign under conditions of an acute crisis of American capitalism. The Trump administration, facing mounting opposition from workers and young people and a deepening economic crisis, is intensifying its Gestapo-like assault on immigrants. It is escalating its trade war against the world and overseeing mass layoffs and declining living standards for the broad mass of the American population, alongside staggering increases in wealth for the financial oligarchy. In line with record levels of social inequality, it is carrying out an assault on democratic rights unprecedented in US history.
Internationally, American imperialism is backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, continuing the US-NATO war against Russia, preparing war against Venezuela, and laying the basis for military conflict with China.
It is within this explosive context that Sawant—long promoted by pseudo-left circles as a “revolutionary socialist”—has stepped forward to channel working class opposition back into the safe confines of the Democratic Party and prop up the trade union bureaucracy.
Sawant says her campaign rests on her “record of victories” in Seattle and that these reforms can be “scaled up” nationally. This premise is false. Her decade on the Seattle City Council did not secure significant improvements for the working class and offers no strategy for confronting the oligarchy that dominates American society. Rather, it exposes the political function of Sawant’s entire career: to contain social anger within the dead end of municipal reform, electoral maneuvering, and alliances with the Democrats and the union bureaucracy, while blocking the emergence of an independent revolutionary movement of the working class.
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Sawant’s political rise was facilitated by the trade union bureaucracy. In her 2013 campaign, she secured endorsements from several Seattle-area union locals, including American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 1789, Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 37083, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 46, and the Greater Seattle American Postal Workers Union (APWU).
These endorsements provided organizational resources and access to union staff who carried out phone-banking, canvassing, and voter mobilization. While not every major union backed her—in fact, key Service Employees International Union (SEIU) locals endorsed her opponent—Sawant’s victory depended heavily on sections of the AFL-CIO apparatus that were in conflict with sections of the Democratic establishment but remained fully committed to capitalist politics. She did not rise in rebellion against the unions apparatus, she entered office as one of its sanctioned political projects. Her “victories” were the product of these same forces—and were designed to stabilize, not challenge, the existing order.
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Sawant presents her political evolution as principled, but it is defined by opportunistic shifts between organizations without explanation or accountability.
She began as a leader of Socialist Alternative, then joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in 2021—calling it “the most significant left organization in the United States in many decades.” In 2023, she launched Workers Strike Back as a new “independent movement.” In 2024 she endorsed Jill Stein’s Green Party campaign. In 2016 and 2020 she campaigned aggressively for Bernie Sanders bid to win the Democratic presidential nomination.
These shifts were not made on the basis of a socialist program or perspective. They reflected Sawant’s continual adaptation to shifting layers of the middle class and to the changing tactical needs of the Democratic Party.
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Sawant calls herself a revolutionary while insisting that every social issue can be resolved through electoral victories and policy tinkering. This is not Marxism—it is liberal reformism dressed in socialist language.
Her national program—$25 minimum wage, rent control, Medicare for all—is presented without any strategy to confront or overthrow the financial oligarchy. She never addresses how these reforms can be enacted under conditions of bipartisan austerity, the domination of Congress by corporate interests, and the escalating drive to world war. She never raises the need to expropriate the corporations and banks. She never explains how workers are to defeat the political and economic power of the ruling class.
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Sawant’s worldview is fundamentally American nationalist. Her appeals to “fight the billionaires” are disconnected from an internationalist understanding of capitalism, war, and class struggle.
Her posture on Gaza consists of moral outrage and calls for a ceasefire, not a socialist strategy linking Israeli and Palestinian workers in a struggle against imperialism, Zionism and the Arab bourgeoisie. She offers no analysis of imperialism, the historical role of the US in the Middle East, or the capitalist roots of the conflict.
Significantly, she is silent on the US–NATO war against Russia. Silence denotes consent. She does not expose NATO expansion or the role of US and European imperialism in instigating the reactionary invasion of Ukraine by the Russian bourgeoisie. This is not an oversight, but a political choice: exposing the Ukraine war would require confronting the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy—institutions on which she depends.
