Jan 17, 2026

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. The Minnesota general strike and the re-emergence of class struggle in the United States

On January 8, the day after the ICE murder of Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis, the World Socialist Web Site posted a statement explaining that “the logic of events is moving inexorably toward a general strike against the Trump regime: a mass, coordinated intervention by workers across every industry to bring the machinery of repression and exploitation to a halt.”

One week later, in response to growing pressure from working people outraged over the daily brutality inflicted by Trump’s paramilitary forces, a coalition of local trade unions and community organizations in Minneapolis has called a general strike for January 23. 

The Minnesota AFL‑CIO has so far failed to endorse the action, and its official webpage—under the slogan “A Day of Truth and Freedom”—carefully avoids the word “strike,” instead urging workers to call in sick, consumers not to purchase anything and businesses to close voluntarily. The union apparatus, closely tied to the Democratic Party, is attempting to counteract a growing sympathy for a general strike that is taking hold among broad layers of the population.

However, the very fact that the general strike has entered political discussion is itself an expression of a new stage in the class struggle and the social and political polarization of the United States. It reflects a growing sense within the working class that traditional political channels—court challenges, appeals to politicians, electoral maneuvers and pressure campaigns—are incapable of halting the rapid turn toward dictatorship. 

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The strike of 15,000 nurses in New York City, the largest in the city’s history, is an early sign of opposition that will grow in 2026, as is, in a different form, the fact that the Detroit autoworker, who was suspended for calling out Trump earlier this week, raised more than $800,000 via GoFundMe in a few days from tens of thousands of people.

This growing opposition must be transformed into a conscious, organized movement. There exists a long and powerful tradition of class struggle in the United States, including of the general strike. From Philadelphia in 1835, to St. Louis in 1877, to Seattle in 1919 and San Francisco and Toledo in 1934, the decisive factor has never been the militancy of the call alone, but whether the working class entered the struggle consciously and independently, in opposition to the institutions seeking to contain it. 

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Trump’s brazen impunity is the product of a prolonged absence of organized working class resistance in the US. Over decades, the labor bureaucracy dismantled the workers’ movement while the ruling class enriched itself through imperialist war and a massive transfer of wealth. In this vacuum, the most ruthless sections of the bourgeoisie have come to believe they can act without constraint.

The assault on the working class was reinforced by an ideological campaign to deny its very existence as a social force. In a country once defined by frequent strikes and mass confrontations between labor and capital, the Democratic Party, official academia and the political pseudo-left advanced ideologies—above all, racial and gender identity politics—that rejected Marxism, denied the reality of class struggle and dismissed the role of the working class as a revolutionary force.

The re-election of Trump marked a violent realignment of the state to reflect the reality of oligarchic rule in the United States. Moreover, the extreme character of its actions, both on the domestic and international levels, reflects the intensity of the crisis confronting American capitalism—expressed in the devaluation of the dollar, the staggering buildup of debt and the rampant speculation that underlies the wealth of the oligarchy.

This is the backdrop to the realignment from below that is beginning to take shape, through the growing resurgence of open class conflict as the central axis of social and political life. Moreover, the development of the class struggle in the United States will have immense international repercussions, shattering the myth that American workers are uniquely reactionary or incapable of collective struggle. 

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The fight against Trump requires the construction of new organizations in the working class that can unify the defense of democratic rights and opposition to dictatorship with the growing social struggles of workers. It is necessary to impart to the emerging class movement a clear political strategy, connecting the fight against fascism to the fight against exploitation, war and the capitalist system itself, in the US and internationally. This depends, above all, on the conscious intervention of the Marxist movement in the working class. 

The perspective of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International has always emphasized the revolutionary role of the American working class as a decisive component of the international working class. 

The SEP has fought consistently against all efforts to subordinate workers to the Democratic Party and its affiliated organizations. Through the initiation of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), the ICFI has developed the organizational form for a rebellion against the pro-corporate trade union apparatus. And most recently, the ICFI and WSWS has launched Socialism AI as a vital tool for the political education of workers and youth in the great lessons of the 20th and 21st centuries, above all, the strategic experiences of the Marxist movement. 

In the actions of the Trump regime, the American oligarchy is crossing a Rubicon, from which there is no turning back. The issue confronting millions of workers and young people is the most fundamental: socialism or barbarism.

The World Socialist Web Site urges all working people who want to stop the descent into fascism and war, who want to fight for a future based on equality, democracy and peace, to draw the necessary conclusions and join the SEP

2. 31,000 Kaiser nurses prepare to walk out in California, Hawaii as conditions emerge for a general strike

A strike of 31,000 nurses and healthcare professionals has been announced by the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP) at Kaiser Permanente on the West Coast. The strike is set to involve roughly 20 hospitals and 200 clinics in California and Hawaii.

The strike expresses the growing opposition among health care workers, and the working class more broadly, to intolerable conditions imposed by corporate health systems and enforced by an increasingly authoritarian political establishment.

This is the same group of workers who launched a five-day strike last October, with the last full day coinciding with the October 18 nationwide No Kings protests. Those demonstrations were some of the largest in US history, with an estimated 7 million marching against the fascistic Trump administration.

The upcoming strike centers on the same unresolved issues, including chronic understaffing, sub-inflation pay increases and growing economic and retirement insecurity. These are the exact same issues at stake in the ongoing strike by 15,000 nurses in New York City, a struggle which has drawn overwhelming support from workers across the area and the country. It also is set to begin three days after a general strike next Friday in Minneapolis against the ICE rampage in the city which led to the murder of Renée Nicole Good.

The Trump administration’s attack on public health has deepened since October. The Centers for Disease Control is rolling back vaccine recommendations for children and the measles are spreading a quarter century after the disease was eliminated in the US. The decision by Trump to cut off funding for supplemental Obamacare health subsidies has led to a staggering 1.4 million people losing their health insurance just over two weeks into the new year.

But the conditions are rapidly emerging in the United States for a mass movement in the working class against inequality and dictatorship. In the forefront are healthcare workers battling the consequences of for-profit healthcare and the subordination of patients’ lives to profit.

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Initiative must remain in the hands of the rank and file. At Kaiser, union officials have kept rank-and-file nurses and health professionals working without a contract for months. “Safe staffing” clauses in nurses’ contracts across the country are either toothless or remain dead letters, and hospital systems routinely flout even legal staffing mandates with impunity.

In particular, Kaiser nurses must organize to impose their democratic decision to strike and be prepared to override any attempt to cancel or limit the strike over their heads. The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), for example, canceled strikes at 11 of 15 hospitals before they even had contracts finalized, much less voted on.

Kaiser nurses must appeal to their coworkers in United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770, who work as clinical laboratory scientists (CLS) and medical laboratory technicians (MLT). They have a separate two-day strike scheduled for January 22 and 23. To maximize their impact, workers from both unions should instead coordinate their timing and walk out together.

UNAC/UHCP is part of the Alliance of Health Care Unions, which covers 23 local unions covering dozens of hospitals and hundreds of clinics from Hawaii to Washington D.C. The entire membership must be engaged in joint actions organized through rank-and-file strike committees.

Kaiser exemplifies for-profit healthcare in America, thinly disguised by its “nonprofit” status. It generated $12.9 billion in net income in 2024 and $7.9 billion for the first three quarters of 2025. Despite this, Kaiser claims it cannot afford to invest adequately in staffing, retention and patient safety.

According to a UNAC/UHCP report, Kaiser also is investing in “companies like CoreCivic and the GEO Group, which run ICE detention centers and provide health care and living conditions so substandard they border on criminal.” ICE raids remain an ever-present danger at hospitals across California and the United States.

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The deliberate starving of health systems produces preventable illness and death, even as billions are funneled into corporate profits and financial speculation. In the same cities where Kaiser nurses struggle to care for patients, schools and public services are being slashed and essential social programs dismantled.

The situation demands a new strategic approach. Nurses on both coasts and in Hawaii must unite with workers in Minnesota and beyond in a common struggle against fascism, war, repression, and exploitation. Central to this strategy is the formation of rank-and-file committees independent of union bureaucracies and big-business parties, capable of coordinating actions across industries and regions.

The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) has been established to provide the organizational framework and political leadership for this fight.

It seeks to link opposition to dictatorship and repression with the broader struggle of the working class against war, inflation, job cuts and social misery. The Kaiser strike must become part of this international counteroffensive, guided by the independent mobilization of workers themselves.

3. “I support a general strike”: New York nurses call for broader struggle

Approximately 15,000 nurses in New York City concluded their fifth day on strike on Friday. Mediated negotiations between the union, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), and hospital representatives resumed for the first time since the strike began on Thursday evening for New York Presbyterian and on Friday for both Mount Sinai hospitals. Montefiore has still refused to return to bargaining.

As of Friday evening, no major movement has been reported over the key issues of nurse-to-patient ratios, safety and adequate health care coverage for workers.

The hospital executives remain intransigent. A New York Presbyterian spokesperson repeated their characterization of nurses’ demands for rational staffing levels as “unreasonable” and refused to continue bargaining on Friday. The hospital rejected the union’s revised offers and refused to make a counterproposal according to a NYSNA statement.

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Open bargaining is a critical issue for the strike, preventing backroom dealing, hidden clauses and rushed agreements that leave workers without full knowledge of their contents. Striking nurses must insist that it is a precondition for negotiating any settlement.  

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The strike is approaching a critical juncture and not only because it faces the obstinate dictates of corporate management. There is immense support for striking nurses across the working class, and conditions are ripening for the potential expansion and transformation of the strike. 

In response to the murderous ICE occupation in Minneapolis, which Trump is poised to expand, popular opposition has reached the point where several local unions in Minneapolis have been compelled to issue a call for a general strike on January 23. 

Meanwhile, 31,000 nurses and other health workers in California and Hawaii delivered a 10-day strike notice to Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest healthcare companies in the United States. The strike would hit more than two dozen hospitals and other facilities in Southern California and Honolulu. The key demands are essentially the same as those in the New York City strike: safe staffing levels and pay increases to improve patient care, prevent burnout, and provide workers a modicum of economic stability.

The nurses’ strike in New York City is not simply a struggle against management and high-paid hospital executives. It is also an element of an intensifying class struggle that must serve as a rallying point for a powerful counteroffensive to fight for the needs of the working class against the profit interests that dominate every aspect of social life.  

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The World Socialist Web Site spoke with striking nurses on the picket line at New York-Presbyterian on Friday. Addressing the outrageous situation where the hospitals have completely cut off health benefits to nurses who sacrifice day in and day out to care for sick patients, a striker told the WSWS, “I don’t have any health insurance at the moment. Even when I had my insurance, I couldn’t come to this hospital to see the specialist that I work with every day. And that’s one of the things that I’m out here for, because I think it’s atrocious that I help make these doctors great. I keep up with the technological advances, but I can’t be taken care of by them."

"And on the day I retire, I get no health benefits. They end literally on the day I retire.”

4. Washington menaces Iran at UN Security Council amid mounting signs of an impending US military strike

Washington’s preparations for a military onslaught on Iran have nothing to do with alleged concern for the democratic rights of its 93-million-strong population. On the contrary, Trump, senior officials in his administration, the corporate-controlled media and political leaders from the imperialist powers in Europe are cynically exploiting Tehran’s crackdown on protests to justify an imperialist-orchestrated “regime change” operation to bring to power a pro-Western government in Tehran. This is viewed as an essential step in the consolidation of American imperialist hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East, and the sidelining of China and Russia, which have significant economic and military ties respectively with Tehran.

