Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today: 

1. Wall Street Journal announces the era of the “mega layoff”

That one of the chief motivators of mass layoffs is the instant increase in share values is a sign of the extreme shortsightedness and recklessness which dominates corporate strategy. But Wall Street’s response reflects a more basic decision made by finance capital: whole swathes of less productive capital must be eliminated, along with the workers employed by them.

This is expressed in the growing series of mass layoffs. There were 1.2 million layoffs last year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the highest toll since the first year of the COVID pandemic. This month alone, layoffs were announced at Snap (1,000 jobs), Disney (1,000), Morgan Stanley (2,500) and Citigroup (1,000). Thirty thousand layoffs each are under way at Amazon and Oracle.

Nor is this confined to white-collar jobs. UPS is eliminating more jobs than any other employer in the country. Thousands of layoffs are taking place in auto, including GM’s shutdown of what had been presented as its new flagship EV plant. At the United States Postal Service, as the result of a manufactured financial crisis, management has stopped payments into the pension plan and is preparing vast cuts. Almost every major school district and transit authority in America is eyeing layoffs to close major deficits.

This is not only an American phenomenon. Lufthansa is closing its subsidiary CityLine. As a result of the expanding war against Iran, Europe has “maybe six weeks of jet fuel left,” according to the International Energy Agency. The BBC is eliminating 10 percent of its workforce, some 2,000 jobs. Canada Post is planning to slash 30,000 jobs, more than half of its workforce, while ending door-to-door delivery.

There is an objective logic driving this. The United States has hit $39 trillion in federal debt, which costs as much in interest payments as the entire military budget. US nonfinancial corporate debt has reached $14.1 trillion, according to a January report by the Federal Reserve. The major “hyperscalers”—Amazon.com, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Microsoft Corporation and Oracle Corporation—are expected to issue as much as $175 billion in new debt in 2026 to finance AI buildouts.

Meanwhile, US military expenditures are soaring, with $200 billion requested for the war with Iran and $500 billion more in next year’s budget, bringing the total to $1.5 trillion.

The cost of their attempts to sustain these levels of debt and avoid economic collapse, while also financing the massive cost to society of the corporate oligarchy itself, can under capitalism only be carved out of the working class.

This means, on the one hand, mass unemployment, lower pay, longer hours and a vast increase in surplus value extraction through new technology. On the other hand, it means the seizure of natural resources, markets and supply chains from national rivals. This is seen most sharply in Trump’s war against Iran, which is a struggle for control over oil routes, shipping lanes, strategic minerals and industrial supply chains.

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The corporate elite dreams of creating profit out of profit by removing human labor from the equation entirely, both through financial bubbles and through AI. But it cannot extricate itself from dependence on the working class, which is the source of all value.

Moreover, these conditions are producing a profound political change. Millions are concluding that this is not simply a matter of “greed” or bad executives. The capitalist system itself is responsible.

The promise of American “unlimited opportunity” sounds like a mocking phrase to young people who cannot possibly get ahead. For the first time in history, the unemployment gap has closed completely between those with associate’s degrees and those with bachelor’s degrees.

This is radicalizing a generation and expanding the potential base for socialist politics.

The paradox of the crisis is that it emerges from an extraordinarily high level of economic development. The level of society’s wealth is so great, and the economic and cultural integration of the planet so advanced, as a consequence of high-tech global supply chains, that they are no longer compatible with the narrow limits of private ownership and the nation-state system.

Workers must take control of the same technology now being used as a weapon against them and transform it into the scaffolding of a new form of society based not on exploitation, but on the free association of producers.

The vast improvements in productivity made possible by AI and automation must be used to fund a sharp decrease in the length of the working day with no loss of pay, along with high-quality education, healthcare and other public programs, rather than financing out-of-control inequality. 

2. IMF spells it out: Workers must pay for the cost of war

According to the IMF, while economies recovered from the energy and food price shock of 2022, governments were left with higher debts and weaker buffers. Even when growth picked up, fiscal positions did not improve.

“Global growth was robust in 2025, yet there was no meaningful progress in repairing budgets. In many countries, deficits stayed high, debt kept rising, and interest bills grew rapidly.” 

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The result is that gross public debt rose to 94 percent of global GDP in 2025 and is expected to reach 100 percent by 2029—one year earlier than forecast a year ago. A significant factor in the worsening debt position is the hike in the interest bill, which has risen from 2 percent of GDP to almost 3 percent in just four years.

Poorer countries have faced mounting pressures on their fiscal position for some time—in many cases having to spend more on debt and interest than they do on health, education and other social services. They are going to be hit even harder in the coming period with further rises in interest rates, as well as energy and food shortages.

Now major economies are increasingly being caught in the vortex of the deepening global crisis.... 

3. New IMF agreement requires Sri Lankan government to complete austerity program

The Sri Lankan government signed another staff-level agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) mission to the country on April 9. The deal was announced after the IMF team conducted an intensive review of the government’s implementation of the austerity program that began in late 2023.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who is also the finance minister, signed the agreement which will mean implementing all remaining austerity measures outlined in the release of the $US3 billion bailout loan.

Speaking at a press conference in Colombo, the IMF mission chief for Sri Lanka, Evan Papageorgiou, praised the government’s “commendable performance,” citing 5 percent economic growth in 2025, rising tax revenues and building foreign reserves to $US7 billion. He said the team concluded the fifth and sixth reviews during their visit and, accordingly, $700 million will be available for the country.

However, the release of the fund, with the approval of the IMF Executive Board, will be contingent on “the restoration of cost-recovery electricity and fuel pricing” and the completion of the financing assurances review so as to confirm multilateral partners’ financing contributions and adequate debt restructuring progress.

The restoration of the price recovery mechanism for electricity and fuel are code words for strictly implementing price increases in these two sectors so as to eliminate the debts of the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) and the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation. From February 2022 to April 1 this year, the country’s electricity tariff has increased by around 125 percent.

Though Papageorgiou did not say so publicly, the IMF is demanding the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) proceed. Though the government earlier listed more than 400 SOEs, only a few have been restructured. The only major restructure has been the CEB, which has more than 20,000 employees and was broken up into six companies last month.

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The IMF official declared, “We know Sri Lankan people are undergoing difficulties with the high cost of electricity, fuel and other everyday necessities.” But people must understand, he added, that the reforms are needed to prepare for “the future shocks and risks.”

The IMF’s expression of sympathy for working people in Sri Lanka is utterly bogus. Its only concern is to ensure the repayment of defaulted foreign debts and to boost investors’ profits. When announcing the IMF bailout in 2023, former mission head Peter Breuer said the program was in fact a “brutal experiment” for Sri Lanka.

4. Milei opens up Argentina’s glaciers to destruction by mining companies

In the summer of 2025, southern Argentina’s Patagonia region was overwhelmed by fires that burned over 270,000 acres of forests, and thousands of homes. The fires were attributed to a decade-long dry spell combined with very high temperatures. Regional rains have fallen by 20 percent. This process was accompanied by less snow in the Andes Mountains, which feed the glaciers, which in turn feed the rivers and lakes upon which Patagonia’s cities and towns, and its tourist industry, depend. There was not enough water to fight the fires.

Further north from Patagonia, the vineyards of central Argentina’s Mendoza province are drying up from lack of water and being contaminated by gold and copper mining. The poor in many areas go days without potable water, which is diverted to rich neighborhoods.

Indifferent to those links between the Patagonian fires, water shortages and water contamination due to the shrinking glaciers on the Andes Mountains, the fascistic administration of President Javier Milei rammed through a bill modifying legal protections to glaciers to increase mining activity in the Andes.

A key provision in the new legislation leaves it up to the provinces and their corrupt politicians how to manage the glaciers within their borders, effectively pitting one province against another. These provinces will be allowed to decide on a case-by-case basis if they believe glaciers should remain protected or whether to permit open-pit mining projects that could destroy them.

The purpose of the new law is effectively to hand over control of these water resources to mining and oil companies. This is justified by the corrupt and fascistic Milei administration as a road to economic development and greater employment to compensate for the attack on full-time jobs and the deindustrialization of the national economy.

In effect, the right of workers, farmers and the middle class to water is to be sacrificed to further the profit interests of mining and oil monopolies and the financial oligarchy.

