Trump may announce the finalization of the “deal,” which would become
the framework for preparing the next stage of war, or he may massively
and recklessly escalate. Journalist Seymour Hersh reported Wednesday
that Trump, at a recent White House staff meeting, raised the use of
low-yield nuclear weapons to destroy “some” of Iran’s underground
missile factories, asking whether a nuclear strike “was doable.” Hersh
wrote that a source with extensive knowledge of nuclear weaponry called
it “a very scary and very serious moment” and that the president was
“desperate not to lose in Iran.”
Trump’s idea, Hersh wrote, was
to warn Iran’s leadership that “we are very seriously” considering such
an escalation. At least one aide present was shocked that an American
president would talk so casually about initiating a nuclear war in the
Middle East.
*****
Whatever the immediate course of events, the war is rooted in the
determination of American imperialism to control the Middle East, a
campaign bound up with its conflict with nuclear-armed China and the
escalation of the US global war. The ceasefire Trump announced in June
2025 lasted until February 28, when Washington and Israel resumed the
war by assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Any new “agreement”
will have the same character.
Each stage of the war has followed
the failure of the last. Trump began the year with a covert operation to
topple the Iranian government. “We sent guns to the protesters, a lot
of them,” he told Fox News in April. When that failed, the United States
and Israel assassinated Iran’s leaders and began the air war. In April,
the United States blockaded Iran’s ports, and on Thursday Trump
threatened to invade.
Washington has been preparing some form of
invasion for months. The journalist Ken Klippenstein reported Monday
that an April 7 order sent paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division to
Israel under joint US-Israeli plans “completed since February, for
seizing Kharg Island and carving out coastal territory inside Iran.”
For
the American ruling class, the stakes are enormous: its global
position, the valuation of a massively overvalued stock market, the role
of the dollar as world reserve currency, and the solvency of a
government that is $39 trillion in debt all depend on the outcome.
No section of the political establishment opposes the war, and none has called any protest against it.
*****
While American missiles were striking targets around Tehran Wednesday
night, Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York
was posting exultantly about the New York Knicks’ victory at Madison
Square Garden.
The Democrats are silent because they support the
same imperialist policy. Above all, they fear the emergence of
opposition from below.
The war is intensifying every element of
the capitalist crisis—economic, political and social. Its consequences
are being felt in surging prices, falling real wages, cuts to social
programs and the escalating assault on democratic rights. This is
fueling a growing movement of the working class, expressed in the
mounting strike wave across the United States and internationally.
One million young people in the UK aged 16 to 24, one in eight, are
not in education, employment or training (NEETs). The figure is on track
to reach 1.25 million, one in six young people, within five years. This
is the “lost generation” identified by Alan Milburn’s “Young people and work” interim report.
Roughly 400,000 are unemployed, actively
looking for work, and 600,000 are “economically inactive”, either unable
to or seeing no hope of finding any. Six in 10 NEETs have never had a
job—up from four in ten in 2005. This is despite 84 percent reporting
having sought employment at some point and wanting a job or training.
*****
Capitalism has robbed these young people of a fulfilling life and a
future. Their suffering is the direct result of a parasitic economy
designed to produce nauseating levels of wealth for a tiny few. The same
processes driving down living standards for the working class and
creating NEETs are driving up historic profits for the ruling class.
While a million young people are deprived of even a job, 157 people in
Britain enjoy a net worth of at least a billion pounds.
From an initial 800,000 expressions of interest, its membership has
sunk into the low thousands; it was equal parts unable and unwilling to
stand a significant number of candidates in the local elections; its
parliamentary leader Jeremy Corbyn refuses even to adopt the title of a
“Your Party MP”; there is a real question over whether it survives a
full year.
This result was produced by the anti-socialist politics
of the leadership around Corbyn, to which every faction of Your Party
subordinated itself.
The Socialist Equality Party stands alone in
having warned of and opposed these consequences from the very
beginning. Our first major statement on the initiative declared:
We
will not be advocates of and apologists for ‘Your Party’. It is not
ours… Our aim is to ensure that the working class does not spend its
energies in a demoralizing campaign for a party which will lead them to
betrayal and defeat, to ensure that illusions in Corbynite reformism are
dispelled as quickly as possible in preparation for the revolutionary
class battles ahead.
*****
The Socialist Equality Party’s message to workers and students is that it is time to break out of this cycle of betrayals.
More
than a decade of potential political preparation has been lost by the
working class since Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015. As
Britain and the world plunged deeper into crisis—from austerity and the
COVID-19 pandemic to the climate crisis and global war—Corbyn sat on
and sabotaged mounting left-wing opposition, putting Starmer in the
saddle. Now Polanski is lining up to play the same role with the
prospective replacement Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham.
If the working class does not rapidly develop a socialist leadership,
then the ultimate beneficiary will be Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and the
far-right. Karl Marx coined the phrase that history repeats itself “the
first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Today we can add, the
third time as catastrophe.
Far-right loyalist mobs targeted migrants in Belfast, Northern
Ireland, for a second night Wednesday. While on a smaller scale than the
violence launched Tuesday, a target list of homes shared on social
media confirms that this was an organised pogrom.
The Police
Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) used water cannon against the rioters
and fired 20 rounds of rubber bullets. It is reported that 200 police
from across the UK are being drafted into Northern Ireland ahead of
possible further riots.
Using
as a pretext the horrific stabbing Monday of Stephen Ogilvie by a
Sudanese refugee, Hadi Alodid, far-right mobs targeted the homes of
migrants and foreign nationals. As on Tuesday, shops, schools and
delivery services closed early. Public transport operator Translink
suspended all bus and train services.
After the first night’s
violence, a “hit list” of “migrant homes” was circulated on social
media, and threats were issued against the Sinn Féin mayor of Belfast,
Róis-Máire Donnelly. In an exclusive published Thursday evening, the Guardian
reported that the Accountability Project Northern Ireland (APNI), which
monitors anti-immigration activity, has been notifying the PSNI of such
lists since the beginning of this year.
*****
Disturbances were repeated in Scotland, with protests in Greenock outside a Holiday Inn used to home asylum seekers.
The
PSNI said 12 officers were injured by petrol bombs and objects thrown
on Wednesday, and 16 rioters were arrested. Government officials say at
least 27 migrant families have been intimidated or burnt out of their
homes since Monday.
Ogilvie, who lost his left eye in the attack and suffered extensive serious cuts, remains in hospital.
*****
This week’s pogroms are the latest in an escalation of
far-right attacks across Britain and Ireland. They are the
long-cultivated product of the demonization of immigrants and asylum
seekers. Successive Conservative and Labour governments sought to show
themselves firmer on policing borders and to deflect working-class anger
from the social catastrophe they are inflicting.