Sawant never warns of the danger of fascism or dictatorship. She does not analyze or expose the Trump administration as fascist, and her campaign website makes no reference to the real and growing threat of authoritarian rule. The attacks on immigrants, the assault on democratic rights, and Trump’s open moves to extra-Constitutional power are treated as policy disputes, not as components of the collapse of American democracy and the turn by the ruling oligarchy to dictatorship and fascism. This silence is political: acknowledging the danger would require exposing and breaking from the Democratic Party and the trade union apparatus. As with her silence on the US–NATO war against Russia, Sawant leaves workers unprepared for the mounting threat of dictatorship.
Her politics, in form and content, remain within the national framework of US liberalism in its death agony. She speaks for a privileged middle-class layer seeking limited reforms to bolster their own privileges within capitalism—not for the international working class.
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The working class confronts unprecedented dangers—war, dictatorship and social collapse. None of these can be confronted through municipal reforms, pressure campaigns, or appeals to “progressive” Democrats. The decisive task is to break from all forms of middle-class pseudo-left politics and build a revolutionary leadership rooted in the international working class.
6. Zelensky’s chief of staff and closest ally forced to resign amid massive corruption scandal
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak was forced to resign on Friday just hours after investigators from Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) raided Yermak’s apartment as part of a $100 million scheme case known as “Operation Midas” that has shaken the crisis-ridden Zelensky government.
Yermak, Ukraine’s most powerful political figure next to Zelensky, served as both Zelensky’s top aide and lead negotiator in the ongoing United States-backed plan to end the ongoing NATO-backed proxy war against Russia.
In a joint statement, the NABU and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office stated the raids were officially “authorised” and linked to an unspecified investigation, which was unspecified but it certainly related to the $100 million embezzlement scandal first exposed by NABU earlier in November.
According to the allegations, several leading members of the Ukrainian government and a close business associate of both Zelensky and Yermak were involved in an embezzlement scheme around Energoatom, the state nuclear company.
Energy Minister Svitlana Hrynchuk and Justice Minister Herman Halushchenko were already forced to resign after it was revealed they had allegedly received kickback payments worth 10 to 15 percent of contract values from contractors building fortifications on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
Other alleged accomplices in the scheme included former Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov and Timur Mindich—a close Zelensky and Yermak associate who is a co-owner of Zelensky’s own former TV studio Kvartal95. Mindich was reportedly tipped off about the raid and had already fled for Israel by the time investigators raided his apartment.
In the following weeks rumors circulated that Yermak and even Zelensky may be next, as their well-known close association with Mindich rendered their claims of innocence in the kickback scheme both logically and politically untenable. Yermak’s voice also allegedly appears on recorded conversations with Mindich released by NABU.
Mindich and his other close business associate Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoysky were instrumental in bringing the former comedian Zelensky to power in the 2019 presidential elections and Zelensky even traveled in Mindich’s personal armored car during the campaign. Zelensky also owned a high end apartment in the same building as Mindich, where NABU investigators discovered a gold plated bathroom that Mindich had built for himself. That Yermak and Zelensky himself were completely unaware of Mindich’s massive embezzlement scheme involving ministers in their own government is highly improbable.
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The resignation of Yermak is the temporary culmination of a ferocious battle within the Ukrainian state and ruling class. On the surface, this struggle has been centered on a war between the Zelensky regime and NABU, which has in the past been strongly backed by both the EU and the United States as means to intervene directly in Ukraine’s turbulent and clannish oligarchical politics.
Earlier in July, Zelensky—likely aware of the massive embezzlement and robbery endemic to his government—had moved to limit the power of NABU and SAPO, leading to the largest protests across the country since the beginning of the NATO-backed proxy war in February 2022.
According to Zelensky, stripping the agency of its independence was necessary to combat “Russian influence.” At the same time, Ukraine’s security services (SBU), which is closely aligned with Zelensky, had carried out raids of NABU to supposedly arrest Russian spies.
As a result of both domestic outrage and intervention from the EU and the US, Zelensky ultimately was forced to backtrack and withdraw his attempt to take over NABU.
NABU was set up in the wake of the US and EU-backed coup of elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, which triggered an eight-year-long civil war in East Ukraine, leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Founded in 2015 by the right-wing nationalist government of Petro Poroshenko, NABU is almost entirely created and directed by the US. Its staff is trained directly by the FBI and European Union.
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It has been no secret that Washington and EU officials have long been extremely skeptical, if not hostile, to Yermak and his immense influence in Ukrainian politics. In July, the Financial Times ran an extensive essay about Yermak as the “grey cardinal” of Ukrainian politics, citing numerous officials complaining about his influence on Zelensky.
