Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Gunman charged with attempted assassination of Trump: The political issues
According to a statement that he distributed prior to the incident, Allen, aged 31, was horrified by being implicated in the crimes of the Trump administration and sought to target senior Trump officials, though his attempt did not place any of these officials in direct danger. Allen was arraigned Monday on three felony counts, including one of attempted assassination of the president, which carries a life prison sentence.
Marxists oppose such attacks from a principled and political standpoint. Individual acts of violence do not advance the struggle against reaction. They substitute the acts of an isolated individual for the conscious political mobilization of the working masses. Regardless of the crimes of the intended target—and those of Trump are monumental—the overriding issue is the political consequences of such violence. Whatever the motive of the attacker, the result is to hand the government a pretext for expanding repression and the criminalization of opposition.
It is, however, necessary to point to the staggering hypocrisy and cowardice that has characterized the response from the media and political establishment. With its characteristic stupidity, the media treats the event as if it bears no relationship to the pervasive and systematic violence that saturates American life, promoted by the state and the ruling class, headed by a president who wallows in bloodcurdling rhetoric and conducts himself like a mob boss.
The response of political figures, in the US and internationally, follows the same script. Wrapped in the sanctimonious refrain that “there is no place for violence in politics,” officials issue moralistic platitudes while defending or presiding over governments whose policy is organized violence.
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As always, the cowardly and complicit response of the Democrats—incapable of saying anything true for fear of legitimizing popular opposition—only encourages Trump and the Republicans to go on the offensive. Party leaders seized on the incident to escalate incitement and repression—denouncing a “radicalized left,” portraying the event as the “inevitable result” of opposition to the regime, and demanding more police powers and expanded funding for the repressive apparatus.
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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt gave this campaign its most explicit formulation. “This political violence stems from a systemic demonization of [Trump] and his supporters,” she declared on Monday, blaming “elected members of the Democrat party and even some in the media.”
Leavitt went further, insisting that those who “constantly, falsely, label the president as a fascist … and compare him to Hitler … are fueling this kind of violence” and denouncing what she called a “left-wing cult of hatred.” The aim is to declare political criticism a form of “violence” and to justify a violent crackdown.
In fact, the vast majority of acts of organized political violence in the United States has come from the right—from armed militia networks and far-right extremists. The past decade has seen repeated, escalating right-wing violence: the mobilization of fascistic forces on January 6, 2021; high-profile attacks and assassination plots against public officials; and acts of individual violence carried out by far-right figures like Kyle Rittenhouse. For years, federal assessments and major research centers have identified far-right extremism as the principal source of deadly domestic terrorism and political violence in the country.
At the same time, if anything is “fueling” acts like that attributed to Cole Tomas Allen is, above all, the criminality of the government itself, combined with a political structure that blocks any genuine avenue for the mass opposition of workers and youth to find expression. The deliberate suppression and diversion of popular anger by the Democratic Party and the trade union apparatus only deepens the sense of frustration and impotence, creating conditions in which desperate, ill-advised and destructive individual actions can emerge.
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The way forward lies not in individual violence, but in the development of the class struggle, which opens the possibility of a far more conscious, collective and optimistic road: the independent mobilization of the working class against war, dictatorship and the capitalist order that produces them.
Settling accounts with Trump is not a matter of individual acts or the removal of one man. It is a struggle against the capitalist state and the ruling class interests it serves—war abroad, repression at home. The only force capable of stopping this descent into barbarism is the working class, acting consciously and independently, mobilizing its social power against the entire apparatus of militarism, dictatorship and oligarchic rule.
2. Gettysburg and the New Birth of Freedom—then and now
World Socialist Web Site contributor and historian Tom Mackaman delivered a lecture to the International Youth and Students for Social Equality at Gettysburg University on April 23.
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Tom Mackaman:
Our moment is also piled high with danger. The counterrevolution spearheaded by the American ruling class, and all of its political representatives, puts in the shade even the designs of the South’s old slaveocracy. It is a ruling class that is seeking to turn back history, as if the past three centuries of human progress had never taken place. No realm is left unmolested—from basic democratic and human rights to the social right to an education, from infrastructure to culture, from history to science.
Consider just one example—the counterrevolution being waged on public health, and think of what this attack means in light of the history of medicine. It is not widely known that the greatest share of the soldiers who died in the Civil War were taken by disease and sickness, in fact, two-thirds, or 500,000 of the estimated 750,000 total deaths. Of the remaining 250,000 killed in battle, about half died after failed medical interventions, particularly amputations. American medicine had not yet adopted the germ theory of disease. The great pioneers who established that theory—Ignaz Semmelweis, who proved that doctors themselves were transmitting fatal infections in maternity wards; Louis Pasteur, who demonstrated that microorganisms caused fermentation and disease; Joseph Lister, who developed antiseptic surgical technique; and Robert Koch, who identified the specific bacteria responsible for tuberculosis, cholera and anthrax—were either just beginning their work or had not yet had their findings accepted by the medical establishment. It was not understood how infection and bacteria spread. There was no concept of antiseptic surgery, so field surgeons often moved between amputations by wiping the blade down with a rag. Here at Gettysburg, it should be added, the “field surgeon” was literally that—at work out of doors or in barns, often with doors on sawhorses converted to tables.