Given the
terrible social and economic crisis in Sudan, Alodid had been granted
asylum in 2023 under a fast-track Simplified Asylum Process (SAP)
without interview, a system put in place by the previous Conservative
government. This was also the case regarding Afghanistan, Eritrea,
Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Labour’s Secretary of State for Northern
Ireland Hilary Benn this week stressed that asylum seekers were now
interviewed in “almost all cases.”
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, Labour’s candidate at the
upcoming Makerfield parliamentary by-election and seen as likely to take
over from the reviled Keir Starmer, is calling for “greater use of
detention” of migrants. This week he told BBC Radio Manchester that on
the question of the Home Office housing asylum seekers in deprived
areas, “I do agree with what [far-right Reform UK leader Nigel] Farage
is saying. What we’ve got to do is get back to a sense of order.”
*****
Farage said, “I’m very open about the fact that some very bad actors
got involved in this stuff [in Belfast], but not the vast majority… The
vast majority want action.” This provided legitimacy for fascist
demagogue Tommy Robinson, who joined the about to be a trillionaire Elon
Musk in calling for the protests ahead of Tuesday’s offensive. Musk
tweeted, “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any
change!!”
Following Tuesday’s pogrom, Musk doubled down, posting:
“Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their hometown is
what’s making people angry, not ‘social media’!”
Unionist leaders
in Northern Ireland have used the attack to demand a hard border with
Ireland. Former Democratic Unionist Party deputy leader Gavin Robinson
told Starmer in parliament, “People are tired of warm words and promise.
They want to see action. The government must now demonstrate that it is
prepared to defend our borders.”
Sinn Féin’s leader in Ireland,
Mary Lou McDonald, condemned the “racist intimidation and violence”
which had been “orchestrated by loyalist and far-right thugs.” She then
praised the “swift” actions of the PSNI, when they were anything but.
Between June 3 and June 5, 2026, elite units of the United States
Army Special Operations Command descended upon working-class communities
across the Los Angeles metropolitan area in a series of exercises known
as Military Operations in Urban Terrain.
The operations included
low-flying Black Hawk helicopters, simulated weapons fire, flashbang
grenades and pyrotechnic explosives detonated without meaningful public
notice, throwing thousands of terrified residents into panic.
*****
A long history of escalation precedes these developments. In April 2012, Black Hawks and Little Birds flew
low-altitude tactical formations through Chicago’s downtown skyscraper
canyons. That same year, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department
secretly partnered with defense contractor Persistent Surveillance
Systems to conduct nine days of wide-area aerial surveillance over Compton, concealed from the city council.
In
2015, the “Jade Helm 15” exercise deployed special forces in civilian
clothing across nine states. In February 2019, blacked-out Black Hawks
flew formation runs through Los Angeles residential neighborhoods,
landing troops on Wilshire Boulevard. These operations were real, not
virtual. They demonstrated that the capitalist state was already
developing the architecture of domestic military control, field-testing
on American soil the counterinsurgency methods drawn directly from Iraq
and Afghanistan.
But they were preparatory. They were conducted under administrations
(Democratic and Republican alike) that still operated within certain
procedural constraints. What has changed is not the existence of this
infrastructure but the social and political conditions under which it is
being deployed.
The intensification of the class struggle,
reflected in strikes, mounting social opposition and growing resistance
to inequality, found its political expression within the ruling class in
the rise of Trump and the consolidation of oligarchic forms of rule.
The
infrastructure built in Compton and Chicago has now been placed in the
hands of a government that in June of last year deployed 4,000 National
Guard troops and 700 Marines against Los Angeles, occupied Washington
DC, and mobilized troops to support federal agents in Minneapolis,
Portland and Chicago, not to enforce the law against suspected
criminals, but to flex the muscle of militarization.
Internal Army documents,
leaked and published by journalist Ken Klippenstein, exposed that last
July’s Operation Excalibur in MacArthur Park—in which 90 National Guard
soldiers and dozens of federal agents descended on a working-class
immigrant neighborhood—had a stated mission not of enforcing any
specific law but precisely that: to demonstrate “the capacity and
freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement.”
The
counterinsurgency methods developed in Baghdad and Kabul, rehearsed over
the years in Compton and on Wilshire Boulevard, are now being test-run
as a matter of deliberate policy by an oligarchic government whose
target is the working class.
*****
The domestic military buildup is directly connected to the
international war drive. As WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North stated at
the May Day 2026 rally, the same crisis of capitalism that drives the
oligarchy toward fascism and authoritarian rule at home drives it toward
military violence and the redivision of the world abroad.
Under
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the Trump administration has launched
the “Drone Dominance Program,” a $1 billion initiative to purchase over
340,000 attack and surveillance drones, the same assets being rehearsed
over Long Beach and Pasadena. The $1.5 trillion military budget
requested for 2027 is, as North stated plainly, “a budget for world
war.” The working class in Los Angeles confronts the same state
apparatus that is bombing Iran, funding genocide in Gaza, and occupying
Washington D.C.
The danger is not only political but immediate and
physical. In January 2025, a US Army MH-60 Black Hawk conducting a
domestic training exercise over Washington D.C., collided with
American Airlines Flight 5342, killing all 67 people aboard both
aircraft. The NTSB determined the disaster was “entirely preventable.”
The Pentagon’s response was to make minor adjustments to flight paths,
allowing operations of exactly this character to proceed in Los Angeles a
year later.
The response of California’s Democratic establishment was
perfunctory. Mayor Karen Bass made theatrical gestures of opposition.
Governor Gavin Newsom positions himself as a defender of California’s
communities. But Pasadena’s own officials acknowledged they had no
authority over the exercises. The City of Industry and Diamond Bar
received no notice at all.
This is not political miscalculation
on the Democrats’ part. It flows directly from what the Democratic Party
is: a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus.
California’s supposed sanctuary laws are riddled with loopholes
permitting continued ICE cooperation. Democratic congressional leaders
voted to fund Trump’s $839 billion military budget, which pays for these
forces deployed domestically. The Democratic Party functions not as an
opposition but as an enabler of the Trump administration.
The working class cannot afford illusions about who will defend it or
what is required. Appeals to Democratic politicians who fund and enable
the military-intelligence apparatus lead nowhere. Reliance on union
bureaucracies which have already demonstrated their role—canceling a
planned strike of 77,000 LAUSD workers at the precise moment workers
were poised to act—leads nowhere.
What is required is the
construction of rank-and-file committees, independent of and in
opposition to the union bureaucracies, capable of mobilizing the class
power of working people.