In recent months, the Trump administration, in particular, has viewed Yermak as an obstacle to a negotiated deal—strongly opposed by its EU rivals—with Russia that would maximize US profit from the end of the proxy war that has already killed hundreds of thousands while at the same time striking a long term agreement with the oligarchic Putin regime. In an interview with the Atlantic just days ago, Yermak as the chief negotiator outright refused to even consider conceding Ukrainian territory—one of the main stipulations of the Trump peace plan—in order to end the war.
With Yermak gone, the position of Zelensky has been dramatically weakened.
In the population, there is immense anger and disgust over the corruption scandal, which reveals the shameless theft of money by the same oligarchs and government officials who have been sending hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into their death, falsely promising them “democracy” and “freedom”. Zelensky’s approval has plunged nearly 40 percentage points and is now below 20 percent—the lowest mark since his election in 2019. For the first time since the beginning of the war, more Ukrainians now distrust than trust him.
At the same time, the growing popular dissatisfaction with Zelensky is exploited by sections of the ruling class and the imperialist powers in an embittered struggle over the country’s foreign policy and division of the spoils of the war. Shortly after the announcement of Yermak’s resignation, Zelensky’s arch-rival, ex-commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny, issued a de facto endorsement of Trump’s efforts to broker a deal. Now the ambassador to the UK, Zaluzhny stated that “the overwhelming majority of wars end either with mutual defeat or with both sides convinced, that they won, or in other variants [of these scenarios].” Zaluzhny, who maintains extensive ties to the country’s far-right, was ousted by Zelensky in 2024 but still enjoys substantial support within sections of the Ukrainian state and the imperialist powers, and has been widely discussed as Zelensky’s possible successor.
7. Death of 15-year-old in Turkey underscores widespread child labor exploitation
Muhammed Kendirci, a 15-year-old student who was working at a carpentry workshop in the Bozova district of Şanlıurfa within the scope of Vocational Training Centers (MESEM), was seriously injured on November 14 when the 20-year-old foreman, Habip A., inflated his rectum with compressed air.
The young apprentice, who reportedly sustained serious internal organ damage as a result of this torture, lost his life after five days in intensive care. This raised the number of children who have become victims of work-related homicides to at least 16 since the establishment of MESEM.
Information obtained from the family revealed that the investigation was handled carelessly from the very beginning. The perpetrator was first released and then apprehended in another city while trying to flee abroad. Muhammed’s trousers, one of the most critical pieces of evidence, were thrown away by hospital staff.
Hundreds of people, including Muhammed’s friends from the neighborhood, staged a protest march on November 24 in the district of Bozova where he lived.
Muhammed’s death has brought to sharp relief the fact that children are subjected to uncontrolled exploitation, with the cooperation of the government and companies, and the complicity of the trade union apparatus.
Vocational Training Centers were included in formal and compulsory education in 2016. Through MESEM, high school-aged students between 14 and 18, who are separated from academic education, are made to work four days a week in a workplace for four years and receive theoretical training at school for only one day. Children officially receive a salary equal to just 30 percent of the minimum wage (6,631 TL/160 USD) for the first three years and 50 percent of the minimum wage (11,052 TL/260 USD) as a foreman in the fourth year.
In Turkey, which has accepted international conventions on children’s rights, the employment of children under 16 years of age is officially prohibited. Children over 15 years old who have completed compulsory primary education may be employed in “light work” that does not interfere with their physical, mental, social, and moral development or their continued schooling. But child labor, which the state denies on paper, has gained legal status through MESEM.
The approximately 500,000 child workers within the scope of MESEM in Turkey mainly come from poor families. Educator Nurcan Korkmaz, speaking to soL Haber, stated that in their field studies, 58 percent of the children directly cited “economic difficulties” as the reason for attending MESEM.
In conditions where inspection mechanisms are systematically eliminated and occupational safety measures are non-existent, child workers are employed in “heavy work” despite the prohibition, and are exposed to insults, pressure, and violence. In its current form, MESEM is an application aimed at providing cheap labor to capital rather than an educational model. Moreover, this is the tip of the iceberg.
