The
European Parliament and EU states have agreed a new return regulation
that abolishes the fundamental right to asylum and normalises
collaboration with fascist parties.
Global
warming is raising the probability that a Super El Niño will develop
this year, resulting in widespread mixture of intense heat, drought and
flooding around the world. This will have devastating impacts on
billions of people.
After
years of mounting anger over worsening conditions and real pay cuts,
and a 98 percent vote for industrial action, many educators view the
agreement as another betrayal.
To
impose the brutal measures demanded by the IMF, Sri Lanka’s government,
backed by every section of the ruling elite, is preparing autocratic
forms of rule.
Within
the next 10 days, Elon Musk is set to become the world’s first
trillionaire, when SpaceX, the space launch monopoly he controls,
carries out the largest initial public offering in history.
The
DSA mayor did not attend the Israel Day parade, but his administration
provided the permits and police protection for a march featuring Israeli
officials implicated in genocide, annexation and ethnic cleansing.
Almost
two months on, hundreds of workers remain in jail on trumped-up charges
of violence and disorderly conduct, while labour activists whom the
authorities claim instigated the protests are being held without charge
under the draconian National Security Act.
Staff
at over 50 hospitals across Germany recently protested against the
government's planned cuts in the healthcare and nursing sectors, which
threaten wages, working conditions and the existence of many hospitals.
Acting
on the orders of the Liberal government, Canada’s border authorities
are systematically handing over asylum seekers to ICE, full in the
knowledge that they will be confined to concentration camp-like
conditions before being expelled from the US.
This
lecture marking the centenary of the 1926 general strike was delivered
by Socialist Equality Party (UK) National Secretary Chris Marsden to
public meetings in Sheffield, Manchester, Inverness, London and Glasgow,
That
First South Yorkshire was ultimately forced to retreat from its
insistence that the 7 percent offer was "final" was due to the
determination and unity of the drivers.
Labour
is presiding over a social catastrophe, including the deepest levels of
poverty in 30 years, and trailing the far-right Reform, the
Conservatives and the Greens in general election polls. If he
successfully becomes an MP, Burnham is expected to challenge Starmer for
the Labour leadership and to replace him in Downing Street.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union removed the last external
constraint on American power in the Middle East. With Moscow gone,
regimes such as Iraq, Syria, and South Yemen could no longer balance
between rival great powers; Washington emerged as the region’s sole
arbiter.
Far from inaugurating an era of peace, unipolarity freed
the US to compensate for its long‑term economic decline through
unrestrained military force. Over the next three decades, it launched a
chain of interventions—Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Iraq again, Libya,
Yemen, and now Iran—that defined the new imperial order.
The Gulf
War was the first expression of this shift. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of
Kuwait in 1990—undertaken under the illusion of tacit US tolerance—was
seized upon by the Bush administration to reassert American dominance.
Operation Desert Storm killed more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and
shattered Iraq’s infrastructure, with Bush vowing to return the country
“to the pre‑industrial age.”
To preserve the Arab coalition, Washington forced Israel to remain on
the sidelines, even withholding Identification Friend or Foe codes to
prevent retaliation against Iraqi Scud missiles. Yet the US stopped
short of regime change, fearing that a Kurdish or Shia victory would destabilize Türkiye. Instead, it imposed a decade of sanctions and
no‑fly zones that devastated Iraqi society while keeping Hussein weak.
*****
The Oslo Accords served US imperialism as a temporary mechanism for
managing, not resolving, the Palestinian question that has historically
been the single most powerful mobilizing force for anti-imperialist
sentiment across the Arab world and, increasingly, globally. Every
massacre, siege, settlement expansion, abuse and mistreatment generates
mass outrage that threatens to destabilize Washington’s client regimes.
The solution from Washington’s perspective was a containment operation,
while advancing several other imperialist objectives.
Oslo’s
fundamental achievement, from America’s standpoint, was converting the
PLO from an armed national liberation movement into a subcontracted
security apparatus. Arafat, in exchange for the fiction of eventual
statehood, agreed to recognize Israel, renounce armed struggle,
and—crucially—guarantee Israeli security. The Palestinian Authority that
emerged was not an embryonic state but a police force suppressing
Palestinian resistance on Israel’s behalf, while enriching a thin layer
of the Palestinian bourgeoisie via “developmental aid”. Oslo served to
tame the most radical of the Arab nationalist movements and put it to
work for the occupation it had pledged to end.
Oslo was also
driven by Israeli capital’s need to break out of national autarchy and
integrate into the wider Middle East economy in the era of globalization. Labour leader Shimon Peres stated the objective with
brutal candor in 1992: “We do not want a peace between nations. We want
a peace between markets”.
A Palestinian mini-state—non-contiguous, economically dependent,
providing cheap subcontracted labor—was the price of that integration
into European Union and Arab markets. Palestinian workers would be
excluded from Israel and replaced by even cheaper and more defenseless Asian migrants, while Palestinian consumers and territory would provide a
captive market. This was colonial economics dressed in the language of
peace.
For Washington, Oslo served another vital diplomatic purpose. It
would provide the Arab bourgeois regimes with political cover for their
collaboration with US imperialism. The Arab ruling classes in Egypt,
Jordan and Saudi Arabia could point to the “peace process” as evidence
that Washington was not simply an unconditional backer of Israeli
expansionism, making it easier to justify their own normalization with
Israel and their alignment with US strategic goals.
Likewise, the
primary purpose of Oslo’s hollow successor, the 2003 Road Map, was to
provide cover for the Iraq War and allow the Arab regimes to defend
their acquiescence in the invasion to their populations.
This
“peace” was structurally incapable of delivering either Palestinian
self-determination or alleviating the Palestinians’ miserable living
conditions. It was not designed to. Israel continued expanding the
settlements throughout the 1990s, more so than in the preceding 26
years. It seized control of water and other resources, built bypass
roads, and installed more than 600 checkpoints that crippled Palestinian
movement and economic life.
*****
After 9/11, George W. Bush used the “war on terror” to normalize preemptive war and regime change, beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq.
This was the declaration that open‑ended military force would now be the
routine instrument of US foreign policy. Israel naturally welcomed the
shift.
Barely a month after invading Afghanistan, Bush unveiled the “axis of
evil”: North Korea, Iran, and Iraq—the last two oil‑producing states
that resisted US hegemony and supported the Palestinians. The list soon
expanded to Cuba, Libya, and Syria. The US now claimed the right to
attack any state that obstructed its global dominance.
Israel moved rapidly to insert its own conflict into this new
framework. It insisted that the US and Israel were fighting the same
war, recasting Palestinian resistance as part of the global jihadist
threat. Netanyahu declared on 9/11 that the attacks would “generate
immediate sympathy” for Israel, while Israeli officials folded Hamas,
the bourgeois clerical group affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood, all
the Palestinian armed groups and Hezbollah in Lebanon into the same
category as Al‑Qaeda. This ideological maneuver aligned US
national‑security doctrine with Israel’s position during the Second
Intifada.
Ariel Sharon, by this time prime minister of Israel,
became one of the most vocal international supporters of the US drive to
war in Iraq, despite Iraq’s shattered condition after a decade of
sanctions and Israel’s 1981 destruction of the Osirak reactor. He helped
manufacture a pro‑war consensus inside Israel that contrasted sharply
with mass opposition across Europe and North America.
Israel did
not formally join the 2003 invasion, but it supplied intelligence,
logistics, and political support. US interrogation and torture methods
used in Iraq—including at Abu Ghraib—drew directly on Israeli
precedents. As in 1991, Washington excluded Israel from the “Coalition
of the Willing” to avoid embarrassing its Arab allies, who publicly
denounced the war while privately providing bases, overflight rights,
and counter‑insurgency cooperation.
US–Israel integration deepened
across every major security domain: counterterrorism, Homeland
Security, urban warfare, cyber operations, intelligence coordination
against Iran in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, regional missile‑defense integration, and joint exploitation of eastern Mediterranean gas. After
9/11, Israel became structurally embedded in the American security
architecture—the forward base and strike arm for the coming
confrontation with Iran.