Even as the cuts took effect, the Trump administration moved to suppress
the data that would document their consequences. In September 2025, the
USDA announced it was terminating its annual Household Food Security
Report—the government’s primary tool for measuring hunger in the United
States, produced under both Republican and Democratic administrations
for more than three decades. The department called the report
“redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous,” and said it did
“nothing more than fear monger.”
*****
As SNAP is gutted, food banks across the country are being overwhelmed.
Demand at food pantries has risen dramatically, with food bank directors
describing operations as being in “disaster response mode,”drawing
down reserve funds that are explicitly described as unsustainable. The
same period that has seen SNAP gutted has also seen the federal
government slash hundreds of millions of dollars in annual food bank
assistance—simultaneously attacking both the primary program and the
last-resort fallback.
*****
The reactionary press has been fulsome in its support for the assault on food assistance. A Wall Street Journal editorial
published June 7 was headlined, “The Food Stamp Rolls Decline—Hurray:
GOP reforms are paying off as more recipients work or volunteer.” It
endorsed the OBBBA’s SNAP provisions, argued that the program had become
“an income transfer for able-bodied adults who choose not to work,” and
that work requirements were nothing more than a restoration of “the
basic bargain that Americans have always accepted: that government aid
should come with responsibilities.” This framing—forced work as civic
virtue, hunger as personal choice—revives the moral logic of the
Victorian workhouse.
*****
Access to food is a basic social right, not a privilege to be earned
through documented labor submitted monthly to a government agency.
Securing it requires the independent mobilization of the working class
against both capitalist parties—for workers’ power and the socialist
reorganization of economic life to serve human need, not private profit.
Teachers
in the United States and Britain have sent messages of solidarity to
teachers and Education Support staff in Victoria fighting a sellout
union-Labor deal.
Newly released 911 calls shed new light on the death of U.S.P.S.
worker Demarcus Little at the Palmetto Regional Processing and
Distribution Center (RPDC) in Georgia. Little, a 45-year-old father of
two, collapsed and died at the facility on June 3. He is the fourth
worker known to have died at Palmetto since it opened just over two
years ago.
According to 11Alive, coworkers who called 911 said
Little appeared to be suffering a medical emergency. In another call, a
coworker expressed alarm over the delay in emergency response: “We’ve
called several times, and nobody has made it here. This man has been
down for like 10 minutes.” Dispatch records state that the first 911
call was received at 11:06 p.m. and that CPR was in progress by 11:25
p.m., roughly 19 minutes later.
But the reports do not explain who
was administering CPR, what happened inside the facility before the
call was made or what emergency procedures were followed. Little’s
fiancée Laura Wheaton and coworkers report that he had asked to leave
after telling a supervisor he felt sick and was refused permission to go
home.
Workers at Palmetto and across the country are demanding an
investigation into Little’s death. In November 2025, the USPS Workers
Rank-and-File Committee launched an independentinquiry
into deaths at the post office, following the deaths of Russell Scruggs
Jr., also at Palmetto, and Nick Acker at the Detroit Network
Distribution Center that same month. The inquiry was launched because
management, federal regulators and the union bureaucracy had failed to
protect workers. This was underscored by a recent OSHA decision to fine
USPS $26,481 over the death of Acker, who fell into a postal sort
machine and was not discovered until hours later.
*****
From its findings, the Rank-and-File Committee urged postal workers to advance the following demands over safety:
Defibrillators and fully stocked first aid equipment in every facility;
Nurses and trained medical personnel on site;
An end to the blocking of cell phone signals;
Written emergency plans in every building, subject to workers’ oversight;
Strict enforcement of lockout/tagout and other safety procedures;
Full transparency over workplace injuries, medical emergencies and deaths;
The right of workers to stop work when conditions are unsafe.
The
postal unions have not issued a single statement on the deaths at
Palmetto or the conditions that produced them. Having endorsed
Delivering for America and collaborated in its implementation, they bear
direct responsibility for the conditions that have killed workers. The
same conditions persist and the deaths continue.
Workers in every
facility must organize to enforce safety measures, not waste time and
effort pleading with management or Congress.
The USPS Workers
Rank-and-File Committee’s investigation into safety continues. But this
issue is inseparable from broader demands to end overwork: an end to
Delivering for America and no more facility closures; full protection
for career jobs; an end to workplace surveillance and punitive
“productivity” regimes; and a reaffirmation of USPS as a public service.
*****
On Sunday, June 14, the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee is
holding an online public meeting: “4 workers dead at Palmetto—The
consequence of decades of cuts and the drive to privatize USPS.” Register for the event here.
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) announced June 1 that
both bargaining units—representing 55,000 letter carriers, mail truck
drivers, post office clerks and sorting plant workers—had voted in
favour of new contracts. Rural and Suburban Mail Carriers (RSMC) voted
by 85.9 percent and Urban Postal Operations (UPO) by 90 percent to
ratify the tentative five-year agreements, which expire January 31,
2029.
The union’s success in selling out the contract struggle
paves the way for the corporation, in close coordination with the
Liberal government and the union, to implement Phase 1 of the
restructuring of the Canada Post Corporation (CPC). This includes the
reduction of postal workers by up to two-thirds over 10 years, the
elimination of door-to-door delivery over five years, the implementation
of new technologies to increase workloads and surveillance and the
general Amazonification of the post office.
The restructuring of
the postal service has been aggressively promoted by the Liberal
government. It hopes to use the attacks enforced on us as a benchmark to
slash wages and eliminate job protections and other worker rights for
all workers, private and public sector alike. The onslaught on worker
rights and conditions is deemed necessary by the ruling class to ensure
the “global competitiveness” of Canadian capitalism and fund a massive
military build-up so Canada can wage war around the world.
The
voting results are not an expression of workers’ support, let alone
enthusiasm, for the concessions-filled contracts. Rather they express
the lack of confidence among the rank and file that the CUPW bureaucracy
could achieve anything or would wage any serious struggle. After more
than two years of the CUPW leadership isolating postal workers,
conniving behind the scenes with management and the Liberal government,
and blocking any attempt to broaden the fight to other sections of
workers confronting the same attacks, the prevailing mood among workers
was that they had no other option but to accept.
World
power politics, attacks on social rights and military rearmament are
Merz’s priorities ahead of the European Council meeting in Brussels in
mid-June.
Several
generations of Chilean students have passed through an educational
system systematically stripped of resources, handed to profiteers and
disrupted by closures and regulatory failures.
The
firing of Antwiane Sanders exposes the bureaucracy’s real function:
policing workers on behalf of the corporations by suppressing opposition
and enforcing labor discipline.