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The Education and Science Workers’ Union (Eğitim-Sen), in its statement on November 20—World Children’s Day—explains that there are approximately 2.3 million child workers in Turkey. A significant portion of these children, coming from families who are refugees mainly due to imperialist wars in the Middle East, particularly Syria, are employed very cheaply in high-risk sectors.
According to the recent Education Monitoring Report by the Education Reform Initiative, approximately 804,000 children of compulsory education age are not attending school. Including foreign nationals, open education students, and those who have dropped out of formal education in MESEM, the total number exceeds 1,470,000. Most poor children in this situation are forced to become child laborers.
The working hours of child workers, which can be up to 12 hours a day, not only keep them from education but also exhaust them physically and mentally. This situation, combined with a lack of supervision and inadequate occupational safety measures, leads to fatal “work accidents”. According to the data of the Worker Health and Work Safety Council (İSİG), at least 82 child workers have lost their lives this year. This represents an increase of about 10 percent compared to the previous year’s data. Since 2013, at least 770 child workers have died at their workplaces.
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The proliferation of child labor exploitation is part of the attack by the ruling class internationally on the conditions and living standards of the working class. According to last estimates published by the International Labour Organization and UNICEF on June 11, 2025, there were approximately 138 million child laborers worldwide in 2024. About 54 million of them are engaged in hazardous work that could endanger their health, safety, or development.
Child labor plays a significant role in pushing wages down. In recent years, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey has accelerated its policy of reducing workers’ real wages under the pretext of curbing high inflation and closing the budget deficit. The minimum wage for 2025 was increased below the official inflation rate. A similar scenario is planned for 2026, in line with the demands of foreign and domestic financial capital.
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Karl MarxKarl Marx, who put socialism on scientific foundations, explains that child labor is not an individual or moral issue but an inevitable product of the development of capitalist production relations. As capitalist industry develops, labor becomes deskilled, and capital tends to constantly cheapen the price of labor. This deskilling facilitates the proliferation of child labor; the child is now suitable for “running errands” and undertaking dangerous jobs for low wages. At the same time, the labor market expands, and average wages are pushed down.
In the twentieth century, due to the impact of the 1917 October Revolution and major industrial and political struggles, significant progress was made in the conditions of the international working class and in children’s rights. These are now being sacrificed worldwide for the profit and wealth accumulation of capitalist oligarchy.
The way forward lies in combining the demands for the immediate implementation of measures aimed at protecting children, and improving the social conditions of workers, with the struggle for the revolutionary mobilization of the working class against the capitalist profit system, for socialism.
That Complicit has become a Sunday Times Bestseller testifies to the widespread opposition within Britain to the support for Israel’s ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza by both the former Conservative government of Rishi Sunak and now Keir Starmer’s Labour government.
Its success is all the more noteworthy because the mainstream press, including the Guardian, has not reviewed it. Yet the book’s author is a journalist who used to write for the right-wing press, including the Daily Telegraph, where he was the paper’s chief political commentator until he resigned in 2015, as well as the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator. He now writes for the Byline Times, Declassified UK, Double Down News, Middle East Eye and openDemocracy.
His previous books include The Rise of Political Lying (2005), The Triumph of the Political Class (2007), and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism (2021).
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) made a preliminary ruling on January 26, 2024, that Israel may “plausibly” be committing genocide in Gaza in the case brought by South Africa against Israel under the Genocide Convention.
Oborne explains that the ruling had serious legal, political, and moral implications for the UK government. It heightened the UK’s obligations under the Genocide Convention, which Britain had incorporated into domestic law under the 2001 International Criminal Court Act.
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That Complicit has become a Sunday Times Bestseller testifies to the widespread opposition within Britain to the support for Israel’s ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza by both the former Conservative government of Rishi Sunak and now Keir Starmer’s Labour government.
Its success is all the more noteworthy because the mainstream press, including the Guardian, has not reviewed it. Yet the book’s author is a journalist who used to write for the right-wing press, including the Daily Telegraph, where he was the paper’s chief political commentator until he resigned in 2015, as well as the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator. He now writes for the Byline Times, Declassified UK, Double Down News, Middle East Eye and openDemocracy.
His previous books include The Rise of Political Lying (2005), The Triumph of the Political Class (2007), and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism (2021).