*****
After 9/11, the Bush administration’s doctrine of reshaping the
Middle East by force—and the Arab regimes’ acquiescence to the US wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq—allowed Israel to abandon the Oslo fiction of
“negotiations” and replace it with open militarism: sieges,
assassinations, curfews, and regime‑change operations aimed at crushing
Palestinian resistance once and for all.
Bush signaled the shift
immediately. In March 2001 he told Sharon he would not “try to force
peace,” effectively giving Israel a free hand. Sharon responded with the
first airstrikes on PA targets since 1967 and a wave of incursions
across the West Bank. When Sharon formally repudiated Oslo in December
2001, the Arab regimes issued ritual protests but took no action.
In
2002 Washington installed Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian Prime Minister
under the “Roadmap for Peace,” to sideline Arafat and create a
Palestinian leadership willing to act as Washington’s enforcer. The
Roadmap served as diplomatic cover for Arab support for the coming Iraq
war.
In 2004 Bush issued written guarantees to Sharon that marked a
historic shift in US policy: recognising that major settlement blocs
would remain part of Israel, rejecting the right of return, and
affirming Israel’s right to act “by itself” even in areas it withdrew
from. Armed with these assurances, Sharon carried out the unilateral
“disengagement” from Gaza—not a step toward peace, but a move to reduce
the cost of occupation while freezing negotiations on refugees, borders,
and Jerusalem.
When Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections, the
US refused to accept the result. It organized a $1.27 billion plan to
arm Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan to overthrow the elected government.
When Hamas preempted the coup and took control of Gaza, Washington
backed Israel’s blockade—cutting off food, medicine, electricity, and
water—with Egypt’s active participation.
The US fully supported
Israel’s 2008–09 assault on Gaza, viewing the destruction of Hamas as
part of its broader project to build a “New Middle East” and weaken Iran
and Syria. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the PA were direct accomplices,
terrified that Hamas’ electoral victory had shown that a popular
resistance movement could challenge their own rule.
Under Obama, US military aid rose to $3.8 billion annually,
with expanded cooperation on missile defense and major funding for Iron
Dome. Trump went further: cutting all funding to Palestinian
institutions, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, endorsing
Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and orchestrating in 2020
the Abraham Accords—the normalization of Israel with the United Arab
Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.
This formalized what
had long been an open secret: the extensive covert commercial,
intelligence and military cooperation between the Gulf States and
Israel, now legitimized in the service of Washington’s “maximum
pressure” sanctions regime against Iran. It ended even the pretense that
Arab regimes conditioned relations with Israel on Palestinian rights.
It consolidated a US‑led anti‑Iran axis and aligned the Gulf States with
Washington’s broader confrontation with China.
*****
When the October 2023 genocide began, the Biden administration’s
immediate deployment of warships to the eastern Mediterranean made clear
that this was a joint US–Israel offensive. Washington provided
intelligence, logistics, and a $14.3 billion emergency weapons package,
while using its veto at the UN Security Council to block ceasefire
resolutions. Gaza became a tactical laboratory for US–Israel military
doctrine: urban warfare, surveillance, drone operations, and
missile‑defence systems tested in real time.
Every Israeli
assault—in Gaza or the West Bank—served US strategic interests. Israel
was given a free hand because each operation advanced the broader
project of remaking the Middle East under US hegemony. The 2023
genocidal war signalled to Iran, China, and Russia that the US had no
“red lines” and would tolerate mass killing to assert dominance.
But
this was always a relationship of mutual dependence. Israel required US
financing and protection to survive; the US required Israel as its
indispensable enforcer, subcontractor, and regional attack dog. What
united them was the shared class interest between US imperialism and its
regional proxy in crushing any challenge—Palestinian, Arab nationalist,
Iranian, or working‑class—to their domination of the most strategically
vital, oil‑rich region on earth.
*****
In 2006, Israel launched a 34-day assault on Lebanon that was explicitly
aimed at eliminating Hezbollah, an Iranian ally, as a military and
political force. It was a carefully planned component of the US strategy
for regional restructuring, which the WSWS described as “a continuation
and escalation of the imperialist geo-political restructuring of the
Middle East and Central Asia that began with the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq.” The immediate military goal — crushing
Hezbollah—was the prelude to confronting Syria and ultimately Iran. The
US actively blocked ceasefire efforts, with Condoleezza Rice’s visit
deliberately delayed, giving Israel maximum destruction time.
The war devastated Lebanon and displaced more than a million people, but
it failed to achieve its strategic aims. Hezbollah survived, mobilised
mass popular support, and forced a ceasefire. The war did, however,
accelerate the development of missile‑defence systems that became
central to US–Israel military cooperation.
Israel persisted in its efforts to eliminate Hezbollah. Throughout
the 2010s, it conducted thousands of airstrikes in Syria targeting
Iranian-backed forces and Hezbollah supply lines, acting as Washington’s
air force against the Iranian axis of resistance. In 2024, Israel
returned to the task with far greater ferocity: a systematic campaign of
assassination of Hezbollah’s entire senior command structure,
culminating in the killing of its leader Hassan Nasrallah on September
28, 2024.
Some 85 bombs—the majority US-supplied 2,000-pound
bunker-busters — were dropped on central Beirut. Netanyahu ordered the
strike from New York City, the day after delivering a speech at the UN
General Assembly explicitly framing Israel’s campaign as the
construction of a “new Middle East” aligned with US strategic interests
against Iran, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. The WSWS wrote that this was not
Israeli unilateralism but an operation of US imperialism, “Netanyahu’s
government, funded and armed by the United States, is not an independent
actor but functions as America’s proxy.”
In March this year,
Israel again attacked Lebanon as part of the wider US confrontation with
Iran, deploying the same tactics used in Gaza—mass displacement and
aerial bombardment—while seeking to push Hezbollah north of the Litani
River. The broader US objective remains the same: reshaping the regional
balance of power. Israel’s leadership, meanwhile, is using the conflict
to pursue its territorial ambitions and consolidate a Greater Israel.
*****
Israel has not only carried out operations directly against Iran; it
has functioned as Washington’s forward strike force against the entire
“axis of resistance” the US seeks to destroy. During the US–Gulf–Türkiye
campaign to topple the Syrian government, Israel launched hundreds of
airstrikes on Syrian military sites, airfields, weapons depots, and the
bases and convoys of Iran and Hezbollah—the decisive external force in
Syria since 2013.
It effectively acted as air support for
US‑backed opposition militias, while providing medical and logistical
aid to armed Islamist groups in the Golan Heights. These operations were
coordinated with US forces in eastern and northern Syria, which shared
intelligence with Israel.
The aim was explicit: prevent Iran from consolidating its position in
Syria as a counterweight to US regional dominance. Israel also
destroyed Syria’s alleged nuclear reactor at al‑Kibar in 2007—an
operation the Bush administration was unwilling to carry out itself but
sanctioned Israel to perform, preserving the US–Israeli nuclear
monopoly. The strike was immediately used by Washington as a warning to
Tehran: this is what awaits your nuclear facilities.
The 2023–24
Israel–Hezbollah war reshaped the Syrian battlefield. Hezbollah was
forced to divert fighters, commanders, and logistics back to Lebanon’s
southern front. Its reduced presence created a temporary vacuum in
northwest Syria just as Hay’at Tahrir al‑Sham (HTS), the Sunni Islamist
militant group and al-Nusra offshoot, was consolidating control over
Idlib.
With Hezbollah tied down and regional actors focused on
preventing a wider Israel–Iran confrontation, HTS faced fewer
constraints. This indirect but decisive shift helped HTS tighten its
grip and contributed to the collapse of the Syrian regime in December
2024.
After HTS seized Damascus, Israel continued its
long‑standing objective of weakening and fragmenting Syria. It backed
minority groups against a centralized state—the Druze in the southwest
and the Kurds in the northeast—until Washington forced it to withdraw
support for Kurdish forces during the Syrian army’s offensive to
reintegrate the autonomous region.
*****
The US‑led invasion of Iraq—whose unintended consequence was to
expand Iran’s regional influence—made Iran the focus of US strategy.
This shift accelerated Israel’s integration into the American
military‑security system and pushed Iran towards deeper ties with China,
now Washington’s principal global rival.