On Wednesday evening, the UAW bureaucracy announced a tentative
agreement in the 10-day strike by 1,000 American Axle workers in Three
Rivers, Michigan. In a video streamed press conference, standing in
front of members of the Local 2093 bargaining committee, UAW President
Shawn Fain presented the agreement as a historic breakthrough with
workers, “winning back a big chunk of what was taken from them” in 2008
when their wages were cut from $29 to $14.50.
While Fain claimed
that “workers will make their own decision about this deal,” the UAW
apparatus is giving the strikers—who remain on the picket line—Friday to
review “highlights” about the contract, Saturday to attend Q&A
sessions with the union leadership and Sunday to vote on the four-year
contract.
A review of the available details shows the tentative
agreement is another sellout. The UAW said it will raise the wages of
American Axle workers, who currently make $22 an hour, to “$30 by 2030.”
American Axle workers made $29 an hour in 2008—the equivalent of $45
per hour today and, with inflation continuing at its present rate, would
be making $50 per hour by 2030. However, in 2008 the UAW betrayed an
87-day strike by 3,600 workers at the company in Michigan and New York,
and agreed to 50 percent wage cuts to supposedly save jobs. The company
promptly laid off half the workforce and shuttered plants in Detroit and
the Buffalo, New York area, leaving Three Rivers as its major remaining
plant.
The current agreement completely fails to make up for the
lost income that was essentially stolen from workers over the past 18
years, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
*****
The UAW bureaucracy has done everything possible to prevent the
strike from developing into a broader struggle of workers in the auto
parts and auto assembly facilities. From the start, UAW officials
intended to run the strike as stage-managed public relations operation
that could be hailed as a “victory” when the UAW Constitutional
Convention opens on June 15 in Detroit.
The bureaucracy is
desperately seeking to contain a growing rebellion of auto parts
workers, including at Nexteer Automotive, Dana Incorporated and
Bridgewater Interiors. Nexteer workers in Saginaw, Michigan have
rejected three UAW-backed sellout contracts that will keep top wages at
just $27 an hour by 2030. Defying the workers’ 86 percent strike
mandate, Fain has sent his lieutenants, including Region 1D Director
Steve Dawes and International Servicing Rep Jason Tuck, to browbeat the
militant workers and hopes the shutdown of the American Axle strike will
convince them to surrender.
*****
The union apparatus also paraded a series of Democratic Party
politicians before the workers on the American Axle picket line and
allowed the capitalist politicians to use the strike as a backdrop for
their electoral campaigns. “We had plenty of politicians come by,
[Democratic Party Michigan Governor] Whitmer, [Michigan Democratic Party
candidate for US Senate] El Sayed and others for photo ops,” one worker
said.
Even before the strike was launched, the union had
coordinated overtime production carefully with the company to make sure
enough product was in inventory so that a potential walkout would not
impact the assembly plants, especially General Motors Flint Assembly
where American Axle provides axles for heavy-duty and light-duty pickup
trucks.
*****
The effort to end the strike underscores once again that the
UAW apparatus functions as a direct tool of corporate management and
both big business parties. While parading Democrats on the picket line,
Fain is in a de facto alliance with Trump, promoting the lie that the
fascist president’s tariffs and the destruction of workers’ jobs in
Canada and Mexico will benefit American workers. But economic
nationalism and the subordination of workers’ needs to the profit
interests of the US-based corporations were the chief culprits for the
massive wage cuts imposed on parts workers in the 1990s and 2000s.
The
only answer to the global assault on the jobs and living standards of
workers is the international unity of the working class and the
coordination of struggles across national borders. This means the
building of rank-and-file committees, under the direction of the
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to
break the grip of the union bureaucracy and unleash the enormous power
of the working class.
American Axle workers should reject the
tentative agreement and build a rank-and-file strike committee to
continue their walkout. They should link up with their brothers and
sisters at Nexteer, Dana, Bridgewater and other parts plants, and with
workers at the Big Three automakers.
The
NATO gathering in Ankara will be a historic war summit. It will be
driven by escalating imperialist war abroad and the suppression of the
social and democratic rights of the working class at home.
The
group’s call to support the bourgeois opposition parties is aimed at
trapping workers and youth who are moving to the left and blocking the
development of a socialist anti-war movement.
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.
Speaking at the White House before signing the bill, Trump praised
the “heroes of ICE and Border Patrol” and boasted that the legislation
fully funds the Department of Homeland Security “through the end of my
term, so we won’t have that to be talking about any longer.”
After
months of mass protests, appeals to Congress and denunciations of ICE
violence, the administration has secured a massive increase in funding
for the same agencies responsible for the murders of Renee Good and Alex
Pretti. The bill contains no restrictions on their operations. There is
no requirement that ICE or CBP agents use judicial warrants; no
prohibition on masked agents; no end to roving patrols; and no
restriction on the deployment of immigration police in airports,
workplaces, schools, neighborhoods and public spaces.
The passage of the bill exposes, once again, the fraud of the
Democratic Party’s posture as an opponent of Trump’s mass deportation
regime. While Democrats voted “no” on the final bill, they had ensured
its passage beforehand, making possible the last act in a phony charade.
As the World Socialist Web Site explained last week,
the Democrats’ opposition was a carefully staged maneuver. Earlier this
year, they agreed to separate funding for ICE and Border Patrol from
the broader Department of Homeland Security funding bill. This allowed
them to vote for the rest of DHS funding, posture as opponents of the
most openly fascistic elements of Trump’s immigration program, and then
leave Republicans free to pass the ICE and CBP money through the budget
reconciliation process without formal Democratic support.
In other
words, the Democrats preserved their ability to posture before the
public while guaranteeing that the immigration Gestapo would receive the
funding demanded by Trump and the ruling class.
*****
Since Trump’s return to the White House, millions have taken part in
“No Kings” demonstrations and the mass protests in Minnesota in response
to the killing of Good and Pretti. There have been protests outside
for-profit immigrant detention centers in New Jersey, Texas, Illinois
and California, and walkouts by students across the country against the
mass deportation operation. Yet this mass opposition finds no expression
in Washington. The reason is that the Democrats are not an opposition
party. They are collaborators in Trump’s and the ruling class’s drive to
establish a presidential dictatorship.
The passage of the Secure
America Act underscores that the fight to free immigrants, stop the
construction of a nationwide network of concentration camps, and abolish
the immigration Gestapo cannot be left in the hands of the Democratic
Party. Workers need their own party and organizations, grounded in an
internationalist and socialist program, which recognizes the right of
all human beings to live, labor and love wherever they choose,
regardless of immigration status.
