Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

 1. Communist Party Marxist - Kenya defends counter-revolutionary Maoist strategy against Trotskyism—Part 2

This four-part series examines the politics of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya, its defense of the Stalinist-Maoist theory of the National Democratic Revolution and its opposition to Trotskyism. 

2. Law-and-order frenzy dominates final weeks of D.C. mayoral primary campaign

Washington D.C.‘s Democratic establishment is responding to youth gatherings by adopting Trump’s law-and-order agenda, criminalizing the impoverished children of communities its own policies have hurt.

3. Ebola outbreak in DRC and Uganda passes 1,000 cases, as Italy reports 2 suspected cases

With the Ebola toll past 1,000 cases, the gap between the WHO's recommendations and conditions in the eastern DRC has erupted in the torching of two treatment facilities.

4. Trump administration targets Hasan Piker, Medea Benjamin over Cuba trip

In a video posted on her social media accounts, Benjamin responded to the investigation, saying it “looks like the Trump administration” was targeting her, Piker and others for bringing “medicines and medical supplies to Cuba’s pediatric hospitals. Basically we want to help save babies. And that, according to Trump, is something that must be investigated. Because how dare we wanna help the Cuban people. How dare we love the Cuban people? And if indeed the charge is that we love Cuban people: guilty!”

She added, “I want my government to leave the Cuban people alone! Not to be strangling them by keeping oil from the island, by sanctions that are so brutal. I want them to stop threatening to invade Cuba… So please, if any government officials are watching, don’t investigate us for trying to save Cuban babies. Investigate yourselves for what you are doing to kill Cuban babies and make lives of the Cuban people miserable.”

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The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party have well-established political differences with Piker’s reformist politics and his attempts to shepherd workers and youth into the Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street and war no less than their “Republican colleagues.” 

But we unequivocally oppose the Trump administration’s McCarthyite investigation into him, Benjamin and anyone else targeted by the administration for traveling to, and providing aid to, the Cuban people.

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The bipartisan silence over the investigation underscores the central fact: The attack on Piker, Benjamin and others is part of a broader campaign to criminalize opposition to US imperialist policy, from the blockade of Cuba to the genocide in Gaza and the expanding wars in the Middle East.

The defense of those targeted cannot be left to the Democratic Party, which has helped construct the machinery of repression now being deployed by Trump. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class in defense of democratic rights and against war, dictatorship and the capitalist system that produces them.

5. US launches missile strikes on Iran in advance of talks in Qatar

The US military launched new strikes on southern Iran late Monday as Iranian officials arrived in Doha for negotiations involving Qatari intermediaries acting under the direction of the Trump administration.

The attacks were described by US Central Command (CENTCOM) as “defensive” to “protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces.” The US strikes reportedly targeted missile launch sites and mine-laying boats in the Strait of Hormuz. 

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The new strikes were announced by CENTCOM spokesman Hawkins, who said they were defensive, although he did not provide details or evidence of any alleged Iranian threats. Hawkins said, “US Central Command continues to defend our forces while using restraint during the ongoing ceasefire.” 

The strikes were no doubt timed with the arrival of Iranian negotiators in Doha. Multiple reports said Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf and Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser were part of the Iranian delegation.

The reports said they were there for talks with Qatari officials tied to a potential US-Iran deal and the unfreezing of Iranian assets and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

On Monday morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that negotiations were “proceeding nicely,” but then added a threat: “It will only be a Great Deal for all or, no Deal at all — Back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before — And nobody wants that!”

This sequence follows a repeated pattern used by the Trump White House to carry out illegal military aggression while publicly talking about negotiations.

The justifications for the strikes also expose the claims by Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and other officials that the 38-day US-Israeli air campaign had degraded or destroyed Iran’s military power. How can Iran threaten US forces in the region if, as Hegseth has repeatedly asserted, Iran’s missile capability has been rapidly crushed, “functionally defeated” and “destroyed”?

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Qatar has been mediating the current round of talks with Tehran over reopening the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for sanctions relief and a halt to hostilities. The talks have been presented by the White House as moving toward an agreement.

The Trump administration faces both a military and political crisis over its inability to achieve its goal of regime change when it launched the war on February 28 and, with the assistance of Israel, killed the entire political leadership of Iran. After first claiming the war would be over within days, Trump later shifted to saying it would end “pretty quickly” in four-to-six weeks. None of this has come to pass.

In a massive miscalculation, the failure of the US-Israeli war to break Iranian resistance led to the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz. The consequences for the world economy from the shutdown are severe since roughly one-fifth of global oil flows through the strait.

The renewed bombing in southern Iran shows that the Trump administration’s propaganda about negotiations is inseparable from the use of military violence. Washington continues to demand surrender while it prepares the next stage of a region-wide imperialist war.

6. The international significance of Erdoğan’s preemptive coup against the CHP in Türkiye

The regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Türkiye is staging a preemptive political coup before the eyes of the entire world. Erdoğan first removed the elected leadership of the Republican People’s Party (CHP)—the main parliamentary opposition party and leading party in the polls—through a politically motivated court ruling, then ordered riot police to forcibly seize the party’s headquarters.

What is unfolding in Türkiye is not a purely national event but a manifestation of an international collapse of democratic forms of rule rooted in the deepening crisis of the capitalist system. US President Donald Trump, having lost the November 2020 elections, mounted a failed coup on January 6, 2021, seeking to remain in power illegally. Erdoğan, for his part, is attempting to forestall a likely defeat in the next elections by neutralizing his principal rival.

Workers and youth must oppose this preemptive coup—which threatens fundamental democratic rights and whose target is ultimately the working class.

The Turkish working class is entering this struggle in a mood of explosive opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the US war against Iran. In the first days of the war against Iran, workers at the Polyak mine in İzmir tore down a gendarmerie barricade and seized control of the mine. Last month, Turkish politics was dominated by the struggle of Doruk Mining workers in Ankara.

Though polls show that more than 90 percent of the Turkish population opposes the war against Iran and the presence of US military bases in Türkiye, Erdoğan has effectively aligned himself with the Trump administration’s aggression in the Middle East and continues to facilitate the flow of oil from Azerbaijan to Israel. Across the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of the population is seething with anger at their ruling elites’ collaboration with US imperialism and Israeli Zionism.

Erdoğan and his allies are working to suppress the emergence within the Turkish, Middle Eastern and international working class—already battered by a severe cost-of-living crisis—of a movement against genocide and imperialist war.

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Erdoğan and his allies are working to suppress the emergence within the Turkish, Middle Eastern and international working class—already battered by a severe cost-of-living crisis—of a movement against genocide and imperialist war.

The repression directed at the CHP has a historically unprecedented character. The CHP is not a Kurdish political movement that has been violently suppressed throughout the history of the Republic, nor is it a left-wing party. It is the party of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the Turkish Republic in 1923. The judicial coup that has ousted its leadership under Özgür Özel and restored Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu—who has assumed the role of “His Majesty’s loyal opposition”—amounts to a declaration that, amid explosive class and international tensions, even the mildest political opposition will not be tolerated.  