5. Six films from Iran that should be seen by workers in the US and around the world

In late March 2012, when Iran was under threat of attack by the Obama administration, the World Socialist Web Site published a perspective on the Iranian film A Separation, directed by Asghar Farhadi. One month earlier, the movie had won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, becoming the first Iranian film to win the honor.

The WSWS perspective asked:

And will a war, in the name of “the American people,” based on one transparent falsehood or another, soon be launched against Iran? Will deadly US bombs and missiles shortly be raining down on the streets, buildings and human beings we see in A Separation?

We added that US imperialism and its allies

are planning to destroy Iran as a regional power, a task requiring the punishment of its population with the most lethal weaponry ever developed. Americans and Europeans should be seeing this film [A Separation] … Mass opposition must build to the threat of war with Iran. Everything must be done to stop this crime being prepared before people’s eyes.

That sentiment is more true now than ever. The US and international working class must put a stop to the imperialist war against Iran before millions are killed and a major civilization is destroyed.

The WSWS has written, extensively and over a long period, about many of the remarkable films from Iran that were made in the aftermath of the mass 1979 revolution against the hated CIA-backed regime of the Shah. Notwithstanding the fact that what emerged from the revolution in the end was a clerical-led bourgeois nationalist regime, an Islamic Republic, Iranian filmmakers created some of the most intelligent and humane works in the 1980s and 1990s, and beyond.

And whatever the subsequent political evolution or confusion of their makers, such films as Salaam Cinema, The White Balloon, The Mirror, Offside, A Time for Drunken Horses, The Apple, The Blue-Veiled and Under the City’s Skin remain valuable, humane works.

6. Trump administration continues torment of El Gamal family as detained mother remains in severe pain

Hayam El Gamal, the Egyptian mother of five imprisoned with her children at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas for over 300 days, was rushed to the emergency room earlier this month after repeated pleas for medical care were ignored or denied by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the staff of CoreCivic, which runs the prison. More than a week later, despite findings that she has an unknown mass in her chest, fluid near her heart and worsening pain, El Gamal is still being denied access to the outside diagnostic treatment doctors said she urgently needs. 

According to court filings submitted by her attorney, Eric Lee, and reporting by NBC News, El Gamal was rushed to the emergency room earlier this month after weeks of complaints about a painful growth in her chest were brushed aside by ICE and CoreCivic officials at Dilley. Three doctors who reviewed her records concluded that ICE and CoreCivic were “systematically denying Ms. El Gamal medical care” and that the neglect posed an urgent threat to her health and potentially her life. 

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The El Gamal family has effectively been imprisoned since June 2025, when federal agents detained Hayam El Gamal and her five children after her then-husband, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, was accused of carrying out a firebomb attack on a pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder, Colorado. From the outset, the Trump administration treated the family not as individuals with legal rights, but as targets for retaliation. Following the attack, the official White House account posted Soliman’s mugshot alongside video of the attack and gloated: “Six One-Way Tickets for Mohamed’s Wife and Five Kids. Final Boarding Call Coming Soon. ✈️”

The persecution of the El Gamal family has nothing to do with public safety. An immigration judge ordered the family released on a $15,000 bond last September, citing their lack of any criminal record, their cooperation with law enforcement and strong community support. In court, the FBI confirmed that the family “had no inkling at all” of Soliman’s planned attack. Yet ICE invoked an automatic stay to block their release, and the administration later used additional procedural maneuvers to keep the family jailed while undermining their asylum claims. Hayam El Gamal has since divorced Soliman, but she and her children remain imprisoned.

As Eric Lee, one of the family’s attorneys, told the World Socialist Web Site last year, “The Trump administration’s vindictive attack on this young family echoes the methods of Nazi Germany, where authorities used kin punishment—Sippenhaft—to intimidate the population.” That assessment has been borne out by the government’s conduct ever since. The continued detention of Hayam and her children, despite the absence of any evidence implicating them in Soliman’s actions, is a campaign of deliberate state persecution, aimed at terrorizing an immigrant family through indefinite confinement, medical neglect and psychological torture.

The government’s claim that the family is a “flight risk” is as threadbare as it is vindictive. According to Lee, the family even offered to submit to ankle monitors and daily ICE check-ins, including for the younger children, in order to address any supposed concern about supervision. ICE still refused release. 

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Ahead of a protest scheduled for Saturday outside the Dilley detention facility, Hayam El Gamal, speaking through her attorney Lee, appealed for the release of her family and all those still imprisoned there. “I am a mother with five children who has been detained behind the gates of Dilley for over 10 months,” she said. “My kids, two of whom are 5 years old, have been struggling to live in a place that isn’t suitable for such long periods of time. We have been suffering from terrible food, inhuman living conditions and medical neglect for almost a year.” 

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She concluded, “This place is a prison. We didn’t do anything to deserve this. Children shouldn’t be punished for their parents’ actions. Please treat us as an innocent family. We will follow the law just as we have been doing our entire lives. We are asking for only one thing: our freedom. Freedom is a human right, and we are begging you to help us gain ours back.”

What is happening to the El Gamals is not an aberration but an extreme expression of a broader policy. The Marshall Project reported this month that ICE has detained more than 6,200 children during Trump’s second term. By the end of the Biden administration, the daily average was 24 children in custody. After Trump revived family detention, that figure jumped tenfold to a daily average of 226. The same report found that the number of children in ICE custody rose to more than 550 on a single day in January before later declining. Nearly half of the children detained during the Trump term have been held at Dilley. 

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At the same time that children and parents are being warehoused in for-profit concentration camps, the state is funneling immense resources into expanding the apparatus responsible. An Associated Press investigation published this week found that some newly hired ICE officers began work before passing full background checks and had troubling histories, including bankruptcies, misconduct allegations and unstable employment records. AP identified one new hire with two bankruptcies and six law-enforcement jobs in three years, another who had been accused of lying in a police report in a case that ended in a $75,000 settlement, and a third who had failed to complete a police academy and then lasted only three weeks in his sole policing job. DHS acknowledged to AP that some applicants received offers and began work on a temporary basis before full background checks were completed.

This hiring spree is being financed by a staggering infusion of money. ICE received a $75 billion windfall from Congress last year, tied to the administration’s mass deportation drive, and that the agency added 12,000 officers and agents in the push to double its force.

The torture of the El Gamal family is a warning. What the American state is doing to Hayam El Gamal and her children today, it will do to others tomorrow, regardless of immigration status. A government that claims the power to imprison children, deny a mother urgent medical care, override court rulings and inflict collective punishment on a family that committed no crime is asserting powers that will be used ever more broadly against the entire working class.

7. Iran reports reopening Strait of Hormuz as Paris summit plans European intervention

Iran announced a shaky reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping yesterday, as 49 countries met in an emergency summit in Paris to plan a naval intervention into the waterway. US President Donald Trump responded, however, by refusing to lift the US naval blockade of Iranian ports. The flurry of announcements, while they produced a fall in oil prices, has neither produced a lasting peace nor resolved any of the fundamental conflicts underlying the war.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that “passage for all commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire.” Thus the reopening depends on Washington continuing to respect the ceasefire it declared last week, as well as Israel respecting a truce with Lebanon. Under Araghchi’s terms, Iranian military forces will still control which vessels can transit the strait, the shipping lanes they can use, and the tolls they will pay to Iran.

Trump immediately announced that the US naval blockade of Iran would “remain in full force” until Iran made a comprehensive deal with Washington. Vessels heading to or from Iranian ports remain subject to interception by the US Navy, and Iran’s oil exports remain blocked. Trump claimed that a peace deal is “very close,” but only days ago, negotiations in Islamabad collapsed after 20 hours of talks.

Even if the US ceasefire somehow holds however, Trump’s war of aggression against Iran, his calls to plunder Iranian oil and his genocidal threats to annihilate Iranian civilization will have lasting and irreversible economic and political consequences. The massive human and economic toll of the war is only beginning to come into view. Even if fighting does not resume, which is far from guaranteed, this toll will continue to grow in the coming months.

8. New York home care workers wage second hunger strike in 2 years

Home care workers in New York City have embarked on a hunger strike to abolish 24-hour shifts. These shifts are associated with chronic pain, injury and insomnia, and workers are paid for only 13 of the 24 hours in each shift. Together with supporters, the home care workers have held at least six protests outside City Hall over the past month. Their resort to a hunger strike, which puts their health at risk, shows how intolerable these shifts are and how determined the workers are to eliminate them.

