Autoworker, socialist, and working class hero Will Lehman
On Saturday, April 25, UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman
introduced this resolution at a meeting of UAW Local 677 in Macungie,
Pennsylvania. Local 677 includes the Mack Trucks plant at which Lehman
works. The meeting was attended by members of the local apparatus. In
order for resolutions to be presented at the upcoming Constitutional
Convention, they must first be approved by local unions.
When the vote was taken, the resolution was voted down 7–1, with Will Lehman casting the only vote in favor.
This
outcome stands in sharp contradiction to the sentiments of
rank-and-file workers. There is enormous opposition among autoworkers
and workers throughout the UAW to the war, to the attacks on democratic
rights at home, and to the diversion of trillions into militarism while
living standards are slashed. But the UAW apparatus has aligned itself
with the war drive of the government and the corporations, enforcing
nationalism while workers are told to “sacrifice” for policies that
benefit only the financial oligarchy.
Will Lehman—a rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker and socialist
candidate for UAW president—introduced a resolution opposing the war
against Iran at a meeting of UAW Local 677 on Saturday. Lehman proposed
that the resolution—“Against the US-Israeli Imperialist War on Iran; For the Independent Mobilization of the Working Class”—be taken up at the 39th UAW Constitutional Convention, scheduled for June 15–18 in Detroit.
The
resolution was put to a vote at UAW Local 677 and was defeated 7 to 1.
Lehman cast the only vote in favor. The seven who voted it down were not
rank-and-file workers but local officers and their associates—a tiny
bureaucratic clique convened without the 2,400 Mack Trucks workers.
Their vote is entirely typical of the pro-war UAW apparatus that has,
from the national leadership on down, either actively promoted the war
drive or maintained a cowardly silence in the face of it.
The
resolution proposed by Lehman is a powerful statement outlining a
strategy for the working class to stop the war. It denounces the war as
criminal, drawing on the Nuremberg precedents established after World
War II, and documents its staggering human costs and implications.
The
resolution also directly connects the war to the attacks on the
democratic and social rights of the working class at home. The same
government that bombs Iranian cities is deploying militarized federal
agents against immigrant workers, killed Renée Nicole Good and Alex
Pretti, and is building what the resolution characterizes as “the
largest immigration prison system in American history.”
*****
The resolution lays out a program of action rooted in the independent
initiative of the rank and file. It declares that the war “can be ended
only by the independent mobilization of the working class,” not by
appeals to Congress, lobbying the Democrats, or reliance on “capitalist
politicians of any stripe.” It therefore calls on UAW members to
“actualize” the resolution through the formation of rank-and-file
committees in every local—independent of and not subordinate to the
union bureaucracy, elected in open meetings, accountable solely to the
membership, and subject to immediate recall.
The resolution
specifies what these committees would be charged with: taking the
resolution into every workplace and convening the membership to discuss
and act on it; organizing the defense of immigrant coworkers against ICE
raids and deportations; opposing the conversion of auto and auto parts
production to military output; and preparing to oppose conscription and
defend any worker or young person who refuses to fight in an imperialist
war. It further calls for establishing direct lines of communication
and coordination with rank-and-file committees in other UAW locals,
other unions, and with workers internationally, including in Iran.
Finally,
it links these organizational measures to concrete industrial and
political action. The committees are instructed to convene assemblies,
prepare the membership for “industrial and political action up to and
including work stoppages and strike action,” and report back “regularly
and openly” on progress. The resolution underscores that implementation
cannot be left to “officials, staff, or apparatus,” but depends on “the
conscious, organized, and independent action of the rank and file.”
The vote against Lehman’s resolution by the Local 677 apparatus is
politically significant not for its tally—7 to 1 in a meeting designed
to exclude the membership—but for what it reveals. A handful of
officials, acting as a closed bureaucratic clique, moved to suppress any
expression of opposition to an illegal war and prevent even a
discussion among the 2,400 Mack workers they nominally “represent.” In
this sense, the vote is a concentrated expression of the role of the UAW
apparatus as a whole.
UAW President Shawn Fain has positioned the
apparatus as a reliable prop of the war drive. He has issued no
statement opposing the Iran war, while reviving the poisonous mythology
of the World War II “Arsenal of Democracy”—the corporatist arrangement
under which auto production was converted to armaments, workers were
stripped of the right to strike, and the union bureaucracy was rewarded
with state sanction and institutional privileges in exchange for
enforcing “labor discipline.”
Fain’s embrace of Trump’s economic
nationalism and tariff war flows from the same logic: divide workers
along national lines, subordinate their struggles to the “national
interest” of American capitalism, and prepare the union to police the
workforce as war and austerity escalate.
The World Socialist Web Site calls on autoworkers and all UAW members to take Lehman’s
resolution into every plant and every local, circulate it on the shop
floor, and implement the strategy that it lays out. As the resolution
states, the working class possesses, through its position in production,
transportation and the universities, the social power to halt the war
machine. The issue is organization and leadership: whether workers’
collective strength is consciously mobilized, or strangled by officials
whose privileges depend on keeping workers politically disarmed and
isolated.
As the strike by members of the Harvard Graduate Student Union–United
Auto Workers (HGSU–UAW) begins to enter its second week, their class
brothers and sisters in the Harvard Academic Workers-UAW
(HAW-UAW) union have reached a critical turning point in their
struggle. The fight by 4,000 non-tenure-track faculty and researchers
for a first contract with the Ivy League university is a focal point in
the struggle of academic workers across the country.
The primary
obstacle to victory is not merely the recalcitrance of the Harvard
administration, but the sabotage of the UAW bureaucracy. UAW
International and Region 9A officials have moved to strangle the strike
before it could become a united counter-offensive by academic workers
and graduate student workers.
In a flagrant violation of
democratic principles, the HAW-UAW bargaining committee has unilaterally
called off plans for a spring strike, overriding a clear mandate from
the membership. As reported in the Harvard Crimson, during a
general membership meeting, 53 percent of attendees voted to close the
strike authorization vote and begin striking immediately. Rather than
implementing this decision, the committee engaged in “bureaucratic
gaslighting,” citing “procedural confusions” and “notification windows”
to justify an abrupt about-face that rules out any strike action for the
remainder of the semester. This maneuver is a deliberate attempt to
protect the university’s “reading period” and commencement operations at
the expense of the workers’ primary leverage.
This betrayal is a
gift to the Harvard administration. By preventing a unified front with
Harvard Graduate Student Union (HGSU-UAW) members who are already on
strike for living wages, the HAW-UAW leadership has effectively enforced
the “divide-and-conquer” strategy of management. While graduate workers
face $3,500 median rents in Cambridge on a pittance wage as little
as $18 per hour, the HAW-UAW bureaucracy is ensuring that the
non-tenure-track faculty remains isolated, stripped of their power to
shut down the university.
The UAW International apparatus functions as a policing mechanism for
the financial oligarchy. Under the leadership of Shawn Fain, the
bureaucracy has perfected the use of corporatist “red tape” to stifle
the initiative of workers. The HAW-UAW bargaining committee’s claim that
a strike was “logistically unfeasible” is a political fiction designed
to obscure their role as management’s enforcers.
*****
As [the World Socialist Web Site has] previously reported, the most important figures on the Board include:
Penny Pritzker: Billionaire; Former Commerce Secretary (Obama); Boards of Microsoft & Icertis.
Timothy Barakett: Founder, TRB Advisors; Appointed to KKR Board (March 2025).
Mariano-Florentino
Cuéllar: Former NSC Senior Director (Obama); President of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, a major thinktank for the military-
intelligence apparatus.
Michael Chae: Vice Chair and CFO of Blackstone (World’s largest commercial landlord).
Sylvia Mathews Burwell: Former Health and Human Services secretary; Chief of Staff to Robert Rubin (Architect of deregulation).
The
administration has weaponized a narrative of “financial distress,”
citing a projected $365 million deficit to justify wage suppression.
This is a strategic accounting lie. Harvard sits on a $53.2 billion
endowment and recently raised $629 million in current-use gifts. The
“crisis” is a political choice made under the pressure of the Trump
administration’s scorched-earth campaign against academic freedom and student anti-genocide protests.
With
Education Secretary Linda McMahon placing Harvard under “heightened
cash monitoring” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth freezing $2.2
billion in grants, the Harvard Corporation is offloading the costs of
its political conflict with the far right onto the backs of the workers.
*****
The only viable path forward for Harvard workers is the strategy
proposed by Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate
for UAW president. Lehman has explained that the Harvard strike is part
of a global movement against exploitation and war, which pits workers
against the pro-war labor apparatus. “The bureaucracy can’t be reformed.
It must be abolished,” Lehman has stated, emphasizing that academic and
industrial workers face the same bureaucratic enemy.
Lehman’s
call for a “unified counter-offensive” is the only response to the
Harvard Corporation’s retrenchment and the Trump administration’s drive
toward fascist dictatorship.
The victory of Harvard workers
depends on their ability to break the grip of the UAW bureaucracy and
the two-party system it serves. The leadership’s decision to override a
strike vote is a warning: the apparatus will always prioritize its
relationship with the university and the state over the needs of the
workers.
To prevail, Harvard workers must:
Reject the sabotage of the HAW-UAW leadership and demand an immediate return to democratic control over the strike timeline.
Form
independent rank-and-file committees to coordinate action across
bargaining units, independent of the highly paid officials of the UAW
International.
Link the struggle to the International Workers
Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to unite with the
international working class in a common fight against capitalism and
war.
The fight at Harvard is a central battleground in the
global class struggle. Workers can only win by recognizing that their
true allies are not the “labor lieutenants of capital” in the union
offices, but the international working class mobilized in a
revolutionary struggle against the financial oligarchy.
The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) tracked 4,235 unique
titles challenged in 2025, the second highest ever documented by ALA.
The highest ever documented was 4,240 in 2023. As one of the essays
included in the State of America’s Libraries points out, “These numbers
stand far from the baseline of 273, which was the average annual number
between 2001 and 2020.”
This is not the result of some sudden
upsurge in public morality or even prudishness. This is a concerted,
organized campaign driven by ultra-right elements dedicated to forcing
their anti-democratic and unpopular views on a largely unsuspecting
public. It is part of the preemptive assault on popular consciousness,
driven by fear of the growing radicalization materialized in the “No
Kings” demonstrations of millions and other indications of public
hostility to the entire political establishment.
Along these
lines, one of the “key findings” of the ALA in regard to the “censorship
landscape” bears on the identity of the “intellectual freedom
challengers.”
The State of America’s Libraries observes:
Contrary
to common narratives suggesting that book challenges originate
primarily from concerned parents, our data shows otherwise.
Approximately 91.7% of titles challenged in 2025 were targeted by
pressure groups (20.8%) and government decision makers (70.9%). By
comparison, only 2.7% of challenges came from parents, and 1.4% came from individual library users.
This represents a dramatic shift from previous years. In the past,
pressure groups and government officials accounted for roughly 12.9% of
book challenges, averaging about 46 titles per year. [Emphasis added.]
*****
The claim by the censorship zealots that they are “protecting children”
is hypocritical, cynical drivel. The right-wing forces so worried about
the young are the same ones in favor of slashing budgets, social
programs and benefits, resulting in the impoverishment of millions of
children and families.
The most targeted books in 2025 included Sold, by Patricia McCormick, a 2006 novel about a girl from Nepal sold into sexual slavery
in India. The book was adapted as a film in 2014, with Emma Thompson as
one of the executive producers. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) by Stephen Chbosky is also highly targeted. That novel too was made into a film, in 2012.
Two fantasy novels by Sarah J. Maas (Empire of Storms [2016] and A Court of Thorns and Roses [2015]), and another by Jennifer L. Armentrout (Storm and Fury, 2019) are on the list, as is Anthony Burgess’ dystopian 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange!
Also on the 2025 list, John Green’s 2005 young adult novel, Looking for Alaska,
was the fourth-most challenged book in the US between 2010 and 2019,
with profanity and a sexually explicit scene identified as
objectionable. When the Marion County (Kentucky) High School considered
removing the book from the library and senior English curriculum, it
created a genuine controversy, with considerable public support for the
book. The teacher who wanted to use Green’s novel received more than 500
encouraging emails, half of them written by teenagers who had read it.
Tricks
(2009) by Ellen Hopkins was another title under attack in 2025, in this
case for its treatment of drugs and adolescent sexuality, as was her Identical(2013). Gender Queer: A Memoir (2019) by Maia Kobabe and Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021) by Malinda Lo were singled out for attack because of their gay sexual themes.
Beyond
the list of the most targeted, the ALA reports that of the titles
targeted in 2025, 1,671 deal with LGBTQ and black or indigenous themes.
The fascistic book banners consider these subjects “low-hanging fruit,”
appealing to the most backward elements in the population. And anti-gay
bigotry and racism are real driving forces in these quarters.
*****
This is along the lines of the Nazi-like effort to “synchronize”
institutions and culture behind American chauvinism, militarism and
social reaction. Donald Trump’s January 29, 2025 executive order,
“Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” for example, asserted
that parents expected US schools “to instill a patriotic admiration for
our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand.” This was to
be coordinated with the Department of Defense.
This year’s militarist Anzac Day celebration coincided with an
eruption of imperialist war that Australia, under the Labor government,
is centrally involved in.