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It is no coincidence that Erdoğan held phone calls with Trump both before İmamoğlu’s arrest and before the latest judicial operation against the CHP. He does not expect anything more than token statements from his European allies, who have declared war on the working class’s living conditions to finance military spending in their own countries and attacked democratic rights.

Özel’s response to Erdoğan’s unlawful operation to remove him as CHP leader underscores that democratic rights cannot be defended under the leadership of a bourgeois party like the CHP. As the leader of a party bound by a thousand threads to imperialism and finance capital, Özel swiftly capitulated to the preemptive coup despite his initial rhetoric of “resistance.” He talked to Kılıçdaroğlu—after first refusing to do so—then accepted the court ruling he had vowed to reject and vacated the party headquarters he had pledged never to leave. He has now called for a new CHP party congress and new elections. 

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The ruling elites in Türkiye and across the Middle East sit atop a social powder keg. As Türkiye ranks among the most unequal societies in Europe, the polarization between the working class and the bourgeoisie has reached unprecedented dimensions. The Erdoğan government’s policies, enriching a financial oligarchy while driving workers into destitution, only intensify class tensions and the threat of social revolution. The domination of the capitalist oligarchy over economic and social life, under conditions of expanding global war, is incompatible with democracy even in its most limited form.

The Erdoğan regime’s operation against the CHP further exposes as a brazen fraud the claim—promoted by the DEM Party, the CHP and pseudo-left tendencies—that the very same government can resolve the Kurdish question through “peace and democratization.”

As Leon Trotsky explained in his theory of Permanent Revolution, in countries of belated capitalist development, no faction of the bourgeoisie in the imperialist epoch is capable of establishing a democratic regime or establishing independence from imperialism. The task of building a regime that stops imperialist wars and secures the basic democratic rights of the Kurdish people and all other oppressed masses in Türkiye and across the region falls to the working class. This means the struggle for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. 

7. 16,000 Orange County, California residents still displaced due to toxic emergency at global defense contractor GKN Aerospace

The incident lays bare, in the starkest terms, the subordination of working class communities to the profit demands of global military-industrial corporations. GKN Aerospace, headquartered in Birmingham, UK and owned by the investment firm Melrose Industries PLC, is one of the world’s largest aerospace and defense suppliers, generating annual revenues of £3.4 billion ($4.6 billion). It operates in 12 countries with more than 16,000 employees across 30 sites worldwide. In Garden Grove, it sits directly adjacent to residential neighborhoods, a sports complex and schools. It has now emerged that the facility has been cited repeatedly for safety and environmental violations for years. 

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Jose, a self-employed renter who has lived for 12 years near the GKN facility, said: “Since we’ve been living here, we never imagined that this company had such dangerous chemicals. It’s surrounded by residents living here for so many years who probably never thought we were breathing contaminants on a daily basis, day and night.”

He described the anxiety of not knowing when residents will be allowed to return and the real fear about what return will mean. “Many people won’t be feeling secure going back home knowing that company still operates in that same location,” he said.

Jose also pointed to the economic devastation facing homeowners in the area. “Who knows about your own property value? There are many years of work going down, their savings and home value, because of that situation.” The surrounding community, he noted, is predominantly working class, drawn from Asian, Latino and black families, many of them immigrants. 

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On Sunday, GKN Aerospace issued a formal apology, expressing “deep regret” for the disruption to residents’ lives. The statement pledged cooperation with authorities and committed to “the safe resolution of this incident.” It offered no explanation for how the situation was allowed to develop, no acknowledgment of its prior regulatory record and no concrete commitments to affected residents beyond the immediate crisis response.

Absent from the official response has been any serious reckoning with the fundamental question: Why is a multinational defense manufacturer storing thousands of gallons of volatile, explosive chemicals in a 34,000-gallon tank directly adjacent to a densely populated working class neighborhood in one of the most expensive and overcrowded regions of the United States? Why have years of regulatory citations and settlements not produced safe storage conditions? And who, if not the workers, renters, disabled, elderly and children now sleeping in cars and evacuation shelters, bears the cost of corporate cost-cutting?

8. Japan and the Philippines to deepen military collaboration against China

Under the cover of collaboration and so-called “collective self-defense,” Tokyo is building military networks in the Indo-Pacific through agreements with nations like the Philippines. 

9. Vote No to the Australian Education Union/Labor sell-out deal! Build independent rank-and-file committees in every school!

The proposed AEU agreement in the state of Victoria amounts to a further real pay cut, does nothing to address crushing workloads or class sizes and strips educators of the right to strike until 2030. 

10. New York subway and bus workers enter second week without contract, as MTA demands austerity

The claim that there is “no money” to meet transit workers’ demands is absurd in New York City, the center of the global economy and the richest city in the world. In reality, trillions are hoarded by Wall Street firms. The MTA’s position amounts to a refusal to accept even the most microscopic concessions to workers, indicating that the contract struggle is a fight of the working class against inequality and the power of the financial oligarchy.

11. The Nexteer workers’ revolt and the case for rank-and-file committees throughout the auto parts industry

The Nexteer rebellion is the concentrated expression of decades of betrayal by the UAW bureaucracy, breaking to the surface across the entire auto parts sector. 

12. Beef Season 2: “The people in charge have made it impossible for us”

Series creator, co-director and co-writer Lee Sung Jin makes the pressures of capitalism and class society a persistent theme and source of crises in the series.

13. Workers Struggles: The Americas

Argentina:

Mass rally to support Bolivian workers

Brazil:

Workers demand end to six-day workweek

Canada:

Nova Scotia long-term care workers’ strike continues to expand

Ecuador:

Health workers and chronic patients protest budget cuts

Mexico:

Tens of thousands of educators protest on Teachers’ Day

Puerto Rico:

Students continue protests at University of Puerto Rico

United States:

Cargill locks out Colorado meatpackers

 

Jefferson Health to close four pediatric facilities in Philadelphia

 

Workers rally to demand higher wages at California news station KEYT

 

 14. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

 

The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today: 

1. This week in history: May 25-31

• 25 years ago:

 US government convicts four in Africa embassy bombings   

• 50 years ago:

Syrian forces intervene in Lebanon

• 75 years ago:

  Britain appeals to world court to reverse Iranian oil nationalization

• 100 years ago:

Ukrainian rightist leader assassinated in Paris

2. Communist Party Marxist - Kenya defends counter-revolutionary Maoist strategy against Trotskyism—Part 1

Part one of a four-part series examining the politics of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya, this article exposes the party’s defense of the Stalinist-Maoist theory of the National Democratic Revolution and its opposition to Trotskyism.

3. Another gruesome week on America’s death row: two executions, another halted amid bungled procedure

The three cases, unfolding within 24 hours, share a disturbing set of commonalities: fundamentally unfair sentencing proceedings, defendants whose severe mental illness, unaddressed childhood trauma and neurological damage went largely unaddressed at trial, and execution protocols the subject of legal challenge.

