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