Anzac Day marks the disastrous 1915
landing of Australian, New Zealand and British troops at Gallipoli,
Turkey, amid World War I. Notwithstanding the government’s glorification
of the landing at Gallipoli, it was a catastrophe from start to finish,
the result of the reckless decisions of British and Australian military
leadership. Up to 50,000 Allied troops and more than 85,000 Turkish
soldiers lost their lives in a battle that was supposed to be a surprise
attack but dragged on for more than eight months.
Now 111 years
later, Australia is participating in a new criminal war in that region
of the world, the US-led assault on Iran, which threatens to ignite a
global conflagration.
Widely reviled amid the mass hostility to
the Vietnam War, Anzac Day has been heavily promoted by governments
since the 1980s and 90s, a period coinciding with unending US-led wars
that are now metastasizing into a direct confrontation of American
imperialism with nuclear-armed states, Russia and China.
The lead-up to Anzac Day was more muted than in previous years. In
his statements on Saturday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese trotted out
the usual lines about the military having “embodied all that is greatest
in our national character.” But he said nothing about the role of the
military in conflicts that are underway today.
The reason for the
vagueness is that there is widespread anti-war sentiment. A Newspoll
last month found that 72 percent of the population opposed the US attack
on Iran. Over more than two years, there have been mass protests
opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the Labor government’s support
for it.
Even among the crowds that gathered, which were many times smaller than
the largest of those demonstrations, there were glimmers of popular
anti-war sentiment. Roy Pearson, a 99-year-old veteran of World War II
told the Sydney Morning Herald, “War never solves anything. We need to wake up to ourselves.”
*****
While government leaders avoid speaking about the implications of
what they are preparing, the reality of plans for a major war were spelt
out bluntly by former secretary of the Home Affairs department, Mike
Pezzullo.
In a comment published by the Murdoch-owned Australian
and the hawkish Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Pezzullo
bemoaned the fact that “Australians tend to frame war in moral terms and
as something that is in our past.” The former senior official warned
that the “solemnity” of Anzac Day, and an emphasis on the horrors of war
undermined “The idea of the utility and necessity of war.”
Speaking about his willingness to sacrifice the new generations of young people he continued:
“Will
we have the fortitude to calculate the odds of war and to prepare
accordingly, even as we abhor war? Will we have the moral clarity to
calculate the cost of war and the price of peace? Will we be prepared to
make the same sacrifices that we rightly honor on Saturday, for the
sake of future generations?
“Odds are, we may be tested soon enough.”
He denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin. But the main target of
the diatribe was China. Pezzullo repeated all of the US talking points,
falsely depicting Beijing as an aggressor and declared, “For
Australia’s part, we are not doing nearly enough to prepare for the
possibility of a war in the Pacific in the near term.”
An editorial in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) was more restrained, but made the same basic point.
*****
In what could become a defining element of this year’s Anzac Day, was
the decision of Victoria Cross recipient, Ben Roberts-Smith, to attend
an Anzac Day event on Queensland’s Gold Coast. He appears to have been
given a warm welcome by most in the small crowd, while media outlets,
including the publicly funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation,
published respectful articles citing Roberts-Smith’s comments about his
passion for Anzac Day.
It’s less than three weeks since
Roberts-Smith was criminally charged with five war crimes, for his
alleged involvement in the murder of multiple Afghans. That includes
accusations that Roberts-Smith machine gunned a disabled Afghan prisoner
to death and kicked a civilian off a cliff.
War crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan flowed
inexorably from the neo-colonial and criminal character of the
occupation itself. The official claims that governments and the military
command were unaware of the atrocities that were carried out are not
credible.
Even in that context though, the ability of
Roberts-Smith to make public appearances and to be treated politely by
the press, as an accused serial murderer, is disturbing and a marker of a
shift to the right by the entire political and media establishment.
On Saturday night, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance,
California, was tackled and subdued by Secret Service agents after he
broke through the outer security perimeter at the White House
Correspondents Association dinner at the Washington Hilton.
There
was a flurry of gunshots, some by the gunman, who was armed with a
shotgun and a handgun, some by Secret Service agents or other security
officers. Only two people required medical attention: Allen himself, and
an unnamed Secret Service agent, who was wearing a bulletproof vest and
only lightly injured, according to accounts given by federal officials.
*****
While the statement issued by Allen indicates that he was deeply opposed
to the actions of the Trump regime, the course he took serves no
progressive purpose. Long historical experience has demonstrated that
individual attacks on one or another leader play into the hands of
political reaction. In this case, it provides an opportunity for Trump
to escalate attacks on democratic rights.
*****
Trump sought to use the incident both to glorify his own significance,
and to press ahead with the construction of the gigantic ballroom that
would replace the now-demolished East Wing of the White House. This
included an obscene comparison of himself to Abraham Lincoln. Trump
declared, “the people that do the most, the people that make the biggest
impact, they’re the ones that they go after.”
The response from the political establishment and the corporate media
is, as always, reactionary, cowardly and hypocritical. In the various
statements from these layers, centered on the theme of “there is no
place for political violence in America,” none made the basic point that
Trump is himself responsible for escalating brutal violence abroad and
within the United States.
It is not even two months since US and
Israeli forces carried out the extermination of much of Iran’s political
leadership, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many of his family
members, advisers and other government officials in a targeted air
strike on the first day of the US war with Iran.
The leaders of the European imperialist powers, who have balked at
some of Trump’s actions in the Persian Gulf, were at pains to condemn
the attack on the WHCA dinner and any suggestion that violence in
America was a case of the chickens coming home to roost.
Commission
President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted that she was “relieved” Trump
and attendees were safe, adding: “Violence has no place in politics,
ever.” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas struck a similar
tone, warning that “political violence has no place in a democracy.”
British
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “shocked by the scenes”
Saturday night in Washington, while German Chancellor Friedrich
Merz tweeted, “Violence has no place in a democracy.” French President
Emmanuel Macron was more direct, declaring, “I extend my full support to
Donald Trump.”
The hypocrisy is sickening. Trump is himself the
greatest threat to American democracy, as these ladies and gentlemen
well know. His thugs attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an
effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, and his war against
immigrants has left American citizens dead on the streets and immigrants
dead in detention camps. To say nothing of the thousands slaughtered in
Iran, Lebanon and Gaza by US bombs and missiles.
Unite union officials have held secret talks with representatives of
Reform UK over ending the 15-month Birmingham bin strike. The meeting is
the filthy product of Unite’s isolation of a struggle that has pitted a
small but determined group of 400 refuse workers against the Labour
Party, locally and nationally, and its brutal austerity agenda.
Strike
action became all out from March last year against the Labour-run
council’s abolition of the safety-critical Waste Recycling and
Collection Officer (WRCO) role, affecting 150 bin loaders, crippling pay
cuts of up to £8,000, and a reduction in crew sizes by a quarter, with a
similar downgrading exercise impacting bin lorry drivers.
Unite’s
attempt to portray Reform UK—a far-right, anti-immigrant, pro-business
party—as a potential ally is politically criminal, with implications far
beyond the Birmingham dispute.
The Times
reported Unite officials met senior advisors to Reform UK leader Nigel
Farage on April 14 at a Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Birmingham to
discuss a potential settlement of the protracted dispute with the Labour
authority led by John Cotton. Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham was
not present, with talks conducted by trusted emissaries.
The meeting was held in secret to avoid backlash against getting into bed with the far-right party.
It
took place amid a deep crisis for Keir Starmer’s Labour government,
which faces a meltdown in local elections on May 7 covering thousands of
council seats across England, Scotland and Wales. This reflects
widespread anger over its austerity program, such as the devastating
£300 million cuts imposed in Birmingham, the UK’s second-largest city,
across the council workforce
Unite’s engagement with Reform UK
lends credence to its efforts to pose as a worker-friendly alternative
to Labour that will in fact be used to push a further shift to the right
in the interests of the corporate and financial elite.
*****
Farage provided an exclusive with the Daily Mail on Friday which laid out what Reform UK would do in power if it replaced the Starmer government.
The
ex-banker demanded brutal cuts to welfare provision, targeting those on
disability benefits, threatening that “there’ll be riots, and there’ll
be strikes and there’ll be protests, and we know all of that, but that’s
what we’re going to have to do – it has to be done. We just can’t
afford it now.”
This is the party Unite officials are promoting as
intermediaries in Birmingham, while normalizing its toxic nationalism
and xenophobia. Conservative shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick made
infamous hate filled remarks against immigrants and the working class
of Birmingham in March 2025 after visiting the Handsworth area of the
city, complaining he had not seen “another white face” and “it was as
close I’ve come to a slum in this country.”
*****
The embrace of Reform UK is in line with Unite’s own promotion of
nationalism and militarism. Graham’s most heated rows with the
government have centered on her complaints that Labour is not moving fast
enough on military spending, including threatening that Chancellor
Rachel Reeves should be sacked if this was not speeded up. If Reeves
could not “grasp the concept” of backing British industry “and doesn’t
care where things are made then she should go.” She described a massive
rearmament program as “vision for Britain.”
Unite’s agenda of
militarism and economic protectionism, so far pursued in collaboration
with the Starmer government, is fundamentally incompatible with the defense of workers’ jobs, pay and conditions, or public services, all of
which are being sacrificed on the altar of increased military
expenditure, trade war and further tax concessions to big business. But
it is entirely compatible with support for a Reform UK government by
bureaucracy that functions not as a vehicle for workers’ resistance, but
as an instrument for its suppression.
The Holiday Inn meeting
between Unite and Reform UK is a damning exposure of the role of the
pseudo-left, including the Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party and
the Revolutionary Communist Party, which have backed Graham, promoted
the union’s bogus “mega-pickets” while the strike was systematically
isolated, and glorified Graham’s spats with Starmer as representing a
shift to the left by the union bureaucracy.
*****
The Socialist Equality Party has insisted throughout the Birmingham
dispute that the fight against the Starmer government, against
anti-migrant attacks, the rise of the far-right, austerity and war mean
ending the strangulation of the class struggle by the union bureaucracy.
It requires the building of independent rank-and-file committees to
transfer decision-making to workers themselves and unify struggles
across workplaces and sectors and forging a new leadership for the
working class, the SEP.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan and her Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM)
government has released a report into the October 2025 post-Tanzanian
election mass killing of protesters—one of the bloodiest episodes in
post-independence African history.
The October 29 election, in
which Hassan claimed a one-candidate “victory” with the absurd official
result of 97 percent, was a transparent fraud. The main opposition
leader Tundu Lissu was detained and accused of treason ahead of the
elections. His pro-business Chadema party was barred from contesting.
The response was explosive. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions,
of workers and youth flooded the streets in the largest protests since
independence, shattering the myth of Tanzania as a stable “land of
peace” promoted by the corporate media and foreign investors. The regime
responded with naked terror. Under cover of a five-day internet
blackout, security forces unleashed a killing spree, gunning down
protesters nationwide.
The report is a whitewash. The commission
was chaired by former chief justice Mohamed Chande Othman, like all
senior judicial posts appointed from the CCM regime responsible for the
massacre.
The report admits that at least 518 people died from
“unnatural causes”, 197 by gunfire, and that victims were shot in their
homes as well as in the streets, with over 2,000 injured and 833 struck
by live rounds. Of the 518, 21 were children. But it dismisses well
documented reports of mass graves and large-scale disappearances as
unsubstantiated, even as it acknowledges that 245 people are still
missing and that 39 families reported seeing the bodies of relatives in
morgues before they later disappeared.
The true scale is far greater. A November report by 40 African human
rights organizations in Nairobi estimated the death toll at up to 3,000
protestors.
*****
Without presenting a shred of evidence, the report attributed the
violence to “trained individuals” and “coordinated actors.” It claims
that “there were people roaming around in various places… inciting and
recruiting others to participate in violence during and after the
election”.
This is a well-worn pattern employed by regimes across
the region, including that of William Ruto in Kenya following the
massacres of anti-austerity protests in 2024 and 2025, and Yoweri
Museveni during recent elections in Uganda.
These stooges of
imperialism, presiding over capitalist regimes carved out on the
colonial boundaries, routinely invoke shadowy external forces to justify
their repression, rather than acknowledge the real driving forces:
soaring living costs, austerity measures, and police state violence,
pushing workers and youth into struggle.
Speaking after receiving
the report, Hassan declared that the events were a “tragedy” that “shook
our nation”. This gave way to an open defense of repression. She
insisted that the security forces had acted to prevent the country from
descending into “anarchy,” and claimed that “all the violence was
planned, coordinated, financed and executed by people who were trained
and given equipment for committing crimes.” The aim of the protests was
“to create a leadership vacuum” and render the country “ungovernable.”
*****
The report’s release has been met with deafening silence from
Washington and Brussels, whose sole concern is Tanzania’s growing
importance within the global scramble for resources. The country
possesses vast deposits of nickel, graphite, rare earths, and other
critical minerals essential for electric vehicle batteries, advanced
electronics, and military technologies. US-backed ventures, including
major nickel and liquefied natural gas projects, are moving forward,
while the European Union has intensified cooperation under its Critical
Raw Materials strategy to secure alternative supply chains.
These
investments are central to the economic and military interests of the
imperialist powers. Maintaining access to these resources and countering
the expanding influence of China, which has become Tanzania’s largest
trading partner and a major investor in infrastructure and mining, is
their overriding aim.