4. Texas cuts education jobs, shutters dozens of schools

Districts face budget deficits amid declining enrollment, budget crises, inflation and war.

5. West Lafayette, Indiana government fast-tracks SK Hynix memory chip factory construction

The city and county governments in West Lafayette, Indiana have approved road construction projects and issued building permits for SK Hynix to proceed with plans to build a massive microchip factory on a Purdue University site, against ongoing community opposition including a pending lawsuit filed by residents.

6. Virginia Governor Spanberger vetoes collective bargaining and immigrant protection bills

The veto of these two bills confirms—for the thousandth and first time—this fundamental reality of American politics: the Democratic party is a capitalist party charged with diffusing and disorienting popular hostility to the profit system. 

7. Jailed 37 days for a Charlie Kirk meme: Tennessee man’s settlement exposes the fraud of Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization” Fund

The Anti-Weaponization Fund is not an anomaly. The language of rights, free speech, due process and protection from state persecution is being selectively deployed in the service of the ruling class which is suppressing its opponents, and now turning to openly authoritarian methods. 

Tennessee’s Charlie Kirk Act, now awaiting the governor’s signature, makes that principle permanent and institutional. Recently passed by the Republican-controlled legislature, the law forbids public universities from disinviting speakers in response to threatened protests, restricts protesters from disrupting invited speakers, and mandates adoption of “institutional neutrality” policies modeled on the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report which was written at the height of Vietnam-era campus unrest.

The principle has been a useful tool for administrators ever since. It was most recently deployed against students protesting the Gaza genocide, when chancellors across the country invoked institutional neutrality to justify refusing to take any position on the mass killing of civilians while simultaneously calling police on the students demanding they do so.

The Charlie Kirk Act also creates litigation mechanisms that right-wing organizations can use to sue universities into preemptive compliance. What Weems did to Bushart with a warrant, the Charlie Kirk Act does to Tennessee’s campuses with a lawsuit. 

The same legislature’s Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act requires public universities to teach the positive influence of Judeo-Christian religion on American history. Taken together, these laws expose “institutional neutrality” for what it has always been: a class principle, invoked against the opponents of the ruling class and discarded when the ruling class advances its own politics. 

Bushart’s settlement was won despite this apparatus, not because of any principle it embodies. The liberal framing, “the system works,” “free speech prevailed” must be rejected. Bushart fought for months through a civil rights organization and a federal lawsuit to vindicate rights that were revoked by the deliberate exercise of state power on the personal authority of a sheriff who already knew, before signing the warrant, that no crime had been committed. That is not a functioning democracy. It is a political system in which every institution is compromised, one that can only be challenged through the independent political mobilization of the working class against the capitalist oligarchy that controls it.

8. AI-fueled Wall Street frenzy raises concerns

Either the US stock market has entered a kind of financial heaven where earthly economic laws no longer apply, or the conditions are being created for a crash and a consequent financial crisis of major proportions.

The market boosters adhere to the former, basing themselves on the enormous changes being wrought by AI and its tremendous potential for lifting the productivity of labour. Others, however, are sounding increasingly loud warnings.

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal dismissed the latter with remarks typical of many.

Commenting on the initial public offering (IPO) of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and those to come shortly of OpenAI and Anthropic, it said that “amid the elegies [highlighting growing problems] about American capitalism, the latest mini-IPO boom is a welcome tribute to the dynamism of US markets that no other country can match.”

The IPO for SpaceX, founded in 2002 for space exploration but which has now extended into broadband, mobile satellite service and data centres for AI, was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last Wednesday. It is said to be the largest in history.

Very few of the company’s shares will be available to public investors; most will initially be in the hands of Musk. But under new rules recently introduced by the NASDAQ exchange, it will be included in indexes which are tracked by Exchange Traded Funds, meaning that billions of dollars will flood into the market to buy its shares.

According to estimates by JP Morgan, if 50 percent of the company’s shares are eventually floated, the market valuation will reach $2 trillion.

The IPO boom comes on top of a surge on Wall Street over the last two months. Since April and the announcement of a “ceasefire” in the war on Iran, it has powered ahead, with the S&P 500 index rising by 12 percent. 

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It is calculated that just five tech stocks—Alphabet (Google), Nvidia, Amazon, Broadcom and Apple—have accounted for more than 50 percent of the recent gains in the S&P index. At the start of the year the prevailing sentiment was that there would be a broadening of market gains.

According to Bloomberg, the AI chipmaker, Nvidia, which has been likened to the sun at the center of an AI planetary system, has been responsible for nearly a fifth of the rise in the S&P since the start of the year and 15 percent of the $32 trillion rise in the market capitalization of the index since 2023.

One of the key features in the rise of Nvidia and its role in powering the market is the degree of circularity involved. The company either invests in or lends money to companies which then buy its chips for AI development. Over the past 16 months Nvidia has committed some $90 billion in investments and partnerships with companies in such deals. 

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And much of this boom is not based on profits made by the AI firms today but the expectation that the investments, amounting to hundreds of billions even trillions of dollars, will bring massive returns in the future. The three major firms at the center of the new round of frenzied activity are all making losses. 

Anthropic has said it expects to turn a profit in the second quarter of this year. OpenAI has said it expects to burn through $600 billion cash before becoming profitable in 2030. SpaceX, whose operations are “something of a financial mystery” in the words of the New York Times, boosted its revenue by 33 percent in 2025 to $18.7 billion. But it lost $4.9 billion in 2025 and in the first quarter of this year recorded a $4.3 billion loss.

The contrast between the Wall Street surge and developments in the economy and the global financial system—oil prices set to rise further, yields on bonds rising to their highest levels in nearly two decades and the prospect that central banks are moving to raise rates—has prompted warnings that some sort of “correction” is bound to come, with the question being how far it might go. 

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Amid warnings by investors that 80 percent of all jobs could be done by AI within years, the initial numbers are in. In the first four months of this year American employers announced more than 300,000 job cuts with technology and AI cited as the main reason.

The argument is sometimes advanced that, as in the past, while technological developments destroy jobs, they will also create new ones, and that this will be the case with AI. What this argument ignores is that those “new” jobs will likely be able to be done by AI itself.

There is no question that AI is a massive development in the productivity of labour and lays the basis for a tremendous advancement for humankind. But for that to take place it must be freed from the destructive grip of the capitalist profit system through the taking of power by the working class and the reorganization of the economy on new, socialist, foundations.

The frenzied boom on Wall Street and the growing indications of its direction is a warning that the political struggle by the working class to achieve this task is not something for the distant future but has become an urgent necessity.

9. New Zealand budget attacks workers and students, boosts the military

Ahead of the release of the budget on Thursday, the government has announced an increase to student fees, nearly 9,000 public sector redundancies and cuts to welfare payments. 

10. Rising unemployment in Australia points to Iran war’s deepening impact

These results provide an indication of the worsening price being paid by working-class households, and especially young people, for the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran.