The home care workers hope to pressure the City Council to vote on the No More 24 Act, which would prevent home health agencies from scheduling shifts of longer than 12 hours, as well as shifts that total more than 12 hours in one 24-hour period. Last month, Council Speaker Julie Menin, a Democrat, promised the home care workers that she would bring the bill to a vote in April, but she missed the deadline to do so. In theory, the bill could be brought to a vote during a City Council meeting on April 30. 

New York City is home to about 200,000 home care workers, according to a 2023 report from the comptroller’s office. About 89 percent of these workers are women, 71 percent are immigrants and more than half are black or Hispanic. Home care workers help elderly, ill or disabled patients with activities of daily living such as personal care, meal preparation and transportation. They often must lift patients without assistance, which contributes to injury and chronic pain. 

During a 24-hour shift, three unpaid hours are set aside for a worker’s meals, and eight unpaid hours for sleep. Nevertheless, the worker must always respond to the patients’ needs. 

9. Harvard clerical, technical union leaders push through sellout deal as grad workers prepare to strike

The Harvard Corporation is simultaneously waging war on two fronts against workers and students at the university. On one front, it has moved to suppress the wages and job security of its clerical and technical workforce. On the other, it has stonewalled thousands of graduate student workers in the Harvard Graduate Student Union–United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW Local 5118), who have now set an April 21 strike deadline after nearly 96 percent of participating members voted to walk out.

The Socialist Equality Party calls on the members of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW) to reject the tentative agreement announced on April 16, build a rank-and-file committee independent of the union bureaucracy, and join hands with their brothers and sisters in HGSU-UAW in a unified fight for living wages, job security and an end to Harvard’s complicity in war and genocide.

HUCTW leadership announced a tentative agreement with Harvard that is centered on a one-year contract that delivers a flat $2,300 raise to most union members. A ratification vote is scheduled for May 12–13. The contract would take effect July 1 and expire one year later. 

10. The way forward for postal workers: A rank-and-file rebellion against the Carney government’s “transformation” of Canada Post and CUPW’s complicity

Canada Post letter carriers, sorting plant workers, post office staff and drivers are voting between April 20 and May 30 on tentative agreements (TAs) for urban and rural units, and on a strike mandate. The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) urges postal workers to vote “No” to the sellout agreements accepted by the union apparatus and “Yes” to the strike mandate.

However, we will not sugar coat the truth. Important and necessary as such a vote would be, it alone will not suffice. To defeat the Liberal government and corporate Canada—for it is they ultimately who determine the class-war policies of Canada Post management—postal workers must adopt a new strategy based on the mobilization of the social power of the working class.

We must combine rejection of the TAs with a fight to make our struggle with Canada Post the catalyst for a broader working class offensive in defence of good-paying secure jobs, public services and the right to strike. We must call on all logistics workers and the broader working class to join us in waging an industrial and political struggle against the Carney Liberal government and the capitalist ruling elite’s agenda of austerity and war. 

11. “Loud and proud”: Strikes against Lufthansa continue

For days, pilots and flight attendants have been striking against Lufthansa's brutal restructuring course. On Wednesday, 15 April, a strike by over 19,000 stewards and stewardesses from Lufthansa and LH-CityLine began again. 

12. Amid Hormuz blockade, US Treasury threatens to sanction Chinese banks trading with Iran

The Trump administration’s cease-fire in its war of aggression against Iran is rapidly proving to be the setting for another escalation of a global conflict that is now underway. The US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is setting into motion in particular an explosive confrontation between the United States and China, with far-reaching economic ramifications, that threatens to escalate into a wider, global war.

This week, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Treasury could impose “secondary sanctions” on any bank found to hold Iranian money, cutting the bank out of the US financial system and access to the US dollar. Like the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—which cuts off vital oil, gas and fertilizer exports on which the world economy depends—this amounts to a declaration of financial war on countries trading with Iran. This measure is codenamed Economic Fury, echoing “Epic Fury,” the US military’s code name for the war on Iran launched this February.

At an April 15 press conference introducing Operation Economic Fury, Bessent said: “We have told companies, we have told countries that are buying Iranian oil that if Iranian money is sitting in your banks, we are now willing to apply secondary sanctions, which is a very stern measure. And the Iranians should know that this is going to be the financial equivalent of what we saw in the kinetic activities,” that is, the physical, military conflict.

Bessent made clear the main current target of these threats is China, the world’s second-largest economy and largest manufacturing power, which now buys 91 percent of Iran’s oil. He said, “We believe this blockade in the straits, there will be a pause of Chinese buying. But I will tell you that two Chinese banks received letters from the US Treasury. … We told them that if we can prove that there’s Iranian money flowing through your accounts, then we are willing to put on secondary sanctions.”

These remarks make clear that its war of aggression against Iran is part of a broader struggle for world domination, in particular directed at China and control of Eurasia, which threatens to explode into a global conflagration between the major nuclear-armed powers.

12. Starmer premiership threatened as Mandelson/Epstein crisis re-erupts

Following the revelation Thursday that Mandelson failed a top-level security vetting prior to his appointment as ambassador to Washington, every opposition party has demanded that Starmer step down as prime minister. After stating earlier this year that Mandelson was appointed after a “full due process”, Starmer is accused of misleading parliament, a resigning matter under UK government ministerial code.

It is already widely accepted within ruling circles that Starmer will face a leadership challenge following the May local elections, in which Labour is expected to suffer heavy losses. But an anticipated post-election reckoning is being overtaken by events.

An investigation by the Guardian revealed, “A formal decision to deny him clearance was made by [UK Security Vetting-UKSV] on 28 January 2025,” and “According to sources, UKSV informed the Foreign Office that the risk factors involving Mandelson meant that his clearance should be denied.” Outright denial of “developed vetting” is rare, particularly for such a senior post.

Mandelson, the main architect with Tony Blair of the New Labour project, was appointed by Starmer as US ambassador in December 2024, with the prime minister, as everyone was, fully aware of his intimate connections with the billionaire child sex trafficker. 

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Mandelson was appointed Ambassador to Washington after the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) took the extraordinary step of overriding the recommendation of the UK Security Vetting unit. The Guardian revealed that FCDO officials “decided to use a rarely used authority to override the recommendation from security officials.” 

Starmer now claims that he only became aware of Mandelson’s failed vetting on Tuesday of this week, with the Telegraph noting that his failure to immediately alert Parliament is another potential breach of the ministerial code.

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Starmer is expected to deliver a statement to the House of Commons on Monday to “correct the record” regarding Mandelson’s vetting. 

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The extraordinary moves to ensure that Mandelson secured the role of UK ambassador to Washington, despite his longstanding connections to a convicted criminal, confirm the assessment of the Socialist Equality Party. In a February 11 statement, “The Mandelson-Epstein crisis and the socialist struggle against the Starmer government”, the SEP explained, “His appointment as US ambassador was seen by Starmer and his allies as epitomizing the triumph of Labour’s Blairite orthodoxy, following the crushing defeat of the Corbynites. His political and business record—especially his intimate connections with Epstein—were also intended to reassure the incoming Trump administration that the Labour government was a trustworthy ally, economically and militarily, wholly embedded in the same criminal oligarchy.”

13. Australian state Labor government defends unconstitutional anti-protest law

The New South Wales Labor government is defiantly proceeding with arrests and charges under its invalid anti-protest legislation.

14. Massive fire at one of Australia’s two remaining oil refineries

A massive explosion and fire tore through Viva Energy’s Geelong oil refinery late Wednesday night, resulting in a conflagration that took firefighters some 13 hours to extinguish. Around 50 workers were on site when the blaze erupted. All escaped without injury, but some were forced to literally run for their lives, according to media reports.

Shortly before midnight on Wednesday, operators in the MOGAS (motor gasoline) section of the plant noticed a drop in pressure on their control boards and raised the alarm, but before they could investigate, there was a large explosion.

Tony Hynds, Geelong organizer for the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), noted that the lack of casualties was only an accident of timing: “If this had happened during the day, we’d be talking about a whole different outcome in terms of injuries and fatalities.” 

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The refinery, one of only two remaining in the country, produces petrol, diesel, LPG, jet fuel and avgas [an aviation fuel]. It supplies roughly half of Victoria’s petrol and about 10 percent of national fuel supplies. Representatives of management and the federal Labor government rushed to downplay the impact of the blast on fuel availability, emphasizing the partial character of the shutdown.