*****
For the Tanzanian masses, the central issues remain unemployment,
poverty, and repression. The October protests expressed a deep social
crisis. The essential lesson is that the struggle for democratic rights
is inseparable from the fight against capitalism and imperialism, and
cannot be entrusted to the state, the bourgeois opposition, or the
imperialist power now waging war on Iran.
What is required is the
united independent political mobilization workers, youth, and the rural
masses in a struggle that must extend beyond the colonial boundaries
imposed by imperialism. This must be based on a program linking
immediate democratic demands, including accountability for the killings,
the release of political prisoners, and the restoration of democratic
rights, to the broader objective of socialist transformation: the
expropriation of the ruling elite, democratic control over the region’s
vast resources, and their utilization for human need rather than profit,
as part of the fight for the United Socialist States of Africa.
The ongoing industrial uprising of tens of thousands of workers
in the manufacturing belt that surrounds Delhi, India’s capital and
largest urban area, is being met with mounting state repression. Acting
at the behest of the BJP–the Hindu supremacist party that holds power
nationally, in Delhi, and in the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh
and Haryana–police have arrested hundreds of workers protesting poverty
wages and brutal working conditions, as well as scores of activists who
have supported them.
Over 400 workers have been arrested in the
National Capital Region (NCR), since the worker rebellion began on April
10. Police are now casting a wider net to capture and arrest young labor and political activists who have shown solidarity with the worker
protests by publicizing their plight and resistance via social media
and by giving speeches at various strike locations. The police have
falsely claimed that these activists are the principal cause of the
worker unrest, labeling them instigators. In a transparent smear, the
authorities have also suggested some of them may be in cahoots with
India’s arch-rival Pakistan.
The police started systematically
targeting the activists after the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (UP),
the Hindu fascist Yogi Adityanath, called the workers’ protests an
“organized conspiracy” to “disrupt peace and progress at a time when the
state is moving steadily towards development and stability.”
On
April 18, Aditya Anand, a young labor activist was arrested at a
railway station in the city of Tiruchirappalli in the southern state of
Tamil Nadu by teams of UP police who had traveled about 2,500 km (1,500
miles) to capture him. They had placed a reward of Rs. 100,000 for his
arrest. Despite holding a bachelor’s degree in engineering, Aditya is
unemployed.
The UP police are fanning out across the country to
arrest political activists simply for being present at the workers’
demonstrations. So far, they have reportedly arrested at least 63 people
across the country, not including the hundreds of workers who have been
thrown in jail.
The police have described Aditya Anand as the “mastermind” behind the
violence that occurred on Monday, April 13, in the Noida township,
about 25 km from New Delhi, the site of India’s parliament buildings.
What the police and the Indian corporate media have termed “violence”
took place after the police mounted a frontal assault on the workers,
mercilessly beating them with batons and dragging detained workers
through the streets. After this assault, the workers defended themselves
by throwing stones and firecrackers at the police and by overturning
police vehicles. Some other vehicles were set on fire by unknown
persons.
Anand has been charged with various criminal offences,
including inciting violence and damaging public property. The police
have also served him with a non‑bailable arrest warrant endorsed by a
local court. Prior to Anand’s arrest two persons police have labelled
his accomplices—Manisha Chauhan and Rupresh Rai—were also arrested. The
day after Anand’s arrest, police arrested two more individuals: Himanshu
Thakur in New Delhi and Satyam Verma in the UP city of Lucknow. What is
common to all of them is that they are activists in a labour advocacy
group named Mazdoor Bigul (Workers’ Bugle). Their only “sin”
has been to document and publicize the misery of these oppressed workers
through social media and to appear at their demonstrations.
After Anand’s arrest, Noida Police Commissioner Laxmi Singh
sensationally told the press that “the violence that occurred in Noida
was a mala fide, internationally organized activity.” The Police
Commissioner provided no evidence to support this claim. She simply
repeated an allegation first propagated by Chief Minister Adityanath
that there may be a “Pak connection,” referring to Pakistan, behind the
workers’ uprising.
*****
In contrast to these sensationalist and highly prejudicial claims, Aditya’s aghast brother, Akash Anand, told the Indian Express:
“He was simply demanding a fair wage for laborers, is that so wrong?”
He continued: “He always had a humanistic approach to everyone. We even
have video evidence of Aditya pleading with workers to protest in a
peaceful manner, but no one is ready to listen to us.”
Aditya
Anand has now reportedly “confessed to his role in the crime.” This
suggests that the police have used beatings and/or torture to extract a
confession from him. India’s police are notorious for abusing detainees
and using forced confessions to railroad poor people and government
opponents to lengthy prison terms.
Lawyers for some of those arrested have called the detentions completely
illegal, arguing that the police have violated the most basic
procedures of law. Defense lawyer Kabir Gupta, who represents Aditya
Anand, told the Times of India: “The arrests are illegal
because they were carried out without following due procedure under law.
Unless the grounds of arrest are disclosed and our client is served
with an arrest memo, the arrests cannot be called legal.”
*****
The Indian ruling class has a long history of criminalizing workers’
struggles. One of the most notorious cases was the frame-up and
victimisation of the entire leadership of the Maruti Suzuki Workers Union
(MSW), a newly formed independent union that led a series of militant
job actions in 2011-12. Following a company-provoked altercation and
mysterious July 2012 fire at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar, Haryana, plant,
thirteen MSWU leaders were framed up on murder charges. After five years
in prison and a bogus trial in which the judge deliberately mangled the
law, the thirteen were sentenced to life in prison. Although the 11
surviving MSWU leaders are currently out on bail pending the court’s
ruling on their appeal, they remain under threat of re-imprisonment and
continue to suffer from their terrible ordeal.
The draconian
measures being utilized by the authorities to suppress worker opposition
flow from their determination to reassure domestic and foreign capital
that India will guarantee them ever expanding profits under conditions
of growing global economic turbulence, further compounded by Trump’s
tariffs and now the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran. While the attack on
the Noida workers has been led by the BJP, opposition-led state
governments have similarly unleashed the police on protesting workers
and routinely invoke essential services laws to break strikes. Many are
also now implementing the “Labour Codes”
introduced by Prime Minster Narendra Modi and his BJP government to gut
even minimal statutory protections for the already highly exploited
Indian working class.
The World Socialist Web Site
condemns the arrests, imprisonment and ongoing prosecution of the Noida
workers and labor activists. These actions are aimed at suppressing
worker resistance and silencing left-wing opposition, above all that
which seeks to support working class struggles. Workers, youth and
socialist-minded professionals in India and around the world must
strongly denounce and publicize this outrage and demand the immediate
release of these class war prisoners.
A strike by approximately 1,300 workers at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Missouri is entering its fourth week
without resolution. The workers, members of the International
Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Local 778, walked
out on April 5 after courageously rejecting a pro-company contract that
enforced severe cuts to real wages amid historic inflation and
maintained a punishing regime of forced, excessive overtime.
While
the immediate demands of the workers are economic—centered on defending
their living standards and winning back a semblance of work-life
balance—the objective logic of their struggle brings them into a direct
political collision with the US government and the machinery of military
production.
The Lake City plant is a central artery of the US
military-industrial complex, producing the vast majority of
small-caliber ammunition for the United States Armed Forces. The context
of this strike is of the highest strategic consequence. It is unfolding
in the midst of a massive, blood-soaked war launched by the Trump
administration against Iran. While a recently declared “indefinite
ceasefire” has nominally paused direct military strikes, workers must be
warned: this is a fraud. Accompanied by a continuing and illegal US
naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the ceasefire is not an end to
the war or a step toward peace, but a tactical, armed truce.
As the World Socialist Web Site has continuously warned, the
assault on Iran is not an isolated conflict, but a major theater in the
initial stages of a rapidly developing Third World War. The drive by
American imperialism to subjugate Iran is inextricably linked to the
US-NATO proxy war against Russia and advanced preparations for a massive
military confrontation with China.
*****
Because the military is demanding this massive stockpiling effort,
the demands placed on defense manufacturing workers have reached
intolerable levels. The mass production of ammunition is dangerous, exhausting work.
Workers operate amid massive industrial presses and high-decibel metal
stamping, facing constant exposure to toxic heavy metals such as lead,
alongside volatile explosive compounds. To meet the Pentagon’s quotas,
workers have been subjected to an exhausting regime of endless, forced
overtime. This brutal setup deprives workers of time to rest, recover or
see their families, destroying their health to guarantee an
uninterrupted supply of bullets.
In stark contrast to the
sacrifices demanded of the workers, Olin Winchester, the
multi-billion-dollar defense contractor that operates the
government-owned facility, is gorging itself on the profits of war. As
the international death toll has climbed, Olin has raked in massive
revenues, funneling this blood money directly into the pockets of its
corporate executives and Wall Street investors. As its own corporate
financial filings confirm, Olin routinely diverts hundreds of millions
of dollars toward aggressive stock buyback programs and uninterrupted
quarterly dividend payouts. The company expects the rank-and-file to
accept effectively lowered wages—eaten away by years of inflation—while
management liquidates the profits of global slaughter to enrich the
major shareholders.
*****
To win this battle, Lake City workers need a new strategy based on a
clear understanding of the political forces arrayed against them. They
are fighting not just Olin Winchester, but the bipartisan war machine,
the capitalist state, and an IAM apparatus that is functioning as an
agency of the government.
Workers
at Lake City must urgently take the conduct of the strike into their
own hands by forming a rank-and-file strike committee. This committee
must outline non-negotiable demands—including a substantial wage
increase that fully offsets inflation, the institution of automatic
cost-of-living adjustments (COLA), and the total abolition of forced
overtime.
But such a committee must recognize the political nature
of this fight. It must break the isolation imposed by the IAM by
sending delegations to other defense plants, manufacturing facilities,
and logistics centers, appealing for broader working-class action. By
organizing through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees (IWA-RFC), workers can unite their struggle with the growing
movement of the working class globally against austerity and capitalist
exploitation.
The fight for decent living standards, for the right
to a life free from exhausting exploitation, is inherently bound up
with the fight against imperialist war. The working class must not be
forced to sacrifice its health, its wages, and its democratic rights to
build the arsenals for World War III. Instead, workers expropriate the
war profiteers and convert the military machine into a socially useful
industry.
The US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran is having a devastating
impact on the global economy, threatening to plunge billions of people
into deep poverty and hunger. Among the worst-affected regions is the
Pacific, where impoverished and isolated island states are highly
vulnerable to the fuel shortage caused by the blocking of the Strait of
Hormuz.
On April 17, the leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), which
includes 18 countries and territories, declared a region-wide emergency
and invoked the Biketawa Declaration—which provides a framework for the
regional coordination of relief efforts.
*****
The imperialist powers, which are responsible for the extreme poverty
and underdevelopment in the Pacific, are utterly indifferent to the fact
that millions of people’s livelihoods are being crushed. The US and its
allies, Australia and NZ, will exploit the crisis to further militarize
the strategically vital region in preparation for war against China—the
main target of US imperialism.
The
US maintains thousands of troops in Guam and is developing bases in
Palau and the Northern Mariana Islands. The US and Australia are
upgrading and making use of the Lombrum Naval Base in Papua New Guinea.
Australia
has signed neo-colonial military agreements with PNG and Tuvalu, and is
spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a Pacific Policing
Initiative, aimed at deploying militarized police anywhere in the region
to suppress popular unrest.
New Zealand last year cut all aid to
the Cook Islands in order to coerce its government into signing an
agreement that will compel it to consult NZ before making any commercial
or diplomatic agreements with China. Under the deal, reached earlier
this month, the NZ military has unimpeded access to the Cook Islands’
vast territorial waters.
Despite the tremendous hardship imposed
on their populations by the war, none of the Pacific governments has
opposed the genocidal bombing of Iran and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
Papua New Guinea’s foreign minister Justin Tkatchenko spoke for the
capitalist elites throughout the region when he told Radio NZ (RNZ) on
March 3: “We have supported the United States and Israel from day one.”
*****
On April 10, Kimberlyn King-Hinds, a US Republican representative for
the Northern Marianas, told the ABC that the territory was on the brink
of economic collapse, fuel prices had doubled and people were “having to
choose between having medication or not having medication… this is a
life and death situation.” But she refused to criticise the war and the
billions of dollars being squandered on the military, saying “that’s for
the president [Trump] to decide.”
Major struggles will inevitably erupt in the Pacific as the imperialist
powers and the local ruling classes seek to impose the full burden of
the economic crisis on working people. Workers, farmers and young people
must prepare by taking up a conscious political struggle for socialism.
We call on readers across the Pacific to participate in the upcoming International Online May Day Rally,
which will present a socialist strategy to stop the developing third
world war, and to join the fight to build the Trotskyist movement in
every country.
Last week, media outlets reported that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA) mayor of New York City, is considering a
plan to defer required contributions to several pension funds for city
workers—an austerity measure that amounts to a pension cut in slow
motion—aimed at reducing the city’s $5.4 billion budget gap.
Such a
move is a major attack on workers who will retire over the next two
decades, weakening the funds’ position and paving the way for future
benefit cuts and “reforms” imposed in the name of fiscal necessity.
Mamdani has taken up this plan from the City Council’s counterproposal
for the Fiscal Year 2027 budget, which begins in July.
Mamdani’s
stated aim is to save $1.2 billion a year in payments to the city’s five
pension funds by extending the legal deadline for full funding. In
2013, the City Council passed a law requiring the funds to reach 100
percent funding by 2032. Mamdani’s proposal would push that deadline
back to 2042 or later.