11. Trump administration moves to force green card applicants out of the US

The May 21 policy memorandum from US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) declares that adjustment of status, the process by which eligible immigrants already in the US obtain lawful permanent residence without leaving the country, is not a right but an “extraordinary” form of discretionary relief granted as a matter of “administrative grace.” USCIS announced the policy May 22, stating that the government would grant adjustment of status only in “extraordinary circumstances.”

For decades, adjustment of status has allowed workers, students, refugees, asylum seekers and spouses of US citizens to receive green cards while remaining in the country. The new policy threatens to force applicants to return to countries they may not have lived in for years, or where they may face poverty, repression, war or political persecution, in order to attend interviews at US consulates.

The consequences could be catastrophic. Applicants who depart the US after overstaying a visa can trigger either a three-year or a 10-year ban on reentry. Others may be unable to obtain an appointment at all because US consular services are suspended, limited or overwhelmed in their country. In some cases, immigrants could be forced to leave spouses, children, jobs and schools in the US for months or years, with no guarantee of return.  

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Doug Rand, a former senior USCIS official under the Biden administration, told CBS News that the changes could affect hundreds of thousands of cases, since roughly half a million people get green cards each year through adjustment of status. He warned that immigrant spouses of US citizens who are in the country on student and other temporary visas would likely be among those most affected. “The primary impact of this appears to be to make it difficult or impossible for very large numbers of US citizens to get on with their lives with the people they’ve chosen to marry who came here legally,” Rand said. He added that many could be stranded abroad, citing Iran, Russia and “114 different countries” where, if applicants return to seek permanent residency, “the Trump administration will not let you in.”

The administration’s claim that immigrants must return to their “home countries” is therefore a trap. For many, the country they are being told to return to is one from which they fled, where the US provides limited or no visa services, or whose nationals are now barred or restricted from entering the United States. 

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The attack is aimed not only at immigrants but at their families, including US citizen spouses and children. Spouses of US citizens could be ordered to leave the country for consular processing and then be trapped abroad by delays, travel bans, visa freezes or reentry bars. Workers who entered legally and followed the rules could be forced to abandon their jobs. Students could be driven out of universities. Refugees, trafficking survivors and abused children could be compelled to return to countries where they face danger.

This is not a policy directed at “public safety.” It is a direct assault on the right of workers to live, work, study and form families across borders. The administration is seeking to transform every immigration benefit into a revocable privilege, granted or withheld at the discretion of the executive branch. 

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The democratic rights of immigrants are inseparable from the democratic rights of the working class as a whole. A government that can force a worker’s spouse to leave the country, deport a student for opposing genocide, or prosecute a man for successfully challenging his illegal removal will use the same methods against every section of the working class that comes into struggle.

These policies must be opposed by workers everywhere. The right to live, labor, study and love across borders is a basic democratic and social right. Its defense requires the independent mobilization of the working class against the capitalist nation-state system, which divides workers by citizenship, nationality and immigration status while granting capital unrestricted freedom to exploit labor across the globe.

12. Chemical disaster at Garden Grove, California aerospace plant displaces 50,000 people

Decades of regulatory negligence in the Democratic Party-dominated state turned a preventable chemical hazard into a crisis threatening thousands of lives. 

13. Democrats join Republicans to attack Trump over Iran negotiations

The announcement Saturday by the Trump administration that it had “largely” reached an agreement with Iran has drawn denunciations from broad factions of the US political establishment, with Democrats joining Republicans to attack the proposed agreement as insufficiently advantageous to US imperialism.

On Truth Social Saturday, Trump said “an agreement has largely been negotiated, subject to finalization between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran.” He said he had spoken with Arab leaders and the heads of Pakistan and Turkey but offered no details.

Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, told CNN Sunday that Trump was “being played as a fool.” “He’s got us in a situation that’s worse than it was before,” Booker said, “with a more extreme regime.”

The United States, Booker told CNN, had “let go of billions of dollars” in negotiations to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program. Giving Iran more money, he warned, would enable Tehran to “fuel their terrorist proxies.”

Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, told CBS “Face the Nation” Sunday that the agreement was a “blunder.” “It sounds like we will go back to opening the Strait of Hormuz, which, of course, was open before the war started,” Van Hollen said.

“It looks like Iran will retain more control over those straits. We also know Iran has an even more hard-line regime in place now, and we’re talking about releasing some of Iran’s frozen assets.”

Their attacks echoed talking points already laid down by Republicans and the far-right press. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial Sunday headlined, “Will Trump Bail Out Iran’s Regime?”, calling the emerging deal a “strategic setback” that ends US pressure “before dismantling the nuclear program.” 

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The war Trump launched February 28 has killed thousands of Iranians, decimated Lebanon and pushed gasoline prices to a four-year high.

On Sunday Trump partly walked the announcement back, writing that he had told his representatives “not to rush into a deal” and that the US naval blockade of Iran would “remain in full force and effect until an agreement is reached, certified, and signed.”

The New York Times reported Sunday that the framework under discussion would extend the cease-fire that took effect April 8 by 60 days, gradually reopen the Strait of Hormuz and lift the US naval blockade. The Times wrote that Iran would pledge “in principle” to dispose of its highly enriched uranium, though the mechanism remained unsettled.

Iran holds roughly 970 pounds of near-bomb-grade material, enough by US estimates for a dozen bombs if further refined. The Times also reported Sunday that three senior Iranian officials had disclosed that the deal would halt fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon, and release $25 billion in frozen Iranian assets.

The Trump administration confronts a deepening crisis over its failure to achieve its aims in the Iran war. It had hoped that murdering Iran’s leaders would trigger rapid regime change. 

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Meanwhile Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon continues. On Sunday Israel ordered residents of at least 10 Lebanese villages to evacuate ahead of further air strikes.

In al-Duwayr, Israel bombed a building around 10:20 p.m. and struck the same location 30 minutes later, killing one person and wounding eight. At Arab Salim, two more were killed and 10 wounded, six of them paramedics, the Lebanese health ministry said Sunday.

Since Israel renewed its onslaught on Lebanon March 2, the ministry has counted 3,151 dead and 9,571 wounded from Israeli air strikes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told Trump that his government will not compromise on its “freedom to act,” including in Lebanon.

The economic toll of the war is mounting. Acting Pentagon Comptroller Jules Hurst told a House Appropriations panel last Tuesday that direct US costs had reached $29 billion.

14. United States: Gerrymandering in the South: The working class and the defense of democratic rights

Across the South, Republican state legislatures are redrawing congressional district lines to eliminate seats held by black Democrats for more than three decades. Legitimized by the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais and accelerating in Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama and other states, this gerrymandering offensive is an attack on the democratic rights of the working class as a whole, of which the assault on black voters in the South is one element.

The immediate mechanism is the dilution of black votes in majority-minority districts, which are being broken up and folded into majority-white districts gerrymandered for Republican advantage.