The primitive character of medicine in the war sheds light on a larger reality. Before the Civil War, life expectancy in the US was but 40 years, a figure that was driven down by the large number of youth who did not survive the infectious diseases that culled children at a frightful rate. Even Lincoln’s family was not spared: In 1850 his three-year-old son, Eddie, died of tuberculosis, and in 1862, during the Civil War, Lincoln lost his 11-year-old boy Willie to typhoid fever contracted from the contaminated White House water supply. Typhoid and tuberculosis were but two of the killers. Diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough, cholera, smallpox, influenza and measles also ravaged the population—the last of which is being revived by anti-science “health policies” targeting universal vaccination.
Life expectancy in the United States grew to nearly 79 years over the next century and a half, gains that demographers attribute overwhelmingly to public health measures, peaking in 2014 before plateauing and setting on a downward decline, even before the COVID pandemic. And this decline in longevity is concentrated entirely in the working class. One new study this year found that those who live in the bottom 50 percent of the American income brackets can expect to live seven years shorter lives than the richest 1 percent. Could there be any greater indictment of this literally diseased social order? The rich have a right to life that workers do not.
Being revived by America’s ruling class is the aristocratic principle. As Lincoln described it,
It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
We could add, it is the same tyrannical principle in the mouths of capitalist politicians.
The saying that behind every great fortune there is a crime is attributed to Balzac. When we speak of chattel slavery, the criminal aspect of the labor exploitation is obvious to us. Historians estimate that in 1860, three-fifths of the richest 1 percent of all American households were slave owners. But the wealth accumulation of the slavocracy is mere child’s play compared to the fortunes of today’s superrich.
We have by now become familiar with the basic data on wealth inequality in the US, which has been growing inexorably since the early 1970s, more than a half-century ago, aided and abetted by both capitalist political parties. But let me cite one more data point: There are roughly 900 billionaires in the US, about .000026 of the population. They hoard a combined wealth of $8 trillion. This $8 trillion for 900 people is the equivalent of all federal spending on K-12 public education for eight years, which serves about 50 million children per year. And supposedly there isn’t enough money for the schools! We often hear media pundits telling us that “we can’t afford” this or that service—education, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security. This is 180 degrees wrong. The working class can no longer afford the rich.
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The ruling class’s moral bankruptcy, revealed so nakedly by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, is the mirror image of its financial bankruptcy. The sovereign US debt now stands at $39 trillion, and will very soon reach $40 trillion. There is no prospect of paying it away, under conditions in which the two parties rally behind ever new rounds of tax cuts for the superrich and vote through ever greater levels of military spending to wage their neo-colonial wars against working people in other countries. The dollar, the preeminent symbol of American power, will inevitably be debased. Workers and retirees, the youth and the elderly, will again be made to pay.
The development of AI, far from opening broad new horizons for capitalism, only deepens its crisis. In the hands of a democratically, cooperatively run society, that is, under socialism, AI and robotics will be used to alleviate human beings from the most taxing, monotonous and dangerous jobs. Production will increase and necessary labor time will decrease, as it should. The deployment of augmented human intelligence will conquer broad new vistas in science.
But under capitalism, AI will be used to slash jobs and benefits, immiserate new millions, and tighten police state surveillance. Moreover, it will only exacerbate the gathering profits crisis, as surplus value, as Marx long ago showed, can only be extracted from human, living labor. The contours of a major financial crisis are already beginning to come into relief. Trillions of dollars have been spent to develop a massive AI buildout. But profits so far derived from productivity increases emerging out of these facilities, as opposed to profits cornered from financial speculation on the manipulation of tech share values, have been minimal. This is nothing new. Through wave after wave of technological innovation, from globalization, computerization, to AI, from container shipping to the development of just-in-time production, to the internet, there has been one constant: the relentless, remorseless decline of American capitalism.
The horizons of the American ruling class are crowding in all around it. It sees no way out, other than war and police state repression. As stated on the World Socialist Web Site, the second Trump administration signals the violent realignment of the forms of political rule with the actual physiognomy of the society. And this, in the final analysis, is the origin of the Frankenstein monster of American politics, Donald Trump, a creature of the shady borderlands of real estate, casino gaming, entertainment and organized crime. And it is this crisis that is the origin of the counterrevolution that Trump leads—not by accident, but because he has been placed there, selected by the decisive sections of American capitalism.
One of the questions long posed by historians is why it was that the slave oligarchy of the South risked everything in seceding from the Union and launching a war to perpetuate and expand slavery. The outcome of their counterrevolution was the complete opposite of what the masters expected. As the great historian of the American Civil War, James McPherson, puts it: “Seldom in history has a counterrevolution so quickly provoked the very revolution it sought to preempt.” Lincoln, as is well known, began the war first as a means of preserving the Union with slavery intact—though, like the founding fathers, he believed that if slavery were hemmed in it would ultimately perish. But the ferocity of the slaveowners’ counterrevolution propelled Lincoln to reach for revolutionary solutions: Emancipation and the destruction of the entire southern social order.