The inflation report was issued only hours before Trump announced a
new round of airstrikes on Iran, which will undoubtedly have a further
catastrophic impact on world energy supplies and prices. Workers in the
United States, and around the world, are paying the price for the US
military slaughtering the people of Iran.
Trump himself
underscored that connection at a press briefing at the White House, as
he signed into law a bill providing $70 billion for the police-state
operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and
Border Patrol (CBP) for the next three years. Asked about the increase
in the Consumer Price Index, he responded with his characteristic
mixture of indifference, lies and sheer incoherence.
*****
Trump’s remarks are the latest in a series of declarations in which
he has expressed the indifference of the billionaire oligarchy toward
the impact of the war on the broad mass of the population.
In
April, he declared that the government should stop worrying about
“Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things” and focus on “one
thing, military protection.” By this he means, not protection for
working people, but protection for the giant oil companies and the vast
fortunes of the super-rich. Asked last month about the impact of the
Iran war on the cost of living, he replied, “I don’t think about
Americans’ financial situation. Not even a little bit.”
The same crisis of American and world capitalism that drives the ruling
class to war abroad drives it to impoverish workers at home. The
hundreds of billions spent bombing Iran, financing the proxy war against
Russia in Ukraine and funding the ICE police-state machine must be
extracted from the working class. Trump has said so openly, though the
entire political establishment, Democrat and Republican, agrees.
The same contradictions driving the ruling class to war are
driving workers into struggle, and the past three months have seen a
powerful growth of the class struggle. As in similar periods in the
past, price inflation and the slashing of living standards are having a
radicalizing effect on millions of working people and fueling an
increasingly oppositional mood in factories, warehouses and workplaces
of all kinds.
*****
The trade union apparatus is engaged in a systematic operation to
suppress opposition among workers. The UAW Constitutional Convention
opens Monday amid a series of betrayals of auto parts workers. On
Wednesday, the UAW announced that it had reached a tentative agreement
at American Axle in an attempt to shut down the strike before the
convention begins and block the development of a united movement with
Nexteer, Dana and other parts and auto workers.
The union
apparatus as a whole is doing nothing to oppose the attack on wages and
living standards. Workers are trapped in multi-year contracts that lock
in real wage cuts while the bureaucracies function as arms of corporate
management and labor police forces, controlled by privileged officials
drawing six-figure salaries.
The Socialist Equality Party encourages the formation of
rank-and-file committees in every workplace, independent of the union
apparatus and both corporate parties, to organize a struggle to defend
living standards, oppose war and defend democratic rights.
These
committees, organized through the International Workers Alliance of
Rank-and-File Committees should raise and fight for immediate demands,
including: a large increase in wages to recover income stolen through
decades of stagnation and inflation; the automatic indexing of all
wages, pensions and benefits to the cost of living through a monthly
escalator; a sharp increase in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security,
against all cuts; and an end to price-gouging by the energy and food
monopolies.
But these demands raise the necessity for a direct
assault on the wealth and power of the capitalist oligarchy. The giant
energy corporations, food monopolies, banks and financial institutions
must be transformed into publicly owned utilities, democratically
controlled by the working class. The fortunes of the billionaires and
corporate executives—amassed through war, speculation, exploitation and
price-gouging—must be expropriated and used to meet urgent social needs.
The
fight against inflation is inseparable from the struggle to end the
war, and both require breaking the grip of the financial oligarchy over
economic life. This is a political struggle: for the independent
mobilization of the working class against both capitalist parties, for
workers’ power and for the socialist reorganization of the world economy
to serve human need, not private profit.
An organized pogrom by far-right forces against immigrants and asylum
seekers began in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Tuesday evening.
Seizing
on a horrific stabbing attack by a Sudanese refugee, mob violence left
families burned out of their homes and communities terrorized across the
city.
Mobilizations were also organized in Glasgow and Liverpool, cities
with an historic presence of the Ulster Unionist forces at the center of
events in Belfast. Hundreds of masked men attacked migrants and a hotel
housing asylum seekers was attacked in Liverpool.
Many schools
and shops were closed and public transport shut down across Northern
Ireland Wednesday, stranding some and leaving Belfast mostly deserted
during the day. On Wednesday evening, a group of around 200 people—again
clothed in black—gathered at roundabout about eight miles north of
Belfast city center and confronted police, including by throwing
projectiles. Riot police, who barricaded the road, responded by firing
water cannon.
The pretext for the latest far-right provocation was
the attack on Stephen Ogilvie, who was stabbed on Monday evening in a
street in the north of the city with a kitchen knife by Hadi Alodid,
aged 30. Ogilvie was stabbed repeatedly in the face, head, neck and back
and Alodid also tried to cut his throat. Oglivie, aged 44, lost his
left eye. Members of the public intervened to fend off the attacker
until police arrived. The incident was partially filmed, and the footage
widely circulated by far-right figures, including Tommy Robinson.
On
Wednesday, Alodid appeared at Belfast magistrates court charged with
attempting to murder Ogilvie, threatening to kill a National Health
Service radiographer on the same day, and possessing a knife.
Ogilvie’s
family issued a principled statement condemning the far-right attacks,
which concluded, “We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable
contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and
hospitality sector, and we depend on them to make our country work. We
do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel
hostility.”
In a posting on X Tuesday afternoon Robinson described the stabbing
as “another invader attack on our people” and listed specific times for
protests being held that night in various cities. The posting was
eventually viewed over 9 million times. Rupert Lowe, leader of the
far-right Restore UK added his voice to calls for mobilizations with a
video (viewed over 2 million times) and another posting stating, “We
must stop harboring those who wish to decapitate children. A vast
number of people need to be removed from our country-when I say vast, I
mean it. Millions and millions need to leave or be made to leave.”
Elon
Musk, the billionaire oligarch who uses his control of X as a megaphone
for the international far-right, reposted another of Lowe’s diatribes
reading “Enough”, resulting in it being viewed over 62 million times.
*****
In Belfast, gangs went door to door demanding the removal of anyone
identifiably foreign. At least three homes were torched. Some families
had to be evacuated by Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service (NIFRS)
officers as their homes caught fire or flames approached. Among those
rescued was a two-month-old baby.
The protest involved hundreds
not thousands, with the fascist hardcore reported to have attacked one
local youth—who involved himself in the attacks—for filming them with
his phone.
The attacks Tuesday were the second major occurrence of violence organized by the far-right within a week. It followed sustained protests in Southampton and beyond after Vickrum Digwa, a British Sikh, was jailed for the fatal stabbing of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak in December.
In
that city Robinson told the crowd “As white people we are treated like
second-rate citizens by our own government.” Former British National
Party member and current Britain First leader Paul Golding urged the
crowd to “take your anger and turn it into political action” against
“the real criminals who are turning Britain into a foreign country”.