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The latest round of protests initially broke out among the bazaar merchants, shopkeepers and small business proprietors, who have traditionally served as a key pillar of support for the regime, but have been hit hard by the collapse in the Iranian currency’s value and the broader economic crisis. They spread in some areas to include university students and drew in some workers as individual participants. However, the longer the protests went on, the more right-wing and explicitly pro-imperialist they became. Although accurate reports are sparse due to the regime’s imposition of an internet blackout over a week ago, the government’s admission that over 100 security personnel were killed, including in armed attacks on police stations, indicates a significant level of armed violence among the protesters.

A wave of ruthless repression was launched by the regime resulting, according to one government official’s account cited by Reuters this week, in the deaths of 2,000 people. A US-based human rights group, HRANA, puts the death toll even higher at over 2,600. Estimates of the numbers detained range from an official Iranian government figure of 3,000 to 22,000, according to human rights observers.

While there can be no doubt about the brutality of the regime’s repression, the fact that media outlets have reported a subsiding of protests over the course of this week also points to the lack of social support they enjoyed from the working class and rural toilers. Iranian workers did not participate in the demonstrations en masse and as a class, a reflection of the pro-imperialist, bourgeois character of the movement’s demands. The main spokesman in the foreign media for the protests has been Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the hated Shah, who ruled the country with an iron fist as a US puppet prior to the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

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Iranian workers require first and foremost their unconditional political independence from all factions of the bourgeoisie, including those championing imperialist intervention and those still loyal to the Islamic Republic. The most important precondition for this is unflinching opposition to all forms of imperialist intervention. Workers must oppose imperialist-orchestrated “regime change” and call for the immediate lifting of all punitive sanctions against Iran. This fight demands the closest unity between Iranian workers and the working class throughout the region, which has long suffered the predations of imperialist wars, and divide-and-rule tactics that have fueled fratricidal religious, ethnic and national conflicts. It also necessitates an appeal for class unity with workers in the imperialist centers of North America and Europe, where Trump and the European imperialists are making workers pay for the imperialists’ war machines and bullying tactics against Iran by slashing jobs, banning strikes and destroying public services.

Developing this struggle is possible only on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program, which is implacably hostile to imperialism and the bourgeois nationalism of the clerical regime in Tehran. The Iranian regime ultimately seeks to cut a deal with imperialism, or to maneuver between it and its rivals like China, which has bought up large quantities of Iranian oil over recent years and supplied Tehran with a critical economic lifeline. But under conditions of a rapidly escalating redivision of the world among the major powers, which is leading towards a third global imperialist war, such a policy is no longer viable.

The alternative lies in the repudiation of bourgeois nationalism and a turn by workers in Iran to the fight for a workers’ government as part of the United Socialist States of the Middle East. This is the program fought for by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

5. Trump’s vendetta against federal death row inmates: Sends prisoners who received commutations to “Alcatraz of the Rockies”

In an unprecedented escalation of state-sanctioned vengeance, the Trump administration has launched a systematic campaign to dismantle the humanitarian protections afforded to 37 federal prisoners whose death sentences were commuted by former President Joe Biden. 

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Donald Trump has maintained a relentless rhetorical assault on the individuals spared by his predecessor, describing Biden’s commutations as a “stain on our justice system” and a “betrayal” of victims’ families. Labeling these men as “monsters,” “liars” and “the worst killers in our country,” Trump has utilized social media to bypass legal nuance and demand savage retribution, at one point telling the commuted prisoners to “GO TO HELL!”

This inflammatory language serves as the ideological foundation for an executive agenda that views the death penalty as a means to “restore order” in the interest of class rule. On his first day in office, Trump signed Executive Order 14164, “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” which formally directed the attorney general to expand capital punishment. The order specifically targets the 37 commuted individuals, instructing officials to ensure they are held in conditions “consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes.” Trump has signaled an intent to seek the death penalty for an expanded list of offenses, including drug trafficking, human trafficking, the killing of law enforcement officers, and capital crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. 

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The administration has already begun the process of transferring these men to ADX Florence in Colorado, the only true federal “supermax” facility. Known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” the prison is designed for those considered threats to “national security” and those who have committed extreme violence against prison staff. As of late 2025, 10 former death row federal prisoners had been moved to the facility. 

Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi justify these moves not in the interest of security, but as extrajudicial punishment intended to ensure that confinement conditions “match” the prisoners’ crimes. Life at ADX is defined by near-total social and sensory deprivation, with inmates kept in concrete cells smaller than a standard parking space for 22 to 24 hours a day. Human contact is restricted to a few minutes of verbal exchange through steel doors, and all exercise is conducted alone in high-walled cages known as “dog runs.” These conditions are so extreme that a former warden described the facility as “a clean version of hell” and “much worse than death.”

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Because the 37 men are protected from federal execution by the Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy clause, the administration is exploiting the “separate sovereigns” doctrine. This legal loophole allows state and federal governments to prosecute the same crime independently. Under Trump’s directive, the attorney general is evaluating whether these offenders can be charged with state capital crimes.

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The ACLU and other organizations have filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of 21 of the 37 prisoners, alleging that the administration is conducting a “sham process” designed to inflict pain. The suit argues that the administration’s actions violate several bedrock principles:

  • Bill of attainder and ex post facto clauses: The administration is retroactively increasing punishment for a specific, identifiable group of people without judicial process.
  • Clemency power: By weaponizing confinement conditions to nullify the effect of previous commutations, Trump is unconstitutionally interfering with the plenary authority of a previous president’s exercise of mercy.
  • Procedural due process and equal protection: The lawsuit alleges that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) departed from established policies—such as downgrading medical “care levels” without any change in physical health—to satisfy a retributive vendetta.

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Judith Lichtenberg, professor emerita of philosophy at Georgetown University who has taught at Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland and the District of Columbia Jail, argues that the American prison system violates three core principles of criminal justice. First, it rejects proportionality, as the punishment (indefinite solitary confinement) often exceeds the severity of any disciplinary need. Second, it fails to treat like cases alike, targeting a specific group of 37 men for harsher treatment than others who have had their sentences vacated or commuted. Finally, it violates the axiom that punishment should not do more harm than good. In its current form, the system is spectacularly ineffective at rehabilitation and inflicts a staggering burden on the families and communities of the incarcerated.

Moreover, efforts to increase the use of capital punishment at the federal and state level is a rejection of Enlightenment principles established by thinkers like Cesare Beccaria. In 1764, Beccaria denounced state killing as a “public assassination” and a “ritual act of vengeance.” While modern European law recognizes any execution as an inherent violation of human rights rooted in dignity, the US remains an outlier of extraordinary harshness in league with regimes like Saudi Arabia and Iran. The current administration’s reliance on capital punishment is a direct contradiction of the humanistic norms that have shaped democratic societies for centuries.

Trump’s aggressive federal stance has already influenced a resurgence of state-level judicial violence. South Carolina resumed executions after a 13-year hiatus, recently employing a firing squad, while Alabama and Florida have accelerated their execution schedules. Even in states with previous moratoriums, such as North Carolina, officials are taking steps to revive the machinery of death. Experts suggest that while Trump has no direct authority over state courts, his rhetoric signals to political allies that the expansion of the death penalty is once again a primary objective of the capitalist state. This trajectory toward state-sanctioned killing and indefinite isolation is not merely a “tough on crime” stance; it is the social normalization of cruelty in a society that has abandoned the pursuit of justice for the theater of vengeance.

6. Blackout in Berlin: Pretext for erection of a police state

On January 3, at around 6 a.m., an arson attack on a cable bridge over the Teltow Canal in Berlin-Lichterfelde triggered the longest power outage in Germany’s post-war history.

Due to the destruction of five 110 kV high-voltage and 10 10 kV medium-voltage cables, not only did the main supply fail, but also the grid redundancy capacity, which ensures that if one line fails, another takes over. A rapid restoration was therefore impossible. Grid operator Stromnetz Berlin could only restore supply gradually; all users were only back on the grid by noon January 7, while mobile phone networks recovered in stages.

Around 50,000 households, with approximately 100,000 people, as well as over 2,200 businesses in Nikolassee, Zehlendorf, Wannsee and Lichterfelde were affected. Lifts remained stuck, street lighting failed, cold chains, critical for maintaining perishable goods and some medicines were affected, mobile communications collapsed and S-Bahn trains, schools, daycare centers and grocery stores remained closed.

High-rise housing was hit particularly hard: in 22-storey buildings, people with impaired mobility were trapped in their rapidly cooling apartments due to the failure of the lifts, and from the seventh floor upwards the (cold) water supply failed because electric pumps came to a standstill.

The healthcare system faced an acute situation: hospitals had to switch to emergency power generators, which only allow for minimal operations. Surgeries, dialyses and complex treatments were cancelled, medical practices and pharmacies remained closed and vital medications spoiled without refrigeration. In care homes, ventilation and oxygen devices failed, staff worked under catastrophic conditions, and evacuations were improvised—a consequence of the attack on a central lifeline of modern major cities.

The authorities cared little about the emergency and reacted at a snail’s pace. Only after 33 hours did the Berlin Senate (state executive), led by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD), declare a major incident and request support from the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) and the Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW). Mayor Kai Wegener (CDU), who in response to media inquiries revealed that he had spent the entire day in his home office organizing help, went to play tennis after the disaster broke out, as it was later revealed.

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While those politically responsible largely ignored the plight of the population, within hours they began to politically exploit the attack on the power grid. The act of sabotage is being ruthlessly used to advance the expansion of a police state and the militarization of society as a whole.

Although, to this day, virtually nothing is known about the perpetrators of the professionally executed act, it was immediately denounced by establishment politicians and the media as being carried out by “left-wing extremists” and all opposition from the left was defamed as “terrorist.”

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The claim that the attack on the power supply of a major city has anything to do with left-wing politics is obviously absurd. The term “left,” insofar as it has any meaning at all, signifies a policy in the interest of workers and youth, of pensioners, the sick and others in need, and requires their democratic participation.

An anonymous attack on urban infrastructure, upon which the existence, health and even the lives of tens of thousands of uninvolved people depend, achieves the opposite. It provides the ruling class with a welcome pretext to strengthen the repressive state apparatus, restrict democratic rights and suppress political opposition.

The only evidence that this involved a “left-wing extremist” attack consists of two letters claiming responsibility from a “Volcano Group” (Vulkangruppe). According to these, the attack was directed against “fossil fuels,” “the rich,” the “imperial way of life” and the “over-exploitation of the earth.”

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Even if the perpetrators of the Lichterfelde attack turned out to be climate activists from the anarchist milieu, the act was an expression of political disorientation and abysmal despair, which has extremely reactionary political consequences.

One does not protect the environment by destroying the infrastructure upon which working people rely. The protection of the environment, like all major social questions, is inseparably linked to the fight against the capitalist social system, which produces only war, social destruction and authoritarian regimes. This requires the mobilization of the broadest sections of the working class, the youth and sections of the middle class for a socialist program.

7. United Kingdom: Striking Further Education workers speak from the picket line at London college

World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke with picketing educators outside the Working Men’s College in Camden, London during this week’s Further Education (FE) strike in England. Workers at 17 FE colleges began a three-day walkout on Wednesday.

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Strikers saw the dispute as one not just with the college, but with the government. One said, “The government needs to step up and give us the funding we need so that we can take care of our staff and also be able to meet the demand of the community. We’re here to serve the community and we’re not able to meet the demand at the moment.”

Cutting education is “a case of the wrong priorities.” It’s “especially disappointing that they say there’s not the money, they say we need growth and then we can invest in public services, but suddenly they’re able to produce huge amounts of funding for things like defense. It doesn’t really square up, it doesn’t make sense to me.” 

8. Royal Mail workers in London condemn war against Venezuela and express solidarity with US workers against Trump

Postal workers at Mount Pleasant Mail Centre, Royal Mail’s central sorting and distribution hub in London, have been speaking to the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) about the US attack on Venezuela, threats against Iran and the killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis last week.