However, its significance, amid a global fuel supply crisis resulting from the US-led war of aggression against Iran, is undeniable. This was underscored by Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s immediate return to Australia from South East Asia, where he was seeking to shore up future fuel import deals, to deliver a press conference at the Geelong site on Friday.

Albanese insisted the incident had only caused a “slight slowdown” in production at the refinery and “will not lead to any change” in Australia’s four-stage fuel security policy. This was echoed by Viva Energy CEO Scott Wyatt, who declared, “we’re still producing, making about 80 percent of diesel and 60 percent of petrol. We do hope to be able to lift that over the coming weeks.” 

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Experts have raised concerns over the age of the plant, which opened in 1956. Yuan Chen, from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Sydney, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “Oil refining is inherently a high-temperature, high-risk industrial process.… These operating conditions, combined with the potential for equipment degradation over time, can increase the likelihood of incidents such as fires if not carefully managed through maintenance and safety systems.” 

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In November and December 2017, the refinery suffered two separate leaks of hydrofluoric acid—one of the most hazardous substances used in petroleum processing—exposing workers to toxic vapor. WorkSafe Victoria responded by laying 11 occupational health and safety charges against the company in 2018, including failing to provide safe systems of work, adequate training, and safe plant, and for failing to properly notify the regulator of a serious incident.

In 2020, a pipeline leak allowed oil to escape into the environment near the Geelong foreshore. In 2023, a contractor’s crane dropped a compressor during planned maintenance works—a serious near-miss in a facility defined as a major hazard site.

The refinery has also been the scene of repeated large flares, power-related upsets causing uncontrolled releases, and persistent foul-odor incidents that have alarmed surrounding communities. Union records list multiple worker injuries—burns, chemical exposures, fractures—during routine operations and turnaround maintenance. 

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These are not random tragedies but the result of the systematic subordination of safety to profit under capitalism. The union bureaucracies will not lead a fight for workplace safety, because they are themselves an integral component of the capitalist system and serve as an industrial police force of management. 

15.  Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia

Australia:

Aurizon Coal train drivers in New South Wales strike for pay rise and better conditions

 

Northern Territory iron ore mine workers stood down without pay

 

BHP electricians in the Pilbara, Western Australia commence industrial action

 

Wilmar Bioethanol plant workers in Victoria take industrial action

 

Library workers at Melbourne metropolitan councils join ongoing industrial action

India:  

Uttar Pradesh police attack workers protesting for minimum wage

 

Motherson automobile factory workers in Rajasthan demand minimum wage

 

Jharkhand: Terminated Tata Motors workers end protest at Jamshedpur plant

South Korea:

Hyundai subcontract workers demand negotiations

16. Defend and help free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, 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.

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. April 1776: When America opened ports to the world

There were, indeed, “but two sorts of men in the world, freemen and slaves,” John Adams concluded. For the first time in world history, slavery became conspicuously wrong, requiring therefore a defense, an explanation that ultimately created racism as a modern ideology. 

A map shows the West Indies and Caribbean, 1732

As the Trump administration imposes the military closure of the ports of Iran, part of its wider neo-colonial war against the peoples of the Middle East, it is notable that 250 years ago last week, on April 6, 1776, the Continental Congress, the revolutionary government of the American colonies, announced that its ports would be open to world trade rather than just to the ships and merchants of imperial Great Britain. 

It was a declaration as consequential as any battle of the American Revolution, and one that speaks with unexpected directness to the present.

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Trotsky once wrote of the world imperialist system that with the Russian Revolution  “the chain broke at its weakest link.” “But,” he added, “it was the chain that broke, and not only the link.” A similar observation could be made about the American Revolution in 1776. It destroyed the mercantilist system and monarchical world where it was weakest, at its very outer edge. But the results were nonetheless momentous. As Marx wrote to Lincoln in 1864, “the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class,” giving birth to “the idea of one great Democratic Republic.” It was then and there that “the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century.”  

It seems that the conflicts that shaped one era have a way of resurfacing in another. The tyrannical power that the revolutionary generation of 1776 confronted in monarchy and its mercantilist system has, in our own time, reappeared in new and grotesque forms. The Trump administration has erased the line between public office and private enrichment with a brazenness that would have impressed even the most predatory of the old Crown monopolists—a government in which the president’s family openly profits from tariffs he imposes, from cryptocurrency ventures he promotes by executive decree and from foreign governments seeking access to his favor. US “trade policy” now reproduces features of the mercantilist logic the Revolution dismantled: that slices of the world are to be seized through war for the personal enrichment of the American oligarchy, or else be destroyed so no one else can have them. 

Behind all of this lurks the attempted resurrection of something the Founders would have recognized immediately—the aristocratic principle: the claim that public office is simply an extension of private property, that wealth confers the right to rule, that inherited and accumulated fortune is its own justification, and that the distinction between the great man and the commoner is natural and permanent. It is a system that once again holds labor, the working class, in contempt. 

These attributes are not the personal qualities of Donald Trump, but the characteristics of a diseased and exhausted social order that has long outlived its historically progressive role. Just as the monarchical system of the 18th century had become an intolerable fetter on the development of society—and was swept aside not by the wishes of great men but by the objective logic of history—so too the decayed capitalism of our own time is creating the conditions for revolutionary upheaval. The force that will carry this forward is the international working class, the true heir to the emancipatory traditions of 1776, 1789, 1865, 1917, and indeed all that is progressive in history. It is a powerful weapon in the hands of the working class.

2. Pentagon drafts plans for military assault on Cuba

The Pentagon is planning a military operation in Cuba to topple the Castroite government in Havana, according to a USA Today report published Wednesday.

Sources familiar with discussions told the newspaper that the White House has issued a direct order to ramp up preparations for action against the island, marking a dangerous escalation in Washington’s long-standing campaign to reassert colonial domination across the hemisphere.

These preparations follow a series of increasingly explicit threats by Donald Trump. Standing next to a woman wearing a “DoorDash grandma” T-shirt at the White House on April 13, Trump spoke in the language of a gangster talking about a drive-by shooting, declaring that the United States “may stop by Cuba” after concluding its war of aggression against Iran. Two weeks earlier, he similarly said that “Cuba is going to be next” for military intervention.

Such statements are not idle rhetoric. They are the public expression of advanced war planning that is already underway. The same administration that is posturing as alternately escalating and de-escalating its war against Iran is, in reality, using negotiations as a tactical cover.

In the case of Iran, diplomatic maneuvers buy time to mobilize the necessary resources for the next phase of US operations: securing control over the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s vast oil and gas reserves, by whatever means necessary, including the open threat of annihilating Iranian society.

A similar strategy appears to be unfolding in relation to Cuba. Limited contacts with the Castro family, alongside carefully calibrated concessions—such as the decision to allow a single ship carrying Russian oil to dock with at most a two-week supply—could suddenly give way to a devastating military intervention against a country of roughly 8 million people whose economy and armed forces are already in shambles.

The humanitarian situation inside Cuba is catastrophic. Decades of the genocidal US economic blockade—intensified through an oil embargo since January—have resulted in daily blackouts lasting for hours, alongside severe shortages of drinking water, food, and medical supplies. The economy has effectively ground to a halt, with workers frequently unable to report to their jobs due to lack of transportation, electricity, or basic necessities.

Internationally, tensions are mounting. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated during a visit to China that Moscow would continue providing assistance to Cuba and expressed hope that the United States would not return to the era of “colonial wars.” A Russian tanker, the Universal, is currently sailing in the North Atlantic and is expected to reach Cuba within approximately 15 days. Analysts have identified it as the likely next fuel shipment to the island.

Washington, for its part, has indicated that such shipments will be permitted only on a “case-by-case” basis—another lever of pressure in its escalating campaign. 

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Cuba occupies a position of immense strategic importance for US imperialism. Its proximity to Florida, its control over key Caribbean shipping lanes and its potential use as a military base all contribute to its significance. Washington has repeatedly invoked allegations that China and Russia maintain signals intelligence facilities on the island to justify its aggressive posture.

Executive Order 14380, issued in January 2026, declared a national emergency over Cuba and threatened punitive tariffs against any country supplying it with oil. This move effectively forced Mexico, Cuba’s primary supplier after the US intervention cut off Venezuelan exports, to halt shipments.