*****
None of this emerges in a vacuum. The far-right has been cultivated
and animated by an unrelenting campaign of immigrant demonization that
has characterized every government at Westminster for years. The
Conservatives and now Labour have made the scapegoating of asylum
seekers and migrants a central instrument of their political programs,
competing to demonstrate toughness on borders in order to deflect
working-class anger from the social catastrophe they are themselves
imposing.
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, positioning
himself as a future Labour leader, moved to line up substantially behind
Farage’s agenda, having already backed harsh anti-immigrant proposals of Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.
The contest was over months before primary day. Mills—the candidate
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had personally recruited and
endorsed in October as the establishment favorite—dropped out in April
citing fundraising troubles, after polls showed her trailing Platner by
as much as 38 points.
By late May, Platner led the entire field,
Collins included, in fundraising, having raised $16.3 million for the
cycle. Polls now show him leading Collins in the general election by
between 5 and 9 points.
The vote for Platner expresses popular
opposition to inequality, to which Platner’s rhetoric speaks. Platner’s
promoters—large sections of the Democratic Party and the trade union
apparatus, most avidly its so-called “progressive” wing—present him as a
genuine representative of the working class. He is nothing of the sort.
*****
His politics are entirely compatible with the Democratic Party. He
invokes the New Deal, praises Roosevelt and talks about billionaires,
while accepting the framework of capitalism, private property,
imperialism and the nation-state. On immigration, he criticizes Trump’s
methods while accepting the need for border enforcement and a more
“effective” system. On war, his military record and later mercenary work
speak louder than any carefully scripted antiwar phrase.
This was
underscored last Tuesday when Platner traveled to Washington D.C. to
meet with Senate Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Schumer.
Following the meeting, Schumer repeatedly ducked questions about
Platner, saying only that Democrats were going to beat Susan Collins and
take back the Senate. In the end, however, he said he endorsed
Platner’s campaign.
Platner has tried to have it both ways, saying
he “spoke with Senator Schumer” and is happy to find “common ground” to
defeat Collins, while insisting he will not vote for Schumer to remain
Senate minority leader and will not soften his “criticisms of the
party.” But one cannot be a champion of the working class and
simultaneously receive the blessing of the “senator from Wall Street,”
one of the most fervent defenders of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The #MeToo-style campaign against Platner must be understood within
this broader political framework. It is necessary to identify the
political function of this scandal and the fraud of both camps.
The controversy began in earnest on May 30, when the Wall Street Journal reported
that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had told his campaign that she had
found sexually explicit text messages to other women on his phone.
Gertner and Platner have stated that they went through counseling and
that the matter is private.
This was followed on June 4 by a New York Times
article based on interviews with several women who had dated Platner.
The article described what it called “unsettling” behavior, though
nothing described in the piece amounts to a crime. The most significant
allegations come from Lyndsey Fifield, a pro-Zionist Republican
operative who worked on Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign and has been
paid by the Independent Women’s Forum, a right-wing organization that
backed the elevation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court when he
himself was the target of sexual assault allegations.
Platner has issued varying responses. He has categorically denied
allegations of physical abuse and claimed that when he put the Totenkopf
tattoo on his chest he did not know it was a Nazi symbol. At the same
time, he has acknowledged that after several military deployments on
behalf of US imperialism he went through a “dark period” in which he
abused alcohol and acted in ways he now says he regrets.
The
hypocrisy of the Republican attacks is staggering. Republicans have
seized on Platner’s alleged infidelity and womanizing, presenting
themselves as guardians of moral decency. These are the same forces that
worship at the altar of Donald Trump, who has faced numerous
allegations of sexual misconduct and was found civilly liable for
sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.
At the same time,
the response of Platner’s pseudo-left supporters is no less revealing.
Many of the same forces who previously insisted that “believe all women”
was a sacrosanct political principle have discarded it overnight,
recasting his alcoholism, womanizing and evasions as marks of his
working class bona fides.
This is a contemptible caricature of the
working class, which is not composed of drunken liars and men who
“accidentally” tattoo Nazi insignia on their chests. The #MeToo campaign
was always, as the World Socialist Web Site explained from its
2017 origins, a reactionary movement of privileged upper-middle class
layers, hostile to due process and the presumption of innocence and
indifferent to class. It was deployed in 2020 to drown class anger in
the politics of gender and race. The pseudo-left embraced it then and
discards it now. Platner is their candidate, their project, their chosen
instrument for corralling opposition to capitalism back into the
Democratic Party.
*****
Platner is not a threat to the financial oligarchy. His campaign is
an operation of the Democratic Party, prepared by operatives,
consultants and the trade union bureaucracy. As Politico
reported in December, Platner was not some spontaneous expression of
working class anger. He was recruited by operatives Daniel Moraff and
Leanne Fan, veterans of the Sanders milieu, who had previously sought a
“blue collar” candidate in Maine before turning to Platner. They were
directed to him by union officials, community organizers and
“progressive” networks.
*****
Workers and youth must draw the necessary conclusion. The fight against
capitalism will not be waged through the Democratic Party or its
pseudo-left apologists. The fight to expropriate the billionaires, end
imperialist war and hold the fascists accountable requires the
independent political mobilization of the working class, in the United
States and internationally, on the basis of a socialist program.
In a recent piece published by CounterPunch, American novelist
Eve Ottenberg mounts a defense of Mexico’s former president Andrés
Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his hand-picked successor, President
Claudia Sheinbaum, as the government faces growing opposition from below
amid spending cuts and a deepening social crisis.
*****
The poverty statistics Ottenberg cites do not survive contact with
Mexico’s own official data. According to the National Institute of
Statistics (INEGI), the share of the population living in poverty did
fall from 41.9 percent in 2018 to 36.3 percent in 2022, the period
Ottenberg celebrates. But extreme poverty remained virtually unchanged,
and in absolute terms nearly 400,000 more people joined the ranks of the
extremely poor. More damning still: the number of Mexicans unable to
access health services more than doubled, from 16 percent to 39
percent—approximately 30 million people stripped of healthcare during
the years of what Ottenberg describes as a “social welfare revolution.”
A
study by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) found that
cash transfers played a minimal role even in the modest poverty
reductions recorded; the improvements were largely attributable to the
post-COVID income recovery.
Yet Ottenberg does not merely praise
these programs. She borrows a term coined by Chinese leader Deng
Xiaoping to justify the restoration of capitalism in China to describe
AMLO’s project as the construction of “socialism with Mexican
characteristics.”