A WSWS reporting team distributed the statement “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela! Release Maduro!” on Wednesday afternoon. Many workers stopped to express their shock and anger, reflecting discussions taking place among co-workers in stark contrast to the Starmer government’s continued support for the US President.

Workers condemned Trump’s actions in Latin America and within the United States, describing him as a “despot” and his administration as being led by “Nazis” with the same ambitions as “Hitler in the 1930’s.”

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“Trump is like a new Hitler. The killing of Renee Good was the kind of action you would associate with the SS [Hitler’s shock troops]. He wants the oil [in Venezuela] and is threatening everyone. Trump must be stopped; the question is how you stop him. There is escalation towards war everywhere. The media is controlled by the same people as Trump. What kind of world are our children going to inherit?”

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Due to an almost total media blackout in the UK, workers at the Mail Centre had no knowledge of the widespread anti-ICE protests in the US. The team explained the scale of social opposition in America, referencing coverage on the WSWS: the No Kings protests, popular actions against ICE Gestapo raids, and strikes such as nurses in New York staging the biggest walkout in their history.

The team also informed postal workers of the launch of Socialism AI and how it can help dynamically answer questions—like those posed by workers about the lessons of the 1930s, and how war and fascism can be stopped—from a socialist, historically grounded standpoint.

One postal worker said they wanted to send a direct message of solidarity to their brothers and sisters in the US:

“Stand up, fight and defeat Trump, he is a dictator; we do not want dictators, we need to stop them. We have not forgotten Gaza either. Here in the UK, Starmer’s [Labour Party] government is attacking our rights as well, making us suffer a cost-of-living crisis. We have nothing.” 

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Speaking on the worsening conditions at the Mail Centre they said, “Labour is privatizing the service and the union is in cahoots with management. Postal workers’ wages are going down by £80 a week because they removed overtime pay and driver’s allowance, while management are getting bonuses. The mail is backed up by at least three days all the time.” 

These conditions are the result of the Communication Workers Union (CWU)’s collusion with the £3.6 billion take-over of Royal Mail completed last May, bringing the privatized service under the sole ownership of billionaire Daniel Kretinsky. The union bureaucracy has policed opposition from below and worked with management to dismantle the mail service and convert it into a low-wage, parcel-driven operation on behalf of the billionaire-owned EP Group.

The development of mass working-class opposition to the rule of the oligarchy is bound up with the fight against wars waged for control of sources of wealth and key resources. Starmer’s authoritarian government is seeking to maintain Britain’s role as junior partner to US plundering operations around the globe.

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The fight to defend jobs, oppose exploitation and social inequality must be combined with opposition to imperialist gangsterism. Workers confront global transnational corporations backed to the hilt by the powers of the state; they require an international strategy to fight back.

9. Israel’s recognition of breakaway Somaliland fuels the fires of regional conflict

In a highly provocative move on December 26, Israel announced that it would formally recognize Somaliland as a sovereign state. The territory unilaterally declared independence from Somalia in 1991. As the first country to do so, Israel’s move, driven by its strategic aim of controlling access to the Red Sea, the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean, has triggered alarm across the Horn of Africa and beyond.

Somaliland, in north-western Somalia, lies east of Djibouti which hosts military bases for the United States, China, France and several other countries. Home to around five million people living in extreme poverty, with high unemployment and insecurity, Somaliland’s main asset is the port of Berbera. Situated on the Gulf of Aden near the Bab el Mandeb strait, the gateway to the Red Sea, and opposite Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen, Berbera occupies a position of enormous strategic value. 

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Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, together with his Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Somaliland President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, have signed a joint declaration establishing full diplomatic relations, including the opening of embassies. This follows a year of discussions in which the establishment of an Israeli military base and the resettlement of forcibly displaced Palestinians from Gaza were reportedly raised, although Somaliland’s foreign minister denied the reports at the time.

Netanyahu justified the move as consistent with “the spirit of the Abraham Accords”, which have provided for the deepening of military and intelligence ties between the Gulf petro-monarchs and Israel. In so doing, he revealed Somaliland’s motivation: securing US recognition that could unlock trade, loans and investment in the impoverished country, forced by decades of diplomatic isolation to function as an autarkic economy.

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Somalia responded by denouncing Israel’s actions as a “deliberate attack” on its sovereignty. The African Union likewise rejected Israel’s move, saying it risked “setting a dangerous precedent with far-reaching implications for peace and stability across the continent”. More than 20 states, mostly in the Middle East and Africa, made similar statements. 

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With Ankara positioning itself as the principal guarantor of Somalia’s unity and sovereignty, Israel’s recognition of Somaliland is a direct threat.

The clash reflects a broader geopolitical rivalry. Turkey offers rhetorical support for Hamas in Gaza and insists on maintaining a unified Syrian state under the regime of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, while Israel prefers a fragmented, decentralised Syria that can no longer act as a regional counterweight. Both states pursue their aims through proxy forces, military bases and aerial strikes, each seeking to reshape the regional order in line with its own interests.

In the eastern Mediterranean, the antagonism is even sharper. Israel, Greece and Cyprus remain committed to the EastMed Pipeline, designed to transport gas to Europe while bypassing Turkey entirely. Ankara views this as part of a broader attempt to “encircle” Turkey economically. Israeli arms sales to Cyprus are another antagonising factor.

The timing of Netanyahu’s recognition of Somaliland was deliberate. It came just days after a summit in Jerusalem to form a “strategic alliance” between Israel, Greece and Cyprus aimed at countering Israel’s regional isolation. Netanyahu took aim at Turkey, saying “To those who fantasize they can restore their empires and their rule over our countries I say: forget it. It’s not going to happen. Don’t even think about it”.

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President Donald Trump publicly dismissed the idea of recognising Somaliland, remarking, “Does anyone know what Somaliland is, really?” Yet this flippant remark contradicts his own administration’s strategic planning. Project 2025, drafted by the Heritage Foundation, explicitly recommended recognizing Somaliland as a means of countering China’s growing influence in Djibouti and the wider region.

Divisions within the administration reflect competing imperialist priorities. Some officials fear that recognizing Somaliland would jeopardize military cooperation with Somalia in the US air war in the region, carried out under the banner of combating al‑Shabaab and ISIL.

Trump’s second administration has dramatically escalated aerial strikes in Somalia—more than the combined total under George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden—killing over 7,000 people. These operations, largely ignored by the mainstream media, are on track to exceed the 219 strikes carried out during Trump’s first term. 

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The combination of competing imperialist and regional interests over trade routes and resource, intersecting with the venal ambitions of the local ruling classes, has not only turned the region into a social nightmare for tens of millions, it has created a tinderbox for war with global consequences.

A major conflict—possibly between the two rival blocs of Ethiopia-Somaliland backed by the UAE and Israel, and Somalia-Egypt-Eritrea-Turkey backed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar—would disrupt critical marine traffic and involve outside powers already deeply entangled in the region.

These dangers are fundamentally rooted in capitalism: the private ownership of the means of production, the division of the world into rival nation states and the relentless struggle for markets, profits and resources. Developments around Somaliland are further proof that this global system is in profound crisis, posing immense dangers to workers and oppressed people around the world.

10. Amid New York City nurses strike, Long Island Railroad unions again prevent walkout with appeal to Trump

The leaders of five Long Island Railroad (LIRR) unions have sent a letter formally asking President Donald Trump to again intervene in contract talks with New York State’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which will prohibit their members from engaging in a job action on January 16. The LIRR is the busiest commuter railroad in the United States, connecting suburbs in Nassau and Suffolk counties with New York City.

This is a repeat of the bureaucrats’ action last September, when they blocked a strike by calling on Trump to appoint a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB). This legal maneuver, under the Railway Labor Act whose purpose is to all but ban strikes through endless rounds of mediation, postponing legal strike action for four months.

Trump will, as he did before, appoint mediators to a new PEB to issue non-binding recommendations. The recommendations from the last PEB were rejected by the MTA.

The unions’ move to sabotage a rail strike comes at a time when 15,000 nurses in New York City are engaged in a powerful strike against dangerous understaffing, impossible working conditions, and a defense of their own health care benefits. Moreover, support is growing across America for a general strike against impossible social conditions and the lawless Trump administration. In Minneapolis, several unions have been compelled to call a general strike next Friday against the ICE rampage through the city.

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Workers in New York City are spoiling for a fight against inequality and the corporate oligarchy, as expressed in the election of self-described democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani in last year’s mayoral election. However, Mamdani has publicly supported Hochul and has not said a word about the LIRR dispute. He appeared on the picket line of striking nurses, but instead of calling for a broader fight against Wall Street has spent months attempting to reassure corporate interests, and even visiting Trump at the White House.

This shows that only action from below, with initiative taken from the rank-and-file, can force the issue.

The appeal for another intervention by the Trump White House means the workers will not be free to legally strike until May 16 of this year, which happens to be the exact date that the contract for the New York City bus and subway workers expires. There is no doubt that, if no contract has been signed by then, the LIRR union bureaucrats will try to find some other excuse to delay even further.

11. Australia: While massive fires continue, Victoria experiences flash floods

Flash floods struck Victoria’s world-renowned Great Ocean Road tourist region on Thursday, transforming idyllic coastal holiday spots into scenes of chaos during Australia’s peak summer vacation period.

The disaster erupted in the early afternoon when a “rain bomb”—an extreme short-duration downpour—unleashed a record-breaking 180 millimeters (7 inches, nearly 10 percent of the region’s average annual rainfall) of rain across narrow, steep catchments in under five hours. 

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Thursday’s sudden deluge caught visitors and locals unprepared. Thankfully, no lives were lost and no serious injuries reported, but the episode reveals the razor-thin margin between tragedy and survival in areas abandoned to the elements by successive state governments.​

The flooding compounds an already catastrophic summer crisis across Victoria, Australia’s second-most populous state.

12. Australian government exploits Bondi shootings to launch historic attack on free speech

The Albanese Labor government will still try to push far-reaching “hate crime” laws through parliament, even in a modified form, despite an intensifying political crisis over its plans, and more than 7,000 submissions from organizations and members of the public against the bill.

Facing a possible defeat in the Senate, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese today said the government’s bill would be split in two, with “hate group” banning and visa cancellation powers to be rushed through next week, alongside gun ownership laws, to be followed by a possible modification of the bill’s “racial vilification” provisions.

Backed by the corporate media, Labor’s assault on free speech will continue, conducted on the false pretext of responding to the reactionary Islamic State-inspired mass shootings that killed 15 people at a Jewish religious event at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on December 14. 

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Even if broken into parts, Labor’s Combating Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026 goes even further, however. It is one of the most serious assaults on democratic rights and political dissent since the right-wing Menzies government outlawed the Communist Party in 1950, only to be defeated in a referendum the next year after the High Court ruled the ban to be unconstitutional.

Labor’s bill contains arbitrary powers for the federal government to not only criminalize targeted political opinion—branded as “hate crimes”—but to declare political parties or organizations to be “prohibited hate groups.” Their members and supporters face up to 15 years’ imprisonment. That effectively overturns the outcome of the 1951 referendum to deny governments such political banning powers. 

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Nothing in the bill is genuinely about protecting anybody, including people of Jewish backgrounds, from violence or fear. Speech that allegedly “incites” violence is already a crime at the state and federal levels in Australia. Moreover, the bill even goes well beyond “anti-vilification” laws, such as the already anti-democratic section 18C of the federal Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it a civil offense to “offend” a person or group because of their alleged race, color, national or ethnic origin. 

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The Albanese government’s legislation deepens the attack on fundamental democratic rights initiated by the New South Wales state Labor government when it similarly rammed through laws just before Christmas that overturn the right to protest and hand extensive powers to the police to crack down on all forms of political dissent. The Greens assisted Labor by abstaining on that bill, helping it pass the state’s upper house of parliament.