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The current gerrymandering campaign, however, must be understood within the broader crisis of American democracy and, in particular, Trump’s effort to establish a presidential dictatorship. Redistricting is being combined with proof-of-citizenship and voter-ID schemes, attacks on mail-in voting such as the Save America Act, threats to have federal agencies usurp the role of local authorities in the administration of elections, and preparations for the use of armed federal agents and even the military at the polls, under the pretext of combating fraud or disorder.

The attempt to eliminate districts with significant black majorities therefore has a dual character. It draws directly on the long history of black disenfranchisement in the South, from Jim Crow to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. But it is not merely an attack on black voters. It is an attack on the democratic rights of the working class as a whole, directed especially against urban, poor, immigrant, minority and young people whose votes stand in the way of the fascistic Republican Party and Trump’s authoritarian project.

The Callais decision is itself the culmination of a decades-long assault on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most significant legislative product of the mass civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This legislation put teeth in the largely unenforced 15th Amendment, passed after the Civil War, which guaranteed the right of the freed slaves to vote.

Under the Jim Crow system of segregation in the South, black voters were almost entirely disenfranchised, partly through legal restrictions such as poll taxes and literacy tests, partly through straight-out terrorism, as blacks who sought to register and vote were routinely subjected to violence and intimidation by local police and the Ku Klux Klan. The South was effectively a one-party state, dominated by the Democrats, who had been the party of the slave owners and remained the party of the wealthy aristocracy that controlled the South.

The Voting Rights Act provided for federal oversight of elections in those parts of the United States with a history of voter suppression, including not only the segregated South, but also Arizona and Alaska, for discrimination against Hispanic, Native American and Alaska Native voters, and scattered counties in many other states.

Black voter registration and turnout skyrocketed across the South, but initially led to the election of only a handful of African Americans to Congress. The vast majority of African Americans now vote for the Democratic Party, crediting it for the reforms of the civil rights era. Racist Democratic politicians in the South shifted en masse to the Republican Party, which made increasing gains in the region.

After the 1990 census, however, black Democratic leaders reached an agreement with the Republican Party to create more than a dozen new majority-minority districts in the region. These would provide safe seats for black Democratic politicians, and in 1992 the number of black representatives from the South jumped to 20. 

At the same time, by concentrating large numbers of minority voters in a small number of seats, the Republican Party expected to gain the vast majority of Southern congressional seats through race-based appeals to white voters. This cynical deal—spearheaded by Republican strategist Lee Atwater and Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia—was the culmination of what Richard Nixon had dubbed the “Southern strategy.” It contributed significantly to the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in the 1994 elections.

In the three decades since, the Republican Party cemented political control of the Southern states, with the sole exception of Virginia. Side by side with the consolidation of Republican political power in the South, the Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court has steadily dismantled the Voting Rights Act, not overturning it explicitly but gutting the enforcement powers through which the federal government and civil rights groups could take action against blatantly discriminatory actions.

The Callais decision completes the process, as the minority dissent written by Justice Elena Kagan argued, of rendering the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.”

The Democratic Party’s response to the mounting threats to democratic rights combines reactionary politics and impotent theatrics. There has been much howling about Jim Crow 2.0, but no action proposed beyond filing lawsuits, staging protests, and—inevitably—voting for the Democrats in the midterm elections in November … if they even take place.

The Democrats have presented the redistricting campaign entirely in racial terms. They use minority districts as electoral props, while they have presided over austerity, police violence, inequality, war and the decay of the cities where much of their minority electorate lives. They have also initiated their own redistricting efforts, particularly in California and Virginia, to create more Democrat-controlled seats. Both parties look upon the great majority of the population as an object of manipulation.

here is no significant constituency for the defense of democratic rights within any section of the American ruling class. The Republican Party has been transformed into the political instrument of a fascist would-be dictator. The Democratic Party blocks any serious struggle against mounting authoritarianism, because it fears a movement from below from the working masses, far more than it does the actions of Trump.

The defense of democratic rights now falls to the working class. It must not only defend voting rights but fight against the entire anti-democratic framework of American elections: the Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court, ballot access laws that exclude independent and socialist candidates, the domination of money over elections, the monopolization of the media and political power by the corporate elite. 

*****

The defense of democratic rights is a central focus of the struggle for socialism. Democratic rights are both a necessity for working class politics within capitalism, and the indispensable basis for the future socialist reorganization of society, which will put working people, not a handful of financial aristocrats, in control. 

15. Turkish police storm CHP headquarters, as court ousts elected party leadership

On Sunday, police acting on the orders of the Ankara Governorship stormed the headquarters of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) using pepper spray, forcibly removing the party’s elected leader Özgür Özel and his supporters, including deputies, from the building.

This unlawful police operation followed a politically motivated judicial ruling issued under pressure from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government. On Thursday, May 21, the Ankara Regional Court of Appeals declared the party’s 2023 congress “absolutely null and void” on charges of “fraud,” removing Özel and all party organs from their positions and reinstating former leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu by court order.

This ruling violated the authority of the Supreme Electoral Council (YSK), which is constitutionally responsible for overseeing and approving political party congresses. The CHP’s appeals to both the court and the YSK were immediately rejected. After Kılıçdaroğlu’s lawyer applied to the Ankara Police Headquarters demanding that the party’s central building be handed over to them, the Ankara Governorship ordered police to move in, citing the need to “enforce the court ruling.”

The political nature of the court decision is also evident in its timing. It was issued just before the start of a nine-day Eid al-Adha holiday beginning on Friday, a move clearly intended to minimize mass protests. One day before the ruling, Kılıçdaroğlu posted a video on his social media account implying he would return to the party leadership, as if he had been forewarned of the impending court ruling.

The situation that has emerged from this unlawful ruling and police operation is clear. The Erdoğan government’s interference with the elected leadership of the CHP—a party that came first in the March 2024 local elections and is currently leading in polls—signals that even the limited constitutional multi-party system in NATO member Türkiye may be coming to an end. The constitutional and legal norms upon which the legitimacy of the Erdoğan government rests are being violated one after another. Özel’s response to what is an existential assault on his party, and perhaps on himself personally, however, is constrained by the limits of the CHP’s bourgeois character.

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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.

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today: 

1. A Turkish court unlawfully removes the CHP leadership from office

Under political pressure from the Erdoğan government, a court unlawfully removed the elected leadership of the Republican People's Party, triggering a major political crisis. 

2. The Ebola epidemic, imperialism and the political economy of social murder

The Ebola epidemic ravaging central Africa is not a natural disaster but a social crime, the predictable product of the Trump administration's destruction of global disease surveillance and more than a century of imperialist plunder.

3. Management boasts deal to end Long Island Rail Road strike “within the MTA’s financial plan”

These statements are significant because they suggest that the overall value of the deal, which workers have not yet seen, is no better than the contracts workers previously rejected before the strike.

4. NATO summit in Sweden exposes sharpening inter-imperialist antagonisms amid escalation of war on Russia

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the media before the formal consultations began Friday morning that the Trump administration was “disappointed” with NATO members’ “response to our operations in the Middle East.”