The phrase “socialism with Chinese
characteristics” sought to provide an ideological cover for the
de-collectivization of agriculture, the opening of China to foreign
capital, the privatization of state enterprises, and the transformation
of the Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy into a property-owning
bourgeois ruling class engaged in corruption, theft of state assets, and
joint ventures with overseas capital.
It attempted to conceal the fact that China was being integrated into
the world market on imperialist terms, reviving the pre-revolutionary
“concessions” through special economic zones and enabling the
exploitation of Chinese workers at globally competitive wages. The
consequences included runaway inflation, mass unemployment, official
gangsterism, and the reemergence of prostitution on a scale not seen
since the worst days of Chiang Kai-shek—while the regime maintained its
dictatorial suppression of the working class, demonstrated most brutally
at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The 1949 Chinese Revolution,
nonetheless, represented a monumental world historic event, ending a
century of imperialist subjugation and unifying the most populous
country in the world. It dealt a major blow to imperialism, smashed the
domination of the landlord class and, ultimately, nationalized much of
Chinese industry. At the same time it created a Stalinist-style
bureaucratic police state that ruthlessly repressed opposition,
particularly from the left.
To compare such a history to the
meager reforms offered by the bourgeois governments headed by Morena
(Movimiento Regeneración Nacional/National Regeneration Movement) is
preposterous, while adopting Beijing’s rhetorical fig leaf for
capitalist restoration—“socialism with Chinese characteristics”—as the
template for a positive depiction of the rule of AMLO and Sheinbaum
recalls nothing so much as Lenin’s famous metaphor of “wishing mourners
at a funeral many happy returns of the day.”
Neither AMLO nor Sheinbaum, of course, has even claimed to be building
socialism. Morena’s ideological content consists of vague promises to
put “the poor first” and expand “the people’s access to rights.” The
slogan of the “Fourth Transformation” grandiosely compares these limited
policies to Mexico’s three prior historic transformations: the Wars of
Independence (1810–1821), the liberal Reform War and expulsion of the
French Empire’s invasion under Benito Juárez (1858–1867), and the
Revolution of 1910-20.
*****
Oxfam Mexico’s 2026 report, “Oligarchy or Democracy,” demonstrates how
preposterous it is to speak of “socialism with Mexican characteristics”
under Morena. The wealthiest 1 percent of Mexicans receive 35 percent of
the country’s total income and hold 40 percent of its private wealth.
Carlos Slim—whom Ottenberg quotes praising AMLO’s social peace—increased
his fortune by 66 percent since 2020, accumulating $107.1 billion. As
Oxfam notes, the Mexican state devotes less than 4 out of every 100
pesos of national wealth to public investment, while the private sector
invests less than 8. “When wealth is concentrated,” the report states,
“power remains in the same hands, causing the erosion of democracy and
the establishment of an oligarchy.”
AMLO himself, in 2018, created a Business Advisory Council composed of
Mexico’s richest men and headed by millionaire Alfonso Romo, who served
as chief of the Presidential Office. This is the institutional
architecture of Ottenberg’s socialist paradise.
*****
Ottenberg states her framework openly: “AMLO’s accomplishment comes
within the context of regulated capitalism,” and she finds it “difficult
to get upset about leaders who obviate this awful system, modify it or
use it to advance social welfare.” What this really means is that
capitalism is acceptable so long as it maintains a polite face that
helps suppress the class struggle.
But the Mexican working class
does not experience capitalism as a spectrum from “regulated” to
“unregulated.” It experiences it as super-exploitation. A minimum wage
of $15 per day, modestly raised, remains a poverty wage—and in a country
where three out of five workers labor in the informal sector, minimum
wage laws are largely symbolic.
*****
Ottenberg’s article has a concrete political purpose: to dissuade
workers in the United States and Mexico from drawing the conclusion that
social reformism has exhausted its historical possibilities and that
their joint revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism is necessary.
Her celebration of Sheinbaum and AMLO as “socialism with Mexican
characteristics” replaces class analysis in favor of feel-good
storytelling about benevolent rulers—and in doing so, provides a service
to Trump and US imperialism in blocking the joint struggle of workers
across North America against capitalist exploitation, imperialist war
and fascism.
The degree of Mexico’s economic subordination to US
imperialism means the Mexican bourgeoisie possesses no independent basis
from which to resist being reduced to the status of a protectorate.
What gives it any room to maneuver at all is the fear, in Washington, of
provoking the Mexican working class—and the service Morena provides in
containing that class from igniting a continental explosion. Mexican
workers need to throw the Mexican bourgeoisie and its representatives in
Morena into the trash bin of history and unite with their class
brothers and sisters in the United States and the rest of the Americas
to destroy imperialism.
Under
the cover of a generally humane portrayal of the impact of the Ukraine
war on a beat-up working class Russian town, the film, at its core,
promotes typical US-NATO anti-Putin politics.
The
protests were directed against Kast’s newly installed fascistic
government and its across-the-board spending cuts in the public sector
in service of Chilean and international capital.
The
Trump administration’s targeting of the Detroit metro area, the
historic heart of the American auto industry and home to nearly a
quarter million manufacturing workers, makes it clear that ICE is not
engaging in narrow immigration enforcement but a terror campaign aimed
at the working class as a whole.
The
Future Combat Air System (FCAS), considered a lighthouse project of
Franco-German plans to arm Europe into an independent imperialist great
power capable of standing up to both the US and China, has failed
spectacularly.
Almost a month since their last contract expired, New York City
transit workers are determined to fight for their needs against the
administration of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. The MTA is
demanding huge concessions in a new contract for 40,000 subway and bus
workers, including 2 percent annual pay increases, restrictions on
overtime and sick leave and a doubling of out-of-pocket costs for
healthcare.
The MTA claims there is “no money,” in the richest
city in the world, for pay that keeps pace with inflation. Meanwhile,
around 15 percent of the MTA’s overall budget is spent servicing debt to
Wall Street firms like BlackRock and Vanguard.
The fight is
against the city’s financial elite, as well as the Democratic Party,
including Governor Kathy Hochul and city mayor Zohran Mamdani. Brought
to power because of widespread opposition to inequality, Zohran Mamdani
quickly aligned himself with the pro-business governor, held two fawning
meetings with Trump, and is now establishing a municipal agency, COGE,
patterned after DOGE, which slashed 300,000 federal jobs.
*****
The World Socialist Web Site also received the
following letter from a working CSX railroad worker, addressed to Long
Island Rail Road workers. Workers on LIRR and the Class I freight
carriers share many of the same unions.
To My Brothers and Sisters at the Long Island Rail Road and the MTA:
I’m
writing as a fellow rail worker — a conductor, a SMART member, working
CSX in the northeast. First: what you did on May 16th took guts. The
first LIRR strike in 32 years. The MTA couldn’t break you — their scab
operation was a humiliation, and the strike was working at the very
moment it was shut down.