This a wider Labor-led offensive. The Bondi Beach terrorist attack is being cynically exploited to not only ban anti-genocide demonstrations, but suppress mounting opposition among workers and young people to the plunge into war, social austerity, climate catastrophe and authoritarian forms of rule.

13. China trade surplus hits historic record

China’s trade surplus for 2025 has come in at $1.2 trillion, the largest level ever recorded for any country with no indication that it will fall significantly in the coming period despite the tariff barriers erected against it by the Trump administration and the threats by other countries to impose restrictions.

The record surplus, up from $993 billion in 2024, was achieved despite a 20 percent fall in exports to the US which was more than compensated for by the increase in exports to the rest of the world. 

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The Chinese surplus is higher by an order of magnitude than anything seen before in modern economic history. Japan’s surplus peaked in 1993 at $96 billion, equivalent to $214 billion in today’s money and Germany’s surplus reached a sum equivalent to $364 billion in 2017.

China has become the world leader in a growing array of commodities, including cars, batteries and solar panels. It is the world’s major producer of steel and its shipbuilding capacity dwarfs that of the US. Despite restrictions imposed by the US and others, its technological capacities were forcefully demonstrated last year when the startup company DeepSeek produced an AI chatbot comparable to those produced in the US at a fraction of the cost.

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The demand of the IMF and others, including some from within China itself, is that the government do more to stimulate the domestic economy and expand social services. But the regime of Xi Jinping shows no sign of doing that apart from some short-lived measures to boost consumption.

The refusal to take measures to advance growth within China is leading to problems as the government continues to grapple with stagnant consumption spending, falling investment apart from high-tech and export sectors and the drag on the economy as a result of the collapse of the property boom.

As for social services, like capitalist governments around the world, the Xi regime, despite its “socialist” pretensions, is hostile to the expansion of welfare measures to the aged and the working class more broadly.

Back in 2021, Xi declared: “Once welfare benefits go up, they cannot easily be brought down. Engaging in ‘welfarism’ beyond our capacity is unsustainable and will inevitably bring about serious economic and political problems.” 

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The official policy of the Chinese Communist Party is the “peaceful development of China” (formerly the “peaceful rise of China” but amended to try to assuage opposition from the major imperialist powers).

But changes in rhetoric do not change objective economic reality and the announcement of a record trade surplus will only intensify the preparations by imperialism to deal with China by military means.

Successive US governments, beginning well before Trump, have used every economic measure at their disposal—tariffs, export controls, bans on the use of Chinese technology in the US and globally—to try to hold back Chinese growth and technological development, regarding it as the chief threat to the global dominance of the US.

But as the trade numbers reveal, these efforts are manifestly failing. The only area in which the US enjoys clear superiority is high-tech development but that is being steadily eroded. While the US has kept silent on the record surplus—no doubt in line with the year-long trade truce with China reached last October—the “spectacular flop” of its measures, as it has been described in some sections of the media, will have been duly noted.

This means the increasing turn to imperialist war by the US as it strives to maintain its economic dominance.

14. Erfurt, Germany: Mail order fashion company Zalando closes logistics center with 2,700 employees

Zalando SE is a Europe-wide mail order fashion company based in Berlin and has been in existence for 20 years. The headquarters in Erfurt, Thuringia, Germany, was opened 12 years ago to take advantage of low wages in the east of Germany and high subsidies provided by the state. In the summer of 2012, the first 350 employees began trial operations in a warehouse in Erfurt. This was followed by additional centers in the cities of Mönchengladbach in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Lahr in the Black Forest (state of Baden-Württemberg) and Peine (in the state of Lower Saxony), as well as in Poland, Italy and Ireland.

Zalando started out as an online shoe retailer. At a time when the large German department stores Quelle, Karstadt and Hertie were struggling, Zalando was able to expand its range to include fashion, sportswear, jewelry, cosmetics and accessories. Zalando founders David Schneider and Robert Gentz deliberately focused on subsidies from German states, the federal government and the EU, as well as on low wages in eastern Germany and Eastern Europe. The company’s high profits also attracted well-known corporations and banks such as Holtzbrinck, Tengelmann, J.P. Morgan, etc., which bought shares in Zalando.

The innovative start-up image cultivated by the owners collapsed six years ago. It became known that Zalando, just like Amazon, was putting its employees under enormous pressure to keep profits high. In a study for the Hans Böckler Foundation, a team of researchers from Berlin’s Humboldt University found that Zalando had a poor working environment and that its employees suffered from stress and psychological strain. In particular, they criticized the company’s use of Zonar personnel evaluation software. Zonar systematically collects evaluations from colleagues and supervisors and puts employees under constant pressure to perform. The study described the surveillance and informant system as “Stasi methods” (referring to the secret police of the former East Germany). 

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Last year, Zalando acquired the mail order company ABOUT YOU, a spin-off of the traditional German outlet Otto Versand, for over a billion euros. Zalando’s management simultaneously initiated a far-reaching restructuring. While the logistics center in Erfurt is to be closed, a modern new center will soon be opened in the city of Giessen.

Management justifies the closure of the Erfurt center with so-called “redundancies,” parallel operating processes that have led to excess capacity since the takeover of ABOUT YOU. This “optimization of processes” will result in 2,700 employees losing their livelihoods. At the first signs of a downturn and losses, managers are responding with relocations, layoffs, plant closures and even more pressure on workers.

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Company planning for life after job losses, transfers and employment companies are ultimately just stepping stones to unemployment. What is needed are reasonably paid, permanent and secure jobs for all employees and wages that allow them to live decent lives with their families. The needs of workers are more important than the profit interests of a tiny and rarefied upper class.

To enforce this, the independent rank-and-file committees, acting on decisions arrived at democratically, must prepare industrial action, including strikes, blockades and, as a last resort, workplace occupations. To this end, it is important to immediately establish contact with colleagues in all Zalando locations and also to reach out to employees in other companies, industries and countries. Zalando has announced that, in addition to the closure in Erfurt, it will also terminate the contracts of three other external service providers outside Germany. Their employees must be located and contacted immediately and the motto must be: one for all and all for one!

15. United States: While Ford Kentucky Truck UAW officials pad their salaries, conditions at plant worsen

The recent audit of the finances of United Auto Workers Local 862 at the Ford Kentucky Truck Plant (KTP) in Louisville illustrates the chasm that separates the privileged union apparatus from rank-and-file workers struggling to make ends meet.

KTP is one of Ford’s largest North American manufacturing facilities and a major profit center for the company, employing over 8,000. Production workers at KTP and the neighboring Louisville Assembly Plant (LAP) are members of United Auto Workers Local 862.

The results of the Local 862 audit, published in December, documented large, unexplained salary increases for top local officers; the disbursement of union funds to businesses owned by officers or their relatives without competitive bidding or documentation; and other irregularities. These include the holding of pre-signed checks, unauthorized debit card purchases, missing receipts for hundreds of expense vouchers, and lax controls over overtime approvals and other disbursements.

At the same time that corrupt Local 862 leaders have been stuffing their own pockets, a broader scandal has erupted in the UAW as a whole. As documented in recent reports by the court-appointed UAW monitor, the UAW apparatus headed by Shawn Fain maintains a “toxic culture of division and retaliation at the highest levels of the organization.” This has included the use of frame-up tactics against factional rivals on the International Executive Board, including Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock and Vice President Rich Boyer, to strip them of their duties.

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As of this writing, no Local 862 officers have been formally cited or disciplined as a consequence of the audit report.

Since 2023 all of the auto companies have carried out mass layoffs, including the wholesale firing of temporary workers who were falsely promised full time jobs. The UAW has not opposed any of these attacks, including the recent layoff off 1,100 workers at General Motors Factory Zero EV plant in Detroit and layoffs at the Ford’s Dearborn REV C plant and Blue Oval SK battery operations in Kentucky.

16. US invasion of Venezuela exposes bankruptcy of Mélenchon’s France Unbowed Party

Imperialism’s turn to unabashed neocolonial war and the rise of the class struggle expose the bankruptcy of “populist” parties like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI) party. Hostile to the independent mobilization of the working class in struggle against the capitalist state and for workers’ power and socialism, they call to unify the people—that is, to unify capitalists and workers based on nationalism. This anti-Marxist position only works to subordinate workers to bourgeois nationalist forces and block the necessary struggle against imperialism. 

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Opposing imperialist war requires building an international movement in the working class. In countries targeted for conquest, the task of this movement is to take control of the resources targeted for imperialist plunder out of the hands of rotten capitalist elites. In imperialist countries, the goal must be to take control of the economic resources of society out of the hands of a ruling class bent on wars of plunder abroad and dictatorship and social plunder at home. In both cases, this objectively leads the working class towards a struggle for socialist revolution.

LFI opposes the building of such a movement in France, however. It seeks to block the growth of the class struggle by forming an alliance, which it currently calls the New Popular Front (NFP), with the bourgeois Socialist Party (PS) and the Stalinist and Green parties and union bureaucracies. This alliance has worked relentlessly to subordinate the French working class to Macron. 

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Macron has applauded Maduro’s abduction, hoping French imperialism could also benefit from the plundering of Venezuela despite rising tensions with the Trump administration. This indicates the urgent necessity not only for renewed working class struggles against Macron, but of a political break with Mélenchon and the NFP, who have played the leading role in enabling Macron to rule against the people.

This requires building rank-and-file committees in the working class, independent of the union bureaucracies like those in the NFP, to coordinate workers’ struggles, block sell-outs as in the 2023 pension struggle and link them to workers’ struggles internationally. Unifying rising workers’ struggles against imperialism in the United States, Latin America, Europe and beyond requires fighting to build a socialist anti-war movement in the working class, based on a perspective of transferring power to the working class and pursuing socialist policies.

17. French youth speak out against Trump’s illegal invasion of Venezuela

The Trump administration’s illegal invasion of Venezuela is provoking an explosion of anger in France and worldwide. The decision of the hegemonic imperialist power to kidnap an elected president, in an operation whose stated goal is to take over Venezuela and seize its oil revenues, signals the descent of world capitalism into unrestrained imperialist barbarism. French President Emmanuel Macron’s initial decision to hail the invasion provoked deep disgust among the masses.

World Socialist Web Site reporters interviewed students in the Paris area on US imperialism’s intervention in Venezuela.

18. NTSB report reveals Boeing knew of fatal defect in UPS plane that killed 14 in Louisville

A report released Wednesday by the National Transportation Safety Board reveals that Boeing was aware of a structural defect in the engine mounting system that caused a UPS cargo plane to crash in Louisville, Kentucky, in November 2025, killing 14 people. The company had documented four previous failures of the same component on three different aircraft but concluded the defect would not create a safety hazard.

The NTSB investigative update provides damning evidence that both Boeing and UPS possessed knowledge of a recurring mechanical failure years before the disaster, yet took no meaningful action to prevent it. The crash of UPS Flight 2976 on November 4, 2025, which killed three crew members and 11 people on the ground, was entirely preventable.

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UPS has a documented record of opposing safety regulations. According to FAA records, the company objected to an FAA airworthiness directive that would have required inspection of wiring harnesses inside the engine pylons of MD-11 aircraft. UPS claimed the inspection would take too long and that Boeing lacked replacement parts for the obsolete planes. This objection concerned the very aircraft type and the very area of the plane where the fatal structural failure occurred.

The corporate press has reported these facts in a sanitized manner, merely reciting facts and technical details. The New York Times, The Guardian, the Associated Press, and the BBC all note Boeing’s prior knowledge of the bearing failures but stop short of drawing the obvious conclusion: Boeing and UPS knowingly operated aircraft with a defective component that had already failed multiple times, and 14 people died as a result.