5. Anger in Australia over brutal treatment of Gaza flotilla activists

Labor issued mealy-mouthed condemnations, while treating the relatives of the brutalized activists with utter contempt and hostility.

6. A $1 billion evening for the art world

Naively, one asks oneself: how is it that one individual can accumulate such an art collection and withhold it from the public? Wouldn’t it make sense, wouldn’t it be fairer, for all this work to be displayed in museums accessible to everyone? Does it seem likely that a Newhouse, a Paul Allen, a Pauline Karpidas has that much more affection and appreciation for art than the average person, or the average 10,000 persons? What type of society accepts the ability of the wealthy to appropriate art for themselves like this? What special, qualifying characteristics do they possess–aside from their riches, of course?

An artist creates a work to communicate with others, to delight, to move, to educate, not to make money. That was true of Pollock and Brancusi, whatever one may conclude about their ultimate success or failure in that regard. (We have discussed Pollock’s evolution from a left-wing artist in the late 1930s to an abstractionist later on here.) Diderot suggested that “As soon as an artist thinks of money, he loses his sense of beauty,” while Marx insisted that although a writer “must earn money in order to be able to live and to write … he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.”

*****

Shakespeare (in Timon of Athens), Marx brilliantly points out, stresses two properties of money in particular.

Money, first, is “the visible divinity–the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things.” As a result, “impossibilities are soldered together by it” (ignorant, greedy billionaires and art work, for example). Second, money “is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations”!

On the other hand, Marx imagined a society,

assuming man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people.

7. The crisis of public health in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic: An interview with Arijit Chakravarty

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with Dr. Arijit Chakravarty. Dr. Chakravarty is the chief executive officer of Fractal Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company that applies mathematical modeling to drug discovery and development, and has headed an interdisciplinary team of volunteers that has published more than 20 peer-reviewed papers on COVID-19.

8. New revelations show San Diego neo-Nazi mosque attackers were known to police and FBI before massacre

New information that emerged Thursday night has raised further questions about the role of local police and the FBI in the lead-up to Monday’s neo-Nazi terrorist attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego, in which three Muslim men were murdered and roughly 140 children narrowly escaped death.

More than a year before Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, carried out the massacre, Chula Vista police filed an emergency gun violence protective order and moved to confiscate weapons from the home of Vazquez’s father, Marco Vazquez. According to court records reviewed by major news outlets, the January 2025 order stated that Caleb Vazquez had been involved in “suspicious behavior idolizing Nazis and mass shooters.”

The order stated that Marco Vazquez and his wife, Lilliana, owned 26 firearms, including Glock pistols, rifles and shotguns. In response, Marco Vazquez told authorities that the weapons had been placed in a storage facility, that the family had increased supervision of their son and that he had been placed in therapy. Authorities have since said they recovered 30 firearms and a crossbow from residences connected to the shooters.

Court records also indicate that Caleb Vazquez had previously been placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold. Separately, Bloomberg reported Thursday that Vazquez had been the subject of a 2025 FBI eGuardian alert. The eGuardian system is used by federal, state and local police agencies to flag suspicious activity and potential threats, with reports reviewed through the FBI’s counter-terrorism apparatus and Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

In other words, police at every level were aware, well before the attack, that at least one of the eventual shooters was immersed in Nazi ideology, mass-shooter worship and violent threats. This makes the refusal of law enforcement officials to clearly characterize the attack politically all the more significant.

At a press conference following the shooting, FBI Special Agent Mark Remily claimed the manifesto expressed “various ideologies” and that the “subjects did not discriminate on who they hate.” This formulation was calculated to blur what was obvious from the facts already available: the attack was carried out by neo-Nazis animated by the same “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that has become a central element of Republican and far-right politics. 

The manifesto, social media material and symbols associated with the attack were not politically incoherent. They were saturated with fascist, racist and anti-Muslim hatred. The attackers’ worldview reduced all the problems of capitalist society to anti-immigrant and neo-Nazi filth about immigrants supposedly coming to the United States to take jobs, replace whites and “outbreed” them.

The deliberate vagueness of the police and FBI is aimed at covering up the social and political forces that cultivated this ideology. The anti-immigrant politics they espoused were nourished in a political climate dominated by the Trump administration, the Republican Party and a layer of billionaires, with Elon Musk foremost among them, who have promoted the same anti-immigrant and white supremacist conceptions in order to divide the working class along racial and national lines. 

*****

The new information demonstrates that the police were deliberately concealing the political motivation behind the mass shooting in order to cover for, and advance, the lies promulgated by the Trump administration: that the greatest “domestic terrorist” threat comes not from fascists and neo-Nazis, but from left-wing, anti-fascist and anti-capitalist opposition.

This was codified in National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, issued by Trump in September 2025. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time, NSPM-7 is “a fascist blueprint for mobilizing the entire repressive apparatus of the American state—the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Justice (DOJ), State Department, Treasury, and the military—against all political opposition on the left.” The memorandum “brands anti-fascism and opposition to capitalism as ‘domestic terrorism,’” while remaining “silent on right-wing political violence.”

9. Audit report documents Australian government's betrayal of 2022 flood victims

Of the 4,382 homes or housing lots promised through the northern NSW flood recovery programs, zero had been delivered as of March 31 this year, four years after the disasters.

10. Sri Lankan president uses war commemoration to declare “economic war” on working people

The working class must understand that the Dissanayake government is preparing a frontal assault on its living and social conditions and democratic rights and is turning towards autocratic rule.

11. New Zealand woman held for weeks in ICE detention

Nobody is exempt from the sweeping attacks on basic democratic rights by the Trump administration, no matter what their national origin or immigration status.

12. Having canceled Los Angeles schools strike, SEIU circulates petition to ask that layoffs stop

The same bureaucracy that blocked a unified walkout of all 77,000 LAUSD employees now presents a letter-writing campaign as a substitute for the mass action it deliberately strangled.

13. UPS shuts down midnight shift at Manhattan’s 43rd Street Hub, imposes split shifts in latest wave of job cuts

UPS carried out the long-threatened closure of the midnight shift at its 43rd Street hub in Manhattan. The closure, repeatedly delayed after a WARN Act notice was first issued in 2025, is the latest chapter in the company’s “Network of the Future” restructuring drive which has cost tens of thousands of jobs. In April, UPS announced it would close 27 more facilities nationwide. 

*****

CEO Carol Tomé has called this “the most significant strategic shift in our company’s history.” In practice, that shift means UPS’s profitability no longer depends on expanding package volume or preserving jobs. It depends on extracting greater profit from a shrinking workforce through layoffs, automation and the intensification of labor exploitation. The back half of 2026—which Tomé refers to as “the inflection point”—is when Wall Street expects the full benefits of facility closures, job cuts and network consolidation to be realized in higher profit margins.

UPS is not an exception. In January 2026 alone, US firms announced more than 108,000 layoffs—the highest figure for the start of any year since the Great Recession. In 2025, US companies announced more than 1.2 million layoffs. Across logistics, healthcare, auto and technology, corporations are using automation and artificial intelligence to slash labor costs and funnel the savings to shareholders.