The Trump administration has likewise launched a preemptive counterrevolution. It has deployed military-style crackdowns on major American cities, most notoriously in Minneapolis and St. Paul, where ICE Gestapo assassinated peacefully protesting citizens. There has never been such a far-reaching attack on basic constitutional and democratic principles as that leveled from the centers of power in Washington D.C., with the criminalization of immigrant workers only the stalking horse for the much larger target: the working class as a whole.
There is today no mass socialist movement. And yet everywhere the ruling class raises the threat of “socialism.” Trump does not mean by this the “socialism” of his chum Zohran Mamdani, who has abandoned all of the radical phraseology that he used to lure New York’s workers and youth to vote him into office. In fact, even Mamdani’s most milquetoast reform proposals, such as cheaper bus fares, are also in the scrapheap. The nightmare that haunts the minds of the ruling class is a politically conscious, politically independent working class, fighting for a political program that actually expresses its real needs: for international solidarity with workers everywhere, for an end to capitalist wars, for good jobs and good pay, for healthcare, a clean environment, for access to culture and beauty.
This is why the fundamental task confronting the youth here at Gettysburg and everywhere else is to turn to the working class, the only social force that has both the power and the need to stop the world’s descent into barbarism and planetary destruction; why the revolutionary duty is now more essential than ever: to tell the truth.
3. Global military spending surges to record $2.887 trillion
Global military spending hit a record $2.887 trillion in 2025—the highest level ever recorded and the 11th consecutive year of growth, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported Monday.
The surge in military spending comes as the Trump administration is waging war all over the world, from Venezuela to Iran, and as the European imperialist powers and Japan are carrying out a massive rearmament drive coupled with a systematic attack on social spending.
The United States, with $954 billion in 2025 military spending, remained the largest military spender on earth, accounting for one-third of global military expenditure.
“Spending approved by the U.S. Congress for 2026 has risen to over $1 trillion, a substantial increase from 2025, and could rise further to $1.5 trillion in 2027 if President Trump’s latest budget proposal is accepted,” said Nan Tian, the program director of SIPRI’s military expenditure work.
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Worldwide, governments are slashing social spending to fund rearmament. SIPRI researchers warned that the diversion of national resources will mean cuts to social services, healthcare and development assistance. Trump’s $1.5 trillion Pentagon request would be paid for in part by a 10 percent cut to non-defense discretionary spending—healthcare, scientific research, housing and education.
At a private White House Easter luncheon on April 1, Trump put the trade-off in plain terms. He told Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, in his retelling, “Don’t send any money for daycare, because the United States can’t take care of daycare.” He explained: “We’re fighting wars.”
4. US unions’ “May Day Strong” seeks to neuter May Day
In an effort to contain the political radicalization of workers and young people, the AFL-CIO bureaucracy is intervening with its own “May Day Strong” campaign. It consists of a series of events throughout the country, ranging from picnics and “labor fairs” to demonstrations in major cities. In Chicago, it has an official character. May 1 has been designated a “day of civic action” in the city’s school district, with voluntary participation in rallies, and the events are officially backed by Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union official.
That thousands will take part in these demonstrations is a significant milestone in a country where May Day was all but banned from the official calendar, and anticommunism has long functioned as a state religion, including inside the unions.
There is also a profound historical significance to mass participation in Chicago. It was the site of the first May Day in 1886, where a mass demonstration for the eight-hour day ended in the bloody police massacre known as the Haymarket Affair.
May Day, founded on a world basis three years later, is a revolutionary and socialist holiday. Rosa Luxemburg explained its significance in 1913: “The brilliant basic idea of May Day is the autonomous, immediate stepping forward of the proletarian masses, the political mass action of the millions of workers who otherwise are atomized by the barriers of the state in the day-to-day parliamentary affairs.”
But while Luxemburg’s words will resonate with the large majority in attendance Friday, the goal of the official speakers and organizers is precisely to reinforce “the barriers of the state.” They are attempting to turn the events into platforms for stumping for the Democratic Party.
For well over a century, the American union bureaucracy was overwhelmingly hostile to May Day and largely ignored it, instead observing Labor Day as a nationalist and non-political alternative in the fall. This flowed from the bureaucracy’s explicit support for capitalism and its intense anticommunism and “America First” nationalism.If they are now partly changing their tune, it is because they want to get in front of the growing movement to the left, dilute the radicalization and divert it into harmless channels.
In the weeks leading up to May Day, the union bureaucracy has carried out a series of betrayals, keeping hundreds of thousands of workers off the picket line.
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Earlier this year, with growing demands by workers and young people for a general strike against ICE occupation of Minneapolis, the unions declared strikes were illegal under the terms of the pro-corporate labor agreements they signed. Instead, they diverted opposition into “No work, no school, no shopping” protests, which largely turned out to be consumer boycotts and impotent appeals to Target and other corporations. By doing so, the union apparatus not only stumped for the Democrats but played directly into Trump’s hands by suppressing organized resistance from below.