Once Iran was placed in
the “axis of evil,” Washington drove a series of UN sanctions against
its nuclear program, despite no evidence that it had violated the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Obama escalated this pressure in
2012 by targeting Iran’s energy sector and central bank, threatening
any state that bought Iranian oil with exclusion from the US‑dominated
financial system.
Trump intensified the confrontation: tearing up
the 2015 nuclear deal, reimposing sweeping sanctions, designating the
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) a terrorist organization, and
ordering the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in 2020.
Alongside these overt measures, the US and Israel waged a long
“shadow war” to cripple Iran’s nuclear and military capacity: the
Stuxnet cyberattack on Natanz; assassinations of scientists and IRGC
officials; sabotage of military and energy infrastructure; and attacks
on Iranian shipping. This was a joint campaign of military,
technological, and economic containment—cementing Israel’s role as
Washington’s frontline enforcer.
The alignment became explicit in
2024, when Israel’s strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus
triggered direct Iranian retaliation. The US mobilized immediately:
CENTCOM assembled a multinational air‑defense coalition, with the UK,
France, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE providing intelligence,
airspace, and logistical support. Israel’s defense now operated inside a
US‑centered regional security system.
The point was driven home in
June 2025, when Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities during
US–Iran talks. The US defended Israel, intercepted Iranian missiles,
provided intelligence and logistics, and ultimately carried out direct
strikes on Iran’s underground nuclear sites—targets beyond Israel’s
capabilities. Iran responded by striking a US base in Qatar, after which
Washington imposed a ceasefire. The Gulf states again supplied bases,
intelligence, and airspace; NATO powers offered political and logistical
backing. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz captured the essence of the
operation: Israel was doing the West’s “dirty work.”
The present conflict, launched jointly by the US and Israel on 28
February, is the fullest expression of this integration. All the Gulf
states except Oman have opened their bases, intelligence networks, and
airspace to Washington; NATO states have provided political and indirect
military support.
Taken together, these developments show how
Israel functions as Washington’s forward agent within a US‑directed
regional security architecture. The US determines the scale, duration,
coalition, and political framework of operations—and orders ceasefires.
Israel is not even a party to the US–Iran negotiations that will
determine the terms of any settlement.
This makes clear that the US–Israel war on Iran is not the product of
Israeli scheming or lobbying networks, but of the crisis of the global
imperial order. To reduce a world‑spanning confrontation to the maneuvers of a state of ten million people is to mistake the shadow for
the substance. The driving force is the strategic logic of US
imperialism, desperately seeking to reassert control over energy, raw
materials, investment routes, trade corridors, and geopolitical
chokepoints as its dominance erodes on every front except the military.
*****
Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism remains
the indispensable framework for understanding the present world crisis.
Imperialism is not simply colonial aggression or great‑power bullying;
it is a specific stage of capitalist development defined by monopoly,
finance capital, the export of capital, international cartels, and the
division of the world among the major powers—a division that can be
altered only through violent redivision. It is not a policy choice but
the structural logic of capitalism once it outgrows the limits of the
nation‑state.
Lenin wrote that the changing economic, financial,
military strength of competing capitalist states constantly destabilizes any imperialist “balance.” The rise of Germany shattered the
equilibrium of the early twentieth century; the rise of China after the
collapse of the Soviet Union has played the same role in the
twenty‑first. The drive toward war flows from this objective
contradiction, not from the decisions of individual leaders.
Lenin
also insisted that imperialism produces “reaction all down the line” at
home. Monopoly capitalism requires repression, censorship, and the
curtailment of democratic rights. The vast sums funneled to Israel—$158
billion since 1948, $3.8 billion annually today, plus emergency
supplements—represent a direct transfer from social needs to militarism
and the arms industry.
The repression of pro‑Palestinian protests on US campuses, the criminalization of dissent, the banning of student groups, and the
threats of deportation in Germany are part of the same process: using
the Israel–Palestine conflict to justify the expansion of the repressive
apparatus against a working class entering into struggle over wages and
conditions.
Lenin’s analysis was rooted in the recognition that
capitalism had entered an epoch of systemic crisis and decay, in which
the socialist transformation of society had become an objective
necessity. From this analysis flows the strategic conclusion. No appeal
to the capitalist state, no invocation of the “rules‑based international
order,” and no campaign to reform US foreign policy by reducing Israeli
influence can halt the descent toward world war. The mass
demonstrations of 2003 did not stop the invasion of Iraq; the global
outcry against the Gaza genocide did not stop it; nor did appeals to the
International Court of Justice or International Criminal Court.
Imperialism cannot be pressured into peace.
What is required is
the construction of an international movement of the working class,
armed with a socialist and internationalist program, directed against
the capitalist system that is the root cause of imperialist war, and led
by the revolutionary party of the Fourth International. Only the
independent mobilization of the working class on a world scale can put
an end to the barbarism now unfolding and open the road to a socialist reorganization of society.
The announcement by AI company Anthropic, the maker of AI assistant
Claude, that it is moving to an initial public offering (IPO) will add
fuel to the frenzy on Wall Street which has sent the S&P 500 index
to 11 record highs in May.
Anthropic’s announcement came in the
wake of that by Elon Musk’s SpaceX late last month that it was going
public and is expected to be followed shortly by one from its rival,
OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT.
Few details are available about the Anthropic launch at this point, such
as the number of shares, their initial price, the structure of the
company and its revenue and profit prospects, because its filing with
the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was on a confidential
basis. But the estimates are that Anthropic will enter the market by
being listed on the NASDAQ exchange with a market value of around $1
trillion.
*****
Anthropic was set up in 2021 by former OpenAI leaders and has since
had a meteoric rise. It has enjoyed a 15-fold increase in its estimated
market value in the past 15 months. In March 2025 it was valued at
around $65 billion and is now valued at $900 billion.
But so far
Anthropic has not made a profit—it says it expects to do so in the June
quarter of this year—but has recorded losses. So have SpaceX and OpenAI.
This
means that investment in the three AI companies launching IPOs is
entirely of a speculative character, based on what they claim they will
be able to make in the future. SpaceX has asserted that its target
market is almost $29 trillion, equivalent to around 90 percent of US
GDP. The issue is whether their various claims will be able to be met.
As comments in the financial press have noted, the market is about to be
“tested.”
*****
The market boosters claim that AI, because of its capacity to raise
productivity, is the means by which American capitalism will power
itself into a glorious future and solve its ever-growing problems, such
as the mounting government debt now at $39 trillion, rising by billions
of dollars every day, with the interest bill, running at around $1
trillion a year, consuming a larger and larger portion of government
revenue.
Closer examination of the stock market boom—of which AI is the latest
component—and its historical development reveals a different picture
from that presented by AI promoters.
*****
The suppression of the living standards of the working class has
played a major role in the accumulation of the Wall Street oligarchs. As
the Economic Policy Institute has calculated, since 1979 productivity
has grown 90 percent while the pay of workers has grown by 33 percent,
meaning that if workers’ wages had tracked productivity growth, they
would receive an average of $16.40 more an hour today.
The
suppression of the struggles of the working class by the trade union
bureaucracies which has created this situation has not only boosted the
profits of the corporations.
It has been a major factor in the
rise of the stock market and the growth of parasitism and speculation
which has siphoned ever increasing wealth into the hands of the
corporate and financial oligarchy, creating a level of social inequality
which exceeds all historical precedent.
*****
The history of the stock market demonstrates this relationship. In
the early 1970s, the period of the last great wages upsurge of the
working class in the US and internationally, stock markets plunged.
In
the period of 1973–74, at the height of the international wages
offensive—in the UK the miners’ strike brought down the Heath Tory
government—Wall Street’s Dow Jones index fell by 45 percent. In the UK,
the fall was even greater at some 73 percent.
This history throws a
revealing light on the present-day role of the trade union bureaucracy.
As the market frenzy continues, so their efforts intensify to sabotage,
betray and suppress, by all means possible, the independent struggle of
the working class to combat the daily cuts to their living standards.
A
collapse in the share market of anything even approaching what took
place in the face of the movement of the working class in response to
the inflation of the 1970s would devastate the global financial system.
Its
operations as a wealth creation machine for the financial oligarchy
rests on confidence—confidence that the working class is suppressed and
that its activity will not call into question capitalist ownership of
the means of production and finance.