The conditions for this bloodbath were established by the 2023 national UPS contract, which the Teamsters promoted as “historic.” It contained no meaningful protections against automation-driven job cuts. When UPS launched its Driver Choice Program—a buyout scheme offering drivers up to $150,000 to leave the company—it initially bypassed the union entirely, offering it directly to workers. Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien objected, not to the elimination of jobs, but to being cut out of the process. The Teamsters bureaucracy derives its institutional power from being the recognized intermediary between workers and management—the mechanism through which workforce compliance is delivered to the company. When UPS went around it, that arrangement was threatened.

UPS’s response to O’Brien’s objection confirmed what was already well underway: “Over the course of 2026, we expect to be overstaffed in all classifications. This could impact substantially all centers. We anticipate managing this overstaffing through attrition and layoffs.” Once UPS agreed to route the program through the bureaucracy, O’Brien declared it a “win.” The jobs were still gone. 

*****

The 43rd Street workers are not isolated. There is growing opposition to the contract that the LIRR unions agreed to to end the powerful three-day strike. Transit workers in the TWU are being forced to stay on the job despite an expired contract. In every industry workers face overwork, declining real wages, deteriorating healthcare and unions that co-manage austerity on behalf of the corporations.

The Teamsters apparatus will not defend UPS workers. The 2023 contract, the Article 38 procedure and the DCP settlement all demonstrate that its function is to administer the company’s agenda, not to fight it. The answer is the construction of independent rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by workers themselves and free from the authority of the union apparatus. The central demand must be that not a single job be lost to automation—that the gains of new technology be used to shorten the working day and raise living standards.

The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees is building the organizational framework to unite workers across industries and across borders against the global jobs massacre and the imperialist war that accompanies it.

Workers at the 43rd Street hub—and at UPS facilities across the country—should contact the UPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee and join the IWA-RFC at iwa-rfc.org.

14. Four weeks of general strike in Bolivia: US imperialism and its regional allies move to crush an uprising

As Bolivia's workers defy repression and maintain their indefinite strike into its fourth week, the international response exposes a single coordinated apparatus—from Washington's threats to Milei's alleged arms shipments to Lula's complicit silence.

15. Pro-independence Parti Québécois strengthens its ties with the far right

Parti Québecois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon gave a one-hour interview last month to Rebel News, a far-right media outlet with close connections to Trump’s MAGA movement and fascist forces in Europe.

16. Lincoln and the enduring legacy of America’s second revolution: A reply to a critic of the “Letter from afar”

Abraham Lincoln

David North to a dissatisfied reader of A letter from afar by A. Lincoln:

To treat Lincoln as a figure alien to the democratic ideals of the socialist movement is to repudiate the method of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky in favor of a sectarian schema in which the working class is sealed off from the entire prior history of revolutionary struggle against feudalism, slavery and absolutism. That schema is a caricature of Marxism. It has appeared on the political stage many times before, always to the detriment of the movement that adopted it.

The WSWS waged a sustained campaign against the New York Times’ 1619 Project—a campaign conducted in defense of the revolutionary heritage of the United States against an effort to falsify the American Revolution and the Civil War as expressions of an immutable racial pathology, to expel Lincoln from the pantheon of progressive historical figures, and to substitute racial mythology for the class analysis of American history. The interventions of the WSWS, supported by the work of leading historians of the period, including James McPherson, Gordon Wood, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum and others, were directed precisely at defending the democratic and revolutionary content of these events against an academic and journalistic offensive that sought to liquidate them. The letter from Lincoln’s grave belongs not only to that political and historiographical fight, but the present struggle against Trump and the fascistic conspiracy of the oligarchy. 

*****

The letter from Lincoln’s grave is an attempt to mobilize what is best in the United States’ democratic heritage against what is worst in its contemporary capitalist-imperialist reality. It is an appeal to the American working class to reassert the traditions of the struggle for democratic rights, and to understand that the defense of these rights is now possible only through the independent political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist program against the capitalist oligarchy. 

*****

We welcome, on the WSWS, poetry, literary experiment and sustained engagement with the resources of artistic form, directed toward the building of the international socialist movement of the working class and the Fourth International. This is an essential element of the political tasks of the movement. The October Revolution unleashed a flowering of artistic experiment, which the Stalinist reaction strangled. The recovery of that tradition, and its further development, is among the responsibilities the movement must shoulder.

In this connection, the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site will be marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with an online webinar to which we have invited leading scholars of the Revolution. Among the issues to be taken up will be Lincoln’s place in American and world history—the place, that is, of the man who carried through the unfinished business of 1776, and whose work it now falls to the working class to complete on an international socialist foundation.

Fraternally,
David North

17. UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman issues letter to Nexteer workers: Prepare for strike action

Autoworker, socialist and working class hero Will Lehman

Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and rank-and-file socialist candidate for UAW president, issued a statement this week calling on Nexteer workers in Saginaw, Michigan to immediately prepare and launch a strike following their overwhelming strike authorization vote.

“The ball is in your court now. Do not give it back,” Lehman wrote in the statement, posted on his campaign website. He praised workers for rejecting two UAW-backed tentative agreements—first by 96 percent and then by 73 percent—and for forcing a strike authorization vote that the apparatus was determined to prevent, culminating in an 86 percent strike mandate, including 89 percent among production workers.      

Lehman warned workers to reject any attempt by UAW Local 699 and the UAW International to use the strike vote as a pressure valve while continuing production. He pointed to the Local 699 Facebook message telling workers to keep reporting to work and stressing that a strike authorization vote “does NOT automatically” mean a strike—a statement Lehman described as “management’s voice wearing a union jacket.”    

In his statement, Lehman argued that the bureaucracy’s call for “14 more days” to reach a deal is aimed at weakening workers’ leverage by giving Nexteer time to build inventory and the Big Three to cushion production disruptions. “The UAW is not using your strike authorization as a weapon against management,” he wrote. “It is delaying action and buying time for management while pretending to fight.” 

*****

Lehman’s statement places the Nexteer contract fight in the broader historical trajectory of concessions imposed throughout the auto parts industry. He noted that parts workers once earned wages closer to Big Three assembly workers, but that the wage gap widened as the UAW apparatus isolated and defeated parts struggles during the 1980s and later paved the way for the spinoff of Delphi and the destruction of jobs, wages and pensions. He cited the tier system forcing workers to start at $19.50 and take four years to reach $27—essentially the same as what workers earned more than two decades ago under Delphi—and noted that if wages had kept pace with inflation, workers would be making “more than $45 an hour today.”

Central to Lehman’s appeal is the call to take control of the struggle out of the hands of officials. He urged workers to form an elected rank-and-file strike committee “composed of trusted workers from the shop floor and accountable only to the membership,” empowered to set a concrete strike deadline, oversee all information related to negotiations, and prevent any further closed-door agreements presented as a fait accompli.  