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) made a preliminary ruling on January 26, 2024, that Israel may “plausibly” be committing genocide in Gaza in the case brought by South Africa against Israel under the Genocide Convention.
Oborne explains that the ruling had serious legal, political, and moral implications for the UK government. It heightened the UK’s obligations under the Genocide Convention, which Britain had incorporated into domestic law under the 2001 International Criminal Court Act.
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Oborne outlines how first the Tory and then the Labour government gave their unconditional backing to the crushing of Palestinian resistance to Israel—following decades of support for Israel against the Palestinians—using the October 7 attack to justify the genocide. Speaking in October 2023, Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, even agreed with Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that Israel had the right to cut off power and water, only retracting his statement a week later after it sparked an outcry and the resignations of several councillors.
The UK provided constant political and diplomatic support for Israel, opposing ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council. The Tory government sent warships to the Middle East as Israel began its onslaught. Since then, both governments have nodded through the export of arms to Israel in the full knowledge they would be used against the Palestinians. They supplied Israel with the necessary components for the F-35 fighter jets that it used to kill civilians, while the Royal Air Force flew near daily reconnaissance flights from its base in Cyprus to supply Israel with intelligence. The Conservative government never put Britain’s support for Israel to a vote in parliament, and Labour in opposition did not call for such a vote.
The day after the ICJ ruling, the UK government withdrew funding for UNRWA, the agency that has for decades provided essential services for the Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes due to ethnic cleansing during the 1948 and 1967 Arab Israeli wars, and Israel had long detested. Israel had alleged, with negligible evidence, that a handful of UNRWA’s 13,000 employees had taken part in the October 7 assault. In so doing, the government was aiding Israel in its mission to annihilate the Palestinians.
Instead of challenging this cartel, the mainstream media backed it to the hilt. It repeated without query or criticism the assertions and statements put out by Israel about the October 7 attack, including its allegations of butchered and beheaded babies. Dissident voices were suppressed or sidelined. The truth about the war was suppressed, the facts misrepresented.
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While Oborne offers a biting and passionate critique of the UK’s support for Israel and complicity in its genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, his disgust and moral outrage is no substitute for explaining its causes. He says that Britain’s foreign policy in the Middle East—Conservative or Labour—flows from its support for “Atlanticism” but does not explain either the policy or the reasons for it.
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Britain has long tied itself to US imperialism’s coattails as a means of punching above its very reduced weight on the international arena and obtaining a share in the spoils that flowed from US control over markets and resources. It joined NATO and participated in Washington-directed wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, as well as backing Ukraine against Russia.
In June 2023, the US and UK announced the “Atlantic Declaration for a Twenty-First Century U.S.-UK Economic Partnership”. This makes clear that cooperation between the US and Britain is based on confronting Russia and China. It states, “We face new challenges to international stability from authoritarian states such as Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).”
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Washington and London’s backing for Israel in its wars, not just against the Palestinians, but against Iran and its allies in Lebanon and Yemen, as well as its efforts to weaken Syria and sever Damascus’ relations with Moscow and Tehran, is bound up with reordering the energy-rich Middle East under the domination of US imperialism. This includes isolating Iran—or securing regime change in Tehran that would pledge allegiance to Washington—in preparation for war against China. Israel’s wars in Gaza and the Middle East—ongoing despite supposed ceasefires—form another front in an emerging World War.
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Oborne accuses Britain of conducting its foreign policy in “a closed world” by a small elite and “on behalf of opaque interests”. He continues plaintively that what is needed is “legal accountability” that in turn requires “bringing democracy to Britain’s state and society”. He does not explain how such a change is to be achieved because he is an unalloyed defender of British imperialism and of capitalism.
9. Nuremberg: Where does fascist barbarism come from?
The new film is based largely on Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, a nonfiction work that traces the investigation by US army doctor Douglas Kelley into the psychological state and fitness for trial of the defendants, particularly Herman Göring, the number two figure in the Nazi regime after Adolf Hitler.
A film that attempts to depict the Nuremberg Trials is certainly welcome at this moment, when genocide and fascist dictatorship have once more begun to threaten humanity. Nuremberg is very uneven as a depiction of a vital part of the history of the 20th century. While it suffers from very serious weaknesses, it is also necessary to recognize several important strengths.