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This disaster must be understood in the broader context of capitalist aviation. The MD-11, originally manufactured by McDonnell Douglas before its absorption by Boeing in 1997, has the second-worst safety record of any commercial aircraft still in service. Airlines phased out passenger service on these aircraft years ago because newer models are more fuel-efficient. However, UPS and FedEx continued operating dozens of them for cargo flights, where profit margins on aging equipment outweighed concerns for crew safety.

The Louisville crash occurred during the longest government shutdown in US history, with NTSB investigators working without pay. Air traffic controllers faced the choice between working complex technical jobs for free or taking unpaid leave to support their families. The Federal Aviation Administration had furloughed 25 percent of its workforce. These conditions did not directly cause the crash, but they reflect the broader assault on safety oversight and regulatory capacity.

Boeing, meanwhile, continues to receive billions in government contracts despite its long record of safety failures. Earlier in 2025, criminal charges against the company over the 737 MAX scandal, which killed 346 people in two crashes, were dropped.

UPS has pursued an identical trajectory. The company reported net income of $5.7 billion in 2024 and $6.7 billion in 2023. It reopened its Worldport facility in Louisville the day after the crash, ensuring that package processing continued without interruption. In the weeks following the disaster, UPS Airlines President Bill Moore assured investors that the company had leased replacement aircraft and was putting more packages on trucks to make up the capacity difference from grounding the MD-11 fleet.

The Teamsters union, which represents UPS workers, issued only a perfunctory statement after the crash. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, who has emerged as a vocal supporter of the Trump administration, blocked a potential strike by 340,000 UPS workers in 2023 and negotiated a contract that he hailed as historic. That agreement paved the way for mass layoffs and the continuation of the precarious part-time work system that leaves many UPS employees unable to afford housing without roommates.

The Democrats issued equally perfunctory statements, reflecting their subservience to Wall Street and major military contractors. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, appeared at press conferences expressing sympathy for victims while taking no action to hold Boeing or UPS accountable for the preventable deaths. This continues the policies of the Biden administration, which did not prosecute Boeing for the deaths of passengers and crew in the 737 MAX 8 crashes and intervened to block railroad workers from striking over safety concerns in 2022. 

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Disasters like the November Louisville air crash will continue as long as the aviation and logistics industries remain under the control of a corporate oligarchy concerned only with quarterly earnings and stock prices. The operation of these essential systems must be transferred to public ownership and placed under the democratic control of the working class as part of the fight for socialism.

19.  Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia and the Pacific

Australia:

Victorian public sector health workers escalate industrial action
 
Holcim building materials factory workers in Queensland begin industrial action
 
Royal Hobart Hospital food preparation workers demand improved pay and conditions

Bangladesh:

Cause unknown: over 100 garment workers fall sick during protest

India:  

Tamil Nadu malaria prevention workers protest in Chennai

Himachal Pradesh childcare workers demonstrate over colleague’s death

Pakistan:

Balochistan government employees demands wage hike and allowances
 
Power sector workers protest IMF-driven privatization

South Korea:

Seoul city bus union ends strike with inferior pay deal

20. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

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.

Jan 16, 2026

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. For a general strike to stop Trump’s occupation of Minneapolis!

On Tuesday, a coalition of local unions and community organizations in Minneapolis, Minnesota called a walkout for Friday, January 23, framed as a one‑day general strike and statewide economic shutdown to oppose the rampage by Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including the murder of Renée Nicole Good. 

The Socialist Equality Party supports this action and urges the broadest possible participation by workers, students and youth. The call for a walkout has emerged under growing pressure from working people across Minnesota who are outraged by the paramilitary occupation of their city. Protests have spread over the 10 days since the brutal killing of Good, who, according to recently released reports, was shot twice in her chest and once in her forearm as she was driving away from ICE officials.

The call for the general strike can prove to be an important step forward in the fight against ICE’s reign of terror in Minneapolis. But this action must be conceived of as the beginning of a broader mobilization of the working class in the city, state and throughout the country against the Trump administration.

The call for action comes as Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota. This is a qualitative escalation in his conspiracy to establish a dictatorship. 

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By branding protests and popular resistance as “insurrection,” the Trump regime is laying the groundwork for mass violence. The Insurrection Act gives the president the power to deploy the US military, overriding the Posse Comitatus Act. Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act against Minnesota’s population—absent any request from the state, and in response to peaceful protests—is blatantly illegal.

The stark reality of what is happening was acknowledged in the extraordinary statement by Democratic Governor Tim Walz Wednesday evening. He declared that developments in the state “defy belief” and that “News reports simply don’t do justice to the level of chaos and disruption and trauma the federal government is raining down upon our communities.” 

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Walz described the operation as “a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.”  Citing Trump’s fascistic threat that “the day of retribution and reckoning is coming,” the governor stated: “That is a direct threat against the people of this state.”

What Walz said about the situation in Minneapolis is true. But what is completely lacking is any serious strategy to stop Trump and ICE. Walz spoke about fighting “in the courts and at the ballot box,” but Trump has already made clear that he will ignore any legal decisions that challenge his authority. Moreover, the Supreme Court is controlled by a gang of fascists and reactionaries who ruled, in 2024, that Trump cannot be prosecuted for “official acts” carried out as president. 

As for elections, Trump is making ever more overt threats to cancel or nullify the 2026 midterm elections, or—if they are held—conduct them under conditions of martial law. In an interview with Reuters published Thursday, Trump declared that he had accomplished so much that “we shouldn’t even have an election.” 

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There is massive opposition within Minneapolis and beyond to the police-state occupation and Trump’s unfolding coup. In the week since the murder of Good, there have been daily demonstrations, high school walkouts, and acts of protest and resistance involving broad sections of the population. 

But resistance will only succeed if it is grounded in the active mobilization of the working class, the immense social force that produces all wealth and holds the power to bring society to a halt. What is required is a shift away from the non-struggle and collaboration of the Democratic Party, and toward the independent organization of a mass movement of workers. 

This is the significance of the action called on January 23. The World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly raised the need for a general strike movement in response to the occupation of Minneapolis. But a general strike is not a symbolic protest or consumer boycott. It means the complete shutdown of production and economic activity.

Workers must reject the threats issued by the governor‑appointed Metropolitan Council that participation in strike action is prohibited by public employee laws and collective bargaining agreements. The Trump administration is operating openly outside the bounds of legality. The defense of democratic rights cannot be subordinated to contract technicalities negotiated by the union apparatus to suppress the class struggle.

And the entire working class must be mobilized. While a number of local unions have endorsed the January 23 demonstration, the Minnesota AFL-CIO, closely tied to the Democratic Party, has thus far refused to do so. In the aftermath of the murder of Renée Nicole Good, the state labor federation issued a statement declaring itself “shocked, heartbroken and angry” but did not call for any action. Instead, it directed workers to place their confidence in a “full investigation” and in appeals to “elected officials.” 

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The Socialist Equality Party calls on workers to organize independently through the formation of rank‑and‑file committees in every workplace, school and neighborhood. The fight of workers cannot be subordinated to the operations of the Democratic Party or trade union apparatus, which is hostile to a real struggle against Trump.

Workers should immediately hold emergency meetings at every factory, school, warehouse, depot and workplace, union and non-union. At these meetings, workers should elect representatives to form rank‑and‑file committees charged with coordinating and directing the struggle and the defense of the people.

Resolutions should be adopted endorsing open‑ended strike action. Such resolutions must articulate a concrete set of demands, including the arrest and prosecution of Renée Nicole Good’s killer; the immediate withdrawal of all ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Department pf Homeland Security (DHS) forces; the abolition of these paramilitary agencies that terrorize immigrant communities; and the immediate release of all detainees held in ICE custody. 

Coordinating committees should be established to link these rank‑and‑file bodies across industries and regions, creating the structures necessary for common action on a mass scale.

There is a powerful precedent for such a movement in the history of the city itself. In 1934, Minneapolis was the site of one of the most militant and significant general strikes in American history, led by Trotskyist militants and the Teamsters. Workers defied the Citizens Alliance, the National Guard and police repression. Despite shootings and martial law, they won decisive victories and laid the foundation for industrial unionism across the country. 

Today, the situation is even more urgent. Workers confront not only employers’ associations and National Guard repression, but a fascist president, the paramilitary forces of the state and an escalating war abroad and at home.

Minnesota is not, as Walz claimed in his remarks Wednesday, an “island.” What is happening in Minneapolis is the spearhead of a broader conspiracy to impose dictatorship. Trump speaks and acts as the political instrument of the capitalist oligarchy, which is dispensing with democratic forms of rule. The Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, is hostile to any genuine movement against this danger. 

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The Socialist Equality Party urges all workers to take up a serious discussion in every workplace about what must be done. The situation is urgent. The way forward is not through appeals to courts or the next election, but through the independent political mobilization of the working class.

2. Revolutionary leadership and the Minneapolis general strike of 1934

This article was originally published on the 75th anniversary of the 1934 Minneapolis truck drivers’ strike. It is being republished today in light of unfolding events that have once again transformed Minnesota into a frontline in the struggle between the working class and the capitalist state. 

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The events in Minneapolis in 1934 show what the working class can accomplish when it fights based on an independent class perspective.

3. Public health collapsing as COVID pandemic enters its 7th year

Soon after the emergence of COVID-19, the International Committee of the Fourth International made the correct analysis that the pandemic had to be understood as a trigger event in world history. It did not create a crisis in public health, but rather exposed and accelerated longstanding processes: the erosion of life expectancy, the dismantling of scientific institutions, and the subordination of human life to the profit requirements and military-strategic interests of the financial oligarchy.

The world has now entered the seventh year of the COVID pandemic, with the United States facing the 12th major wave of infections. Conservative estimates place cumulative COVID deaths in the United States at over 1.2  million, while excess-mortality analyses indicate a substantially higher toll. Globally, excess-mortality modeling places the true pandemic death toll in the tens of millions, with central estimates near 27 million worldwide, far exceeding official counts. Transmission continues at high rates—presently at roughly 1 million infections per day, with more than 240 million infections recorded in 2025 alone. Reinfections are widespread, and Long COVID remains a mass disabling condition affecting millions.

What has ended is not the pandemic, but any acknowledgement by the political and media establishment that COVID-19 remains a major threat. There is zero political commitment to even the meager combination of mitigation, surveillance and data-gathering. This was not and is not an oversight. It is a decision to conceal the ongoing harm that is affecting the entire global population. 

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During the earliest phase of the ongoing COVID pandemic, life expectancy fell far more sharply among poorer and working class layers than among the wealthiest. Exposure risk, access to care, the ability to isolate and the burden of long-term disability followed class lines.

Now, barely six years later—a brief period in historical terms—international evidence confirms the devastation wrought by the COVID pandemic and how it continues to sicken population health. 

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In the course of the 20th century, public health interventions—vaccination, clean water systems, sanitation, community water fluoridation and disease surveillance—produced some of the most dramatic gains in human longevity ever recorded. Vaccination alone is estimated to have saved tens of millions of lives globally over the past 50 years. In the United States, routine childhood immunization reduced infant and child mortality to a fraction of early-20th-century levels.

It is precisely these historic gains—achieved through collective action, scientific rigor and public investment—that are now under direct and conscious attack. 

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On January 5, 2026, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unilaterally preempted the established scientific review process and imposed sweeping changes to the US vaccine schedule. 

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On that day, federal health authorities revised the US childhood immunization schedule, reducing the number of diseases with routine universal recommendation from 17 to 11. Six vaccines—including influenza, COVID-19, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B and certain meningococcal vaccines—were removed from routine universal recommendation and reclassified for high-risk groups or shared clinical decision-making. This action did not emerge suddenly. It followed earlier interventions, including changes to the hepatitis B vaccine, which served as a preliminary signal of the direction being prepared.