The role of the trade union
apparatuses is not a product of the characteristics of the individuals
who head them, but of their social and class function within the profit
system. They are tied by a thousand strings to the capitalist class.
These
ties are: material (as they pull in salaries, financed to a
considerable degree by union financial investments, far above those of
the workers they supposedly represent); ideological (in their undying
support for capitalism and its system of exploitation), and political
(as they openly align themselves with the nationalist “America First”
agenda of the fascist Trump or back his props the Democrats).
They
are more than aware that any significant movement of the working class
in defense of jobs, wages and living standards threatens the financial
system on which they depend and for which they are the gendarmes.
*****
To
meet this developing crisis and the offensive of the ruling class,
the working class must make its own preparations at both a political and
organizational level. It must initiate a struggle to reorient itself
based on an internationalist socialist program and develop the means for
carrying through the fight against the policemen of the capitalist
oligarchy, the trade union bureaucracies, through the building of
rank-and-file committees in workplaces and communities.
The outcome of the promise of free bus fare has lessons for the 40,000 subway and bus workers who have been working on an expired contract
for more than two weeks. In contract talks, MTA management is demanding
2 percent annual wage increases (less than half the rate of local
inflation), along with a doubling of out of pocket healthcare payments
and sharp restrictions on overtime and sick leave. It claims that
anything else is “unaffordable” and must be offset through fare hikes.
In
reality, what is “unaffordable” is the 15 percent of its operating
budget that goes to MTA’s Wall Street creditors. The MTA is among the
most indebted transit agencies in North America, carrying tens of
billions of dollars in long-term debt accumulated through decades of
borrowing to finance capital projects.
Workers should form
rank-and-file committees to prepare a fight, appealing for support from
the city’s riders and the broader working class and fighting for
oversight and control over the talks. A struggle must be organized from
below. The Transport Workers Union bureaucracy is compromised by its
deep relations with the Democratic Party, including both Mamdani and New
York governor Kathy Hochul, whom the union endorsed in 2022.
*****
During his campaign, Mamdani argued that working-class New Yorkers
should not be forced to choose between transportation and other
necessities. That message resonated especially in neighborhoods where a
$3 fare is not a minor inconvenience, but a recurring expense borne by
people already struggling with the city’s soaring cost of living.
Implicit in the support for the demand was also the broader question:
Why should access to public transportation depend on a rider’s ability
to pay, rather than a basic social right?
While the free bus
demand found broad support in the working class, Mamdani quickly
abandoned it once he took office in January. After securing state
funding for a modest expansion of childcare, the mayor endorsed New York’s openly pro-business state governor Kathy Hochul for reelection and
accepted her refusal to fund fare-less bus service, which would have
taken place via small income tax increases for the wealthy.
This
was coupled with a city budget balanced on the backs of city workers,
with Mamdani and Hochul reaching a deal to achieving billions in savings
by delaying the implementation of new class-size mandates in public
schools and by delaying repayment to city pension funds. Hochul and
Mamdani agreed on a plan for a modest pied-à-terre tax, a minor source
of additional revenue as a fig leaf so the mayor could claim he
delivered on his promise to tax the rich.
Mamdani’s pretensions
and that of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which he is a
member, are being rapidly exposed. His function is to corral the
radicalizing sentiment and direct it towards alliances with the
Democratic Party establishment and even President Trump, whom he visited
twice at the White House.
The MTA’s bus evasion crackdown, while
not directed by the mayor himself, mirrors the broader policing strategy
of the Mamdani administration. On Monday, Mamdani’s police commissioner, the billionaire Jessica Tisch, announced the administration’s plan to hire an additional 580 uniformed officers by the end of the year.
The
new recruits will bring the NYPD headcount to a staggering 35,555 cops,
larger than the standing armies of 97 countries, according to World
Population Review. This is also an increase compared to the
law-and-order administration of ex-cop Eric Adams.
*****
As a candidate and state legislator, Mamdani frequently denounced
over-policing and the use of law enforcement to manage social problems
rooted in poverty and inequality. Yet in office, he supports the very
institutions he once criticized.
The
bans stemmed from demands from right-wing Labourites and Zionists, who
deployed the now standard lie conflating opposition to the fascistic
Israeli government with antisemitism and terrorism.
The
Trump administration's designation of Brazil's PCC and CV as Foreign
Terrorist Organizations marks an ominous escalation of imperialist
intervention in Brazilian politics.
While
the cause of the accident still remains unknown, officials said 11 rail
cars carrying finished vehicles derailed along a major rail corridor
that cuts through a busy industrial and commuter section of northwest
Houston.
The
strike was shut down this week by the United Auto Workers because it
raised deeper political and class questions which the bureaucracy works
to suppress.
New Jersey state and local police have continued their crackdown on
protesters outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in
Newark, New Jersey, where hundreds of immigrants are nearing the end of a
second week of hunger and labor strikes against filthy conditions,
medical neglect, rotten food, lack of access to counsel and pressure to
sign deportation documents.
*****
The Delaney Hall arrests are part of a broader effort to criminalize
opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Last week,
three anti-ICE protesters in Spokane, Washington—Bajun Mavalwalla II,
Justice Forral and Jac Archer—were convicted on federal conspiracy
charges stemming from a June 2025 protest aimed at blocking the
transport of immigrants from Spokane to the Northwest Detention Center
in Tacoma, Washington, on the other side of the state.
Spokane
police arrested 30 people that day, but no officers or protesters were
injured. Richard Barker, then the acting-US attorney for the Eastern
District of Washington, resigned before the indictments were filed and
has since said he did not believe the charges were warranted. There was
no “conspiracy,” only a call to action answered by dozens of people. The
three now face up to six years in prison if their appeal is denied.
The
message is clear: Those who oppose ICE raids, deportations and
detention centers are to be treated as criminals and potential federal
felons.
*****
The return of Congress to Washington this week will bring the
resumption of work on the reconciliation package that would fund ICE and
Customs and Border Protection (CBP), including the Border Patrol,
through the end of Trump’s term. Senate Republicans have proposed
roughly $72 billion for the two agencies, including more than $38
billion for ICE and more than $26 billion for CBP. Senate Majority
Leader John Thune has made clear that the purpose is to provide “border
security and immigration enforcement for the next three years,”
bypassing the normal appropriations process and insulating the agencies
from even token oversight votes.
This outcome was prepared in advance by the Democrats. As the World Socialist Web Siteexplained
last month, Democratic leaders helped separate ICE and CBP funding from
the broader DHS funding bill, allowing them to posture as opponents of
Trump’s immigration Gestapo while ensuring that the money would be
delivered through reconciliation. Having helped split DHS funding from
ICE and CBP funding, they could then claim innocence as Republicans
moved to funnel tens of billions of dollars to the very agencies
carrying out masked raids, warrantless home invasions, illegal
detentions and killings.
The Democrats, who postured as opponents
of ICE and CBP following the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex
Pretti in Minneapolis, have in fact dropped any attempt to impose even
token restraints on the police-state operations of the immigration
agencies. Meanwhile, Trump has indefinitely deployed hundreds of armed
ICE officers at major airports to harass and detain immigrants and,
ultimately, political opponents of his dictatorial regime, without the
slightest protest from the Democrats, including figures such as Bernie
Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The
Opportunity Party’s claim to be neither left- nor right-wing is a
fraud; backed by sections of the capitalist class, it aims to protect
the wealth of the super-rich while maintaining New Zealand’s imperialist
alliance with the US.
In
a naked attempt to intimidate the 1,700 Nexteer workers who have
defiantly rejected three UAW-backed deals, the union apparatus could
hold the next vote in the plant under the supervision of management.
Workers
in Cuba, the US and across the Americas must urgently mobilize in
opposition to Trump’s blockade and war plans, but effective opposition
to imperialism requires a historical balance sheet of Castroism and the
Cuban Revolution.
A
furious campaign by business leaders and the corporate media against
the minor tax adjustments has demonstrated the refusal by Australia’s
billionaires and their global partners to accept even the slightest
inroads into their profits and fortunes.
Kast’s
speech was built around the conceit: that Chile is in a “state of
emergency” requiring extraordinary measures, ruling through presidential
decrees and demanding that the working class pay for a crisis it did
not create.