The current offensive is codified in what has been termed the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, outlined in the 2025 National Security Strategy. This doctrine reasserts US dominance over the Western Hemisphere by denying rival powers access to “strategically vital assets,” including ports, military bases and natural resources.

Framed in openly expansionist terms—akin to Hitler’s “Greater Germany”—the administration has advanced the concept of a “Great North America,” stretching from Greenland to the equator through a program of recolonization.

The objective is not merely geopolitical control but the dismantling of all social gains associated with the working class and national liberation struggles of the 20th century, including the 1959 Cuban Revolution that led to vast nationalizations and basic social and labor rights. 

*****

Already, the Cuban regime has implemented sweeping measures to open the economy to foreign investment and has actively courted wealthy Cuban exiles in Miami—the very social layers that have historically supported terrorist attacks and coup attempts against the island.

In this context, the continued role of pseudo-left organizations to mischaracterize the regime and thus US imperialism’s actions is particularly pernicious. The Morenoite Left Voice, affiliated with the so-called Permanent Revolution Current, claims that the Cuban government continues to be a bureaucratic workers’ state that retains a “socialist character” and merely needs to be pressured by the working class to adopt more democratic policies. It warns of “capitalist restoration” in the absence of greater mass participation, thereby promoting the illusion that the existing regime can be reformed in a progressive direction.

Within the United States, Left Voice calls for opposition to Washington’s policies through appeals to union bureaucrats and activist networks dominated by the Democratic Party. These proposals are designed not to mobilize the working class independently but to subordinate it to the very institutions of the capitalist state responsible for imperialist aggression.

This mirrors the role played by revisionist tendencies in the 1960s, which hailed Fidel Castro’s movement as a model for socialist revolution and denounced the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) as “ultra-left” and “sectarian” for rejecting this characterization. The Socialist Workers Party, led by Joseph Hansen, promoted the Cuban revolution as the “acid test” for Trotskyism, arguing that a petty-bourgeois guerrilla movement had established a workers’ state.

In opposition, the Socialist Labour League, the British section of the ICFI, defended the fundamental principles of Marxism. It insisted that conscious revolutionary leadership by the working class is indispensable, that Cuba represented a negative confirmation of the Theory of Permanent Revolution and that Hansen’s empiricism amounted to an adaptation to bourgeois and non-proletarian forces.

Today, as the United States prepares for a new colonial war against Cuba, these lessons assume urgent relevance. It is not long before Trump speaks of turning Cuba into the 52nd state—having already proposed the annexation of Venezuela as the 51st. The implications of this war must be grasped in their full historical and political significance.

3. US blockade of Strait of Hormuz deepens conflicts between major powers

Washington’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has been in force since Monday in what marks a major escalation of the war against Iran. The attempt by US forces to halt all tanker traffic to and from Iranian ports aims to compel Tehran to accept sweeping concessions to American imperialism, while also cutting across the interests of China, which relies on cheap oil from Iran and the broader Gulf region for much of its energy imports.

US Vice President JD Vance made clear Tuesday that the US war of aggression is aimed at restructuring the Middle East. He declared at an event that President Donald Trump was not interested in “small deals” but was seeking a “grand bargain” with Iran, which would see the US treat Iran “economically like a normal country.” Trump and Vance want to roll back the clock to before 1979, when the Iranian Revolution ended US imperialism’s financial and military dominance over the country of 93 million people.

Trump’s statements since the beginning of the war demonstrate that American imperialism will resort to the most ruthless barbarism in order to secure its preeminence over the world’s most important energy-exporting region. He vowed to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages” and made the genocidal threat on 7 April that an “entire civilisation” could be wiped out. The US/Israeli bombardment of Iran was conducted with indiscriminate bloody-mindedness, as shown by the destruction of a girls’ school on the first day of the war, killing over 160 children. Independent investigations and on-the-ground reports following last week’s ceasefire revealed that even when the US claimed to be hitting military targets, the collateral damage to surrounding civilian infrastructure and residential buildings was extensive.

In an interview this week with Fox Business, the war criminal Trump menaced Iran with further war crimes if it refuses to bow to American imperialist dictates. Speaking like a mafia don, Trump said, “If I pulled up stakes right now, it would take them 20 years to rebuild that country. And we’re not finished...We could take out every one of their bridges in one hour...every one of their power plants.”

Trump speaks for American imperialism, which has never forgiven the Iranian people for the 1979 revolution that toppled the US-funded Shah’s repressive dictatorship. His concern is not with Iranian “terrorism,” let alone the democratic rights of the Iranian people. Rather, as David North put it when summing up the historical relationship between US imperialism and Iran in a recent lecture given at Berlin’s Humboldt University, it all boils down to “oil, geopolitical influence, and the class interests of American capitalism.” 

*****

Home to the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves and second-largest natural gas reserves, Iran exported between 80 and 90 percent of its oil to China. Beijing has benefited from cut-price Iranian oil over recent years due to the brutal sanctions imposed on the country by Trump during his first term in office, when he unilaterally abrogated the UN-backed nuclear accord with Tehran in 2018. In 2021, China signed a 25-year strategic partnership with Iran that included major investments in Iranian infrastructure in exchange for $400 billion worth of oil for the Chinese economy. Washington now hopes that what its sanctions could not accomplish can be achieved through brute military force, but the first six weeks of this war have demonstrated that even the world’s most powerful military cannot overcome the impact of American imperialism’s protracted decay.

Prior to the war, China was receiving some 1.4 million barrels of oil per day from Iran and over 5 million barrels per day from the Gulf region as a whole. Although the US blockade does not directly hinder exports from other Gulf states to China, the region’s output has been hit sharply by the war, threatening global economic disruption. China reportedly has oil reserves able to cover 5 months of demand, but long-term reductions in supply could seriously weaken its already fragile economy. Moreover, the prospect of a global economic recession, raised this week in a report by the IMF, would mean a decreasing market for Chinese exports, which the Stalinist regime in Beijing relies upon to maintain economic growth.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated during a visit to Beijing Wednesday that Moscow could offset any oil shortfalls for China resulting from the war in the Middle East. However, this assertion is more than dubious. Pipelines between Russia and China are reportedly already operating at full capacity, and Russia lacks the tankers needed to substantially increase its approximately 2 million barrels of oil per day reaching China. Russia would have to more than double its present exports to China to offset entirely Iranian oil exports and partially cover the decline from other Gulf nations. 

Faced with the aggressiveness and criminality of American imperialism unparalleled since the Nazi regime during World War II, Beijing has responded to the US blockade by holding out the prospect of a stable “multi-polar world” in which the interests of all states are respected. According to a Xinhua report, Xi told Lavrov that Beijing and Moscow should “strengthen multilateral cooperation, firmly uphold and practice multilateralism, join hands to revive the authority and vitality of the UN, engage in closer coordination and cooperation within the frameworks of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS countries, and promote the development of the international order in a more just and reasonable direction.”

This modern-day version of the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy’s policy of “peaceful coexistence” has even less of a basis in the realities of world capitalism today than it did during the 20th century, when it led to the Stalinists’ liquidation of the Soviet Union in a failed bid to integrate Russian capitalism into the imperialist world order. Under the would-be dictator Trump, American imperialism is fully committed to waging a third world war to defend its global hegemonic position amid its accelerating economic decline. Trump’s blood-curdling threats to wipe out Iranian civilization testify that American imperialism is not simply going to peacefully accept an expansion of Chinese and Russian influence under the banner of “multilateralism” at its expense.

4. Iran war brings massive price and profit gouging

As workers around the world are hit with the ever-worsening consequences of the US war on Iran—crippling rises in petrol and gas prices, food price hikes and the growing threat of food shortages in poorer countries—major corporations and banks are raking in increased profits to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

First in line to benefit from the profit bonanza, as could be expected, are the oil companies. But the flow of increased money extends across the board. 

*****

Apart from the oil producers, trading firms which deal in oil, food, metals and other necessary commodities, largely dominating global markets, are already cashing in. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Swiss commodities trader Gunvor said it had already made as much money in the first quarter of this year as it did in all of 2025 when it made a profit of $1.6 billion. Others will be experiencing a similar boost. 

Also not surprisingly, US arms manufacturers have been cashing in. On the first day of the US attack on Iran major firms recorded a rise in their total market value of up to $30 billion.