This is aimed at satisfying Wall Street
while exposing workers to far greater danger in the long term. If a
major stock market crash were to occur in 2033, for example—and the
financial system is already in an extremely fragile state—the city would
be in a far weaker position to absorb the shock because it would not
yet have the supposed “100 percent funded” cushion.
There is also
the more immediate danger of provoking credit rating agencies to reduce
the city’s rating, making borrowing more expensive. In March, Moody’s
and Fitch issued negative outlooks for the city—the same warnings that
preceded credit downgrades in 2020.
There is desperation in this
proposal—but also political calculation. The DSA administration is
working to prove to finance capital that it can govern “responsibly,”
which in practice means administering austerity and preparing major cuts
to schools and social programs.
*****
Last week, amid much fanfare, [conservative New York Governor Kathy] Hochul and Mamdani announced that she
would implement a “pied-à-terre tax” on second homes in New York City
valued at $5 million or more and owned by people who do not live in the
city.
The aim is political theater: a headline-grabbing “tax the
rich” gesture used to provide cover for austerity measures aimed at
workers—beginning with pensions. On April 15, the day income taxes were
due, Mamdani released a widely circulated video in which he stood
outside hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthouse on
Billionaires’ Row in Midtown Manhattan and declared that he was honoring
his campaign pledge: “Well, today we’re taxing the rich!”
Mamdani and Hochul have, in fact, formed a close political alliance and,
as with his alliance with the would-be Führer Donald Trump, he has
carefully avoided criticizing her in public. Hochul is using Mamdani to
provide a pseudo-left cover for a right-wing budget framework, while
Mamdani uses Hochul to market austerity as pragmatism.
*****
Mamdani’s public “affordability” branding has now been explicitly
folded into the Democratic Party’s attempt to refurbish itself through a
photo-op with Barack Obama—an architect of Wall Street rule and
imperialist war. In their first public appearance together, Mamdani and
Obama staged a preschool event earlier this month. Mamdani’s cultivation
of Obama—like his cultivation of Hochul and even Trump—signals a deeper
integration into the capitalist establishment.
There is little
doubt that Mamdani will be unable to balance the budget without massive
cuts to education and social programs. The Trump administration is
cutting aid to New York City at the very moment that the New York City
Housing Authority, which houses 500,000 low-income residents and is kept
afloat by federal funds, is collapsing. An estimated $80 billion is
needed simply to address the enormous backlog of repairs.
While
the full impact of federal cuts has not yet become clear, the expiration
of certain programs is already making working class life measurably
worse. The Emergency Housing Voucher program—part of the American Rescue
Plan Act of 2021, the third and final pandemic measure passed by
Congress—has run out of funds. The program subsidizes rent for 5,200 New
Yorkers, who will now have to find new subsidies or face homelessness.
The city is teeming with poverty and homelessness, and layoffs are
affecting broad layers of the working class. Inflation driven by the
Iran war is pummeling incomes, and a simmering mood of dissent and anger
is brewing in millions of households.
*****
... perhaps nothing will better symbolize the tenor of Mamdani and
the pseudo-left’s accommodation to American imperialism than the visit
of the British monarch, Charles III, to New York City next week, in the
year of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. Charles is the
figurehead of British imperialism and the patriarch of the decayed and
disgraced British royal family.
Mayor Mamdani, King Charles and
Queen Camilla will lay a wreath on Wednesday at the monument to the
victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.
After everything carried out in the name of that event—and amid the
ongoing American assault on Iran—nothing could more clearly symbolize
the surrender of Mamdani and the DSA to imperialism.
On April 14, a collision was narrowly avoided between a cargo jet and
a smaller aircraft on approach to Louisville Muhammad Ali International
Airport in Louisville, Kentucky. The 767 cargo jet had to abort its
landing when another aircraft moved onto the runway, forcing a go-around
at one of the busiest freight hubs in the country.
The airport
hosts UPS’s Worldport hub, the center of its air operations and one of
the biggest logistics hubs in the country. The same facility was the
site of the fatal crash of UPS Airlines Flight 2976 last November which
killed 15 people, including three pilots. The plane crashed shortly
after takeoff into a dense industrial corridor, which includes a Ford
assembly plant, creating a debris field a mile long.
The National
Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) preliminary findings showed that
the left engine and pylon separated during takeoff, with fatigue cracks
and overstress failures in the attachment structure. Evidence so far
indicates that maintenance of the 34-year-old MD-11F freighter was
inconsistent at best. The plane had been in San Antonio from September 3
to October 18 for a heavy maintenance check, and investigators said
they would examine every maintenance action performed before the crash.
UPS has since retired its entire MD-11 fleet.
*****
The latest near-disaster at Worldport is the latest sign of a serious
crisis in US aviation safety. On March 22 at LaGuardia Airport in New
York City, an Air Canada Express CRJ-900 struck a fire truck on landing,
killing the two pilots. Only two controllers were in the tower
overnight, and the fire rescue truck on the runway lacked a transponder
and could not be reliably tracked by the airport’s surface detection
system.
On April 18, four days after the near miss in Louisville,
two Southwest aircraft came perilously close at Nashville International
Airport in Tennessee. One Southwest aircraft was executing a go-around
while another was departing from a parallel runway, creating a near miss
that investigators are still reviewing.
The ruling class’s
relentless drive for profit has led to the dangerous neglect of
maintenance and technology in the National Airspace System (NAS). More
than 90 percent of US air traffic control facilities operate below
recommended levels, forcing controllers into 10-hour shifts and six-day
weeks.
While billions of dollars are being spent on domestic
repression and imperialist wars, air traffic control systems are forced
to rely on antiquated equipment and a technological patchwork.
Conditions for controllers have worsened for decades since the Reagan
administration smashed the PATCO strike in 1981 by firing over 11,000
air traffic controllers.
Significantly, the November UPS crash took place during a federal
shutdown, in which controllers spent more than a month working without
pay.
On March 6, Trump fired NTSB board member J. Todd Inman,
undermining the independent investigatory powers of the agency. Inman
had played a key role in the investigations of the November and the
midair collision of a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American
Airlines flight over Washington D.C. in January 2025, which killed all
67 people aboard both aircraft. Inman has said he was removed without
explanation. White House cited misconduct allegations, which Inman has
denied.
Inman is the second NTSB board member fired by Trump in less than a year. NTSB Vice Chair Alvin Brown was fired last May.
In his drive to establish a presidentialdictatorship,
Trump fired 17 independent inspectors general across departments like
DHS, State and Defense during his first week in office. He has since
dismissed dozens of independent agencyleaders and either appointed loyalists or left seats vacant.
The latest data from Gallup and Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF)
provide a devastating statistical portrait of social conditions in the
United States. The figures expose a society in which tens of millions
are forced to sacrifice basic necessities, forego treatment and incur
crushing debt in order to survive.
The Gallup survey finds that 33
percent of Americans, or roughly 82 million people, have cut back on
essentials such as food, utilities and transportation to pay for
healthcare in 2025. Among the uninsured, the figure rises to 62 percent,
but even among those with coverage nearly 3 in 10 report similar
sacrifices.
Among the uninsured, 32 percent borrowed money to pay
for care and 24 percent delayed or prolonged medication use. Nearly 1
in 10 Americans (about 9 percent) reported postponing retirement due to
healthcare expenses, while twice as many delayed changing jobs.
The
financial strain extends well beyond low-income groups. Around 25
percent of households earning $90,000–$120,000 and even 11 percent of
those earning $240,000 or more reported cutting back to afford care.
Healthcare has become a top economic concern, with over 60 percent of
Americans expressing serious worry about costs and access.
*****
One-third of adults report cost-related rationing of medications,
including skipping doses or failing to fill prescriptions. A similar
percentage say they skipped or postponed needed medical care due to cost
in the past year. Meanwhile, 41 percent of the population carries
medical or dental debt, with nearly a quarter unable to pay their bills
at all.
Financial vulnerability is pervasive, with about half of
adults unable to cover an unexpected $500 medical expense without going
into debt. Healthcare costs now rank as a leading source of anxiety,
with roughly two-thirds of Americans expressing serious concern about
their ability to afford care, which only compounds mental healthcare
conditions.
These statistics have profound political significance. Access to
healthcare in the US, one of the most basic needs in human society, is
determined not by medical need but by one’s income, employment status
and insured status. And having health insurance is not a guarantee of
access to medical care. The insured majority of patients increasingly face
rising premiums, deductibles and out-of-pocket costs that render formal
coverage largely meaningless. The result is a system of de facto
rationing, enforced by the financial limits imposed on working class
households.
This situation is the product of decades of bipartisan policy, carried
out by both Democrats and Republicans, aimed at dismantling the social
gains won through generations of class struggle. Programs established in
the aftermath of the Great Depression and expanded in the postwar
period have been systematically eroded. The guiding principle has been
the same: to subordinate healthcare and other social needs to the profit
requirements of the financial and corporate elite.
The expansion of privatization and deregulation has been central to
this process. Public programs have been hollowed out or transformed into
vehicles for private profit, while regulatory constraints on insurers,
pharmaceutical companies and hospital systems have been weakened.
The
Affordable Care Act, designed and signed into law under the Obama
administration, was not a progressive reform; rather, it entrenched the
role of private insurance and, above all, was based on the private
ownership of the health insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and giant
healthcare chains. The result is the present crisis, in which nominal
coverage coexists with widespread inability to access care.
Under
Donald Trump, these long-standing tendencies have taken on an especially
aggressive and reactionary form. The administration’s 2025–2026
policies represent a direct assault on the most vulnerable sections of
the population, while increasing funds for war abroad and repression at
home.
Central to this is the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act,
which imposes mandatory Medicaid work requirements of 80 hours per
month and introduces monthly eligibility checks, while cutting $900
billion from the fund. These measures are designed not to promote
employment but to create bureaucratic barriers that strip millions of
coverage through paperwork hurdles and administrative churn.
The
impact is already evident. The expiration of enhanced Affordable Care
Act subsidies (introduced in 2021 through pandemic relief laws) has
driven up insurance costs, placing coverage further out of reach for
low-income families.
At the same time, new restrictions on Medicaid and CHIP eligibility
for immigrants have excluded broad layers of legally present residents
from care. Frequent income verification requirements have produced a
system of “coverage churn,” in which eligible individuals lose insurance
due to minor reporting discrepancies or delays.
The essential aim
of these policies is to reduce federal expenditures by cutting people
off from care. The human cost, measured in untreated illness,
preventable deaths and deepening poverty, is treated as irrelevant. What
matters is the reallocation of resources to serve the interests of
finance capital, including tax cuts and increased military spending.
*****
Under the Clinton administration, the “Pivot to Managed Care”
integrated market-driven efficiency into public safety nets. This era
was defined by the expansion of private HMOs within Medicare and the
1996 welfare reforms, which disassociated Medicaid from cash assistance
and introduced administrative hurdles that reduced enrollment.
The Obama administration furthered this trajectory with the “Private Market Mandate” of the Affordable Care Act.
By rejecting a “public option” in favor of an individual mandate, the
ACA required citizens to purchase private products, effectively using
federal authority to guarantee a customer base for the insurance
industry. Additionally, the growth of Medicare Advantage plans, which
use federal funds to pay for privately run Medicare plans under both
administrations represents a form of “stealth privatization.”
In states such as California, under Gavin Newsom,
austerity budgets have targeted essential programs with approximately
$5 billion in cuts, affecting particularly those serving immigrants and
low-income communities.
The combined effect of these policies is a
healthcare system that functions as a mechanism of social control and
economic extraction. Workers are compelled to remain in jobs they might
otherwise leave due to fear of losing insurance. Families are driven
into debt or forced to choose between medical care and other
necessities. The system operates not to promote health but to sustain
profitability for insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms and
corporate hospital networks.
*****
No solution lies within the existing political framework, as both
parties defend profit and corporate dominance. Growing social struggles
point to the need for an independent working class movement to transform
the system, establish universal public healthcare and abolish corporate
control. As millions already sacrifice basic needs, conditions will
worsen, posing a stark choice between continued inequality or a mass
socialist movement to reorganize society.
A video reminder describes Syrotiuk's ongoing plight
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.
Apr 26, 2026
Live updates of persecuted El Gamal family are being reported at the World Socialist Web Site:
On Saturday afternoon, a flight carrying Hayam El Gamal and her five
children from Willow Run Airport in Michigan to New Jersey was diverted
midair and ordered back to Michigan. The family was then placed on a
return flight to Colorado, in compliance with an order from US District
Judge Fred Biery.
The return followed a day in which the Trump
administration sought to deport the family in defiance of a court order.
Their attorneys responded with a series of emergency filings seeking to
block the illegal maneuver.
The El Gamal family had been
released from Dilley detention center on Thursday, after a ruling from
Judge Biery. However, on Saturday morning, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) re-detained the family during what was supposed to be a
check-in, escalating the Trump administration’s campaign of collective
punishment against a family that has never been charged with any crime.
One of the family’s attorneys, Eric Lee, warned in an urgent post:
“THE EL GAMAL FAMILY WAS REDETAINED BY ICE MOMENTS AGO. ICE SAYS
DEPORTATION IS IMMINENT. PLEASE ACTIVATE YOUR CONTACTS TO STOP THIS
TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE FROM TAKING PLACE.”