Taken together, these actions represent a deliberate rupture with evidence-based public health governance. In this sense, January 5 marks a “Welcome to 2026” moment for public health, just as the January 3 criminal attack on Venezuela was for American imperialist foreign policy and the January 7 murder of Renee Nicole Good was for Trump’s plans for dictatorship.

Just as the criminal attack on Venezuela has functioned as a harbinger of the abandonment of international law in favor of the openly stated law of force, the preemption of the vaccine schedule marks the abandonment of scientific truth and public health norms in favor of ideological rule. Peer review, evidence and population-level risk assessment are no longer constraints on policy. 

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The consequences of inadequate prevention were already visible during the 2024–2025 influenza season, when more than 280 children died from influenza in the United States. Pediatric flu deaths are a recognized sentinel indicator of failure in vaccination and prevention systems. 

Although these deaths occurred before the most recent changes to the vaccine schedule, they demonstrate the inherent danger of influenza under existing social conditions and provide a clear warning as the country enters another severe flu season.

Influenza is now well understood to be primarily an airborne disease, transmitted through aerosols in the indoor air. Despite this knowledge, no systematic airborne precautions—such as ventilation standards, air filtration or masking during surges—are being implemented. In this context, vaccination remains the only broadly available population-level measure shown to reduce severe illness, hospitalization and death from influenza. Under these conditions, the public health consequences are not uncertain or speculative; they are well understood in advance.

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This crisis cannot be attributed to any single administration. The Trump administration initiated the abandonment of pandemic mitigation, dismantling federal coordination and promoting mass infection in the name of economic reopening. The Biden administration did not reverse this course. Instead, it consolidated and normalized these policies despite vastly greater scientific understanding of the nature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Under Biden, emergency measures were dismantled while excess deaths continued. Masking guidance was withdrawn, surveillance was curtailed and responsibility for protection was shifted onto individuals and families. As a result, far more people died of COVID under Biden than under Trump. This was not ignorance. It was a political decision.

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The assault on public health must be understood within the broader framework of class rule under capitalism. From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the decisive priority of governments was not the preservation of life, but the protection of profit, financial markets and corporate interests. This orientation was articulated openly in calls to “reopen the economy” even as mass death unfolded.

In this context, the staggering death toll among the elderly and medically vulnerable was not an unintended consequence, but an outcome that was politically accepted and normalized. Sections of the population deemed no longer “productive” were treated as expendable. The refusal to suppress transmission, the dismantling of mitigation measures and the abandonment of population-level protection functioned to reduce life expectancy along class lines.

This process has not ended. The dismantling of public health institutions, the erosion of vaccination programs and the normalization of mass infection continue to operate in the same direction. The well-off retain access to private health care, early treatment and protection. The working class is left exposed—to infection, long-term disability and premature death. Disease itself becomes a mechanism through which social inequality is enforced.

The policies now being advanced under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. must be understood in this light. The attack on vaccination, disease surveillance and scientific authority does not represent a defense of individual freedom, but a further degradation of collective protection. These policies function to weaponize disease against the population, particularly against those with the least capacity to shield themselves.

Central to this project is an ideological assault on science itself. By promoting the claim that scientists are corrupt agents of corporate interests, and that medical knowledge is inherently suspect, these forces cultivate distrust, fear and confusion. This anti-scientific outlook has a paralyzing political effect. It undermines rational understanding, fragments social consciousness and obstructs the development of a clear, class-based response to the crisis.

From a Marxist standpoint, this represents the antithesis of what is required. The working class cannot defend its interests without access to truth, scientific knowledge and a clear understanding of the social forces shaping its conditions of life. The defense of public health is therefore inseparable from the defense of scientific integrity and the political education of the working class.

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In sum, public health is a class question. The assault on vaccines, science and population-level prevention is part of a broader attack on the social gains secured by the working class over the 20th century. The COVID pandemic exposed these priorities with devastating clarity. What is unfolding now is the conscious continuation of that trajectory. The task before us is to make this reality understood and to orient the working class internationally to the defense of science, public health and human life itself.

4. Following Trump’s threat: European powers send troops to Greenland

US President Donald Trump’s persistent threats to take over Greenland have provoked strong reactions in Europe. After Trump repeatedly asserted his claim to the huge island—which belongs to Denmark as an autonomous territory—in recent days and a Danish-American meeting in Washington ended without a resolution, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany and France have sent military reinforcements to Greenland.

For the time being, only a few soldiers and ships have been sent to explore further options. The mission is justified by the need to allay Trump’s concerns that Greenland is not sufficiently protected against Russian and Chinese attacks. In fact, it is intended to deter the US from annexing Greenland by force, even though it would offer little resistance to an American military operation.

The US president has justified his claim to Greenland on the grounds of US national security, among other things. “We need Greenland,” he said, “to prevent Russia and China from owning it.” He added threateningly that the takeover could be done “the easy way” or “the hard way.” 

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In Europe, outrage over Trump’s claim to Greenland has reached fever pitch. The media and all established parties are up in arms over his threat to forcibly seize territory from a NATO partner. Seven European heads of government—including Friedrich Merz (Germany), Emmanuel Macron (France), Keir Starmer (Great Britain), Giorgia Meloni (Italy) and Donald Tusk (Poland)—signed a joint statement against Trump’s annexation plans in early January. They emphasise that the island belongs to the Greenlandic people.

What motivates the European leaders is not concern for international law, and certainly not for the Greenlandic people. The same media and leaders who criticise Trump over Greenland have supported and continue to support his numerous other crimes—from the genocide in Gaza to the bombing of Iran and the attempt to forcibly bring about regime change there. They even welcomed the attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Maduro, which clearly violated international law, even though Trump openly boasted that his goal was to steal Venezuelan oil.

Nor do European governments raise any criticism of the destruction of democracy in the US, the terror of the ICE Gestapo, the instrumentalization of the judiciary, and the unpunished murder of peaceful citizens such as Renée Nicole Good, even though they are otherwise relentless in condemning human rights violations when it comes to Russia or China. Instead, the European governments are competing to flatter the fascist gangster in the White House.

Even with regard to Greenland, the Europeans’ claims are not as clear-cut as they pretend. Although the island belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark under international law, it enjoys a high degree of autonomy. Copenhagen only has a say in foreign policy and defense; the Greenlanders themselves regulate internal affairs. The 2009 Self-Government Act expressly guarantees them the right to self-determination: they can therefore decide for themselves at any time whether they want to remain part of Denmark or not.

Greenland is also not, as is often claimed, part of the European Union. In 1973, it became a member of the European Community (EC), the predecessor of the EU, as part of Denmark, even though 70 percent of Greenlanders had voted against it. After gaining internal autonomy, Greenland held its own referendum in 1982, in which 53 percent voted in favor of withdrawal, which was completed in 1985. Since then, Greenland has only been associated with the EU as an overseas country or territory.

Greenland’s relationship with Denmark, which exploited the island as a colony for over two centuries, is also not as close as the government portrays it to be. Between 1966 and 1991, the Danish government implemented a brutal contraception program on the island to reduce the birth rate. For a quarter of a century, every second woman, including many girls, had an intrauterine device inserted without their knowledge. The Danish government did not apologize for this crime until 2025—six years after Trump first laid claim to Greenland.

Greenland, which has a population of only about 55,000, is dependent on financial support from Denmark. However, at €80 million per year, this support is very modest. It is therefore quite possible that Trump will try to bring Greenland under his control with an “offer they cannot refuse”—a combination of threats, blackmail and incentives. This is likely to be the subject of the negotiations agreed upon by the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland with Vance and Rubio. 

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No one should be carried away by this war propaganda under the guise of “defending Greenland.” Not only Trump, but also Merz, Macron, Starmer and Meloni are preparing new wars to defend imperialist interests in a world where only the law of the strongest applies.

The answer to Trump’s annexation plans is not European military strength, but the mobilization of the international working class against war and capitalism. The workers of Europe and the US are allies in this struggle.

5. New York City workers urge broadening strike of 15,000 striking nurses

The enormous support which the 15,000 strong nurses strike in New York City has received in the working class in the city, nationally and internationally, continues to grow. The nurses on the picket line feel this directly by visits from other workers and by the honking of cars and trucks that pass them. But the support is both more widespread and deeply felt by hundreds of thousands in the city that are not immediately present.

Hundreds of thousands of municipal workers, including 37,000 city transit workers, have contracts coming up this year. There is not only broad support but a growing feeling that a united movement of the working class is the only way to address skyrocketing cost of living.

In Minneapolis, a general strike has been scheduled for next Friday, January 23 in opposition to the rampage by ICE throughout the city and Trump’s threats to declare the Insurrection Act. The union bureaucracy had earlier canceled a teachers’ strike the day after the shooting of Renee Good; that it felt compelled to call a general strike is a sign of fear that workers may act with or without their approval.

Reporters for the World Socialist Web Site spoke to transit workers at one of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) subway stations. 

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Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site spoke to nurses on the picket line during the fourth day of their strike Thursday. “The most important thing is patient safety for nurses,” one nurse said. “We care for our patients down to the core. Nobody knows the Bronx like the nurses here. These patients can be your grandfather, your grandmother, your brother, your sister, and no patient deserves to be in a hallway. Every patient deserves a bed and a room and proper care. The ED [Emergency Department] is completely overcrowded.” 

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The response to the nurses’ strike on social media has been overwhelming. Hundreds of thousands of people have viewed World Socialist Web Site videos and articles published on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, Youtube and Reddit. Thousands of spirited and enthusiastic comments have been posted there by users, including many nurses and other healthcare workers from around the world.

On a healthcare subreddit, one person remarked on the same video: “Awesome! The way they are overworked is insanely dangerous for both them and anyone in need of medical assistance. I hope this catches on in more places.” In response, anther user said, “The entire country should strike.”

6. Federal agents raid Washington Post reporter’s home in crackdown on press freedom

On Wednesday, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the Virginia home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, in an unprecedented escalation of the Trump administration’s campaign against alleged leaks of classified information. The raid, ordered at the request of the Pentagon and approved by Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department, was carried out under the pretext of investigating a government contractor accused of improperly retaining national defense information.

The FBI seized Natanson’s phone, her personal laptop, a Post‑issued laptop and a Garmin smartwatch, effectively ransacking the basic tools of her work and sweeping up material that includes confidential communications with hundreds of current and former federal employees. Natanson, a Pulitzer Prize‑winning journalist who has been at the center of the Post’s exposure of President Donald Trump’s purge and restructuring of the federal workforce, was present when FBI agents arrived with a search warrant authorizing the seizure of her devices.

Officials have claimed that the journalist herself is “not a target” of the investigation, which they say is focused on Aurelio Perez‑Lugones, a Maryland‑based Pentagon systems administrator charged in federal court with unlawful retention of classified documents. But the real purpose of the operation is unmistakable: to intimidate whistleblowers throughout the federal government and to send a warning to journalists who expose the criminal conspiracies of the state.

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Attorney General Bondi boasted on social media that the FBI had executed a warrant at the home of a reporter who “was acquiring and reporting classified and illegally disclosed information,” cynically denouncing the exposure of government secrets as a threat to “national security,” concealing the illegal actions and intrigues being exposed.

News organizations and press freedom advocates condemned the search as a dangerous crossing of a line that even previous administrations, despite their own vicious pursuit of leakers, had hesitated to breach.

7. Federal agents in Minneapolis tear gas family, sending 2 children and a baby to hospital

A family in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was forced to rush their 6-month-old baby and two young children to the hospital on Wednesday night after police forces doused a residential neighborhood in tear gas following the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa Celis by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The shooting prompted an instant protest by local community members that lasted well past 2:00 a.m. local time.