The profit and price gouging extends across the US economy under conditions where, according to a recent article in the New York Times, corporate profits “have reached a record share of the US economy.” Corporate America intends to keep it that way.

*****

Major US banks have also been cashing in on the opportunities generated by the war. The six major US banks reported collective profits of $47.6 billion for the first quarter, much of it generated because market volatility provided conditions for significantly profitable trading. 

*****

JPMorgan led the way in absolute terms with a 13 percent increase in profits, over the same period last year, to $16.5 billion, with market jitters being characterized as a “gift to trading desks.” Goldman Sachs reported a 19 percent increase in profits to $5.6 billion. Citigroup reported a 42 percent profit surge and Morgan Stanley’s profits rose 29 percent.

The combined increase in the profits from the trading desks of the major banks is estimated to be the highest in 12 years. 

*****

The banks have benefited from the relaxation of regulations under Trump. Bank of America chief financial officer Alastair Borthwick said the bank was “encouraged by the work the administration is doing,” as it bought back $7.2 billion of its own stock in the quarter, the highest level in four years. The Trump regime is moving to reduce the amount of capital the banks must hold as a reserve, freeing up money for trading and buybacks.

The overall sentiment on Wall Street is that the profit bonanza will continue, at least for now, with the S&P 500 passing the 7,000 mark for the first time on Wednesday. Inflation profiteering fueled by the war is one factor. Another is the wave of mass layoffs, hitting tens of thousands of workers in many cases, especially in the high-tech industries. 

*****

Giant corporations and banks are feeding on death, destruction and the impoverishment of the working class the world over. This makes it urgently necessary for workers and youth to draw the sharpest political conclusions.

The war on Iran itself is not the product of the individual Donald Trump, but is driven by the historic crisis of imperialism, of which he is the most grotesque personification.

Likewise, the obscenity expressed in the present day economic and financial system is not the product of the individual greed of the ruling oligarchs, though that exists in abundance. It is a product of the capitalist system itself, the objective logic of which, as Marx explained 150 years ago, is the creation of fabulous wealth at one pole of society and poverty, misery and degradation at the other.

Today the necessity for its overthrow and the establishment of socialism is not confined to the pages of Das Kapital but is being written large in the language of daily life.

5. US war on Iran exposes bankruptcy of Mélenchon's France Unbowed party

Since February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel have waged a war of aggression against Iran. Trump publicly threatened to exterminate Iranian civilization, in remarks of an undeniably Nazi character. Tens of thousands of Iranian civilians have been killed or wounded. The nuclear site at Natanz and the famous Golestan Palace have been struck. The war has set the entire Middle East ablaze and is shaking the world economy.

In the face of this, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his France Unbowed (LFI) party has not called on the millions of workers who vote for LFI to strike or protest against the war. They confined themselves to lamenting the violation of international law, while remaining silent on workers’ struggles in Iran and on Washington’s political maneuvers to manufacture a crisis there before it launched the war.

Mélenchon's inaction in the face of the war has the same roots as his silence on the intrigues Washington used to prepare it. It stems from the class character of LFI: a populist and anti-Marxist party, born out of the bourgeois Socialist Party (PS), whose founder explicitly rejects a policy oriented towards the working class and the socialist revolution. In L'Ère du peuple, published in 2014 as he founded LFI, Mélenchon declared that the entire left was dying: “The harm is well advanced. It will not be repaired with clever explanations to distinguish the true left from the false.” He called for burying the foundations of Marxism: “Here, it is the people that takes the place formerly occupied by the ‘revolutionary working class’ in the left’s project. The citizens’ revolution is not the old socialist revolution.”

These conceptions primed LFI to serve as a political instrument of French imperialism to block a mobilization of the working class against the war in Iran and the genocide in Gaza, and against the global social and economic crisis that flows from the catastrophes in the Middle East. 

*****

The full social power of the working class in France, Europe, the United States, and the Middle East must be mobilized to stop imperialist governments who are committing crimes of historic gravity. This is not an abstract political question.

In December 2025, before the demonstrations backed by Washington and Tel Aviv erupted, a wave of strikes swept through Iran, objectively indicating the possibility of such a mobilization. These strikes had deep causes. Years of US sanctions had ravaged the Iranian economy, causing persistent inflation and a continuous fall in workers’ living standards. The war waged by Israel and the United States against Iran in June 2025 had further aggravated this situation, disrupting oil exports and deepening the economic crisis.

Thousands of oil, gas, and electricity workers demonstrated on 10 December in Tehran outside parliament. Steelworkers struck in Shadegan on 8 December, and more than 5,000 workers at the key South Pars refineries had walked out on December 8-9. Workers at the Middle East Sugar company in Shush followed suit during the second half of December, as did railway workers in Lorestan, Zagros and Andimeshk.

Mélenchon and LFI, like the entire French media and political establishment, were silent on Iranian workers’ struggles. Instead, they latched onto a movement that began at the end of December with demonstrations by bazaar merchants, centered on the fall of the Iranian currency and the collapse of the Iran’s Ayandeh bank. It was not by accident that Mélenchon ignored the strikes while focusing on this second movement. A working-class, internationalist policy would have required supporting the strikes, explaining what was at stake, and calling on workers in France to support them and to mobilize against the policy of war, sanctions, and genocide being waged in Gaza, against Iran, and throughout the Middle East. Mélenchon does not practice this kind of politics.

The popular demonstrations in Iran testify to the dead end of a religious power trying to manage a developed society without gagging it. A people like ours always watches with sympathy the popular insubordination that asserts the right to a dignified life. However, in expressing its support, the Mossad seeks to inflame tensions among Iranians.

This declaration exemplifies Mélenchon’s political method. It mentions the Mossad’s intervention only to minimise its significance, relegating it to the role of an external factor that “inflames” Iranians, rather than explaining the way imperialism and Zionism intervened in this movement. In doing so, it suppresses the essential fact: Washington deliberately engineered the economic crisis that triggered these demonstrations and then tried to exploit it politically to achieve regime change.

Two weeks later, on January 13, the Wall Street Journal wrote: “The harbinger that everything was about to collapse in Iran did not come from the anger of the opposition in the country, or from the frustrated hopes of young people eager for personal freedoms. It came from the collapse of a bank. At the end of 2025, the Ayandeh bank, run by regime insiders and saddled with nearly $5 billion in losses, had gone bankrupt.”

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated publicly on 5 February, 2026, before the Senate Banking Committee: “What we did was create a dollar shortage in the country. That ended quickly and gloriously in December, when one of Iran's largest banks collapsed. The central bank had to print money, the Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded, and so we saw the Iranian people in the streets.”

Trump has since admitted to having attempted to arm the demonstrators by sending weapons via Kurdish nationalists in the region. This confirms that the fascist in the White House sought to transform protests into a pro-imperialist armed insurrection. His policy does not aim to defend the democratic rights of Iranians. 

From the very start of the movement, however, it was already clear that NATO and Israeli leaders were aggressively intervening to try to steer it. Mossad officials had publicly expressed their support for the demonstrations; former CIA director Mike Pompeo tweeted: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking alongside them.” These forces were monitoring and directing the movement from its outset, precisely because Washington had engineered the financial crisis that provoked it.

This information was available as Mélenchon was hailing the movement. His tweet of January 1 treated it straightforwardly as a popular affirmation of the right to dignity, without warning workers that Washington and Tel Aviv had deliberately triggered and were actively steering the movement.

*****

As the Iranian regime crushed armed attacks targeting its police and internal security forces, Mélenchon applauded the movement. In his post of January 14, headlined, “You are right to be afraid!”, he lumped together bazaar merchants ruined by the US Treasury and insurgents linked to the CIA and Mossad as actors in a “citizens’ revolution.” 

*****

It is revealing that Mélenchon described the December-January movement as a “citizens’ revolution” the central concept from his own 2014 book. The “citizens’ revolution,” by definition, transcends classes and unites “the people” against power. It does not ask which social classes or political forces organize and direct a movement. It need not ask who engineered the dollar shortage, who triggered the banking collapse or which Mossad agents marched among the demonstrators. Mélenchon deliberately suppressed these facts, which were nonetheless accessible, thereby depriving his readers of the information necessary to analyze the ongoing movement and to oppose the war that was being prepared.