The attorneys’ issued a
subsequent statement declaring, “The Trump administration has kidnapped
the El Gamal family in violation of a federal court order for the
Western District of Texas.” It referred to an order by Judge Biery
issued Thursday directing ICE “not to detain or remove the family from
the United States.”
After the family “arrived home in Colorado this morning,” the attorneys
reported, “Hours later, ICE arrested them all and has put them on a
plane headed for Detroit’s Willow Run Airport, and then outside the
United States on an unknown location.”
*****
Biery’s previous order
on Thursday was the product of months of legal struggle in which
federal judges rejected the government’s effort to hold and deport the
family based on “guilt by association” with the alleged actions of Hayam
El Gamal’s estranged husband. The family had already endured nearly ten
months of imprisonment and repeated violations of basic medical care
and humane treatment while in federal custody.
By seizing the
family again, ICE effectively sought to nullify the authority of the
federal judiciary and the specific release order that was supposed to
protect the family from precisely this sort of retaliatory action.
This
action is consistent with the administration’s broader strategy: to
establish a precedent that the state can punish relatives, terrorize
children, and carry out collective reprisals to intimidate the
population as a whole. The El Gamal family has been treated as a
political trophy—from the White House’s earlier public threats to deport
“Mohamed’s Wife and Five Kids,” to the sustained effort to portray
children as “national security threats.”
The well-known American conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, long
associated with the San Francisco Symphony, died on Wednesday at his
home in that city.
MTT, as he was known almost universally to
musicians and also to music lovers in the US and elsewhere, had led the
San Francisco Symphony from 1995 to 2020, when he became music director
laureate. It was the longest tenure of any conductor since the
symphony’s founding in 1911. Under Tilson Thomas, the SF Symphony had
become one of the most prominent and critically praised orchestras in
the US.
*****
Throughout his life, Tilson Thomas sought to use the medium of
television to reach a broader audience. He inaugurated the “Keeping
Score” series of programs on public television in the US about 20 years
ago, introducing the music of such figures as Beethoven, Tchaikovsky,
Gustav Mahler, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Copland and Charles Ives. These
programs, nine in all, highlighted some of Tilson Thomas’s interests:
his devotion to the great classics like the work of Beethoven and
Tchaikovsky; his enthusiasm for work of the late 19th and the 20th
century, including Mahler, Stravinsky and Shostakovich; and his advocacy
for American composers like Aaron Copland and Charles Ives. These
treasures of education and of musical performance can be viewed today on
YouTube.
Another American composer with whom Tilson Thomas was closely identified was George Gershwin, the composer of such classics as Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, the Piano Concerto in F, the Cuban Overture and Porgy and Bess. MTT’s recordings of Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris
were among his best. “Gershwin Live!,” an award-winning performance
with Sarah Vaughan and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, included some of
Gershwin’s most famous song
*****
It should be noted as well that Tilson Thomas was also an active composer. The titles of some of his compositions—From the Diary of Anne Frank (1990); Shôwa/Shoáh (1995), composed to mark the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; and Whitman Songs (1999)—indicate an interest in social issues and history that he shared with Bernstein.
In
Tilson Thomas’s programming, both in San Francisco and elsewhere, he
was able to combine the standard repertory with new music in a fresh and
lively way. He worked closely with contemporary composers, including
John Adams, Steve Reich, Meredith Monk and others.
*****
Tilson Thomas’s partner of some 50 years, Joshua Robison, to whom he was married in 2014, died in February of this year.
The April 22 Oval Office meeting between Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass,
County Supervisor Kathryn Barger and President Donald Trump has been
hailed as a pragmatic effort to secure relief for victims of the January
2025 wildfires. In fact, it is a stark demonstration of the unity of
the political establishment in defense of corporate interests.
Bass and Barger appealed for $34 billion in federal aid, citing the
scale of devastation and the insufficiency of existing funds. They urged
pressure on major insurers, including State Farm, to pay outstanding
claims in areas such as the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. They also
called on banks to grant relief to residents paying mortgages on
destroyed homes while struggling to afford rent elsewhere.
Trump’s
response exposed the fraud at the center of the entire exercise. He
announced that Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin
would conduct an “audit” of insurance companies, producing a public list
distinguishing those that have paid claims from those that have not.
Such
an “audit” without enforcement powers imposes no obligation on
corporations. It replaces law with publicity, allowing the
administration to posture as an opponent of insurance abuses while
guaranteeing that no meaningful action is taken.
*****
The joint appearance of Bass, who has cultivated a “progressive”
image, alongside Barger and Trump, is being celebrated as bipartisan
cooperation. In reality, it lays bare the essential class unity of
Democrats and Republicans. When confronted with a crisis that threatens
social stability, all factions of the ruling elite close ranks.
Karen
Bass’s administration in Los Angeles has been defined by austerity,
expanded policing and support for real estate developers. Her 2025–26
budget has intensified opposition amid overwork, stagnant wages and
declining services, while wildfire response failures followed cuts to
fire funding.
Bass’s appearance beside Trump was entirely consistent with her role
only days earlier in shutting down the threatened strike by 77,000 Los
Angeles educators and school workers. At 2:30 a.m. on April 14, hours
before the walkout was set to begin, SEIU Local 99 announced a
last-minute deal with LAUSD, abruptly canceling what would have been the
first district-wide strike of classified workers, teachers and
administrators in LAUSD history.
Bass had intervened directly in
the late-night talks, appearing the next morning alongside union
officials who praised her for “stepping in” and serving as “the closer,”
while they made clear they would “rather be here today than on the
picket line.” In that case, as in the wildfire talks, Bass functioned as
an enforcer for the corporate and Democratic Party establishment,
blocking a broader mobilization of workers and subordinating urgent
social needs to the dictates of the ruling class.
She has boosted LAPD spending, aligned with federal raids and
advanced punitive homelessness policies benefiting private contractors.
Facing reelection and a $1 billion shortfall, Bass declared a fiscal
emergency, proposing the elimination of 1,647 city jobs to impose
sweeping social cuts.
The supposed pressure on insurers is a
preemptive maneuver to contain mounting public anger. Insurance
corporations are not aberrantly failing. They are functioning exactly as
the system requires, maximizing profit by denying or delaying payouts.
The refusal to impose binding regulation reflects the political intent
by both big business parties.
*****
Wildfires, like all disasters, are shaped by social conditions. Their
scale and impact reflect decades of deregulation, environmental
destruction and the subordination of infrastructure to private profit.
By reducing the crisis to a logistical problem, officials conceal its
origins in policy and class relations.
The situation in California makes this explicit. Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara,
a Democrat, has functioned as a key facilitator of insurance industry
interests, approving major premium hikes while advancing a “sustainable
insurance strategy” that legitimized deregulation. He accepted industry
donations, intervened to benefit contributing firms and helped create
conditions allowing insurers to raise rates, withdraw coverage and shift
costs onto homeowners, effectively transforming the regulatory
apparatus into a mechanism for protecting corporate profits rather than
consumers.
The role of California Governor Gavin Newsom
cannot be ignored either. He has suspended key environmental
protections, including the California Environmental Quality Act, to
fast-track rebuilding for utility companies. Under the guise of
recovery, his policies grant firms like Southern California Edison broad
freedom to operate without oversight, prioritizing profit over
environmental and public safety concerns while mirroring federal
deregulatory practices and reinforcing the subordination of state policy
to corporate demands
State Farm
has no doubt played a central role in deepening the wildfire crisis by
delaying and disputing claims, while simultaneously seeking major
premium increases and reducing coverage in high-risk areas. Homeowners
have faced prolonged waits for payouts and, in many cases, loss of
coverage altogether, reflecting a profit-driven strategy that shifts the
financial burden of disasters onto policyholders rather than absorbing
losses.
However, the focus on individual firms such as State Farm
can be used as a diversion. The problem is not a handful of bad actors
but the structure of the entire industry. Insurance companies operate
according to profit calculations, not social need. Without coercive
regulation, they will continue to deny claims and raise rates.
The same applies to the appeals directed at banks. Calls for
voluntary relief are empty gestures. Financial institutions will not act
against their own interests absent compulsion. The refusal to impose
such compulsion defines the policy of both parties.
The April 22
meeting exposes the real character of American politics: whatever
differences exist between Democrats and Republicans, they collapse when
corporate interests are at stake. In times of crisis, the political
system operates as a unified mechanism for defending capitalist rule.
The alignment of Bass, Barger and Trump exposes how the ruling class
manages social catastrophe: empty rhetoric with policies that leave the
underlying system untouched.
The United States is expanding its naval blockade of Iran into a global
operation against shipping in any ocean, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
said Friday. Hours earlier the Treasury Department sanctioned a major
Chinese oil refinery and 40 shipping companies for buying Iranian crude.
“Our blockade is growing and going global,” Hegseth told reporters at
a Pentagon briefing on April 24. “No one sails from the Strait of
Hormuz to anywhere in the world without the permission of the United
States Navy.” He said 34 ships had been turned back since the blockade
began this month and the U.S. Navy had seized two Iranian ships in the
Indian Ocean this week.
The blockade and the sanctions are aimed
at China. The U.S. Navy this week seized the M/T Tifani, a tanker
carrying about 2 million barrels of Iranian crude bound for Chinese
refineries, in the Bay of Bengal between Sri Lanka and the Strait of
Malacca. China is the largest buyer of Iranian oil and depends on Iran
for more than 10 percent of its crude supply.
*****
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said Friday that
the sanctions “undermine international trade order and rules” and
“infringe upon the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies
and individuals.” The action came on the eve of a planned meeting
between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
*****
At the same Pentagon briefing Hegseth demanded that European
governments join the war, telling them to “start doing less talking and
having less fancy conferences in Europe and get in a boat.”
A Pentagon memo, authored by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby and leaked to Politico
on April 24, proposes to formally punish NATO members who refuse to
send warships to enforce the blockade. The memo recommends throwing
Spain out of NATO planning meetings, putting the British claim to the
Falkland Islands back into question, cutting French access to US
intelligence and canceling joint exercises with the German military. The
targets are treaty allies. The United States launched the war on Iran
without consulting NATO or gaining authorization from the United Nations
Security Council.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said
Thursday that Israel is preparing to renew its bombing of Iran. “We are
awaiting a green light from the United States, first and foremost to
complete the elimination of the Khamenei dynasty,” Katz said, “and
additionally to return Iran to the Dark Age and the Stone Age by
destroying key energy and electricity facilities and dismantling its
national economic infrastructure.” When the attack resumes, Katz added,
“it will be different and lethal, adding devastating blows at the most
sensitive points.”
*****
Among targets struck in the past 48 hours: a Tehran University student
dormitory in Amirabad, where the Human Rights Activists News Agency
reported 14 students killed and 31 wounded; an apartment block in Bandar
Abbas the US military described as a “naval logistics target”; people
standing in line for bread in Ahvaz, per Tasnim and HRANA; and a Red
Crescent triage station in Khorramabad. In Lebanon, the Health Ministry
reports 2,491 killed and 7,719 wounded, including at least 177 children
and 91 medics. CNN, citing satellite imagery analysis, says 523
buildings have come down in southern Lebanon over the past three weeks.
Israeli officials, in reports by Al Jazeera and Haaretz, describe the policy as “Gazafication.”
*****
The escalation comes as the Pentagon’s missile stockpiles fall below
half their prewar level. The Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS) reported this week that the US has burned through as many
as 1,430 of its 2,330 prewar Patriot interceptors—over 60 percent of
the stock—each priced at nearly $4 million. “A war against a capable
peer competitor like China will consume munitions at greater rates than
in this war,” the report said. “Prewar inventories were already
insufficient; the levels today will constrain US operations should a
future conflict arise.”
The economic costs of the war are being
paid by working people around the world. Brent crude oil closed Friday
at $106 a barrel, roughly 60 percent above prewar levels. Gold reached
$4,697 an ounce. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has called the
disruption to global energy markets “the worst energy crisis in history”
and executed its largest coordinated reserve release ever, 400 million
barrels. JPMorgan projects Brent at $150 a barrel if the Strait of
Hormuz remains closed into mid-May.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Associated Press that Iran
“in the next two, three days ... they’re going to have to start
shuttering production, which will be very bad for their wells.”
Republican Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, in a Newsmax interview
Wednesday, said of the embargo: “We’re literally starving them, both
financially, and they can’t feed themselves either.”
In the same
interview Marshall endorsed nuclear escalation. Asked whether the US
“will have to go in and finish this job” if negotiations fail, he
replied: “I think that’s right. Previous presidents have had the same
issues on what to do. Think about President Truman’s decision on
dropping the bomb, and D-Day for President Eisenhower.” Truman ordered
the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A federal court order releasing Hayam El Gamal and her five children
from the Dilley family detention center in South Texas is a significant
victory for democratic rights and a defeat for the Trump
administration’s campaign of collective family punishment.
But it
is a victory in a single battle. The war on immigrants, and through them
on the democratic rights of the entire working class, continues and is
escalating, and the El Gamal family, including four minor children,
remains under threat.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery of the Western District
of Texas ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to
immediately release the family after nearly 10 months of imprisonment
and seven months after a judge earlier ordered them released on bond.
Hayam El Gamal and her 18-year-old daughter Habiba were ordered to wear
electronic monitors.
The order followed an emergency hearing
Thursday argued by Christopher Godshall-Bennett, an attorney for the
family. Attorneys Eric Lee, Rebecca Webber and Niels Frenzen were among
those who submitted the filings and argued for the family’s release.