A
major exhibition of the Renaissance artist’s work sheds light on the
social and aesthetic factors that enabled his artistic development and
on the character of his achievement.
The
Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee calls for the development of a
movement of the rank-and-file to take control of their struggle and
connect it with American Axle and other auto workers.
On May 28 around 30 students and workers gathered at Humboldt University
in Berlin for a meeting organized by the International Youth and
Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) titled “Freedom for the socialist
anti-war activist Bogdan Syrotiuk! Stop the war in Ukraine!”
Syrotiuk, now 27 years old, was arrested on April 25, 2024, by the
Ukrainian secret service (SBU) for advocating the unity of the Ukrainian
and Russian working classes against the war. The government accuses him
of “high treason under martial law”—an offense for which he could face
life imprisonment.
The meeting took place at a time when Bogdan’s
trial is at a critical turning point. Two expert reports have now
exposed the core of the charge—that Bogdan spreads Russian propaganda—as
baseless.
The international campaign for Bogdan’s release is
gaining increasing traction in Germany. As the WSWS reported, his case
has garnered growing attention in recent weeks at universities and in
working-class neighborhoods.
*****
At the end of the meeting, those present adopted a resolution calling
for the immediate release of Bogdan Syrotiuk and all other political
prisoners in Ukraine, and demanding that the European Court of Human
Rights expedite the review of his case. The resolution makes clear:
Bogdan is not in prison for a criminal offence, but because he advocates
for the international unity of the working class against the war.
In August, Mehring Verlag will publish the book The War in Ukraine and the Struggle for Socialism: The Case of Bogdan Syrotiuk, which is already available for pre-order.
It will feature, for the first time, Bogdan’s own writings, statements
by the International Committee of the Fourth International on Bogdan’s
case, and analyses of the war in Ukraine and the role of German
imperialism.
The campaign for Bogdan’s release must be expanded in
the coming weeks and months. We call on everyone who wants to support
Bogdan’s freedom and the building of an anti-war movement to sign the
petition at wsws.org/freebogdan and to join the IYSSE’s struggle!
We
also invite all interested individuals to attend the IYSSE’s next
meeting: “Science Instead of War Propaganda: How Can We Fight
Conscription, War, and Cuts at our University?” Thursday, June 11, 2026,
6:30 p.m., Humboldt University of Berlin, Main Building, Unter den
Linden 6, Room 1072.
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.
From its inception, the Zionist state—whose borders were shaped not
by the United Nations partition plan but by Israel’s military victory in
1948 and the displacement and dispossession of more than 700,000
Palestinians—faced severe structural constraints.
Israel was a
small country with few natural resources, limited water, and exclusion
from the surrounding Arab economies, which imposed boycotts, closed
their borders and refused trade. Few other 600‑kilometer corridors cut
through so many conflict zones—Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria—making
any overland route from Rafah in Egypt to Antakya in Türkiye impossible.
These conditions rendered the economy non‑viable without external
support and pushed successive governments toward territorial expansion,
high military spending, and settlement building, generating recurring
economic crises.
For nearly four decades until the 1985 Stabilization Plan, Israel
took the form of a state‑led, Labor‑Zionist developmental regime, built
on the institutions of the pre‑state Yishuv (settlement) and dominated
by the Histadrut and the Mapai/Labor movement.
The United States
provided almost no economic aid in the early years—limited mainly to
food assistance. Early US policy was pragmatic, cautious, and often
ambivalent. Seeking alliance with the Arab states and wary of alienating
key regional partners, Washington avoided close relations with Israel.
France, not the US, was Israel’s primary arms supplier in the 1950s.
US strategy in the Middle East centred instead on three pillars:
Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt, with Iran the most important. Washington
deepened its relationship with Saudi Arabia after Roosevelt’s 1945
“oil‑for‑security” understanding; orchestrated the 1953 coup against the
elected government in Iran to restore the Shah and secure US control of
Iranian oil; and initially cultivated ties with Egypt’s new regime
after the 1952 Free Officers coup. During the 1956 Suez Crisis, the
Eisenhower administration forced Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw
from Egypt, prioritising regional stability over Israeli ambitions.
Israel
nevertheless worked to secure US support. David Ben‑Gurion, Israel’s
first prime minister, sought to present Israel as a reliable Cold War
partner, offering military cooperation and intelligence. Mossad
collaborated with the CIA and MI6, including in the 1953 coup in Iran,
and provided intelligence on Soviet activities. Israel also attempted
covert operations to shape US and British policy, most notoriously the
1954 “Lavon Affair” in Cairo: false-flag terrorist operations aimed at
ensuring a British and US presence in Egypt. It backfired spectacularly
and caused a major political crisis in Israel.
Without substantial economic assistance from Washington in its early
decades, Israel survived largely through diaspora funding and German
reparations. Reparations and compensation payments—amounting to a sum
equivalent to 86 percent of Israel’s GDP in 1956—financed
infrastructure, industry, shipping, and energy systems. Even after
formal reparations ended in 1966, West German aid continued at high
levels.
By the mid‑1960s, Israel remained economically fragile,
militarily dependent on external suppliers, and politically constrained
by US regional strategy. This dependency shaped its foreign policy, its
domestic economic structure, and its search for a great‑power
patron—conditions that would shift only after the 1967 war.
*****
The 1956 Suez Crisis marked a turning point in Middle Eastern
geopolitics and a warming of US–Israel relations. Although the US forced
Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw from Egypt, the crisis
unintentionally elevated President Gamal Abdul Nasser’s prestige,
boosted pan‑Arab nationalism, and destabilized the pro‑Western regional
order. The Baghdad Pact collapsed after the 1958 Iraqi revolution; Egypt
and Syria briefly united; Jordan and Lebanon sought British and US
military support; and Washington announced the Eisenhower Doctrine,
asserting US responsibility for the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula.
As the Cold War intensified, Washington reassessed Israel’s strategic
value. In the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration initiated the
first formal US–Israel security ties, ending the arms embargo and
supplying Hawk anti‑aircraft missiles. Covert cooperation deepened as
Israel positioned itself as an ally against Soviet influence, with
Mossad acting as a subcontractor for US intelligence operations abroad.
*****
Nasser
attempted to counter Israel’s nuclear advantage by developing missiles
with German scientists, prompting Mossad’s 1962 campaign to intimidate
or assassinate those working on Egypt’s programme. Egypt never matched
Israel’s capabilities, leaving Israel the region’s sole nuclear power.
As
Soviet influence expanded in Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Iraq, the
Johnson administration moved closer to Israel. In 1966, Washington cut
economic aid to Egypt and began supplying Israel with tanks, aircraft,
and missiles. During the 1960s and 70s, Israel also acted as a proxy for
US interests, aiding pro‑Western forces in Ethiopia, Yemen, Iran,
Morocco, South Africa, and parts of sub‑Saharan Africa—often where the
US could not intervene directly.
In June 1967, the Johnson
administration gave Israel the green light for its preemptive war
against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, hoping it would weaken Nasser.
Israel’s rapid victory reshaped the region: it destroyed Egyptian and
Syrian air forces and occupied the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, the West Bank,
East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Israel’s attack on the
USS Liberty—apparently a “friendly fire” incident that killed 34 US
sailors for which it apologized and paid compensation—did not derail the
emerging strategic relationship, with Washington judging that a public
confrontation could play into Moscow’s hands. But it did generate
enduring controversy and mistrust beneath the surface.
*****
The 1967 War was the decisive turning point in US–Israel relations.
Israel’s rapid victory established it as the dominant military power in
the Levant, shattered the appeal of pan‑Arab nationalism, and weakened
Soviet influence in the region. By demonstrating that it could achieve
militarily what Washington sought politically—containing Arab
nationalism and checking Moscow—Israel proved its value to the US as a
strategic Cold War asset, laying the foundations for the “special
relationship” that would define the next decades.
Washington began formally integrating Israel into its regional security
system, supplying it with advanced weapons previously reserved for NATO
allies. Under the Nixon Doctrine of 1969, while Washington would provide
a nuclear shield, its regional allies rather than US ground forces
would police the world on its behalf, thereby reducing American
intervention in local conflicts. The Nixon Doctrine opened the
floodgates of US military aid to allies in the Persian Gulf as the
petrostates moved closer to the US, aligning against radical Arab states
and the Soviet Union.