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The catalyst for the protest in North Minneapolis was the latest shooting by a DHS thug that left one man, identified by the agency as Julio Cesar Sosa Celis, wounded in the leg. DHS claimed their agent fired a “defensive shot” at Sosa Celis after the agent was attacked by two other people allegedly armed with a broom or shovel, who were trying to help Sosa Celis escape.

The two men DHS claims assaulted their officer were identified as Alfredo Alejandro Ajorna and Gabriel Alejandro Hernandez-Ledezma. It is unclear if either of the men knew Sosa Celis prior to yesterday.

Nothing the liars and fascists at DHS or in the Trump administration at large say should be taken at face value. Cell phone footage from inside the home of Sosa Celis has already revealed a contradiction in the narrative put forth by the government.

8. Amid conflict over Powell indictment, attention turns to Supreme Court decision on Fed governor Lisa Cook

As conflict continues over the legal action via the Department of Justice (DoJ) against Fed chair Jerome Powell, attention is being directed to a Supreme Court hearing next week which could have even more significant implications for the so-called independence of the US central bank.

Next Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether the Trump administration can sack Fed governor Lisa Cook “for cause.”

Cook was sacked “effective immediately” via a social media post by Trump at the end of August with claims that she had falsified information on mortgage applications for two properties she purchased in 2021.

The move sent a shock wave through the financial world. In the words of the Financial Times (FT): “Trump’s late-night putsch represents one of the gravest challenges to the Fed since it became independent 74 years ago, and marks a stunning escalation in the president’s attacks on the US economic establishment.”

In various legal actions, including a shadow docket ruling by the Supreme Court, Cook has successfully resisted moves to have her ousted from the Fed’s governing body before the issue was finally determined.

The case is regarded as potentially more significant than the attack on Powell because a decision against Cook would enable Trump to install an acolyte to the Fed. It would also create conditions where the threat of being removed “for cause” hung over every other member of the bank’s policy making body if they defied Trump’s demands for a major reduction in interest rates, possibly to as low as 1 percent. 

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Powell has received support from key figures in the US financial establishment, including all living former central bank governors and from central bankers around the world who issued a statement declaring their “full solidarity” with the Fed chief. A significant omission was the central governor of the Bank of Japan, leading to conjecture this was because the government did not want a conflict with Trump. 

The statement, organized by the European Central Bank, said the “independence of central banks is a cornerstone of price, financial and economic stability in the interest of the citizens that we serve.”

The notion of “independence”—tied to the claim that central banks somehow serve the interests of the public or the people—is a fiction. Central banks serve the interests of financial capital.

The conflict has arisen because they consider that Trump’s push for lower rates—aimed at enhancing the interests of the most speculative sections of capital involved in crypto, real estate other risky areas from which Trump himself emerged—will set off inflation and spark a wages movement of the working class.

And they are also deeply fearful that under conditions where the US is the most indebted country in history—$38 trillion and counting—direct political control will lead to a collapse in confidence in the US dollar and undermine the American and global financial system.

So far finance capital has been able to withstand major economic storms—the crisis of 2008 and the March 2020 freeze of the US Treasury market—because of massive bailouts, running into many trillions of dollars, organized by the US government and the Fed. But if there is a crisis of confidence in the dollar that is no longer possible. 

9. Reject BMA Scotland’s sellout deal: For a united fight by resident doctors and NHS workers

Resident doctors in Scotland should vote “No” to the divisive package cobbled together between the Scottish National Party (SNP) government and leaders of the British Medical Association Scotland, after they vetoed a four-day strike due to start January 13.

The cancelled action, which would have been the first doctors’ strike in Scotland this century, had overwhelming backing from resident doctors—a 92 percent strike mandate.

Had it gone forward, it would have strengthened the long-running dispute between resident doctors in England and the Keir Starmer’s Labour government in Westminster. It would have opened a new front in the struggle for pay restoration as an integral part of defending a well-funded, fully staffed National Health Service (NHS) and social care system.

More is needed than a “No” vote, however. To take forward any struggle, resident doctors, around 7,000 of whom work in Scotland, are posed with taking control of their own dispute.

The decision to cancel the strike last Friday breaches the basic principle that members have the right to vote on any agreement before mandated action is called off. The BMA had not even confirmed a date for the ballot at the time of this writing; its January 9 press release stated that a consultative vote “will open in the coming weeks.” 

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Recent figures from Public Health Scotland report that 70,000 people have been waiting for treatment for over 12 months. Only 43 percent of those currently on the waiting list will be seen within the government’s target time of 12 weeks. 5,262 people have been waiting for outpatient treatment for over two years.

Figures from Public Health Scotland in 2024 underscore how cutting waiting lists is being used to justify increased outsourcing to the private sector, with the number of Scottish patients treated in non-NHS facilities reaching a five-year high in 2023–24. More than 7,200 inpatients and day patients and 3,700 outpatients were sent to private hospitals and other non-NHS providers, with sharp year-on-year increases. 

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Rejecting the deal cooked up between the SRDC and the SNP government is the first step toward resident doctors in Scotland going on the offensive against the private interests and government underfunding pulling apart the health service. And it will strengthen the resolve of resident doctors in England as they re-ballot for strike action against attempts by the BMA to push through a sellout deal with the Starmer government.

Both struggles can be the signal a fightback against the substandard deals in Wales and Northern Ireland.

Mounting such a unified struggle, which the BMA leadership opposes, will require new centers of democratic organization among resident doctors: rank-and-file committees. These committees can draw strength from the ongoing fight of tens of thousands of nurses in New York and strikes by doctors in France and Spain (where a national strike involving up to 175,000 is taking place this week), confronting the same issues. They can turn the resident doctors’ struggle into the spearhead of a movement to secure the billions necessary for a modern health and social care service.

This is the perspective advanced by NHS FightBack. We urge all resident doctors and NHS staff seeking to oppose the rout being led by the union bureaucracy to make contact.

10. Further Education workers strike 17 colleges in England as University and College Union stifles action

Workers at 17 Further Education (FE) colleges across England began a three-day walkout on Wednesday.

University and College Union (UCU) members at 33 colleges overwhelmingly rejected a non-binding pay offer of 4 percent from the Association of Colleges (AoC). However, by the time of the walkout, the UCU had already pulled action at half the colleges which voted to strike.

The union is splitting FE workers into a handful of local disputes, ending them one-by-one with pay deals that do not make up for years of real-terms cuts as workers seek to close the £9,000 gap between salaries in schools and colleges. Although the headline demand is for a pay rise of 10 percent or £3,000, whichever is higher, the UCU is boasting of pulling branches out of the strike when they have “won pay awards worth up to 8.7%.”

Low pay is a sector-wide problem caused by the cuts of successive Conservative and Labour governments. According to a 2025 report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), “[f]unding per student in FE colleges is 11 per cent lower than in 2010-11, while sixth form funding has fallen by 23 per cent.” Classroom-based adult education funding has been cut by 40 percent in real terms since 2009-10. 

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After the three-day walkout this week, no further action is currently planned. Instead, there are weeks of delays while local branches meet and a special meeting of the UCU’s Further Education Committee is held on February 6 to “consider branch and member feedback” and “next steps”.

Even where pay increased by more than the last years’ 4.1 percent price rises (by the RPI measure of inflation), without further funding from central government it will come out of already stretched college budgets, raising the risk of workers’ paying for their own pay rise with job losses and increased work pressure.

Forcing through localized deals means the remaining striking workers, those who are last to even get an offer, are in an ever weaker position. The bureaucracy defends its actions by saying that FE colleges are responsible for setting their own pay terms, with no binding national bargaining, accepting this is a fait accompli. Claiming that it is “at this level, not the national level, where the power lays,” it tells workers to “react to the existing structural, legal, and power realities.”

All but admitting that its strategy is based on pre-emptively accepting defeat, the UCU states baldly that the “central premise of a New Deal for FE is that UCU is not yet ready to achieve fundamental change at sector level and any precipitate move will most probably take the union and our strategic demands backwards rather than forward.”

This flies in the face of the guiding principle of the workers’ movement that “an injury to one is an injury to all”. The true “power reality” is that it is FE workers who are the lifeblood of the sector, and who have the power, precisely “at sector level”, through a unified struggle, to enforce their demands for decent terms of employment and a high quality of education. 

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Further Education workers must take steps to bring the dispute under their direct control through rank-and-file committees at each college, whose first principles are: firstly, to fight for what workers need not what the college groups and government say they must accept; secondly, that the struggle must be waged on a unified basis among as wide a section of the workforce as possible.

11. New Zealand, Japan strengthen military links

New Zealand’s Defense Minister Judith Collins signed two new defense and security pacts with Japan during a visit to Tokyo on December 19. Collins signed the agreements, which upgrade the countries’ bilateral and multilateral military activities, with Japan’s Foreign Affairs Minister Toshimitsu Motegi.

Collins’ Japan visit capped a year in which the far-right National Party-led government further integrated New Zealand, a minor imperialist power, with the expanding US-led alliance for war in the Pacific. In August she welcomed US FBI director Kash Patel to open the agency’s new office in Wellington, which he made clear is part of US war preparations against China. 

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The agreements are aimed squarely at North Korea and above all China. The Japan Times observed they are key to expanding the “scope and scale” of joint military activities and to “boost joint training exercises and enhance interoperability.” Collins pointed to the growth of joint engagements such as naval patrols in the East and South China seas, often with the navies of “like-minded countries” including the Philippines, Australia and the United States. 

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Japan’s military alignments accompany its remilitarization and involvement in US-led war preparations against China. The Japanese government aims to double military spending by 2027. This includes acquiring offensive weaponry capable of reaching China, in a clear breach of the “Pacifist Clause” of Japan’s post-World War II Constitution. Tokyo claims it has the right to engage in so-called “collective self-defense,” preparing to join wars alongside allies. 

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The developments accompany a major expansion of NZ’s military presence in South East Asia. In April Collins visited the Philippines to sign a Status of Visiting Forces Agreement strengthening military cooperation. Washington and its allies, including Japan and Australia, are preparing the Philippines to serve as a staging ground for conflict over Taiwan.

12. Collapsing crane kills 32 people on train in Thailand

A large construction crane collapsed onto a passenger train in Thailand on Wednesday, killing at least 32 people and injuring 66 others, with at least seven in critical condition. Three people are listed as missing. The collapse of the crane demonstrates starkly the lack of safety measures throughout the country’s construction industry.

The crane, a launching gantry hoisting a concrete segment for a new elevated China-Thailand high-speed rail line, collapsed around 9:00 a.m. in the Sikhio district of Nakhon Ratchasima province. The crane operator, who was injured but survived, stated that he heard the sound of uneven concrete joints sliding against one another shortly before the collapse and had ordered workers off the platform.

The crane struck the second carriage of the express train traveling from Bangkok to Ubon Ratchathani carrying 171 passengers and traveling at 120 km/h. The impact cut the carriage in half while derailing the other cars. Train conductors and people nearby the accident site initially rushed to help victims before rescue personnel arrived. 

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The line under construction was being built through the joint collaboration of the Italian-Thai Development (ITD) company, one of the largest construction companies in Thailand, and the China Railway Engineering Corporation (CREC). It is meant to connect Thailand and China via Laos as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The exact cause of the accident is still under investigation. According to Pichet Kunadhamraks, the director-general of the Department of Rail Transport, ITD violated a Ministry of Transport safety regulation that requires construction on high-speed rail lines to halt when a train is passing underneath. 

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ITD expressed regret over Wednesday’s accident and pledged to compensate the families of the dead and those injured. However, ITD has a long and notorious record of disregarding safety and causing workplace deaths. For big business, such payouts are the cost of doing business to keep costs low at the expense of safety.