Following the ruling, Godshall-Bennett wrote on social media, “Heading
home from Texas after the triumph of our family over the admin. The
Dilley concentration camp remains full of children living in shipping
containers. Release every single one and close that hell hole
immediately.”
The Texas Tribune reported that the family
was believed to have suffered the longest detention in the history of
the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, the only federal
immigration facility authorized to hold parents with their children.
The family had been held since June 2025, after ICE thugs seized them
two days after the June 1, 2025 Boulder, Colorado, firebombing attack
for which Hayam’s estranged husband, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, was
arrested. None of the six family members has been charged with any
crime, and El Gamal has divorced Soliman and condemned the attack. The
FBI confirmed that none of the family members had advanced knowledge of
the attack.
The family’s innocence did not stop Stephen Miller and
the Trump administration from punishing them. The El Gamal case was
intended to establish the principle of collective punishment: that
relatives of those the state labels “enemies” can be seized, imprisoned
and deported without charge or trial.
*****
The conditions the El Gamal family endured at Dilley are part of a wider atrocity. Human Rights First and RAICES (Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services) reported this month
that more than 5,600 people, including parents, children, toddlers and
newborn babies, were imprisoned at Dilley between April 2025 and
February 2026. The report found “pervasive and systemic” abuse and that
families are “routinely threatened with or subjected to separation to
coerce them into abandoning asylum claims.”
The report documented
inhumane conditions, due process violations and lasting physical and
psychological harm to families and children, including inadequate access
to food, water, hygiene and basic medical care. Families reported
foul-smelling and unclean water, dirty water barrels and mold. Parents
also reported undercooked meat, hair, worms, bugs, dead flies and
foreign objects in meals. The concentration camp was the site of a
measles outbreak earlier this year.
El Gamal was rushed to the ER
this month after her urgent requests for medical care were ignored. A CT
scan revealed an unexplained chest lump and fluid around her heart, but
ICE then denied the doctor-recommended ultrasound for follow-up. Her
16-year-old son also suffered acute appendicitis after detention staff
refused treatment beyond Tylenol.
In heartbreaking letters, El Gamal’s children described their
imprisonment in writing as “slowly killing us on the inside.” The
younger children drew pictures pining to go “home” and to “school.”
*****
What is being tested on immigrants is being prepared for the entire
population. Federal troops have been deployed against peaceful
protesters in American cities. Immigration Gestapo have killed US
citizens, including Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Administrative subpoenas are being used to compile dossiers on students,
healthcare workers and social media users who speak out against the
raids.
The New York Times reported Thursday that the
Justice Department has identified 384 foreign-born US citizens whose
citizenship it wants to revoke, part of a broader push to accelerate
denaturalization cases through dozens of US attorney’s offices. A top
Justice Department official described the 384 people as the “first wave
of cases” in a “White House initiative.”
The conspiracy for
dictatorship is unfolding in real time. The defense of immigrants is
inseparable from the defense of democratic rights for the entire working
class. Immigrant workers are not a separate population. They are part
of the international working class confronting the same program of
austerity, war and authoritarianism.
*****
The Democrats have ceased fighting ICE deployments at airports, a
test run for deploying immigration police at polling stations. By
agreeing to DHS funding in March, they have paved the way for the
current Republican reconciliation package, which would entrench ICE and
CBP funding and expansion through Trump’s presidency.
The El Gamal
family’s freedom was won through sustained legal and public struggle,
including by the family itself, whose letters and public statements from
detention, combined with the efforts of their attorneys and supporters,
mobilized broader support. Protests were held outside the Dilley
facility and in Colorado demanding the family’s return home and the
closure of the concentration camp.
The Socialist Equality Party
calls on workers to demand the immediate end to all proceedings against
Hayam El Gamal and her children, the removal of the electronic
monitoring imposed on Hayam and Habiba, and a guarantee that the family
will not be re-detained or deported. The Dilley detention center must be
closed, and every child and parent still imprisoned must be released,
along with an end to family separations, mass raids and the use of
detention and deportation as instruments of political terror.
The
defense of immigrants is inseparable from the defense of democratic
rights for the entire working class—against political surveillance,
denaturalization, and the normalization of armed immigration forces in
cities, workplaces and airports. What is required is the independent
political mobilization of workers, native-born and immigrant alike,
against both parties and the capitalist system they defend—a system that
imprisons children, wages illegal wars abroad and diverts the wealth
produced by society into repression and destruction.
Prosecutors
in El Salvador have opened a mass trial of 486 alleged members of the
MS-13 gang on charges ranging from homicide to extortion and arms
trafficking. In what will be the largest criminal proceeding in the
country’s history, the defendants are accused of involvement in more
than 47,000 crimes committed between 2012 and 2022, including an
estimated 29,000 homicides.
Authorities claim they are targeting
the highest ranks of the gang’s leadership and insist they possess
overwhelming evidence, pledging to seek the maximum sentences available
under Salvadoran law.
The trial is taking place under a regime
enacted through sweeping legal changes enacted during the ongoing state
of emergency imposed by President Nayib Bukele, who has ruled under
extraordinary powers for four years. These measures permit mass
hearings, often conducted virtually, denying defendants’ basic rights.
*****
Bukele, who has referred to himself as “the coolest dictator in the
world,” has been embraced by Donald Trump as an “incredible ally.” The
American would-be dictator has applauded his crackdown on gangs,
amounting to martial law, and the construction of vast prison complexes.
He has described El Salvador’s prison system as “humane” and effective,
while highlighting cooperation on immigration enforcement, including
deportation agreements targeting alleged gang members.
The reality
behind this rhetoric is the consolidation of an authoritarian regime.
The state of emergency has suspended fundamental democratic rights and
enabled mass detentions on an unprecedented scale. Human rights
organizations estimate that El Salvador’s prison population has surged
to approximately 118,000 detainees—more than double the system’s
capacity. At one point, 1.9 percent of the country’s population was
incarcerated, one of the highest rates globally. Bukele’s government has
threatened life sentences and even starvation for detainees, invoking a
so-called “war on gangs” to justify these measures.
This state of authoritarian terror strips away the thin democratic
façade established after the end of military rule in 1979 and the
conclusion of the civil war in 1992. That façade was constructed with
the complicity of the petty-bourgeois nationalist and Stalinist
leadership of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN),
which transformed itself from a guerrilla movement into a bourgeois
political party. Bukele himself emerged from the section of the business
elite that aligned itself with the FMLN.
The repressive apparatus
now in place has extended beyond El Salvador’s borders, intersecting
with US immigration policy in alarming ways. The Trump administration
designated MS-13 a terrorist organization and pursued agreements with El
Salvador to exchange prisoners. These policies have led to the
deportation of migrants—including Venezuelans—under conditions that
evoke the forced disappearances of Latin America’s military
dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s.
*****
Invoking the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act, the US government has
justified mass deportations by claiming an “invasion” by criminal
groups. Hundreds of migrants have been detained without due process,
often seized by plainclothes agents and transported to undisclosed
locations. Lawyers and relatives frequently cannot determine their
whereabouts, as records are altered or erased. Some detainees last year
later reappeared in El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center
(CECOT), effectively functioning as a concentration camp overseen by
security forces with a documented history of torture and extrajudicial
killings.
The historical parallels are unmistakable. Under the
US-backed dictatorship that ruled El Salvador during the country’s civil
rule (1979-1992), approximately 71,000 people—between 1 and 2 percent
of the population—were killed or disappeared.
CECOT itself has
become a symbol of repression. Human rights groups estimate that at
least 238 to over 250 individuals, including Salvadorans and
Venezuelans, were transferred from the US in early 2025 without charges.
As many as 36 Salvadorans deported from the US remain there
incommunicado.
Testimonies describe a pattern of brutality: beatings, humiliation
and sexual assault. Prisoners are held in windowless cells under
constant artificial light, deprived of sleep and basic necessities.
Access to water is severely limited, with reports of contamination by
worms and mosquitoes. Hunger strikes have been met with violent
reprisals, including prisoners being beaten and dragged away “half
dead.” In desperation, some detainees resorted to a “blood strike,”
cutting their wrists—only to be ignored by guards and medical staff.
Internal
intelligence documents further reveal that 36 percent of those detained
during the state of exception had no prior criminal profile. Yet they
remain imprisoned without contact with the outside world and without any
meaningful opportunity to defend themselves.
The NGO Socorro Juridico Humanitario (SJH) has compiled a database
showing 517 deaths of prisoners under Bukele's state of exception, with
nine out of ten of them never having been convicted of any crime. About a
third of the deaths were caused by violence or torture, another third
by medical negligence, and for the rest the cause of death remains
unknown.
The case of Kilmar Abrego García illustrates the arbitrary nature of
these policies. Deported unlawfully from the United States, he became
one of hundreds sent to CECOT without trial. Although later returned to
the US and released by court order, his case highlights the broader
system of extrajudicial detention. Bukele himself publicly refused to
return him during a meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, underscoring
the political alliance underpinning these actions.
The broader
implications extend across the region. Bukele’s model—combining mass
incarceration, suspension of rights and militarized policing—is being
promoted by right-wing governments in Ecuador, Honduras and Costa Rica.
Trump’s support reinforces this trend, normalizing a doctrine that the
state may detain or even kill individuals based on suspicion alone,
without due process.
Bukele has placed the country under a permanent state of exception,
criminalizing civil society organizations and journalists as fronts for
gangs.
As is typical of the US corporate media, little attention
has been paid to the deeper roots of violence in El Salvador. These lie
in a long history of extreme inequality and state repression, driven by
the interests of local elites and US imperialism. The rise of gangs such
as MS-13 and Barrio 18 cannot be understood outside this context.
Their
consolidation was a byproduct of US policies in the 1990s, particularly
under the Clinton administration. Mass deportations of young
immigrants—many of whom had formed small groups for protection in US
cities—transplanted gang structures to Central America. One deportee
recalled: “Eventually it became a gang, but initially it was just to
protect each other… These kids were being treated like trash.”
The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act
(IIRIRA), enacted under the Democratic Clinton administration, marked a
turning point, dramatically expanding deportations and undermining due
process. Combined with severe social inequality in El Salvador, these
policies created fertile conditions for gang proliferation.
That
inequality is itself rooted in decades of US-backed economic and
military intervention. During the civil war, Washington provided more
than $4 billion in aid to the Salvadoran government, supporting a regime
that employed death squads, torture and mass killings. Economic
policies tied to US interests deepened poverty, promoting export-led
growth while increasing dependence on imports and undermining domestic
employment.
Privatization, austerity and dollarization—under both
the fascistic Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) party and the
FMLN—further eroded living standards. By the early 2000s, a tiny elite
controlled nearly half of the country’s wealth. Subsequent FMLN
governments, despite their leftist rhetoric, continued these policies,
expanding military spending and imposing austerity measures.
Conditions have worsened under Bukele, who came to power exploiting
mass anger against the ARENA party and the FMLN. Poverty increased from
22.8 percent in 2019 to 25.8 percent in 2024, driven by a 24 percent
rise in the cost of living that outpaced wage increases. Social programs
were slashed, with 31 out of 40 eliminated. Meanwhile, public debt
ballooned from $19.8 billion to $32.1 billion.
These conditions
will continue to push youth toward migration or involvement in criminal
networks, perpetuating the cycle of violence that the government claims
to combat. The current mass trial, far from addressing these root
causes, represents a further escalation of repression aimed ultimately
against the working class.
Pentagon officials recently met with executives from General Motors
and Ford, marking a turn by the Trump administration toward the
development of a war economy.
According to press reports, unnamed
senior defense officials have held meetings with executives of major
corporations about building military equipment, including Mary Barra,
CEO of General Motors, and Jim Farley, CEO of Ford. The Pentagon is
reportedly seeking to replenish critical munitions and weapons systems
that have been depleted due to the ongoing Ukraine proxy war against
Russia, the Gaza genocide, and the war against Iran.
According to a report in the Detroit Free Press,
“By some estimates, it could take five years or more to replenish the
munitions that have been used in the last 40 days” of the war against
Iran. It quoted John Ferrari, a retired Army major general who now works
for the American Enterprise Institute, a right wing Washington, DC
think tank, who warned, “We are on borrowed time. The Russians, the
Chinese, the Iranians—everybody knows that we don’t have enough
munitions.”
For their part, auto executives, with profits lagging
as a result of low electric vehicle sales, are eyeing Trump’s proposed
$1.5 trillion military budget.
A defense official stated, “The
Department of War is committed to rapidly expanding the defense
industrial base by leveraging all available commercial solutions and
technologies to ensure our warfighters maintain a decisive advantage.”
The
meeting with top auto executives follows the announcement earlier this
year of the launch of the so-called “Arsenal of Freedom” project, aimed
at putting US industry—and all of society—on a war footing. This has
involved tours by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other military
officials of weapons plants.
Hegseth is calling for the
rebuilding of the US military-industrial base and moving away from what
he calls a “peacetime science fair” toward a “wartime arms race,” aiming
to “out-innovate competitors.”
*****
Autoworker, socialist, and working class hero Will Lehman
This
is what fueled the student protests against the genocide in Gaza.
Universities were associated with war development and war technologies,
and students and university workers did not want any part of it.
War is being presented to workers as something that will bring jobs, but the reality is that workers will pay in blood.