Chief among these are the scenes of the actual trial, including its concluding days. Staged courtroom scenes are effectively and rapidly intercut with 80-year-old black-and-white film footage. These sequences include the screening of imagery from the recently liberated concentration camps. As the names Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and others flash across the screen, we see the huge piles of corpses as well as a few survivors near death. The film audience is stunned, as the spectators were during the original trial. Humanity had never seen anything like this. The depths of Nazi barbarism began, in 1946, to seep into mass consciousness. The Nuremberg Trials were instrumental in telling the world about the crimes of German imperialism.
It is one thing to graphically expose this history, however, and quite another to make sense of it. The principal problem with Nuremberg is that it looks for the motive force of the Nazi Holocaust largely in the psychology of the individual leaders, and not in the acute social contradictions that roiled Europe, and especially Germany, in the wake of World War One.
Consequently, Nuremberg cannot explain why the Nazi leaders were capable of such monstrous crimes. The most that director Vanderbilt (of the prominent Vanderbilt family) can say, in an interview, referring to the main plot of the movie, is that “Kelley had the highest-ranking living Nazi dropped in his lap. It was an opportunity to dissect the nature of evil.”
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The Tribunal broke with earlier legal practice by allowing for the first time those convicted of planning and waging aggressive war to be punished in a court of law. As Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), the US Supreme Court Justice and lead prosecutor at Nuremberg, declares in his opening statement: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.”
The trials were, nevertheless, inseparable from the postwar settlement shaped by the victorious Allies. The political and strategic aims of these powers, especially the US, determined which crimes (and criminals) would be prosecuted and which would not. As the World Socialist Web Site explained some years ago, the trials
remained silent not only about the root cause of the war, the historic crisis of capitalism, but also the many war crimes committed by US and British imperialism. In particular, the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was never condemned, nor was the issue even raised.
Nuremberg served several immediate political purposes: to legitimize the postwar settlement, and to establish conditions for the rehabilitation of German imperialism, including the rehabilitation of former Nazis, as part of what was almost immediately to become the Cold War against the Soviet Union and the imperialist drive against the threat of socialist revolution.
10. Elisabeth Zimmermann-Modler: November 10, 1956 – November 28, 2025
Internationalism was the most important question for Elli. She participated in numerous ICFI schools and conferences, forming friendships with many international comrades. When the British Workers Revolutionary Party, led by Gerry Healy, broke with the ICFI in 1985/86 and adopted a nationalist course, Elli unhesitatingly supported the ICFI, even though she had great respect for Healy.
In the years that followed, she played an important role in educating new members in the lessons of the split. Tamil comrades who fled the civil war in Sri Lanka and had a nationalist background still remember today the perseverance with which Elli convinced them of international socialism at that time.
Her encyclopedic knowledge of the history and documents of the ICFI also played an important role in the party’s national committee, of which Elli was a member for many years. When fundamental questions arose, one could always count on Elli to contribute a historically informed perspective.
Elli also campaigned as the public face of the SGP. She ran several times in European, federal and North Rhine-Westphalia state elections and wrote nearly 330 articles for the World Socialist Web Site. Her core topics were poverty and social inequality, the coronavirus pandemic, trials of Nazi criminals, the flood disaster in the Ahr Valley, and reports on industry, especially on the crisis in the steel industry, which she experienced firsthand in Duisburg, where she lived.
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We will remember Elisabeth Zimmermann-Modler as a tireless fighter for socialism who dedicated her entire life to serving the working class and building a better society. Her death is a bitter loss and fills us with deep sorrow, but her confidence in a better, socialist future is also an inspiration.
We will publish a detailed tribute to Elli’s political life soon....
11. German unions silent over their state visit to Israel
The German unions secretly sent a forty-person delegation to Israel to demonstrate solidarity with the Zionist Histadrut amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza. This revealing silence exposes the alignment of the German trade unions with Berlin’s war agenda.
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While the German elites are reorganizing society for war, rearmament and a war economy, the trade unions have also been transformed. Whereas in the past they negotiated social compromises within the framework of a so-called “social partnership”, today they are actively involved in implementing social cuts and mass layoffs. No plant closure, no redundancy plan, no agreement on wage cutting takes place without the signature of a works council, of IG Metall, Verdi or another DGB union.