Here, too, there is a bitter historical irony. Minneapolis was the site of the 1934 general strike, led by Trotskyists in the Teamsters, which marked a turning point in the growth of industrial unionism during the Great Depression. Workers defeated attempts by police and the city’s business elite to drown the strike in violence.
While opposing a general strike in 2026, UAW President Shawn Fain is promoting a “general strike” on May Day in 2028, timed to correspond with the Democrats’ campaign for president. This was first announced after the sellout contract in 2023, which cost thousands of workers their jobs. It is safely placed in the distant future, allowing the bureaucracy to posture without taking action.
Fain’s defenders claim that a general strike now is unrealistic because they “take time” to organize. This is a fraud. The union bureaucracy, tied by a million threads to the corporate and political establishment, has no intention of organizing such a fight. A general strike will only emerge through the development of a movement of rank-and-file workers in every factory and workplace—in a rebellion against the pro-corporate bureaucracy.
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As for the Democrats, they refuse to take any action to fight Trump because they are terrified that a mass movement would threaten capitalism itself. On Iran, they oppose only Trump’s incompetence, not the war aims themselves. In major cities across the country, they are carrying out massive austerity. They are a party of Wall Street and US imperialism.
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One of the chief lessons of May Day is that the emancipation of the working class requires a struggle for independence from capitalist politics in all forms, and from the agents of capitalism in the union bureaucracy.
Massive struggles are on the horizon in the United States. It is impossible for a country with this level of inequality and such open criminality by the political elite to suppress social tensions indefinitely with dishonest phrases and maneuvers. The logic of the development is towards a mass political strike, unifying the struggles of the working class against exploitation into a broader fight against American capitalism.
To realize this potential, an alternative leadership must be trained and developed. Such a leadership must be guided by a historically and internationally grounded perspective. May Day is imbued with the struggle for socialism and an end to capitalism and war. These powerful traditions must be revived under conditions of a growing movement of resistance around the world, which is increasingly taking the form of a rebellion against the pro-war and pro-capitalist union apparatus.
5. Little Lake City teachers continue strike, while UTLA claims LA teachers ratified new contract
Around 200 teachers in the Little Lake City School District (LLCSD) have been on strike since April 16.
The district serves students in Santa Fe Springs, Norwalk and Downey in Los Angeles County. The vast majority of students come from low-income and disadvantaged households, and most qualify for free or reduced school lunches and other assistance programs. Teachers are demanding better healthcare, smaller class sizes and special education support.
While the strike has wide support, it is being isolated by the union bureaucracy. Only two days before Little Lake City teachers walked out, union officials canceled a far larger strike in Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest. The strike was called off in the dead of night, following last-minute talks which included LA Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat.
Last Friday, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) claimed its members ratified a new three-year contract with a 92 percent vote in favor. The size of the outcome raised eyebrows among many educators, who were opposed to the deal’s inadequate pay increases, with newer teachers receiving higher raises than older ones, pitting teachers against each other. Worst of all, the contract paves the way for the district to move towards closing an $800 million deficit over the summer.
Having isolated LLCSD teachers, the UTLA bureaucracy covered its tracks by by calling for UTLA members to show up at LLCSD pickets last Friday, when all LAUSD schools were already closed for Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.
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Diana, a special education teacher:
“In special education, we had four teachers in our program, and now we only have three. So I have 18 students right now, sixth graders, with behavioral needs, with severe educational needs. And they need support, and I don’t have an aide. I haven’t had an aide since January this year.
“The rich keep getting richer, and it’s like the cost of living goes up but everything else goes up around us except for our pay. So it’s really unfair. That $1,400 in extra healthcare costs, that’s nothing to [billionaires]. That’s probably a night out or a dinner to them, but to us that’s rent, that’s food, that’s groceries, that’s car payments. So, yeah, that’s a huge effect on us, and from what we’re seeing, they could care less.”
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The struggle is reaching a new phase with the ongoing LLCSD strike and austerity coming soon in Los Angeles. Opposition must be organized from below through the formation of rank-and-file committees, consisting only of teachers, parents and students that will fight for independent action. Not only must Los Angeles teachers unite with teachers in Little Lake City, but they must reach out to workers across other districts to fight for a broader movement in defense of public education.
Peru’s nominally “left” presidential candidate Roberto Sánchez Palomino is poised to advance to the second round after securing second place in the national vote on April 12.
According to the ONPE (National Office of Electoral Processes), which had counted only 95.97 percent of the ballots two weeks after the elections, Keiko Fujimori received 2,753,825 votes (17.06 percent), Roberto Sánchez of Together for Peru 1,943,155 votes (12.04 percent) and the far-right Rafael López Aliaga of Popular Renewal 1,918,981 votes (11.89 percent).
With a difference of 24,174 votes, what until last week was considered a virtual tie now makes it highly unlikely for López Aliaga to overtake Sánchez.