They
are gearing up to send workers and the children of workers to fight
these wars, to die for the profits of those who are exploiting workers.
The wars in the Middle East have led to debacles. They have left scars
on the working class that will not soon be forgotten.
Trump talks about destroying an entire civilization, but it is not just Trump talking—it is US imperialism that is driving this.
The
only way we are going to stop that is through our collective action.
The UAW bureaucracy is fine with workers going off to fight wars as long
as they collect dues. They are not going to be fighting these wars.
The
UAW usually lines up behind the Democrats, but they are fully backing
the Trump administration by promoting war production. Fain wears a shirt
with a bomber on it. Anti-genocide protesters in Michigan were thrown
out of a UAW rally.
This is part of the bureaucracy’s policy that
everything must be subordinated to nationalism and the war effort.
Nationalism is a poison being fed to the working class, and workers must
oppose this.
Workers face a choice. It is not all said and
done—we still have an opportunity to stop it. The power of the working
class is real. Workers need to understand their class strength and act.
But the UAW bureaucracy is not going to lead that fight. If they remain
in charge, we are going to lose.
This means workers need to assert
their own power by building rank-and-file committees to organize and
coordinate struggles based on the interests of workers, not the UAW
bureaucracy.
*****
Shawn Fain became president of the UAW through an apparatus‑managed election in the aftermath of scandal
Last month, the UAW bureaucracy shut down a strike after 5 days by
General Dynamics shipbuilders at Bath Iron Works in Maine. Workers at
the facility make the same guided missile destroyers being deployed
against Iran.
In a visit to the facility only weeks before the
strike, Hegseth delivered a speech in which he stated, “[America and
Americans first] means we protect your jobs, your security, and your
family’s future before we even think about any foreign country or
globalist peacekeeping project. We invest in factories in Colorado, not
China.” The local UAW leadership reportedly responded by leading chants
of “USA, USA.”
World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to workers and
youth protesting the genocide in Gaza last weekend, under conditions
where those war crimes are being extended into Lebanon and Iran.
The
demonstrations, attended by several thousand people across the country,
took place in an atmosphere of repression and intimidation. In
Brisbane, 22 protesters were arrested
under the state Liberal-National Party government’s draconian “hate
speech” legislation, which bans the anti-genocide phrases “from the
river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada.”
This followed
police raids in recent weeks in Sydney and Melbourne, arresting people
who had taken part in previous protests. While the New South Wales
anti-protest laws that were the ostensible basis for the Sydney arrests
have now been ruled unconstitutional and struck down, the state Labor
government still plans to go ahead with the charges.
Shane Jones, a member of the right-wing nationalist New Zealand First
Party and minister for Regional Development in the National Party-led
coalition government, sparked controversy over the past week with racist
comments targeting Indian immigrants.
Speaking with the far-right Reality Check Radio on April 20, Jones
denounced a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with India, falsely claiming that
it would lead to “unfettered immigration.” In fact, the deal only
provides for up to 5,000 extra temporary work visas at any one time.
With the coalition divided
on the FTA, the National Party is relying on the opposition Labour
Party’s support—which was confirmed on April 23—to pass it into law.
Jones
ranted that immigration will “drive down the value of wages, it will
clog up our roads, it will completely overwhelm our health and other
frontline services. And I don’t care how much criticism we get, I’m just
never going to agree with a butter chicken tsunami coming to New
Zealand.”
Such statements are part of NZ First’s positioning ahead
of the November election. They are a crude attempt to scapegoat
immigrants for the social crisis created by decades of brutal austerity
measures, the transfer of wealth to the rich, and the diversion of
billions of dollars to the military, under successive governments in
which NZ First has played a significant role.
*****
Jones’s comments follow months of racist agitation against Indians, who
make up more than 5 percent of the NZ population (292,000 people). The
fundamentalist Destiny Church has held provocative demonstrations
in Auckland, with slogans including “This is New Zealand, not India,”
“Kiwis first” and the Trumpian “Make New Zealand Great Again.”
*****
For most of the twentieth century, Labour upheld a racist “white New
Zealand” immigration policy. More recently, it has echoed NZ First’s
anti-Chinese rhetoric—including scapegoating Chinese immigrants for high
house prices in 2015—while pushing for New Zealand’s integration into
US-led war preparations against China.
*****
Workers must reject anti-immigrant poison and all forms of
nationalism, which is promoted by the ruling class to obscure the real
source of the deepening social crisis: the capitalist system, which
subordinates every aspect of life to profit and is plunging billions of
people into poverty, war and fascist barbarism.
The working class
is an international social force whose strength lies in its unity across
national and ethnic divisions. The essential task is to break workers
from all capitalist parties and to build a conscious, unified movement
against austerity, racism and imperialist war, based on the fight for
socialism.
On Thursday afternoon, April 16, five workers at an old tannery in
central Hesse were found lifeless in a pit. Two were able to be
resuscitated, but for the other three, help came too late. A fourth
worker died in hospital a week later, on April 22.
The workplace
accident deprives the old tannery of almost its entire workforce. The
Beuleke leather factory and fur tannery has been in existence for 200
years. It is a family business with only half a dozen employees, located
just outside the small town of Runkel (Limburg-Weilburg) on the river
Lahn. The company website states: “Closed due to bereavement!” and all
flags in the town are flying at half-mast.
The autopsy results were announced Thursday, determining that the men
were the victims of hydrogen sulphide poisoning, an extremely toxic gas
that can cause death very quickly. It is denser than air and
accumulates on the ground and in pits. The treacherous nature of the gas
is such that the characteristic warning smell of rotten eggs may not be
noticed, as hydrogen sulphide has the property of numbing the olfactory
receptors at higher concentrations.
It is suspected that one or
more men climbed into the pit while working and fainted, and the others
tried to come to their aid. The fifth seriously injured worker was a
fitter from a pipe cleaning company who just happened to be present.
Public
sympathy is enormous. A fundraiser was set up for the bereaved family
of one victim, 35-year-old Yuri, who leaves behind a wife and a
five-year-old daughter. On the initiative of a mother at the local
nursery, €37,000 was raised for this family in just a few days. The
mayor has now encouraged further fundraising campaigns.
*****
Tanning, the processing of animal hides into leather and fur, is a
very old, complex craft that involves numerous special steps. The
greatest dangers to humans and the environment, however, do not stem
from the production process itself, but from the waste products.
Waste
residues of animal hides that are temporarily stored in septic tanks
can form highly toxic substances such as carbon monoxide, digester gases
and hydrogen sulfide during the fermentation and rotting process. The
most toxic, hydrogen sulfide, which can paralyze the sense of smell, is
the most common cause of fatal accidents in such production worldwide.
*****
For many years, the central Hesse region was world renowned for its
tanneries, to which the Leather Museum in Offenbach still bears witness
today. With globalization, however, the profession of tanner has almost
died out in Germany. At the same time, the processing of animal hides
has developed into an industrial process worldwide. Large tanning
operations have emerged in North and South America, China and India.
*****
Theoretically, every tannery is subject to strict environmental and
occupational health and safety conditions. There are legal regulations,
accident prevention rules, and supervisory authorities. In practice,
however, these rules are systematically eroded and undermined. Hardly
any authority, municipality, city or region still has the capacity to
effectively monitor compliance with the rules.
The political
attitude towards this is exemplified by the handling of the supply chain
laws in Berlin and Brussels. The attempt to make corporations liable
for occupational health and safety and environmental protection in
supplier companies and countries as well, was watered down and torpedoed
in the EU at the end of last year. The supply chain law is now only
supposed to apply to a few large corporations and will only come into
force across Europe from 2028. Since then, the Merz government has also
been working to abolish the same law in Germany.
Corporations and
governments increasingly have their sights set exclusively on two
issues: rearmament for a war against Russia and profit maximization for
shareholders and the super-rich. Issues like occupational health and
safety and accident prevention inevitably fall by the wayside. The
consequence of this is more and more fatal accidents and increasing
danger in the workplace.
Officials from Brazil’s largest union federations met last Wednesday,
April 15, with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers
Party – PT). Officially portrayed as delivering a series of demands
compiled in the nationalist and pro-corporate document “Working Class
Agenda 2026-2030,” the meeting signaled the open support of the union
federations for Lula’s candidacy in October’s presidential election.
The
meeting took place amid a wave of strikes in Brazil, particularly in
the education sector at the municipal, state, and federal levels. Just
as happened during the administration of the fascist President Jair
Bolsonaro (2019–2022), Brazil’s largest union federations are making it
clear that they will do everything they can to once again isolate,
stifle, and divert these struggles behind Lula’s candidacy.
During
the 2022 election campaign, Brazilian union federations offered
unprecedented joint support for Lula’s candidacy against Bolsonaro.
Explaining this support, Ricardo Patah, president of the UGT — Brazil’s
third-largest union federation — told Folha de S. Paulo in February:
“Bolsonaro wanted to wipe out the union movement, a pillar of democracy,
while Lula listens to us and endorses our demands.”
At the April
15 meeting, Lula greeted the union bureaucrats, repeatedly calling them
“comrades.” Sérgio Nobre, president of the PT-controlled CUT—Brazil’s
largest union federation—responded by declaring: “President, here is
your army, and we will be fighting this battle alongside you. You are
our general.”
The labor federations made a big fuss over their
drafting of the document “Working Class Agenda 2026–2030” and its
presentation to Lula and to the presidents of the House of
Representatives, Hugo Motta, and the Senate, Davi Alcolumbre. The CUT
wrote on its website that the unity of the federations “ensured that our
voice would echo in the ‘corridors of power.’”
The document was
written in the tired language of bourgeois nationalism, which assumes
that conflicting interests between “capital and labor” can be reconciled
by the capitalist state. Furthermore, it promotes a protectionist
chauvinism that mirrors the support US unions are giving to Trump’s
tariff war.
*****
At no point do Lula and the union federations point out that the brutal
regime of labor exploitation in Brazil is a consequence of the
capitalist system in one of the most unequal countries in the world. For
them, a measure such as reducing the workweek is something that “helps
improve productivity” and “the winners are Brazil and the companies,” as
the labor minister, former union bureaucrat Luiz Marinho, declared last
year. This illusion also helps divert the struggle for a reduction in
the workweek into the safe channels of the Brazilian Congress,
pressuring it to approve the end of the 6x1 shift schedule.
*****
The behind-the-scenes negotiations in the “corridors of power”
between union leaders, the Lula administration, and the heads of the
Brazilian Congress take place in the context of a powerful working-class
movement emerging in Brazil.
A report by DIEESE published on
Wednesday indicates that the number of strikes in Brazil increased by 14
percent in 2025 compared to the previous year, rising from 880 to
1,006. The largest increases occurred in the “private sector” (from 440
to 539) and in state-owned enterprises (from 46 to 71). Among the latter
are numerous work stoppages throughout 2025 and strikes at the end of
the year by postal workers and Petrobras employees against the Lula
administration.
Like everywhere else in the world, this trend will
intensify as the effects of the war in Iran become more pronounced in
Brazil. Since last October, inflation has been rising, climbing from
0.09 percent that month to 0.88 percent in March. The largest increases
were in diesel fuel (13.90 percent), gasoline (4.59 percent), and food
and beverages (1.56 percent).
Last week, a strike by app drivers
and delivery workers took place in at least four Brazilian states. In
addition to protesting against rising fuel prices and increased fees
charged by companies, they protested against a bill in the Brazilian
Congress to regulate app-based work. Championed by app companies, this
legislation leaves “platform-based independent workers” without an
employment relationship with the companies. In 2024, the Lula
administration had advocated for a similar bill, which was also widely
rejected by app workers.
Since the beginning of the year, a series of strikes in primary and
higher education has erupted across Brazil at the municipal, state, and
federal levels. Teachers, staff, and students have been fighting against
widespread attacks on public education, which combine low wages, poor
working conditions, and a rapid advance of privatization and
pro-corporate policies.
Today, this movement has been making its presence felt in a powerful way
in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which are among the most populous
states in Brazil. Teachers in the public school systems of the capitals
of these states, as well as those in the state public school system, and
teachers, students, and staff at state universities—the University of
São Paulo (USP) and the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ)—have
been staging walkouts and strikes.
*****
Workers have faced repeated betrayals by the unions, which refuse to
unite their struggles. At the same time, the vast majority of these
unions are led by bureaucrats from the PT and from Morenoist and
Pabloite groups within the PSOL, who do everything to suppress these
struggles for fear that they will get out of their control and seek to
divert them toward bourgeois politics, particularly elections.
The
attacks on education and the working conditions of the working class
and Brazilian youth are being waged by the entire ruling elite and its
parties, including Lula’s PT. Like other bourgeois rulers around the
world, Lula’s response to the growing global crisis—now intensified by
the war against Iran—has been an open defense of increased military
spending, while continuing to commit to austerity policies. Conversely,
this policy is paving the way for the electoral rise of Bolsonaro’s son,
the equally fascist Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who is already tied with
Lula in the polls.
Brazilian workers and youth seeking a
socialist and internationalist response to the capitalist crisis—the
root cause of austerity and the attacks on education and working
conditions, as well as of war and the threat of the fascist far
right—will find a genuine path forward in the International Online May Day Rally organized by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). We call on
you to organize to attend the rally, which will take place on May 1, and
to help publicize it as widely as possible.
The struggle by Doruk Mining workers to demand their unpaid wages and
other benefits—centred on a march which began in Eskişehir and has now
reached the capital, Ankara—continues with a hunger strike under police
siege.