American support for Israel increased dramatically: 99 percent of all US
military aid to Israel has been provided only after 1967. US aid rose
from roughly $50 million annually before 1967 to about $3 billion a year
by the mid‑1980s and $3.8 billion a year 2019-28, totalling almost $318
billion since World War II and making Israel the highest per‑capita
recipient of US assistance.
US aid to Israel took an exceptional form. Unlike standard American
foreign aid—tied to specific projects and monitored by USAID—most US
assistance to Israel is transferred as unrestricted cash, deposited
directly into the Israeli treasury. Military loans were routinely
converted into grants, and Congress eventually forgave outstanding
balances. Washington also agreed to front‑load the entire annual aid
package at the start of each fiscal year, allowing Israel to earn
interest on unspent funds. Israel is uniquely permitted to spend up to
one quarter of US military aid inside Israel, subsidizing the
development of its domestic arms industry, and is exempt from detailed
reporting requirements on how economic aid is used.
Beyond direct
transfers, the US provides loan guarantees, favorable tax treatment for
private donations, and even guarantees Israel’s oil supplies in the
event of a crisis. Diplomatic protection has been equally crucial: since
1972, the US has used its veto in the UN Security Council to block
dozens of resolutions critical of Israel, ensuring no international
action is taken over its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory,
settlement expansion, or nuclear weapons.
This system of support expressed a consistent political logic. After
1967, Israel became one of the pillars of US strategy in the Middle
East. Its military strength, intelligence capabilities, and alignment
with US interests justified an aid regime exceptional in scale,
structure, and political insulation. The transfers of US arms also fueled a regional arms race, generating lucrative contracts for
American defense manufacturers.
In return, Israel acted as the custodian of Washington’s
interests in the region, preventing victories by Palestinian movements
and their allies in Jordan (1970) and Lebanon (1976-82), that threatened
the decrepit, corrupt, US-dependent Arab regimes, and countering
Soviet‑aligned states during the Cold War. It served as a conduit for US
arms to regimes Washington couldn’t be seen arming openly: apartheid
South Africa, Khomeini’s Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, Central American
death squads. Mossad provided intelligence and carried out illegal
covert operations on Washington’s behalf. In effect, Israel replaced
Britain—after its withdrawal “East of Suez”—as Washington’s primary
strategic partner and security proxy in the Middle East.
In the
surprise attack mounted by Egypt and Syria against Israel in October
1973, Israel suffered early losses, prompting it to consider a nuclear
alert (the “Samson Option”). The US responded by launching a massive
airlift—the largest since the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49—that enabled
Israel to regain the initiative, cross the Suez Canal, and encircle
Egypt’s Third Army, while signalling to Moscow that it would not permit
an Arab victory. It also demonstrated Israel’s dependence upon a
powerful backer.
The war triggered the 1973–74 oil embargo, unleashing global
inflation and recession and convincing Washington that regional
stability—and secure energy supplies—required deeper diplomatic and
military engagement. After the collapse of Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in March 1975, and in recognition of
Israel’s dependency, President Gerald Ford ordered a punitive
“reassessment” of US–Israel relations to pressure Israel into limiting
its territorial ambitions and avoid alienating Arab oil producers.
This
pressure forced Israel to accept ceasefire and disengagement agreements
with Egypt and Syria, laying the foundation for the Camp David Accords
and the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, which returned the Sinai to
Egypt and cemented the US role as the region’s indispensable mediator.
It laid the basis for Arab-Israeli normalization (Jordan in 1994 and
eventually the Abraham Accords in 2020) and the isolation of the
Palestinians, as key Arab states no longer viewed the Palestinian
question as a barrier to cooperation with Israel.
*****
The 1979 Iranian Revolution removed Washington’s most important ally in
the region. The Shah’s sudden overthrow produced a regime openly hostile
to both the US and Israel. The Islamic Republic backed the
Palestinians—handing the former Israeli embassy in Tehran to the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—energized Islamist movements
across the region, and destabilized conservative Arab monarchies. For
Washington, the loss was profound: Iran had been its strongest regional
ally, a key intelligence outpost on the Soviet border, a major arms
client, and a crucial source of recycled petrodollars.
The US responded—alongside the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—with the
1980 Carter Doctrine, reversing the 1969 Nixon Doctrine. President Jimmy
Carter declared that the US would use military force to defend its
interests in the Persian Gulf. This led to a major expansion of the US
military presence, the creation of what became CENTCOM, and a long era
of direct American intervention. The Reagan administration reinforced
this posture in 1981, pledging to protect the “internal stability” of
Saudi Arabia.
With Iran lost, Israel was left as the only stable, militarily capable,
pro‑Western power in the region. Washington increasingly relied on
Israeli intelligence and military capacity, while Israel pressed for
expanded US aid and advanced weapons systems. This dovetailed with Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s 1981 doctrine of unilateral military
dominance, preemption, and the destruction of hostile political
infrastructures.
*****
Although Washington publicly criticized some actions—such as the
Osirak strike, the Lebanon invasion, and the massacre of Palestinians in
Sabra and Shatila —cooperation continued to deepen. Israel’s wars
offered the US real‑time testing of American weapons, often against
Soviet‑supplied systems, while Israel’s nuclear arsenal provided
long‑range deterrent capacity.
During the Iran-Iraq war (1981–86),
Israel served as the conduit for secret US arms sales to Iran despite
official American opposition. The arms helped prolong the war, weakening
both hostile states, while the proceeds funded US‑backed “Contra”
forces in Central America.
At the same time, Israel pursued its
own interests, sometimes at Washington’s expense. The most damaging
episode was the Jonathan Pollard espionage case, in which a US Navy
intelligence analyst passed classified material to Israel, some of which
reached the Soviet Union. The scandal strained relations for years. But
despite such tensions, US policymakers continued to view Israel’s
military strength and intelligence capabilities as essential to American
power in the Middle East.
Israel became known in Washington as “America’s aircraft carrier.” In
1985, the US concluded its first-ever free trade agreement with Israel,
and in 1987 designated it a major non‑NATO ally, embedding Israel
within the broader Western security and technological ecosystem.
Israel’s
strategic utility was repeatedly emphasized in Washington. In 1986, Joe
Biden, during a Senate speech, argued against selling weapons to Saudi
Arabia, saying, “It’s about time we stop apologizing for our support for
Israel. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. If there weren’t
an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel
to protect her interests in the region.” This was an opinion he was to
restate more than once.
In a speech last Saturday replete with hypocrisy and falsity, US
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told the annual strategic-military
Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that there was “rightful alarm
regarding China’s historic military buildup and the expansion of its
military activities in the region and beyond.”
Once again Hegseth demanded all strategic allies and partners
throughout the Indo-Pacific dramatically boost military spending and act
in concert with United States to prepare for war against China under
the pretext of maintaining regional peace and stability.
The
absurdity of Hegseth’s remarks would not have been lost on the defence
ministers, top military officers and strategic officials gathered at
Asia’s top security conference—even those that side with US imperialism.
*****
Addressing the assembled political and military leaders, Hegseth
insisted that all allies and partners had to step up as the military
strength required was “not a burden America can or should carry alone.”
He declared: “You don’t have a strong alliance unless everyone has skin
in the game. No freeloading.” He added point blank: “We demand 3.5
percent [of GDP spending on defence] from our allies and partners.”
Hegseth’s
remarks inadvertently point to the historic decline of the United
States that underpins the real reasons for the accelerating US war drive
against China over the past decade and half. US imperialism regards the
rapid economic rise and growing technological sophistication of China
as the chief threat to US global domination and is determined to
eliminate that danger through its remaining military might.
The
Trump administration’s military actions have a strategic logic—the
consolidation of US control over, and exclusion of China from, the
Western Hemisphere and the domination of energy reserves and global
crossroads of the Middle East in preparation for war against China. It
is no accident that Venezuela and Iran, both heavily sanctioned by the
US, have been the chief suppliers of discounted oil to China. The war
against Iran, as well as the ongoing US-NATO war against Russia in
Ukraine, are integral to an unfolding world war that will envelop China
sooner rather than later.