The bankruptcy of this position becomes glaring in light of subsequent events. The genocidal forces carpet-bombing Iran and threatening to exterminate its civilization had instigated and supported from the very beginning the movement that Mélenchon presented as a quest for human dignity. To present this operation as a movement for dignity is to whitewash imperialism using pseudo-left language. 

*****

Mélenchon adopted an apparently critical posture after the start of the war on February 28, but in reality continued his previous policy. While observing on X that a war of aggression is the “negation of all international law,” he proposed to workers that they trust not the class struggle but Macron’s diplomacy in the face of the aggression against Iran: “Faced with the mounting danger, now more than ever law and the United Nations are France’s only means.” 

In his tweet, Mélenchon denounced Ayatollah Khamenei—the head of the Iranian regime, killed along with his family in an American-Israeli strike—as “the butcher of the Iranian people.” This formulation, at the very moment when the most powerful military state in the world was carpet-bombing Iran, deserves comment.

It is true that the Iranian regime had suppressed by force the movement instigated by Washington and sentenced opponents to death. But calling Khamenei “the butcher of the Iranian people” at the moment of his death in American-Israeli strikes is to cover for imperialism. The biggest butcher of the Iranian people resides in the White House: it was he who threatened to exterminate Iranian civilization, bombed civilian sites, and organized the economic collapse that led up to the war. He has for this purpose the active complicity of the French state, which placed its Istres base and its Persian Gulf bases at Washington’s disposal.

Mélenchon’s statements do not mention these facts. They do not mention the tens of thousands of civilians killed, nor the families of regime officials who bear no direct responsibility for the regime but are nonetheless struck by bombs. The asymmetry between Mélenchon’s severity toward the Iranian regime and his silence on Washington’s crimes and French complicity amounts to pro-imperialist hypocrisy. 

*****

LFI’s response to the war against Iran vindicates the irreconcilable opposition of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to the pseudo-left tendencies oriented to the political establishment. Mélenchon uses his influence not to organize the working class’s resistance to imperialist war and the continuous reduction of its living standards under Macron, but to subordinate it to the framework of the capitalist nation-state.

Mélenchon was a member of the Organisation communiste internationaliste (OCI), Pierre Lambert’s party, which broke with the ICFI in 1971 to support Mitterrand’s bourgeois PS. His trajectory—from the OCI to the PS for more than 30 years and finally to LFI—produced not a revolutionary workers movement, but a faction of the capitalist establishment that drapes itself in radical language in order to contain mass opposition.

The war against Iran provides the most recent and damning demonstration of this. Only the intervention of workers into the historical process can stop this war. The task is to prepare the mobilization of the working class: to build the rank-and-file organizations capable of opposing the war, to unify workers’ struggles internationally, and to prepare workers to wrest power from the war-making capitalist oligarchies.

*****

The Parti de l'égalité socialiste (Socialist Equality Party), the French section of the ICFI, puts forward the following demands, on the basis of which it calls on workers, youth, and progressive layers among intellectuals to give it their support:

— Stop the war against Iran and the genocide in Gaza!

— French troops out of the Middle East!

— Not a euro, not a soldier for the wars of imperialism!

— For an international movement of the working class against war and for socialism!  

6. Research demonstrates that enhanced instruction in genetics can reduce racist conceptions among students

It is well-established science that the concept of race is a social construct not a biological reality. Genetic variation within “racial” groups is greater than between them, thus refuting claims there is any scientific basis for claims that there are fundamental racial differences. Yet racism, in various forms, persists in the modern age under capitalism, as a weapon employed by the ruling class to divide and oppress the working class. What role does inadequate education in genetics play in perpetuating the concept of racial difference, and the superiority of one “race” over another, in the face of scientific knowledge to the contrary?

*****

Genetic essentialism is a form of psychological essentialism, which is an early-developing bias in humans. Psychological essentialism is observable across human cultures and refers to the belief that members of a social category share an unobservable and internal essence that determines their traits. People who endorse genetic essentialism believe that such essences are genetic, which leads them to believe that same-race individuals are genetically homogeneous, that races are nonoverlapping genetic groups, and that most racial differences are therefore determined by genes.

Essentialist beliefs are socially dangerous and a biological misconception. For example, genetic essentialist beliefs about race facilitate intergroup hostility, support for eugenic policies, discrimination and disinterest in cross-racial friendships.

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“The problem is that the basic genetics education that the US public receives is a risk factor for the development of genetic essentialism during adolescence,” he writes. “Because basic genetics education does not discuss patterns of racial similarity in the human genome, and because it does not discuss the multifactorial basis of complex human traits, students are never exposed to information that explicitly counters genetic essentialist views about race.” 

*****

To test the hypothesis that teaching a more complex view of genetics and inheritance could effect a reduction in genetic essentialism and, by consequence, racism, Donovan and his associates designed and carried out a series of scientifically controlled experiments with middle and high school students and teachers from six US states. “Participating teachers received 40 hours of professional development to learn how to implement the humane genomics intervention and how to align their Mendelian and molecular genetics curricula with basic genetics.”

To randomize the effects of teaching basic genetics versus humane genomics, half of each class was taught the two modules in that order (basic genetics first followed by genomics) and the other half in reverse order. The researchers took care to avoid any biasing factors which might imply a preferred result, such as implications that genetic essentialist beliefs are socially unacceptable. 

At each stage of the program—before the start of instruction, after the first module, and at the end— students were tested to gauge their understanding of the subject. They were measured with regard to a number of parameters: 

“… (a) basic genetics knowledge, (b) knowledge of genomics, (c) belief in the genetic discreteness of racial groups, (d) genetic attributions for complex human traits, (e) environmental attributions for complex human traits, (f ) belief in racial genetic essentialism, (g) belief in social constructionism, (h) colorblind racial beliefs, and (i) emotional response to instruction.” 

The results were clear.:

The results of the first model fully supported each component of the humane genomics hypothesis. Relative to basic genetics, classrooms that received humane genomics instruction had greater knowledge of genomics and less belief in genetic essentialism. Humane genomics classrooms also had less belief in racial discreteness and lower genetic attributions for complex human traits. Furthermore, humane genomics classrooms had greater environmental attributions. All effects were reproduced in the second half of the crossover trial. 

In the subsequent analysis, the resulting data “was explored [regarding] whether students gravitated toward racial colorblindness or social constructionism.” These are two alternative concepts of race. “People who believe in the former [racial colorblindness] contend that racial discrimination is no longer a problem or that it can be ignored because race is not socially important, or real. By contrast, constructionism contends that race is a social concept and that racial disparities are caused by prejudice, discrimination, and institutional racism.” According to the authors, colorblindness tends to be associated with genetic essentialism. 

The study found that “[w]hereas there was no effect of genetics instruction on racial colorblindness, there was a positive effect of humane genomics instruction on belief in social constructionism after the first and second rounds of instruction.” 

Based on this result, the researchers “… contend that the ideal instructional sequence to reduce genetic essentialism is to introduce students to the models of Mendelian genetics and then move beyond these models and highlight their limitations using a humane genomics curriculum.” Furthermore, they recommend that “[c]oherent learning experiences that are implemented repeatedly can create enduring changes in how people view the world. Several humane genomics learning experiences spread over many years of biology instruction will be needed to reduce the prevalence of genetic essentialist beliefs.” 

This study is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the role of education design in developing a correct, scientific view of how racist conceptions are, if inadvertently, reinforced by an insufficient course of study in genetics. Furthermore, it demonstrates that racist attitudes are learned and are not in any way innate. However, it does not, and did not attempt to address the underlying social, economic and political factors that promote racism, which is a tool of class oppression used to divide and subjugate the working class under capitalism. 

Racism and other forms of discrimination, such as those based on religion or sex, did not begin with capitalism. They are inherent in class society as tools employed by the elite to divide and subjugate the oppressed classes. Education alone cannot overcome the ill effects which are products of the objective economic interests of the ruling class in defending its social position. It is precisely those interests that are driving the Trump administration’s assault on science and historical truth. Discrimination of all kinds can be definitively eradicated only with the elimination of class society.  

It is in fact because of this study’s value that the lead author, Brian Donovan, is one of the many scientists targeted by the Trump administration and his scientific career destroyed. The study was initially supported by a grant to Donovan from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Based on this study, Donovan was awarded this year’s Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education by the Genetics Society of America, recognizing someone who has helped the public better understand the science of DNA. The article in STAT cited above chronicles the long struggle by Donovan to build his research team and carry out the investigation. 