But solidarity means being honest. Your
officials ordered you back without showing you a single term of the
contract — and when asked why, the answer was plain: they were afraid
you’d vote it down if you saw it. That’s not representation. Now they’ll
tell you this is the best deal you could have gotten. They always do.
They
did the same thing to us on the freight railroads this contract cycle,
also weakening our bargaining power by isolating each craft during
contract talks. This tactic of negotiating each craft separately, is not
an accident — it is a pattern, and its purpose is to weaken your hand
before you even sit down at the table. When you hear “this is the best
we can get,” what it really means is: this is the best they were willing
to fight for.
This moment demands more than waiting for the next
contract cycle or the next hot shot union rep. The power that shut down
New York’s commuter rail for three days belongs to the workers who
walked that picket line — not to the bureaucrats who ended it without
your consent.
Take that power back! The time is now to form your
own workplace committees — democratic, rank-and-file bodies that answer
only to you, that you run, that represent what you actually need. We
should do this nationally, and right now.
In solidarity — A CSX Conductor, Northeast Region, SMART-TD Member
On
Wednesday, June 3, over 200 skilled trades workers at the Hersheypark
theme park and luxury resort in Hershey, Pennsylvania, voted down a
fourth tentative agreement offered by management and the Chocolate
Workers Local 464 bargaining committee. Following the rejection, over
500 Local 464 members across Hersheypark, the Giant Center and Hotel
Hershey voted to authorize a strike. A walkout could shut down
operations amid the busy opening weeks of summer.
Originally,
the skilled trades workers had been scheduled to authorize a strike in
mid-May, following rejection of one of the $1 billion corporation’s
“final offers.” No sooner was that offer defeated than management and
the union—affiliated with the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and
Grain Millers (BCTGM)—returned with another proposal, keeping workers
on the job while attempting to ram through yet another sellout
agreement. It was only after the fourth rejection that Local 464
officials felt compelled to call a strike authorization vote at all and
only then to save face.
The consecutive rejections and strike
authorization reflect a deepening mood of resistance and militancy among
workers in the United States and internationally. They come as 1,700 Nexteer
auto parts workers in Saginaw, Michigan, have launched a rebellion
against both management and the United Auto Workers union, rejecting
three tentative agreements and authorizing strike action by 86 percent.
That militancy, however, is being strangled by the UAW leaders, who have
instructed workers to remain on the job indefinitely.
Nearby, American Axle workers in Three Rivers, Michigan, have launched
strike action against low pay, the absence of sick days and years of
concessions extracted by the UAW, even as the company has posted massive
profits. In addition, Dana workers in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana have
rejected union-backed contracts by more than 90 percent over the last
week.
In a June 3 statement, the same day Hersheypark workers
voted to strike, the Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee—composed of
workers from the shop floor determined to advance their struggle—declared:
“We have rejected three contracts. We have voted to strike. We have
made our position clear. From this point forward, the workers will
become the authority.”
*****
Workers should build a rank-and-file committee of militant
members to prepare for strike action, elect a new bargaining committee
directly accountable to the membership, and organize solidarity with
non-union workers at the park, as well as rank-and-file members across
other unions.
What has unfolded since the contract’s expiration in mid-March makes this clear.
On
March 15, the contract expired. Rather than strike, a 60-day extension
was agreed to—a move that enabled management and the union leadership to
divide the workforce, pushing a separate revised agreement through at
the Hershey Lodge and Hershey Country Club.
On May 7, they voted
down what management called its “last, best and final” offer. With
Hershey preparing to operate seven days a week through the Memorial Day
holiday weekend, a strike at that moment would have significantly
disrupted operations and increased pressure on the company by directly
hitting its bottom line. The union ensured that did not happen.
The
most recent vote was conducted over three days, June 1 through 3, with
different sections of the workforce voting in separate time blocks. This
staggered process was plainly designed to dilute unified opposition and
improve management’s chances of securing ratification. Despite it,
workers rejected the offer a fourth time and authorized a strike.
Hersheypark workers are not alone in confronting the brickwall of the
apparatus. The BCTGM brings to this struggle a long train of betrayals.
In mid-2021, 600 Frito-Lay workers in Topeka, Kansas, struck and
rejected four sellout agreements, but the BCTGM pushed through a
contract while paying just $105 a week in strike benefits. “The union,” a
striking worker told the World Socialist Web Site at the time, “literally starved us into accepting the latest offer.”
In
August–September 2021, Nabisco workers struck across five states. The
BCTGM colluded with management to isolate the walkouts, rushing through a
sellout vote that gave workers less than an hour to read the contract
before balloting.
The relationship between the BCTGM
bureaucracy—with President Anthony Shelton drawing $364,966 per year to
deliver sellout agreements to his members—and the two major political
parties is what separates these institutions from the rank and file.
Their material interests make them instruments of management and
capitalism, not of workers’ power or solidarity.
A strike would
win mass support. A former coworker posted on social media following the
latest rejection: “The Hershey Trust is sitting on how many billions? I
worked with those guys for two seasons. They deserve every penny.”
These
were not simply tragic accidents but the lethal results of austerity.
Preventing them requires an organized movement from below, not beholden
to management, toothless regulatory agencies or corrupt union officials.
The
Trump administration escalated its political persecution of anti-war
protesters on Wednesday, as the FBI and federal law enforcement agencies
raided homes across southeast Michigan and unsealed a 63-page
indictment charging eight individuals associated with pro-Palestinian
activism at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
The
flouting of safety standards in order to cut costs in the Philippines
and in countries around the world regularly turns so-called "natural
disasters" into man-made ones.
The
June 3 strike was the second nationwide strike against Trabalho XXI in
six months, after the December 11, 2025 strike--the first in 12
years--which paralysed the country.
The
United States bombed Iran for a second consecutive day Wednesday, with
the US military announcing that it had begun striking “multiple targets”
in Iran at 5:15 p.m. Eastern time. CBS News reported Wednesday that two
US officials said the targets included ammunition depots,
command-and-control nodes and warehouses.
This book appears at a decisive moment. More than two years after
Bogdan’s arrest, the legal frame-up constructed by the SBU has largely
collapsed. Bogdan’s lawyers have systematically refuted the claim that
he is a supporter of the Kremlin on the basis of his own writings. Late
last year, they submitted an independent linguistic expert report by
Yuri Borisovich Irkhin, one of Ukraine’s most renowned criminologists.
His analysis shows that the accusations against Bogdan are entirely
baseless.
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.