Lehman also raised an immediate financial demand: $1,000 per week in strike pay from the UAW’s strike fund. “At current living costs, $500 a week is not meaningful strike support,” he wrote, calling it “a mechanism for weakening workers’ ability to sustain a struggle.”   

Addressing the company’s threats to shift production to Mexico or Poland, Lehman emphasized international solidarity, rejecting nationalist competition. “Mexican workers are not your enemies. Polish workers are not your enemies,” he wrote, calling for workers to link up across borders through rank-and-file committees and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).

Lehman appealed directly to autoworkers at GM, Ford and Stellantis to honor Nexteer picket lines and refuse to handle scab parts, and urged parts workers at American Axle, Dana, Magna and Bridgewater—whose contracts are approaching expiration—to build rank-and-file committees.  

Lehman concluded by tying the fight at Nexteer to the broader struggle over who controls production and society. “This struggle is about more than one contract,” he wrote. “It is about who controls the workplace, the union and ultimately society itself—an apparatus tied to management and the political establishment, or the workers who create all wealth.”

18. Israel faces a general election with all parties committed to war, repression and social devastation

Israel is preparing for a general election in which every Zionist party—Netanyahu’s ruling bloc, the ultra‑Orthodox factions, and the nominal opposition—enters the race on a single, unifying platform: the continuation and expansion of war.

The debate in the ruling elite is over how best to manage it, how to distribute the spoils, and how to suppress the growing internal contradictions produced by a society reorganized around permanent militarism.

The Knesset’s overwhelming vote to begin dissolving itself was triggered by the ultra‑Orthodox parties’ demand for a law exempting yeshiva students from compulsory military service—an exemption they have enjoyed for decades and which has become intolerable to a society now mobilised for total war. When the bill failed, they withdrew support from the governing coalition, forcing the move toward elections.

Netanyahu’s government, nearing the end of its four‑year term, follows one of the most politically unstable periods in Israel’s history: five elections in three and a half years, repeated failures to form viable coalitions, and the brief interlude of the Naftali Bennett/Yair Lapid “government of change—an incoherent alliance that collapsed within a year. Netanyahu returned to power in November 2022 at the head of the most extreme government Israel has ever seen, dominated by racist demagogues, settler leaders, and advocates of annexation and ethnic cleansing.

In the last days, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security caused international outrage over his treatment of the 450 abducted Gaza flotilla activists who the Israeli armed forces had seized in international waters and deported to Israel. He published a video on social media in which he was seen taunting the activists as they knelt on the floor with their hands tied.

Before October 7, Israel was already in a profound political crisis. Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul—an attempt to strip the courts of even their limited ability to restrain executive power—provoked seven months of mass protests, police violence, and refusals to serve by more than 10,000 reservists. The opposition leaders, many of whom had served in Netanyahu governments, postured as defenders of “democracy,” but they all shared Netanyahu’s strategic aims: the repression of Palestinians and the maintenance of Israel’s regional military dominance. Their fear was that Netanyahu’s open authoritarianism threatened the interests of Israel’s corporate and financial elite.

The October 7 attack ended even this shallow dissent. The Netanyahu government had spent months provoking a confrontation, ignoring warnings from Egypt and Israeli soldiers, and leaving the border effectively unguarded. At least 360 of the 1,200 Israeli deaths resulted from the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) own massive military operation, including the use of the secretive Hannibal Directive.

Within hours, the opposition declared full unity with the government and the IDF. Five opposition leaders—including former generals Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot—joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet on October 11. Their later resignations changed nothing. They remain fully committed to the war’s aims. 

*****

The decisive issues confronting Israeli workers—the genocidal war on Gaza, the deepening occupation of the West Bank, settlement expansion, the US‑led war on Iran and confrontation with Hezbollah, and the erosion of democratic rights—are excluded from the electoral agenda as givens. So too is the economic crisis produced by the war and the government’s authoritarian restructuring.

Instead, the opposition focuses on a state inquiry into October 7, Netanyahu’s corruption trial, ultra‑Orthodox draft exemptions, and the growing influence of religious parties. These are secondary disputes within the Zionist state’s political leadership that is united on the essentials: war abroad, repression at home and the exclusion of Palestinians from political life. 

*****

Israel has been transformed into a permanent war economy. Debt‑to‑GDP has risen to 69 percent. Defense spending reached 8 percent of GDP in 2024 and is set to climb further as the Iran war continues. The 2026 defense budget of nearly $50 billion guarantees worsening living costs, a deepening housing crisis—the issue that precipitated mass protests in 2011—and chronic underinvestment in transport, healthcare, education, and welfare. The VAT hike to 18 percent and the end of tax exemptions are already squeezing the middle class.

The workforce has been hollowed out by mass reserve call‑ups, especially in the tech and service sectors. Small businesses, particularly in the Galilee and periphery, are collapsing. Construction and agriculture remain crippled by the exclusion of Palestinian labor. Attempts to recruit Asian workers have failed to substantially increase house starts and prevent soaring housing costs.

Israel’s global “reputation risk” has surged. Foreign investors increasingly demand that companies base their operations abroad, threatening Israeli jobs and tax revenues. The Trump administration’s 15 percent tariff on Israel’s key chip and pharmaceutical exports further threatens employment and state revenues.

These pressures are tearing apart Israeli society. The middle class and high‑tech workforce—long the backbone of Israel’s economy—face falling incomes, rising taxes, and the burden of reserve duty, while watching the ultra‑Orthodox secure exemptions and expanded state funding. The result is a society in which every class fraction feels betrayed, overburdened, and increasingly hostile to others.

Israel is a garrison state whose ruling class sees perpetual war as the only means of maintaining its power. The coming election will only determine which faction of the Zionist political establishment presides over a deepening war, an expanding authoritarian state, and a worsening social crisis. The essential program—militarism, occupation, repression, and the exclusion of Palestinians—will remain untouched. 

19. London Underground Train Operators speak on TfL’s compressed "four-day week"

 

“A young driver told the World Socialist Web Site, “I’m against this deal. Nothing management comes up with is done to benefit us. It is an attack on all our hard-won terms and conditions, going back 50 years when they were won.”

16. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia

Australia:

Maintenance workers strike at Woodside’s LNG production plants in Western Australia

 

INPEX LNG production workers in the Northern Territory announce future action

 

Brownes Foods dairy production workers in Western Australia hold third strike

 

20,000 South Australian nurses resume industrial action for better pay and conditions

 

University of Tasmania educators walk out again for improved pay offer

 

Blue Star Electrical installation workers in Tasmania begin industrial action

 

Stowe electricians in New South Wales strike for pay rise

 

DP World security guards at Port Botany resume industrial action

India:  

Punjab municipal sanitation workers still on strike

 

Himachal Pradesh sanitation workers walk out in Shimla 

 

Air India ground staff hold one-day strike in Mumbai

 

Gig workers across walk out against rising fuel costs and declining wages

South Korea:

Samsung Electronics union suspends 18-day strike 

17. Defend Bogdan Syrotiuk! Please add your name to our petition! 

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.