The miners’ arrival in Ankara brought the class struggle to the
forefront of the national agenda. While the people of Ankara showed
their support for the miners, statements of solidarity with the workers
were issued in factories and public squares across the country. Dozens
of actors, musicians, poets, academics, writers, and
journalists—including Hüsnü Arkan, İlyas Salman, Vedat Yıldırım, Orhan
Alkaya, Menderes Samancılar, Ataol Behramoğlu, Müjdat Gezen, Suavi,
Tülin Özel, and Füsun Demirel—released solidarity videos.
The
class struggle in Ankara is unfolding in the midst of an imperialist war
of aggression against Iran, waged by the Trump administration—an ally
of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government—in collaboration with
Israel. Despite the government’s calls for a “ceasefire” and “peace,” it
is effectively siding with the US and condemning Iran’s right to
self-defense, while over 90 percent of the population opposes the
US-Israel war against Iran.
Under these conditions, the workers’
entry onto the political stage and their potential to block the
implementation of the capitalist oligarchy’s agenda are deemed
unacceptable by the government. Numerous independent workers’ leaders
have been arrested in recent months. The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi –
Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International)
has called for the demand for the release of prisoners of the class struggle to be one of the main demands of the upcoming May Day.
That the struggle of just a hundred miners for their unpaid wages and
other social rights has resonated so widely highlights the decisive
nature of the class struggle that has been suppressed for decades, not
only by state repression but also by the union apparatus and identity
politics. The miners demonstrate the social power that must be mobilized
for the social and democratic rights of the overwhelming majority of
the people and against imperialist war.
*****
Miners’ demands include payment of months of unpaid wages, severance
and notice pay for dismissed workers, an end to the imposition of unpaid
leave, safe working conditions, reinstatement of workers dismissed for
union membership, and the nationalisation of the mine to guarantee job
security.
Mining workers who set out from Eskişehir on April 13 to seek a response to their demands arrived in Ankara on Monday after a nine-day march covering approximately 190 kilometers. The arbitrary arrest of union leader Aksu just before the march began signaled what kind of response President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government was preparing to give.
On
Monday, police attacked workers with pepper spray at the entrance to
Ankara, detaining 30 people—including Aksu and the union’s General
President, Gökay Çakır—later releasing them. On Tuesday, 110 miners
who had begun a hunger strike in an attempt to stage a peaceful protest
in front of the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources were detained
by police. Faced with growing public outrage over the unlawfully of
detentions and the government’s oppression of workers, the miners were
released after 14 hours. However, neither were their demands met nor did
the threat of severe state repression subside.
*****
The urgent task of putting an end to capitalist exploitation and private
property—the root causes of social problems—requires the working class
to take power into its own hands. This is the most important question
raised by the struggle of Doruk Mining workers: Who controls society and
the economy? The problems faced by Doruk Mining workers are, at their
core, part of the broader problems of the working class in Türkiye and
around the world. A fundamental solution requires the economy to be
restructured on a socialist basis in the interests of society, rather
than in the hands of a handful of capitalist oligarchs.
The numerous parties that visited the miners on Thursday are
representatives of the same capitalist order and ruling class that the
Erdoğan government is striving to protect by suppressing workers’
struggles through force. Some of them, such as the CHP and the Kurdish
nationalist Peoples’ Democracy and Equality Party (DEM Party), are
attempting to control the social opposition developing within the
working class through illusions of social reform and democratization.
DEM
Party Co-Chair Tülay Hatimoğulları visited the miners and stated, “We
stand with the resistance of the Doruk Maden workers.” While the DEM
Party criticizes the government’s repression of social opposition and
the working class, it simultaneously promotes the illusion that the
government could expand democratic rights within the framework of the
negotiations being conducted between Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers’
Party (PKK).
On Thursday, a representative of the Islamist New
Welfare Party visited the workers. The day before, Şenol Sunat, a
far-right deputy from the Good Party, expressed his support for the
miners in a speech in parliament. In addition, many union
representatives visited the miners and expressed their support.
None
of these establishment parties—including the CHP and the DEM Party—or
the union bureaucrats have done anything to mobilize the masses in
defense of the miners. The truth is, they are just as reluctant as
Erdoğan to see a mass working-class movement erupt across the country.
The
government and the company are now trying to pacify the miners by
deploying not only police pressure, but also the corrupt trade union
apparatus. While the workers’ march to the Ministry of Energy and
Natural Resources was blocked by police force, the ministry’s doors were
opened to the Türkiye Maden-İş Sendikası (Turkish Miners’ Union),
affiliated with the Türk-İş confederation—an organization that has been
absent for years and complicit in the company’s attacks on workers. On
Wednesday, Minister Alparslan Bayraktar met with Nurettin Akçul, the
General President of the Türkiye Maden-İş Sendikası.
*****
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), one of the sponsors of this year’s 13th International Online May Day Rally,
is fighting to put an end to the way union bureaucracies everywhere
divide the working class along national lines for the interest of
corporations and their power, and to unite the growing workers’
struggles across borders. We call on all workers to establish
rank-and-file committees linked to the IWA-RFC in their workplaces, to
show organized solidarity with the workers of Doruk Mining and other
workers’ struggles, and to participate in the International May Day Rally.
The African National Congress (ANC)-led Government of National Unity
(GNU) is deploying 2,200 soldiers across South Africa, targeting
working-class townships under the pretext of combating gang violence.
Under
the banner of “Operation Prosper,” South African President Cyril
Ramaphosa is deploying troops in full combat gear, armed with assault
rifles and transported in armoured vehicles and military Samil trucks.
Soldiers are equipped with live ammunition, with standing orders to fire
in “self-defense”.
These forces are being sent into
overwhelmingly working-class and impoverished apartheid-era townships,
shaped by the legacy of the Group Areas Act. Areas targeted include
Eldorado Park, Westbury, Riverlea, Mitchells Plain, Hanover Park, and
the northern parts of Nelson Mandela Bay, spanning the Eastern Cape,
Free State, Gauteng, North West and Western Cape provinces.
Speaking to Parliament last month, Ramaphosa stated that “We are
getting the police and the army to work together to handle the
challenges our people are facing.” He justified the deployment of the
South African National Defence Force as necessary to complement the
South African Police Service in tackling gang violence, extortion
syndicates and unregulated mining, and in “bringing stability to our
communities.”
*****
Soldiers are also being deployed in regions such as the Far West Rand
that have become centres of the country’s “zama-zama” informal mining
economy.
For many residents, the sight of soldiers on the streets
revives memories of apartheid-era repression, including the brutal
suppression of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 and the widespread township
revolts of the 1980s under successive states of emergency of the
apartheid regime. Entire generations recall the military’s role in
occupying townships, enforcing curfews, and terrorizing residents.
The deployment of troops has nothing to do with combating gangs. The
growth of crime and violence stems from a deepening social crisis rooted
in capitalism and overseen by three decades of ANC rule.
Thirty
years ago, Nelson Mandela promised that taking control of the capitalist
state and advancing a new black capitalist elite would open the path to
widespread prosperity. In his inauguration speech on May 10, 1994, he
declared, “Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful
land will again experience the oppression of one by another.” He
proclaimed that “we have, at last, achieved our political emancipation”
and pledged to liberate all people from “the continuing bondage of
poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.” He
concluded: “Let freedom reign. The sun shall never set on so glorious a
human achievement.”
The ANC’s promise has given way to a nightmare for the majority of South Africans.
Two-thirds of the population now live in poverty, and around 10.8
million people cannot afford sufficient food. Approximately 30 percent
of workers are unemployed, while youth unemployment stands at around 40
percent. At the same time, the richest 10 percent of the population
controls more than 80 percent of the country’s wealth.
Wealth
ownership is still overwhelmingly concentrated among the white South
African ruling class. However, studies show that inequality within the
black African population now accounts for the largest share of total
inequality in South Africa. The ANC’s black economic empowerment
policies have benefited a thin layer to the point that now more than
half of total inequality in South Africa now comes from differences
within population groups, particularly within the black African
population, rather than between racial groups.
*****
The use of the military to suppress the working class is set to
escalate amid the social crisis intensified by the US–Israeli war
against Iran. On April 1, petrol increased by R3.06 per litre
(approximately $0.16), while diesel rose by R7.51 (approximately $0.39).
Paraffin—used by the poorest households for cooking and heating—has
more than doubled in price, reaching between R30 and R35 per litre
(approximately $1.55 to $1.80) in informal settlements. Lower-income
workers already spend around 40 percent of their wages on transport, and
rising fuel costs are cascading through the entire economy.
As
the global crisis of capitalism deepens—driven by imperialist war,
economic instability and intensifying geopolitical conflict—the ruling
class is preparing for dictatorship and war. The US–Israeli war against
Iran is a decisive factor in the worsening conditions faced by millions
of workers in South Africa and internationally. Through its impact on
energy prices, currency instability and global supply chains, it is
accelerating inflation, driving down real wages and pushing already
impoverished populations to the brink. The ruling elite, integrated into
global finance capital, is imposing the burden of this crisis onto the
working class while preparing the armed forces to suppress the
inevitable resistance.
*****
The working class must draw the necessary political conclusions. The
fight against poverty, inequality and repression cannot be waged within
the framework of capitalism or through appeals to the existing parties
and institutions.
The upcoming International May Day Online Rally 2026
takes on decisive importance. It will bring together workers and youth
from across the world to advance a socialist program against
imperialist war, social inequality and authoritarian rule. Workers and
young people in South Africa should seize this opportunity: register
today, participate in the discussion, and help build a unified
international movement against capitalism and war.
The working class in Britain faces a surge in unemployment as the
economic shockwaves from the war on Iran push an already stagnating
economy towards recession.
New forecasts point to a sharp
deterioration in labour market conditions, with up to 250,000 additional
job losses forecast. This would see the official number of unemployed
to increase from 1.87 million to over 2.1 million.
The EY Item Club, an economic forecasting group, warns that the UK
economy will flatline across the second and third quarters of this year,
placing it on the brink of a technical recession, defined as two
consecutive quarters of contraction. Economic growth, already weak, is
projected to collapse from 1.4 percent in 2025 to just 0.7 percent this
year, cutting across earlier signs of modest recovery reflected in
February’s slight uptick in gross domestic product.
The
consequences for the working class are severe. Unemployment is expected
to rise to 5.8 percent by mid-2027, up from the current five-year high
of 5.2 percent, as the crisis triggered by the Middle East conflict
reverberates through the global economy.
*****
The UK economy is highly exposed to energy price shocks, with imports
accounting for nearly half of the UK's oil and gas needs. Almost 68
percent of the UK's gas supply was imported in 2025.
Rising energy
prices are increasing household bills, delivering significant blows to
incomes. Analysis by the Resolution Foundation published this month
found that average median working-age households are expected to be
nearly £500 worse off this year than they would have been without the
Iran war.
Higher energy and petrol costs continue to hit
household income. Filling a typical 55-litre family car now costs £27
more for diesel (breaching the £100 mark for the first time since
December 2022) and £14 more for petrol than before the war.
Only
limited protection for households exists for electricity and gas bills
through the price cap in England, Wales and Scotland. However, it is
temporary, with the latest cap set to expire on July 1. Energy
consultancy Cornwall Insight’s latest forecast predicts that under
Ofgem’s price cap for July to September, a typical dual-fuel household
could pay £1,861 annually, up from £1,641.
*****
The war is affecting mortgage markets. Before the conflict, expectations
had grown that interest rates would fall, easing costs for borrowers.
Instead, lenders now face higher funding costs and reduced expectations
of rate cuts. According to Moneyfacts, the average two-year fixed
mortgage rate has risen from 4.83 percent at the beginning of March to
5.9 percent, with the cheapest deals increasing most rapidly.
The
1,800 members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) are
striking against Transport for London (TfL)—overseen by London’s Labour
Party Mayor Sadiq Khan—who plan to impose a four-day week. This would
increase shift lengths to eight hours and 45 minutes, risking greater
fatigue and compromising safety.
Strikes were held this week from Tuesday to Wednesday and Thursday/Friday with further action planned in May and June.
The RMT represents half of all drivers on the Underground. The Aslef
union already agreed to the changes earlier, significantly affecting the
impact of the strikes. If combined, the two votes on the deal by RMT
and Aslef members showed a clear majority of drivers across the whole
Underground had voted against the deal.
A driver at Seven Sisters
on the Victoria Line said, “We want a four-day week with reduced hours,
32 hours a week, which makes sense. But we don’t want any four-day week
where you have longer hours to work because the fatigue will kick in. We
don’t agree with the offer that is being imposed on us. We want better
conditions, that is what we are striking for.
*****
On the picket line at Barking depot, Socialist Equality Party members
raised that management’s proposals—originally pushed in 2021—were a
Trojan horse for the destruction of hard-won working conditions. A
striker, Malcolm, replied, “The action today is essentially about
freedom of choice. We have fought for decades to get the terms and
conditions we have—through our actions and through our union
affiliation. To have those stripped away at a whim for a token gesture, a
half-hour paid meal relief is what we are getting, sweeping everything
else away is simply not worth it.
“Everybody would like a four-day week, but not at this cost. This is not
the four-day week we wanted. Management are selling the lie that it’s
optional, which it absolutely is not, it will be imposed. That is why
we’re standing here today.”
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.