The media, controlled by a handful of aristocratic families, diligently went to work to cast doubt on the results, publishing large front-page headlines: “Fraud,” “ONPE’s incompetence in counting votes,” and “New election.”
Television news programs were not far behind, giving voice to the concerns about “a new Castillo in the presidency”—referring to the left nationalist President Pedro Castillo ousted in a parliamentary coup in December 2022.
The dominant sections of the bourgeoisie and their corrupt politicians feared any expression of left opposition to the dominant far-right parties, even in a tame fashion like the Sánchez candidacy. They are unwilling to accept even the smallest obstacle to their anti-worker policies and profiteering through the state.
The elections come after twelve months of a growing wave of class struggle. There were more than a dozen 24-hour public transportation strikes in Lima and Callao, supported by the entire citizenry and betrayed by union leaders who collaborated with the police. In addition, 60,000 EsSalud workers held a militant two-week strike in July 2025. University students, Gen Z youth, and other sectors have begun taking to the streets of Lima and other cities, clashing with the police, most recently to protest hikes in transit fares.
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The explosive levels of opposition to the entire political establishment were mainly expressed in abstention and spoiled ballots. Of the 27.3 million Peruvians eligible to vote, 8.4 million or 30.8 percent cast null votes, blank votes, or did not vote. That is three out of every 10 voters, more than the top two candidates combined, either cast a protest ballot or stayed home out of opposition to the entire bankrupt bourgeois democratic system in Peru and its disregard for widespread poverty, informal employment, corruption, citizen insecurity, extortions, and other widely felt issues.
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As the most prominent representative for the dominant sections of the national bourgeoisie and foreign capital, Keiko Fujimori is the heir to her father's 1993 Constitution, which was aimed against the interests of the working class, small farmers and small businesses.
Her entire family is neck-deep in corruption, but all the top candidates are as well. The most well-known case against her is “The Cocktail Parties.” She allegedly invited businesspeople, bankers, and other millionaires who paid US$500 to attend fundraising meetings to finance her 2011 and 2016 campaigns.
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Roberto Sánchez Palomino is the presidential candidate for Together for Peru—a nominally center-left, bourgeois party—with a background that includes positions in various branches of government. He served as Minister of Foreign Trade and Tourism between 2021 and 2022 during Pedro Castillo’s administration.
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His political platform has a populist slant disguised as progressive: promoting education, health, science, and micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises. Sánchez's proposals would place his administration in a head-on clash with the Fujimori-era Constitution, based on unfettered dominance of free markets and foreign investment.
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Sánchez has a murky political past. As a member of the Humanist Party, he supported its integration into the government of Alan García. During García's second term, the June 2009 “Baguazo Massacre” took place. At that time, Humanist Party leader Yehude Simon was serving as President of the Council of Ministers with Roberto Sánchez as part of his government.
The National Police's attempt to evict Amazonian indigenous communities resulted in the deaths of 33 people (police officers and civilians). Sánchez helped cover up this massive crime, with García combining the deployment of special forces with racist insults against the protesters, who sought to block oil companies from exploiting the Amazon region.
Under the party label Together for Peru, Sánchez would then join several coalitions with Stalinist and pseudo-left forces, including with Veronika Mendoza’s New Peru for the 2021 elections, before joining the Castillo administration as a minister. Prosecutors have launched several investigations over corruption under his term, including over the misappropriation of funds for personal use and for influence peddling.
Independently of who assumes the presidency on July 28, the ruling class will continue its offensive against the social and democratic rights of workers.
Not only will the newly created bicameral Congress retain the power to remove presidents and name key officials, the campaign and debates saw all the top candidates maintain a “tough on crime” focus, synonymous with building up the state repressive apparatus.
Their proposals included:
(1) the reinstatement of the death penalty
(2) death for extortionists
(3) death for corrupt members of Congress,
(4) the construction of several prisons at altitudes above 4,000 meters above sea level, an extreme climate,
(5) the reorganization of the police force with increased funding, modern weaponry, and intelligence equipment,
(6) a reduction in the number of ministries, which would mean mass layoffs.
The opposition of Sánchez to Fujimorismo is not based on a defense of workers’ rights and social programs. Instead, his populist rhetoric serves as a cover for the sorting out of the conflicting interests of different sections of the ruling class, which compete over the distribution of profits and ties to foreign capital as the Trump administration goes on an aggressive offensive against the influence of China, Peru’s main trading partner.
7. Meta and Microsoft announce mass layoffs, as AI jobs massacre continues
The business press has normalized the cuts as a critical “efficiency” move. The Wall Street Journal headlined Meta’s layoffs as part of a “relentless shift toward AI,” reducing the question to a management strategy rather than social devastation. Bloomberg’s coverage, as summarized in companion reporting, described the layoffs as a response to “heavy AI spending” and a need to “trim workforces,” language that conceals the class content of the decision behind balance-sheet jargon.
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The terminations themselves are being organized in a way meant to maximize fear and discipline. Reuters reported that Meta’s layoffs were initially leaked, then confirmed, with more cuts planned later in 2026, producing an atmosphere in which workers are left waiting for notices while management continues business as usual.