If Hegseth’s speech was less bellicose than at last year’s Shangri-La
Dialogue, it is only because the Trump administration has been compelled
to take a temporary step back in its economic war on China after
Beijing countered by imposing strict limits on exports of critical
minerals needed for a vast array of technologies—including for military
purposes. China has a virtual global monopoly over the production of
most rare earths and other critical minerals.
*****
China’s defense minister did not attend last year’s Shangri-La
Dialogue nor this year’s, given the domination of the US and its allies.
The Chinese delegation was headed by Major General Meng Xiangqing, a
professor at the People’s Liberation Army National Defence University.
He reserved his critical remarks for Japan’s rapid remilitarization and
plans to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines under the
AUKUS alliance with Britain and the US. He also warned that any move by
Taiwan to declare independence was “incompatible” with peace across the
Taiwan Strait.
However, on the US, Meng’s comments were muted.
Referring to Trump’s recent meeting with Xi in Beijing, he said: “We
also hope that China and the United States will move towards each other…
promote the development of military-to-military relations along a
healthy, stable and sustainable path.”
Beijing has no progressive
response to Washington’s criminal aggression or drive to war against
China. While constantly seeking a new deal with US imperialism, it is
engaged in an arms race that can only spiral into a global conflict that
spells disaster for humanity. The only means for halting the further
descent into world war is the building of an international anti-war
movement of workers in the US, China and around the world, fighting for a
socialist perspective to put an end to capitalism.
Employers'
association Gesamtmetall is threatening the loss of 300,000 jobs in the
metal and electrical industry. The consequences of the Iran war are
being passed on to the working class through mass layoffs and social
cuts.
The
strike, backed by a 98 percent authorization vote, opens a new front in
a wave of rebellion throughout the auto parts industry, alongside
ongoing contract battles by 1,300 workers at Nexteer Automotive in
Saginaw and thousands more at Dana, Magna International and Bridgewater
Interiors.
What
is unfolding is not a spontaneous eruption of "popular anger,” as it is
often portrayed, but the outcome of a consciously cultivated political
campaign by the bourgeois establishment and official media, developed
over many years.
As
global warming accelerates, sea levels are projected to rise on average
1 meter (3.3 feet) by the end of the century, inundating vast low-lying
areas.
Mehring
Verlag, the publishing house of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei
(Socialist Equality Party) in Germany, will soon release a new
German-language edition of Leon Trotsky’s My Life.
A report from Statistics Canada, published in late April and based on
2024 data, demonstrates that at least 11 percent of Canadians—more than
4.5 million people—now live in poverty. This is roughly equal to the
entire Census Metropolitan Area of Montreal, the country’s second
largest urban area.
The current poverty figures are a devastating
indictment of the policies of the ruling federal Liberal government,
first under Justin Trudeau and now Mark Carney. For over a decade, the
Liberal-led government has overseen the impoverishment of large sections
of the Canadian population, the slashing of spending on critical social
programs and infrastructure, and the reckless and costly rearming of
the military to secure the interests of Canadian imperialism amid a new
redivision of the world between the great powers.
The growing
numbers of poor also expose the consequences of decades of trade
union-backed concessions on workers across all economic sectors, from
auto assembly and industrial manufacturing, to public services and the
service sector. Layoffs, plant shutdowns, the destruction of worker
rights, wage stagnation in the face of the increasing cost of living,
and a vast expansion of precarious employment have contributed to a
situation in which many people cannot afford to live decent lives, even
when they have a job.
*****
The income levels needed to keep individuals and families afloat have
risen sharply, particularly in the big cities and industrial centres
where the lion’s share of the country’s population lives. A family of
four in Toronto would, for example, have needed an income of $61,763 in
2024 just to be able to afford basic necessities. For Calgary the figure
for the same year was $57,840, while in Vancouver it was $64,351, and
in Montreal $49,244.
*****
Aside from the devastating social, psychological, and health impacts
poverty is having on the millions condemned to it, the impoverishment of
broad sections of the working class produced by the ruling elite’s
class war agenda has an important historical and political dimension.
For decades following World War II, the “left-wing” of official
politics—the NDP, together with the trade union bureaucracy and a broad
swathe of middle-class “progressives”—portrayed Canada as a “kinder,
gentler” society than the US dollar republic. This narrative was always a
fraud, but for a time objective conditions appeared to lend it some
veracity. The reality during this period was that due to Canadian
capital’s weaker position relative to its US rival, the Canadian
bourgeoisie was forced to go further in the concessions it made to a
militant working class upsurge that reached its peak between 1965 and
1975.
These concessions, wrenched from the hands of corporate
Canada, never changed the ruthlessly exploitative character of Canadian
capitalism; but they did enable significant sections of workers to
obtain a higher standard of living and secure access to Medicare and
other public services. However, all these conditions have long since
passed into history. The open and repugnant growth of poverty and misery
on a scale unprecedented since the Great Depression, combined with the
disgusting increase in wealth at the very top of society, are creating
the social and economic conditions for an explosion of class struggle
and a revival of socialist consciousness.
*****
Meanwhile, Canada’s Liberal government is pouring hundreds of
billions of additional dollars into the military as part of the ruling
class’s drive to rearm and violently lay claim to “its share” of the
spoils in the imperialist redivision of the globe. The announcement by
Carney earlier this year of the government’s Defense Industrial Strategy
underscores the rapid transition to a wartime economy with disastrous
consequences for millions of ordinary working people. The government’s
latest budget—passed with the support of the New Democratic Party and
Greens—pledged $81.8 billion in new defense spending.
In addition,
Ottawa has pledged to ramp up defense spending to 5 percent of GDP by
2035 in what observers have noted is the largest “peacetime” military
buildup in the nation’s history. The eye-watering sums
involved—projected to reach nearly $160 billion annually by 2035—will
exceed the size of all federal transfers to the provinces for
healthcare, social welfare, post-secondary education and equalization.
The
runoff election in the third-largest country in Latin America, a
long-standing hub for US operations, has started with allegations of
fraud and appeals for military intervention.
Mass
demonstrations in Nanyuki, Kenya, have erupted against a planned US
Ebola quarantine facility, denouncing Washington’s callous and
imperialist response to the catastrophic outbreak ravaging central
Africa.
After
months of complaints, a coverup and a 20-day delay by the landlord to
acknowledge that the complex had been condemned by local building
officials, residents of Wildwood Off Main apartments in Kalamazoo were
abruptly forced to vacate their residences in the 292-unit complex.
On
March 19, 2026, Joe Wrote, a Denver-based member of the DSA who
maintains a substack with some 9,000 subscribers, attacked Kshama Sawant
on Twitter/X, writing, “After months shitting on DSA, you beg for our
help? No wonder Stalin ice picked your boy.”
The “boy” was Leon
Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the 1917 Russian Revolution and founder
of the Fourth International, murdered in Mexico on August 20, 1940 by
GPU agent Ramón Mercader, as part of Stalin’s systematic campaign to
liquidate a generation of Marxist revolutionaries. Sawant is a former
Seattle City Council member and current congressional candidate, who
that week had urged the DSA to support her campaign. She herself is part
of the pseudo-left milieu, a former member of the DSA and Socialist
Alternative, who collaborates with the Democratic Party and sections of
the trade union bureaucracy.
The same day, Left Voice posted to
its website a lengthy article by Joe Wrote promoting the DSA’s alliance
with and functioning within the Democratic Party, and attacking other
left groups as “sectarian” and politically irrelevant. Wrote was
responding to an invitation by Left Voice to the DSA and other groups to
submit articles to its website as part of a discussion aimed at
establishing a “united front” and a “new workers’ party.”
When
the tweet threatening Sawant drew attention, Left Voice removed Joe
Wrote’s article on March 22 with a brief disavowal on Twitter. It has
issued no further statement, political accounting or explanation of how a
figure publicly glorifying Trotsky’s murder came to write under its
imprimatur.