However, two years of genocide in Gaza have changed the working class. More and more workers understand the broader dimension: a ruling class that supports such a brutal genocide will trample over the “own” working class in pursuit of profit. To drive an unwilling population into war, it is also prepared to revive fascism.
The struggle against social devastation is inseparable from the struggle against war. The first step for workers in Germany must be a break with the DGB and its member unions.
The World Socialist Web Site and the Fourth International, which have fought for decades, since the founding of Israel in 1948, for the unity of Palestinian and Israeli workers, have called for the mobilization of the international working class to stop the genocide in Gaza. We call on workers in all workplaces to form rank-and-file action committees independent of the DGB. Only in this way can they defend their own interests, their workplaces and their lives.
12. Kennedy installs anti-vaccine loyalist, Ralph Abraham, to finish purge of CDC
Dr. Ralph Lee Abraham, the former Louisiana surgeon general and a long-standing opponent of established vaccine science, has been named principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the agency’s second-highest leadership post.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made the decision three months after firing CDC Director Susan Monarez and replacing her by making HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill, who has no medical experience, acting CDC chief. The firing of Monarez was quickly followed by the resignation of four top CDC officials who opposed the anti-science, anti-vaccine agenda pushed by Kennedy.
Abraham will now become the highest-ranking figure in the CDC with a medical degree, with outsized influence over its policies, although he has no background in epidemiology, infectious diseases, outbreak response or the management of scientific institutions—core qualifications for leading the nation’s premier public health agency.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he heavily promoted quack treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, while fiercely attacking the lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines. After leaving Congress in 2020, he became Louisiana Surgeon General, where he opposed mandatory mass vaccination for childhood diseases.
Abraham’s elevation, which directly aligns with Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda, has drawn alarm throughout the public health community. “My jaw hit the ground,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, former principal deputy director of the CDC under the Biden administration, calling the decision “unqualified” and “atrocious.” Dr. Richard Besser, acting CDC director in 2009, said he is “greatly concerned” that Abraham will function as an extension of Kennedy’s longstanding hostility toward vaccines. “Rather than being someone who will push back on that, I think he will further the secretary’s agenda,” Besser warned.
13. Rolling strikes continue in New Zealand
Despite intense efforts by New Zealand’s trade union bureaucracy to demobilize and break up the strike movement that erupted in a nationwide “mega-strike” on October 23, thousands of workers are continuing industrial action against the far-right government’s austerity agenda.
The mass strike, the country’s largest since 1979, saw more than 100,000 public sector workers—teachers, nurses, doctors and healthcare workers—mount a militant and unified one-day stoppage. The strike was a demonstration of the potential power of the working class, and an expression of enormous opposition to the attacks on wages and conditions by the National Party-led coalition government.
The unions were forced to call the strike due to mass anger over moves, begun under the 2017-2023 Labour government, to further cut wages across the public sector, while starving hospitals and schools of staffing and resources. It was part of an upsurge of workers internationally—including millions-strong protests against US President Trump’s fascist dictatorship, strike waves in France, Italy and elsewhere and global mobilisations against the Gaza genocide.
The NZ union bureaucrats promptly moved to contain the developing movement and divert it into safe parliamentary channels. They did not schedule any further joint strikes and, while keeping each section of workers isolated, returned to negotiations seeking deals that would freeze wages and intensify the crisis of living costs.
The strategy has met with fierce resistance among workers. Last Friday nearly 17,000 health workers covered by the Public Service Association (PSA) struck over pay and unsafe staffing levels. On the same day 2,000 firefighters walked out in the latest of a series of one-hour stoppages in a contract dispute that flared up in August. The unions limited both strikes to a paltry one hour while deliberately isolating them from each other.
14. Australian governments invoke Nazi actions to crackdown on democratic rights
The repressive laws, providing the state with powers to prosecute Nazi “ideology,” are a precedent for further attacks on the working class and the socialist movement.
15. To stop the ICE raids in Chicago: Mobilize the working class through rank-and-file committees
In Chicago and across the United States, the most flagrant violations of constitutional rights are being carried out by armed teams under Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). More than 3,000 people have been abducted from Chicago this year, overwhelmingly with no criminal background. Chicago Public Schools has reported a sharp drop in attendance since federal agents surged into the city in September, as families pull children from class out of fear of kidnappings at school entrances.