CNBC reported that Microsoft’s buyouts are structured as a first in the company’s 51-year history, with workers being pushed out under the guise of “voluntary” separation.
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Wall Street’s response has been predictable. Meta’s stock fell on Thursday on the layoff news, only to rebound and exceed previous levels. Microsoft shares went through a similar downward cycle on Thursday and then bounced back by Monday.
The Wall Street sentiment is bound up with the significant capital expenditures required for AI development. Reporting cited in CNBC and elsewhere notes that Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are expected to spend some $650 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, much of it connected to AI infrastructure.
Wall Street is effectively cheering a model in which workers are discarded so that speculative bets on AI can be funded and corporate valuations preserved and increased. The market celebrates “productivity” because the financial benefit from gutting employees translates into increased shareholder value.
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has already explained the class logic of the new wave of job cuts. In March, we wrote that executives were openly justifying mass layoffs as the product of artificial intelligence and “new ways of working.” In a year-end review, the WSWS warned that “AI and automation were used to implement thousands of layoffs” while corporations continued funneling money into buybacks and executive compensation. That analysis is now being acknowledged by corporate statements and business news reporting.
The latest surge of layoffs at Meta and Microsoft must be understood as part of a deliberate corporate offensive against the working class. The financial oligarchy is using it to reorganize work, intensify exploitation and shift the costs of technological change onto the remaining workforce. While the corporate press describes these cuts as strategic and prudent, the socio-economic purpose is unmistakable: The jobs of tens of thousands of workers are being sacrificed by the multi-trillion dollar tech giants with the expectation of another surge in their market value.
8. NYC home care workers end hunger strike on disputed promise of vote on 24-hour shifts
A weeklong hunger strike by New York City home care workers fighting to ban 24-hour shifts ended Thursday after City Council Speaker Julie Menin’s office told organizers the “No More 24” Act would be brought to a vote by May 14—a commitment her office immediately denied making. The strike, the second in two years, followed repeated broken commitments and months of inaction after multiple protests at City Hall. It ended without a concrete gain, leaving the workers’ struggle once again suspended pending a future vote.
This action demonstrates that workers cannot rely on the City Council or any existing political channels to advance their demands. Appeals to City Council Democrats, including Menin and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who voiced support for the bill while taking no action, have led to a dead end. The determination shown by the strikers must now find a new form. To win their demands, home care workers must organize independently and mobilize broader layers of New York City workers confronting the same conditions of overwork, low pay and inadequate healthcare.
The bill is not being judged based on workers’ conditions, but on its financial impact. Ending 24-hour shifts would require increased Medicaid spending. At every stage, officials have cited funding as the decisive issue while postponing a vote and extending “ongoing discussions.” That cost question places the decision in Albany, where Medicaid funding is controlled. Reports that the office of Kathy Hochul has pressed City Council leadership to delay a vote, along with repeated insistence that any change must be “paid for,” underscore that the demand to abolish 24-hour shifts has been subordinated to budget priorities.
Responsibility is passed between city and state authorities, each citing the same financial constraints, while no action is taken. The legislative process thus operates as a mechanism for delaying and containing the workers’ demands.
The hunger strike was carried out in isolation, without any mobilization by 1199SEIU, which represents roughly 200,000 healthcare workers in New York City. Despite the serious health risks faced by workers on hunger strike and the well-documented physical and psychological toll of 24-hour shifts—including chronic pain, injury and sleep deprivation—the union has taken no action to organize broader opposition, call strikes or mobilize its membership.
Instead, the struggle has been confined to a small group of workers appealing to City Council officials. This isolation has allowed the political establishment to delay action without facing pressure from the wider workforce. The union leadership’s silence, even as the strike ended on a disputed promise, underscores its refusal to mobilize the power of the workers it claims to represent.
In this way, the absence of any organized intervention by the union apparatus has been decisive. By keeping the struggle limited and disconnected from broader layers of workers, it has ensured that the workers’ demands remain subject to the same political processes that have already failed to deliver results.
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Within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), rank-and-file members voted to support abolishing 24-hour shifts, only to have that position overridden by the organization’s leadership, which moved to block official backing for the bill. This reflects the same alignment seen at the city level. The leadership of the DSA acted in line with the union apparatus and Democratic Party officials, refusing to support the workers’ demands as the bill was delayed. Figures such as Mayor Mamdani have voiced support while remaining within a political framework that has produced no action.
The result is that even where support develops from below, it is blocked and redirected. Workers are encouraged to appeal to elected officials and established organizations, only to be brought back to the same processes of delay and inaction. In this way, the political environment functions to contain the struggle and prevent it from developing into a broader movement capable of forcing change.
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To win their demands, home care workers must organize independently of the union apparatus and the Democratic Party, building rank-and-file committees under workers’ direct control and uniting with broader layers of New York City workers confronting the same conditions of overwork, low pay and inadequate healthcare. Only through the independent mobilization of the working class can the power necessary to impose fundamental changes in working conditions be brought to bear.