This was driven home on Thursday when another crane operated by the same company collapsed on Rama II Road in Samut Sakhon striking two vehicles, killing two people, and injuring five more. The crane was being used for the construction of an expressway bridge. Rama II Road is the main route connecting Bangkok with the southern regions of Thailand and is known for frequent accidents related to construction.

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Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul of the ruling Bhumjaithai Party (BJT) and other government officials have ordered official probes into the exact causes of Wednesday’s accident, including the creation of a 15-day fact-finding committee. Anutin called on Wednesday for somebody to “be punished and held accountable.” 

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However, even if any new laws are passed, they will do little more than paper over conditions that are not the result of one company or one government, but the capitalist system as a whole that places profits before people’s lives.

It is the same system that has made Thailand one of the most economically unequal countries in the world. The World Bank has reported that as of 2021, the richest ten percent in Thailand controls 74.2 percent of the wealth in the country. Under such conditions, big business openly flouts safety and the minimal regulatory laws as well as the needs of the public as a whole.

This therefore is another factor behind the government’s claims that it will address safety, keenly aware that it is sitting on a social powder keg as the working class’s economic conditions decline. The World Bank predicts that the Thai economy will have grown by only two percent last year and will slow to 1.6 percent in 2026. In 2025, prices for household essentials such as food, transportation, and utilities rose by 15.3 percent over the previous year, driving concerns over rising prices among workers.

13. Squid Game 3: Ending not with a bang, but a bleak (and lucrative) whimper

Unfortunately, the [Netflix] series that gained international attention for its cutting portrayal of the capitalist system as a rigged game show employing violence and social manipulation to prey upon the poor has been, to a considerable extent, remolded into its opposite.

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Variety review of Squid Game 3 summed up the series’ retrograde conclusions, although approvingly:

The world is cruel, unfair and full of horrors, many of which will grow increasingly grotesque in our lifetimes. … Yet, even amid this dark and twisted final scene, creator Hwang has offered a path forward. Individually, we don’t have the power to fix everything. Yet, if we do our part in changing and affecting one thing, just like Gi-hun, Jun-ho and No-eul, it will add up to so much more.

The combination of nihilism and unconvincing hints at bright spots in the darkness is thoroughly inadequate for making sense of today’s convulsive realities. 

14. East Palestine, Ohio residents report long-term health problems from 2023 Norfolk Southern rail disaster

Residents of East Palestine, Ohio say they have long-term health problems stemming from the massive derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in February 2023. In a bid to reopen the tracks as soon as possible, the company decided to burn off highly toxic vinyl chloride from chemical tank cars, citing a bogus risk of explosion.

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Jami Wallace is a lifelong resident of East Palestine and an outspoken critic of the handling of the disaster by Norfolk Southern, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as both the Biden and Trump administrations.

Jami is married and a mother of a daughter who was 3 at the time of the derailment. Jami was working as a Human Resource Director. Now she is working as a research assistant.

Jami spoke with the World Socialist Web Site about the disaster and the effect it has had on herself, her family and the community.

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On February 3, 2023, 38 cars derailed on a Norfolk Southern freight train near East Palestine, Ohio, 11 cars of which carried hazardous chemicals. The derailment was caused by an overheated wheel bearing that failed after warnings and alarms were ignored by the company.

Three days later, company and government officials carried out a so‑called “controlled release and burn” in which five tanker cars carrying 1.1 million pounds of vinyl chloride were punctured and set on fire.

This produced a towering inferno over 300 feet high and a black plume visible for miles that sent contaminants across the surrounding countryside. Chemicals that didn’t burn flooded into the ground and nearby creeks. 

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Jami later became a leader of a community group, the Unity Council for the EP Train Derailment, which fought for residents to reject a class action settlement which left the railroad off the hook. She says, based on her connections with other residents, similar issues are affecting hundreds of residents throughout the area.

“A woman contacted me [that] her husband died of lung cancer about six months ago. She has just been diagnosed with breast cancer in one breast and now they want to biopsy her other breast.

“A man came down with a rare form of breast cancer after the derailment, and he had to have a double mastectomy. Now the cancer is moving to other parts of his body. Many people have had surgery on their thyroids and had their thyroid removed.

“A friend of mine called and her husband both got diagnosed with neuropathy. Another friend and her husband are on seizure medication.

“In the beginning,” Jami said. “There were more symptoms. We saw a lot of people with upper respiratory infections, chemical bronchitis or rashes.

“Then we started seeing things like seizures, so you could tell it was getting a little worse. Seizures, neuropathy, things like that. And now we’re seeing a lot of heart attacks and cancers and things of that nature. I just watched it move from symptoms to long-term illness and now we’re already seeing terminal illnesses.”

Asked if she knew for sure that these illnesses are caused by vinyl chloride exposure, Jami said no. She explains that when the testing is done to establish safe levels of exposure it is only done on one chemical at a time, not the soup of chemicals they were exposed to.

“We can learn from our past disasters. When you look at every other chemical disaster in the United States—they all have respiratory issues; they all have thyroid issues; they all have neurological issues; they all have gastrointestinal issues.

“There’s a profile. A lot of the symptoms we’re seeing in East Palestine are the same symptoms that our Gulf War veterans saw when they came home after being exposed to the chemical burn pits.”

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“We’re one of the poorest communities in the state of Ohio. We’re part of Appalachia and a lot of people don’t have any medical insurance at all. I feel like the very, very least we deserve to have is medical insurance, not just for ourselves but for our children. We don’t know what their medical issues are going to be in the future. They’re the ones that are going to truly pay and if my daughter gets sick and can’t work, she needs to have some kind of insurance.

“It affects me mentally. I get phone calls every single day from residents that are sick, some of them are terminal. These aren’t just random people. These are people that I grew up with. People that I love. My family. Mentally watching everyone’s health decline.

“I knew it would come. I just didn’t know it would come this fast. And it is being ignored by the government.

“We continue day after day to show evidence of how our government betrayed us, how we were fed lies, but there has been zero action from our government to right the wrongs for the community. Instead, they ignore us and continue to leave us sitting in contamination while they study us.”

15. Governments advance universal digital identification, mass surveillance and censorship

On December 11, 2025, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce subcommittee advanced the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) 2.0, legislation that would effectively require age verification for access to social media and online services. Additionally, Republican Senator Josh Hawley and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal introduced the Guidelines for User Age‑verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act on October 28, 2025, a bill that would require AI chatbot providers to verify the ages of users and impose restrictions on minors’ access to AI systems. 

Australia’s social media ban for minors under 16, passed in late 2024 under the Online Safety Amendment Act, officially took effect on December 10, 2025. Platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit and Snapchat, face fines of up to $49.5 million for non-compliance. In practice, verifying that users are 16 or older requires platforms to demand identification or biometric data from all users, including adults. The timing of this measure, following mass opposition among youth and workers to the Gaza genocide, underscores its political character. 

The European Union is negotiating the final terms of the so-called “Chat Control” law, which would force messaging platforms to verify users’ ages and expose private communications, undermining encryption and online anonymity under the guise of “protecting children.” 

All such systems permanently tie individual’s real-world identities to their online activity, making proof of identity a constant requirement for taking part in social and political life. 

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The drive toward digital authoritarianism and online censorship is part of a broader assault on democratic rights. The same governments pushing universal digital ID are conducting mass deportations, criminalizing protests, expanding police powers, gutting press freedoms and waging wars of aggression abroad. The attacks on online anonymity by major imperialist powers are of a piece with the attack on the right to asylum, the right to strike and the right to oppose government policy without state surveillance.

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The claim that these measures protect children is a fraud. The same governments imposing age verification are arming Israel’s slaughter of children in Gaza, cutting funding for schools and healthcare and forcing youth into military service for imperialist wars. The target is political opposition. Brazil’s Aletheia system, scanning social media for prosecutable speech, shows the trajectory: from “protecting children” to criminalizing dissent.

The working class cannot defend democratic rights through appeals to the courts or capitalist politicians. US federal judges have blocked some state laws on First Amendment grounds, but the Supreme Court has ruled that age verification is constitutional. The EU has overridden objections from various civil liberties organizations. More fundamentally, the defense of privacy requires a political struggle against the capitalist system.

The same ruling class constructing universal digital identification is waging war abroad—invading Venezuela, arming genocide in Gaza, escalating toward conflict with Russia and China—and building a police state at home through mass deportations, attacks on the press and the gutting of constitutional protections. These are two fronts of the same war against the working class. Only the independent political mobilization of workers, aimed at the expropriation of the technology monopolies and the socialist reorganization of society, can halt the descent into digital authoritarianism.

16. Australia: Antisemitism Education Taskforce to attack democratic rights and academic freedom

In the aftermath of the December 14 Bondi terrorist attack, which claimed 15 lives and injured dozens, the political establishment is cynically exploiting the atrocity to implement a raft of anti-democratic measures.

The offensive is being led by the federal Labor government. Last week, it announced a Royal Commission, which has nothing to do with investigating the circumstances of the attack, but has the character of a witch-hunting body directed against mass opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza and Australia’s complicity in it.

The Royal Commission is the spearhead of an authoritarian campaign that is to extend into every area of social and political life. The educational system is a particular target. 

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Educators, students and academic staff must recognize this initiative for what it is: an attempt to establish conditions in the schools and universities that are of a police-state character. 

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While suppressing mass opposition to the genocide is the immediate aim of this program, its purpose is broader.

The Labor government, as part of its lockstep alignment with US imperialism and the Trump administration, is seeking to subordinate universities to a war agenda, centered on the preparations for conflict with China. Funding and courses at universities are increasingly tailored to that aim, along with pumping out graduates who can meet the immediate workforce needs of the major corporations.

The material forces driving the taskforce go beyond the aims of the Zionists against the Palestinian people. but rooted in the deeper contradictions of capitalism. Central is the Albanese governments alignment with US-led wars, its commitments under AUKUS, and preparations for conflict with China, all of which demand ideological conformity and the suppression of dissent.

This government’s program, of war abroad and a war against social conditions domestically, is incompatible with basic democratic rights, including academic freedom and freedom of speech. As in 1930s Germany and in Trump’s America, the universities and schools are to be subordinated directly to the state, authoritarianism and war. 

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Rank-and-file committees of staff and students must be built across campuses and schools to coordinate resistance. These committees should demand: no gag clauses tied to public funding, oppose victimizations and censorship, full restoration and expansion of funding for humanities and other courses, employ thousands of additional teachers, protection of jobs, workloads and tenure, and the repeal of anti-protest and politicized “hate speech” laws.

Above all, the defense of democratic rights and academic freedom must be tied to a broader struggle against war, and austerity. The task is not to reform capitalist institutions, but to mobilize the independent social power of the working class against them.

17. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East

Africa

Namibia: 

Mill workers striking over pay locked out

Nigeria: 

Striking health workers continue stoppage, defy government intimidation

Europe

Belgium:

Public waste collectors in Ghent strike against attacks on working conditions

Germany:

Non-medical workers at Red Cross hospitals in Berlin strike for pay increases and reduced hours

Italy:

Steelworkers strike over workplace death caused by company negligence

Spain:

Tens of thousands of doctors strike for better pay, hours and working conditions

United Kingdom:

Strike by Further Education lecturers across England over pay

Strike by teachers across 20 schools in West Midlands, England against compulsory redundancies

UK Diligenta staff hold one-week stoppage over pay

Special needs transport workers at Leeds city council walk out over safety fears
  
Transport coordination staff at UK West Yorkshire Combined Authority walk out over pay

Middle East

Israel:

Student strike in occupied East Jerusalem as Israel restricts access of West Bank teachers 

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.