The incident is an exposure of the broader political
orientation of Left Voice. Since November 2025, Left Voice has been
calling for the construction of what it terms a “united front” of
tendencies, including the DSA, the Party for Socialism and Liberation
(PSL), Socialist Alternative, Tempest and sections of Labor Notes. Its
May Day 2026 statement declared it “essential to build a broad united
front of unions, social movements, community and grassroots
organizations, and the Left.” In other words, Left Voice seeks a
regroupment whose purpose is to channel workers’ opposition back into
the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy.
The call by Left Voice comes amid an escalating crisis of American
and world capitalism, above all the criminal US-Israeli war against
Iran—part of an expanding global war—which is sharply intensifying the
economic and social breakdown inside the United States. The response of
workers has been a series of major class battles, including strike
action by New York City nurses, Kaiser Permanente nurses and other
healthcare workers; walkouts by New York City building service workers;
mounting anger over union shutdowns of authorized strikes, including
among University of California workers; and the repeated rejection of
pro-company contracts by Nexteer autoworkers in Saginaw.
In each
case, the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy worked in
tandem to suppress the fight by workers and force through sellout
contracts. One of the most egregious examples was the three-day strike
by 3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers, which paralyzed North America’s
largest commuter rail system, and was shut down through backdoor
negotiations between New York Governor Kathy Hochul, the union apparatus
and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the DSA.
Joe Wrote’s article, before its quiet removal from Left Voice’s website,
was a full-throated defense of these right-wing forces. In it, he
asserted that the only way to “bring socialism to Americans” is to “give
them a practical alternative” in the Democratic Party because “the
duopoly is the prism through which Americans understand politics.” Using
this crudely pro-imperialist framework, he then stated that the only
“realistic option” was to vote for the Democrats.
*****
Left Voice published Wrote’s article because it has no fundamental
disagreement with the DSA’s reactionary politics. In 2021, following
Ocasio-Cortez’s denunciation of WSWS criticism of then-President Joe
Biden as “privileged,” DSA leaders and supporters launched a coordinated
social media campaign featuring ice-pick imagery and celebrating Trotsky’s assassination, documented in detail by the WSWS.
SEP National Chairman David North wrote to then-DSA National Director Maria Svart demanding the posts be repudiated
and those responsible expelled. Svart never replied. And Left Voice,
which purports to be a Trotskyist organization, never uttered a protest.
The
anti-Trotskyist position of Left Voice stems from the organization’s
Pabloite political history. It is associated with the Argentine Partido
de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS), whose international tendency
rebranded itself in 2025 as the Permanent Revolution Current–Fourth
International (PRC-FI).
The origins of the PRC-FI go back to the
1950s, when the founder of the Morenoite movement, Nahuel Moreno,
initially supported the break by the Fourth International in 1953 from
the liquidationist tendency led by Michel Pablo and the formation of the
International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to defend
the program of orthodox Trotskyism.
*****
The Marxist conception of the united front bears no resemblance to
this type of opportunist politics. Lenin and Trotsky elaborated the
united front tactic at the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Communist
International in 1921 and 1922. It referred to defensive joint action
between organizations of the working class—at that point the Communist
Party and the mass social democratic parties—on concrete questions of
working class interest, while maintaining complete political
independence.
Trotsky further developed this conception between
1930 and 1933 in his writings warning against the rise of fascism in
Germany and the call for a united front of the German Communist Party
and the Social Democratic Party. Trotsky proposed defensive agreements
between the two organizations to mobilize their combined forces against
the fascist threat. He insisted on no mixing of banners, no political
concessions to the Social Democrats and no restriction on the Communist
Party’s freedom to criticize reformist politics. The Stalinist
leadership of the Comintern, having designated the Social Democrats as
“social fascists,” rejected this perspective. The result was the
disarming of the German working class and the victory of Hitler in
January 1933.
Following the catastrophe in Germany, the Stalinist
bureaucracy adopted the policy of the “Popular Front,” which
subordinated the working class to alliances with bourgeois “democratic”
parties in the name of defending democracy against fascism. The Popular
Front led to the demoralization of the French working class in 1936-38
and to the defeat of the Spanish Revolution and the victory of Franco.
Earlier applications of the same method had produced the crushing of the
Chinese Revolution in 1927 and the betrayal of the British general
strike in 1926.
What Left Voice advances today is the application
in the United States of the opportunist line of the international
Morenoite tendency of which it is a part. What they propose is not a
mistaken application of the united front, but a variety of the Stalinist
Popular Front, applied to organizations such as the DSA—a faction of
the Democratic Party that represents privileged sections of the
upper-middle class—along with the corporatist trade union apparatus.
*****
Wrote’s article—which Left Voice published and only removed after the
ice-pick tweet—was a full-throated defense of the Democratic Party as
the only “realistic option.” Left Voice published it because it shares
its basic political orientation.
The real way forward is by
building the only organization capable of resolving the crisis of
leadership in the working class—the International Committee of the
Fourth International. The proof is in our record of struggle, against
the bourgeois parties themselves, the trade union bureaucracies and all
forms of political opportunism and attempts by the pseudo-left to block
the independent mobilization of the working class.
The
walkout by members of UAW Local 2093 is part of a growing revolt among
auto parts workers, who are fighting to overturn decades of UAW-backed
concessions.
Around 40,000 subway and bus workers in New York City’s Metropolitan
Transit Authority (MTA) remain on the job more than two weeks since
their collective bargaining agreement expired. Their determination to
fight significant concessions demanded by management, while winning pay
increases to keep pace with inflation and other key demands, is bringing
them into direct conflict with both management and the union
bureaucracy.
Workers are fighting against the staggering
inequality and corporate oligarchy centered in the world’s financial
capital. The consequences of decades of neglect of the transport
infrastructure were underscored last Friday when a fire broke out in
Penn Station, the country’s busiest train station and located only a few
miles from Wall Street, injuring five people.
Management claims
that wages keeping pace with inflation, currently running at 4.6 percent
in New York City, are “unaffordable.” Its initial “offer” was only 2
percent annually, combined with a doubling of healthcare contributions
by workers and sharp limits on overtime and sick leave.
The
three-day strike last month by 3,500 Long Island Rail Road (LIRR)
workers was an opening stage in this struggle. The LIRR, New York City’s
busiest commuter rail system, is part of the MTA although under a
separate contract. The three-day strike was shut down abruptly without
any input from the membership, while union officials refused to release
details, on the grounds that they did “not want to fail ratification.”
The shutdown underscored the role of the bureaucracy in limiting the
struggle and bypassing the democratic will of members.
Almost three years after the Canadian parliament celebrated the Waffen SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka with honours and standing ovations, Ukraine has elevated his political boss to the status of “national hero.”
In
a hastily organized ceremony in Kiev’s National Military Cemetery on
May 24, Ukraine’s political and military leadership re-interred the
ashes of the WWII Ukrainian nationalist, fascist leader and Nazi
collaborator Andriy Melnyk and his wife Sofia. Melnyk had been buried in
Luxembourg since his death in exile in 1964.
The chairman of the
Israeli Holocaust memorial site Yad Vashem, Dani Dayan, publicly raised
concerns about the ceremony in honor of the Nazi collaborator. He was
promptly added to a notorious Ukrainian blacklist called Myrotvorets,
which has close ties to the Ukrainian government, for allegedly
spreading “Russian-fascist propaganda narratives.”
Melnyk led one
faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the eponymously
named OUN-M, from 1939 until his death, advocating the establishment of a
fascist Ukrainian ethnostate subordinated to Nazi Germany. His OUN-M
forces enthusiastically collaborated in the Holocaust of European Jewry
and in the Nazi war of extermination against the Soviet Union. The
OUN-M-affiliated newspaper, Krakivski Visti, described the
onslaught as “the most justified war in history” while celebrating Adolf
Hitler as “the greatest leader of the 20th century.” When the Nazis
lost WWII, Melnyk and other fascist collaborators effortlessly adapted
themselves to the Cold War campaign of American, British and Canadian
imperialism to destroy the Soviet Union.
Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky, two years after the expiry of his own legal mandate,
announced on May 19 that the remains of Melnyk and soon other fascist
nationalists, such as Yehven Konovalets, would be repatriated and
reburied within days as part of a government plan to establish a
“pantheon of national heroes.”
The
Labor government and the fascistic Trump administration were as one at
the forum in their denunciations of China and their plans for a further
military build-up.
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.