9. Oppose the political persecution of Dr. Ranjeet Brar and all health workers!
The Socialist Equality Party (UK) opposes the arrest and persecution of Dr. Ranjeet Brar, general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Maintaining its irreconcilable political differences with the Maoist CPGB-ML, the SEP denounces this anti-democratic act aimed at suppressing and intimidating anti-war speech and sentiment.
Brar, employed as a National Health Service (NHS) consultant vascular and endovascular surgeon at King’s College Hospital, was arrested on April 9 by Metropolitan Police officers at his home under Section 18 of the Public Order Act—on allegations of a racially aggravated offence. He was taken to a police station despite him being the only adult in the house caring for his children, the youngest of whom is six years old.
A statement by the CPGB-ML issued April 9, said, “Not only have the police arrested him, they arranged to have him suspended from his work as an NHS surgeon for at least two weeks—no doubt with a view to further suspension and ultimately with the aim of depriving him of work.”
Brar was released later that evening. He has now been arrested five times over the past few years, targeted in connection with the Labour government’s clampdown on protests against the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza—backed by Washington and London.
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Last month, Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan, a trainee NHS surgeon—with an impeccable record over seven years—was arrested under the Terrorism Act (2000) and the Public Order Act (1986) in connection with statements opposing the genocide in Gaza.
This was her fifth arrest—part of a campaign of intimidation and harassment led by Zionist lobby groups, police agencies and the Starmer Labour government.
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Following the latest mass arrest earlier this month of 523 peaceful protesters in London—who carried a sign reading: “I support Palestine Action”—the total number arrested for indicating support for the group stands at 3,302. These arrests were carried out despite the UK’s High Court having ruled the PA proscription unlawful on February 13.
On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, the Court of Appeal will hear Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s appeal of that decision.
These unprecedented attacks on democratic rights and freedoms must be opposed. The SEP demands that the charges against Brar and Aladwan are dropped and that they are allowed to resume their jobs, free from intimidation and attacks on the right to free speech, assembly and association.
10. United Kingdom: Your Party’s purge of socialists: the rotten end of the Corbyn project
With its majority vote to proscribe nominally socialist organizations from Your Party and purge “dual members” belonging to them, Jeremy Corbyn’s factional allies on the Central Executive Committee (CEC) stand exposed as witch-hunters against the left who have effectively self-destructed their organization.
More than a year after 800,000 people expressed support for a new mass socialist party to fight Labour’s pro-war, pro-austerity and genocide-enabling government, Corbyn’s “The Many” faction has confirmed its central remit in building a Labour Party Mark II, one bitterly hostile to the socialist aspirations of workers and youth.
Corbyn’s clique, with a comfortable majority on the CEC, tabled their plans for a purge of socialists at a meeting of the CEC on Sunday, April 12. It was the main item of business, based on proposals set out in a 7-page document titled “Dual Party Membership Eligibility”.
A list of parties that “don’t meet the criteria for dual membership” was presented to the CEC, set out in bullet points: “Socialist Workers Party, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Socialist Party, Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), Scottish Socialist Party, Socialist Equality Party, Revolutionary Communist Party.”
This list, the CEC explained, was “not exhaustive”. In support of its mission of building “a broad left party”, the CEC voted to ban all “small self-described revolutionary parties that operate according to principles of democratic centralism”. All of these had “strategic objectives” that were “incompatible with the values and constitutional framework of Your Party.”
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Corbyn’s party seeks to divert anti-capitalist sentiment into parliamentary channels to prevent a developing break by the working class with Labour from acquiring a mass socialist and revolutionary character. His guiding star remains The British Road to Socialism, the postwar program of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which insisted on socialism’s achievement through parliament via the election of a left-wing Labour government.
While bureaucrats like Murphy have spent months decrying the “Marxist sects” and their supposedly clandestine activities within YP, Corbyn’s CEC has presided over an internal regime even more anti-democratic than Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC).
Neither the identity nor the number of YP CEC members who voted for the dual membership ban is known—not even by CEC members! A secret ballot was introduced for this purpose, justified as a means of preventing leaks. Forbes simply declared each motion carried. Once the ban on socialist groups had passed, Pontius Corbyn arrived on cue, having left the dirty work of purges and proscriptions to others.
11. Australia: Labor’s aged home care cuts continue
In an anxious move in response to a popular outcry, the Albanese government last week announced that older people in its new Support at Home program will no longer have to pay for showering, dressing and continence care.
Despite the reversal of the most cruel and humiliating aspects of the scheme—such as paying up to $50 for a full-fee shower—hundreds of thousands of retired workers, mostly depending on poverty-line aged pensions, are still facing prohibitive costs under the program, which the Labor government launched last November.
While the government will now pay for immediate clinical expenses, such as nursing and allied services, participants will still have to pay up to 50 percent—depending on their pension status and means testing—of the charges for transport and mobility support, and up to 80 percent of the charges for everyday living services such as cleaning, home maintenance, gardening, meals and social support.