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In Chicago, spontaneous resistance has developed rapidly. In working class and middle class neighborhoods, residents have formed rapid-response teams to warn families of approaching ICE or CBP vehicles. Teachers, school staff and parents have organized informal patrols during drop-off and pick-up hours, intervening when agents appear. On the Southwest Side, small businesses have prepared thousands of meals for families too afraid to leave home. Volunteers deliver groceries, medicine and other necessities and aid street vendors most likely to be targeted.
This active resistance stands in stark contrast to the posturing of local Democratic officials—Governor JB Pritzker, Mayor Brandon Johnson and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle—who rush before cameras to associate themselves with popular anger while insisting that the only remedies lie in court challenges or electing more Democrats in 2026. This performance of helplessness is not confusion or timidity. It expresses their fear—and hostility—toward any movement of workers and youth that might slip out of their control, unify broad layers of the working class and challenge the corporate and financial interests they defend. Their appeals to the courts, which Trump openly disregards, and to an electoral cycle that could occur under martial law are aimed at diverting and demobilizing real opposition.
A growing section of the population refuses to recognize ICE or CBP as legitimate authorities, chanting “There is no law” during a protest in the Chicago neighborhood of Little Village. Their sentiment recalls an earlier turning point in American history: In the years before the Civil War, millions in the North concluded that the Supreme Court, Congress and the principal institutions of government had fallen under the control of the Slave Power and that moral appeals or legal arguments would do nothing to halt its expansion.
Today, millions are drawing a similar conclusion about Trump—that the United States government is headed by a lawless gangster, who treats lawsuits, court rulings and constitutional restraints with open contempt. What is emerging is an initial break from the political framework that enabled these conditions in the first place and a recognition that genuine rights can only be defended through mass, organized struggle.
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Chicago’s entire history of class struggle demonstrates that the working class has never achieved anything without a politically conscious struggle against the ruling class’s use of race, nationality and anti-immigrant hysteria to divide them. The Haymarket affair, the Pullman strike, the meatpacking struggles depicted in The Jungle and the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 were all battles in which the ruling class accused workers of being foreigners, agitators, anarchists or communists, weaponizing nativism to weaken resistance. Workers prevailed only when they overcame these divisions and united across ethnic, racial and linguistic lines.
Today’s witch-hunt against immigrants is a continuation of the strategy of divide-and-conquer. It must be countered consciously, through the unification of US-born and immigrant workers in a common struggle against exploitation, repression and war.
16. Sri Lanka: Over 330 dead from Cyclone Ditwah, hundreds of thousands impacted
Cyclone Ditwah, one of the worst natural disasters to hit Sri Lanka in decades, has killed more than 334 people and affected nearly one million across the island as of Sunday evening. With over 370 people still missing, and search operations ongoing, the death toll is expected to rise further in the coming days.
Cyclone Ditwah tore through the country, unleashing devastating floods and massive landslides that swept away entire villages and buried families alive, particularly in the hardest-hit Central Province.
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The lack of timely evacuation has contributed to the high death toll. In many cases, landslides struck without warning because authorities either failed to issue alerts or sent them at the last minute, leaving residents no time to flee.
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While the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government has deployed 25,000 troops, and many civilians are volunteering to assist, the magnitude of the catastrophe demands coordinated efforts both nationally and internationally. So far, the government has failed to mobilize anything close to the level of aid required.
As public outrage over the government’s disastrous response continues to grow, President Dissanayake invoked a sweeping state of emergency on Saturday, granting himself vast powers—not to address the humanitarian crisis, but to clamp down on growing social unrest. Opposition parties, including the Samagi Jana Balawegaya and the United National Party, had already been calling for such measures, fearing the eruption of mass anger.
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In an interview with the Sunday Island, Dr. Thasun Amarasinghe, a scientist at the Climate Research Centre in Indonesia, stated: “There are no natural disasters. These are governance disasters. Sri Lanka destroyed the very systems that protected it. What’s happening now is the predictable result of political mismanagement.” While accurate as far as they go, his remarks overlook the inadequate measures being taken by governments internationally to stem global warming, which directly contributed to Cyclone Ditwah’s intensity.
17. After nationwide strike, Belgian unions block further action against austerity budget
Last week, a powerful three-day nationwide strike movement against austerity halted public services, logistics, and industrial activity across Belgium.
18. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