Plus, home modifications are still capped at $15,000 for someone’s entire lifetime, with an additional $15,000 available for assistive technology like wheelchairs.
As many of those affected and advocate groups have protested, many aged people, especially those with infirmities, illnesses or disabilities, will be unable to afford essential services as the cost-of-living soars for all working-class households.
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Those most in need of support will face higher costs, effectively punishing them for their failing physical and mental health and their frailty. The burden will also fall on relatives and friends as a result.
Moreover, the underlying thrust of the scheme will intensify over coming years as more profit-making service providers move in to take advantage of the privatised aged home care market that Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s previous Labor government initiated in 2013.
This attack on retired workers goes hand-in-glove with Labor’s plan to force off or deny access for 300,000 people to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) over the next four years. Health Minister Mark Butler outlined the twin assault at the National Press Club last Wednesday.
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Support at Home continues the CDC model, but with extensive co-payments. Full pensioners now contribute 17.5 percent toward everyday living services, whereas many previously paid very little or nothing beyond a basic daily fee.
This is a levy on the poorest retired working people. Around 75 percent of participants will be full aged pensioners. Only 4 percent of recipients are expected to be self-funded retirees.
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In announcing the backdown on personal care charges last week, Health Minister Butler made similar claims, saying the government “has listened to older Australians, their families, advocates and providers—and in the 2026 Budget will invest $3 billion to deliver more beds, more packages and better care for older Australians.”
Butler said the May 12 budget would deliver an additional 5,000 residential beds a year. But that will nowhere near overcome the crisis resulting from the fact that more than 200,000 people are also on a Support at Home waiting list, hoping to avoid having to go into a residential facility. About 120,000 people are waiting to be assessed for aged care at home. Another 87,000 have approval but no package yet.
Last year, in introducing the Support at Home legislation, Aged Care and Seniors Minister Sam Rae claimed that only 90,000 people were waiting and that the proposed release of 83,000 new packages by mid-2026 would effectively solve the problem. Given Labor’s record, this is another fraud.
In fact, the figure of 200,000 waiting is a massive underestimate because it does not include people waiting for long established services such as Meals on Wheels, community transport, home nursing and other services funded via the Commonwealth Home Support Program, which the government intends to shut down by 2027.
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Across the board, from the NDIS to aged care, Labor governments have led the way in transforming care services into a for-profit market. Under the slogan of “rights-based aged care,” they have created markets in which vulnerable people do not have a right to necessary services and, even if approved for services, may not be able to afford to pay for them.
In the leadup to the May 12 budget, the Albanese Labor government is going further to meet the demands of the corporate elite for cuts to social programs, while pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into military spending in preparation to join further criminal US-led wars, from the Middle East to China.
To answer this offensive, a political struggle is essential against the trade union-backed Labor government and all its apologists, for a socialist program based on social needs, not the profits of the billionaires.
12. UNDP report exposes vulnerability of South Asia’s economies to US war against Iran
The US-led imperialist war against Iran is intensifying the economic crisis across the world, with South Asian countries among the worst hit as confirmed by a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report.
Washington’s indiscriminate bombing of multiple sites inside Iran triggered retaliatory strikes across the region. This led to the US blocking commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the global energy supply normally passes. The blockade has significantly affected South Asian countries, where oil storage facilities are minimal.
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The UNDP report entitled Military Escalation in the Middle East: Human Development Impacts Across Asia and the Pacific (April 2026) warns that higher fuel, freight, and input costs are “diminishing household purchasing power, raising food insecurity, straining public budgets, and weakening livelihoods” in underdeveloped Asian countries.
“Rising living costs are squeezing poor and near-poor households, while food and fertilizer prices increase, hitting ahead of key planting cycles, threaten to deepen food insecurity… Employment losses are concentrated in informal and micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME)-intensive sectors. Women, migrants, and low-income households face the greatest risks,” the report notes.
South Asia accounts for the largest share of people being pushed into poverty by the Iran war—the UNDP estimates an additional 8.8 million—with the region particularly exposed to rising food and energy costs and falling remittances.
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The report states that labor market effects in South Asia will be “regressive,” with low-skilled workers hit hardest. A one percentage point decline in GDP growth is associated with a 2-percentage-point increase in unemployment among lower-skilled workers. Women workers, migrants, and informal laborers are singled out as the most vulnerable.
The US war against Iran is inseparable from the broader descent into global war. South Asia’s ruling elites, whether aligned with Washington, Beijing, or balancing between them, will only deepen their attacks on the working class and the masses through increased austerity and social repression.
The only progressive answer is the independent mobilization of the working class across South Asia, the Middle East, and internationally against war, IMF austerity, and capitalism itself. This means fighting for workers’ governments and socialist policies that place society’s resources under the democratic control of the working class to meet human need, not profit and geopolitical plunder.
13. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Bolivia:
Canada:
Nova Scotia long term care workers’ strike continues to expand
Chile:
United States:
California state workers rally as contract talks for 100,000 workers begin
Venezuela:
Public university employees hold 24-hour protest strike
14. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