Despite the high praise the study received, last April, both of Donovan’s National Science Foundation grants were terminated, part of a mass cancellation of science education awards. The NSF’s justification was that the grants “no longer effectuate administration priorities.” Donovan and his team at the University of Colorado were left without jobs. They were not alone. The Trump administration massively slashed grants for science education, accounting for 40 percent of the agency’s terminations and 65 percent of funding cuts. In spite of his groundbreaking research and the high regard with which he is held by many in the field, his quest for an academic position has also been fruitless. He is now studying to become a nurse. 

Both Democrats and Republicans are carrying out major assaults on education and science as part of their drive to increase the wealth of the super-rich oligarchy and to prepare for world war. 

7. Thailand’s right-wing government formally takes power

Thailand’s new government was formally sworn in on April 6, two months after the February 8 general election. The Bhumjaithai Party (BJT) secured a parliamentary majority through a coalition with Pheu Thai (PT) and a number of small conservative and military-aligned parties.

The coalition government led by Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, who is one of Thailand’s wealthiest politicians, is no more stable than its predecessors. Years of court rulings, Senate interventions, backroom deals, and military influence have eroded even the semblance of a democratic façade that took shape after the formal end of the most recent military junta in 2019. 

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The new cabinet, in which the BJT holds 31 positions and Pheu Thai holds nine, is unmistakably pro-business and pro-military. It includes Lieutenant General Adul Boonthumjaroen as defense minister and Police Lieutenant General Rutthapol Naowarat as the justice minister. The economic ministries have been handed to an assortment of trusted corporate and bureaucratic figures.

The new government faces the worst economic conditions since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997. Global shocks from the US/Israeli war on Iran portend a significant economic contraction with declining investment and tourism, rising inflation and the destruction of jobs.

With total trade equivalent to more than its annual GDP, Thailand is one of the most vulnerable in the region to the ongoing energy crisis, with the World Bank predicting the country’s economy will grow by only 1.3 percent this year as a result.

The Strait of Hormuz is a vital source of resources for Thailand including oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and fertilizer. Diesel has risen from 23 to 52 Thai baht per litre, the Asian spot LNG price has risen from 350-420 baht per MMBtu to about 680 baht, and urea, the main fertilizer used, has risen from 17,500 baht to just under 24,500 baht a tonne.

The government has no solution but to foist the new economic burdens on working people. Household debt, already among the highest in Asia relative to GDP with 86.7 percent, leaves millions highly vulnerable. 

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Political tensions and border clashes last year were seized upon by the Thai conservative elites to force out the previous Pheu Thai government and to brand social opposition as “unpatriotic.” Anutin was only able to form a minority government with the support of the People’s Party, which claimed to offer a democratic alternative to the country’s conservative establishment dominated by the military and monarchy.

The appointment of Adul as defense minister is significant. He previously served as deputy defense minister in Anutin’s first cabinet. His military career was spent in the lower Isan border area with Cambodia, where he was made commander of the 2nd Army Area in 2023. Adul retired from the army in 2024 and retains close connections to the military top brass.

In his policy statement, Anutin pledged to increase the number of volunteer soldiers by 100,000 and to cancel or suspend the 2001 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) 44 with Cambodia—an agreement tied to negotiations over the shared maritime boundary. The MOU and similar agreements ostensibly established guidelines for resolving the border dispute between the two countries stemming from France’s colonization of Indochina over a century ago. 

Last year during the conflict that began in May, more than 640,000 people were displaced near the land border between Thailand and Cambodia, with military clashes resulting in over a hundred soldiers and civilians killed.

Pheu Thai, which has long postured as a party of reform, is completely discredited. Over the past two decades, it has twice been ousted by military coups. In 2010, sustained mass protests Pheu Thai’s “Red Shirt” were violently suppressed by the military which gunned down protesters in the streets, killing nearly 100.

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Last August, a second Pheu Thai prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, was removed from office by the Constitutional Court over “ethical violations” based on the claim that she had criticized the military’s handling of the border dispute with Cambodia. Now under conditions of economic crisis, Pheu Thai functions as a junior partner to the right wing BJT in the name of the “national interest.”

Pheu Thai has been appointed the key ministries of agriculture, education and labor. In other words, it has been charged with suppressing unrest among farmers, students and the working class, under conditions of spiralling costs of living, mounting debt, and deepening social inequality.

All of the capitalist parties, including Pheu Thai and the People’s Party, have proven utterly incapable of meeting the democratic aspirations and pressing social needs of the masses of ordinary working people. The right-wing Anutin government will not hesitate to resort to police state measures in an attempt repress any social opposition. 

8. After 2 votes in favor, UAW bureaucracy denies strike approval to student workers at Columbia University

On Tuesday, the Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers (SWC-UAW), which covers over 3,000 student workers at Columbia University in New York City, announced that the UAW leadership rejected its request for strike approval.

The SWC membership had voted by 91.5 percent to authorize a strike last month, 1,129 to 105. They voted 82.2 percent in favor of starting the strike on April 23. Over a hundred members wrote letters urging Region 9A Director Brandon Mancilla and UAW President Shawn Fain to authorize their strike.

In an email to the membership, the SWC wrote, “This does not mean we cannot strike this semester, but it does mean that we would not get strike pay from the UAW should we go on strike to win some or all of our demands.”

The UAW bureaucracy has twice now rejected their democratic vote. Student workers must organize to impose their decision, with or without the approval of corrupt and unaccountable bureaucrats! Columbia student workers should form independent rank-and-file strike committees to prepare a struggle themselves and to demand full strike pay, which is paid out of their own dues money.

Columbia student workers should appeal to the working class throughout New York City and beyond for support and solidarity. Graduate workers at Harvard University, also organized in the UAW, have already set a strike deadline of April 21.

Will Lehman

Will Lehman, a rank-and-file autoworker and candidate for UAW president, responded to the UAW’s decision by declaring: “Your fight against intolerable learning, living and working conditions at Columbia University, which the Trump administration has made a central target of its efforts to establish a presidential dictatorship in the United States, will resonate powerfully with workers across the globe. Power must be seized from the bureaucracy and placed in the hands of the rank and file so that we can fight for a politically conscious movement of workers together.” 

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Student workers should reject with contempt the argument that their demands are “too political.” The prospect of a political strike terrifies management at Columbia, because it would pose a serious challenge to the status quo: The Trump-Columbia partnership, Columbia’s collaboration with US imperialism, and the staggering disparity between the multi-billion-dollar assets of the university and the paltry wages and benefits it gives student workers in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

As the World Socialist Web Site wrote: “The union bureaucracy, bound by a thousand threads to the political establishment, primarily through the Democrats, functions as the corporate oligarchy’s industrial police force… The more powerful the potential for a mass movement, the more openly and shamelessly the union bureaucracy attempts to disrupt it.”

In Michigan, UAW leadership has kept 1,300 Nexteer Automotive workers on the job for nearly two weeks after workers rejected a sellout contract by 96.2 percent. When workers asked why a strike had not been called, UAW officials said it was “illegal” to walk out under the terms of the contract.

At the University of California, UAW leadership kept 40,000 academic workers on the job for nearly three weeks without a contract after 93.3 percent of workers voted to strike. It refused to set a strike date and ultimately rammed through a contract without a fight.

At Columbia, the UAW bureaucracy committed student workers to a no-strike clause in their first contract. Student workers at Columbia have now been working without a contract since June 30, 2025.

It is high time to revive the old union slogan, “No contract, no work!” But this cannot happen without confronting the union bureaucracy, a parasitic layer full of figures like Mancilla and Fain who siphon six-figure salaries off workers’ dues while doing everything in their power to demobilize the fighting strength of the working class. 

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In a recent article in the Columbia Daily Spectator, SWC president Grant Miner remarked nervously about “undue scrutiny from parties which are not a part of our community and not a part of our bargaining… people from outside of the University who don’t have, frankly, the best interest of either the union or the University at heart.”

The UAW’s denunciation of unstated “outside parties,” long used as part of a red-baiting strategy to cut workers off from socialist militants, reflects the extreme nervousness about their ability to keep a lid on the situation and enforce the UAW’s no-strike dictate.

Fain and the rest of the UAW apparatus fear that the Trump Administration could use a strike as the impetus to reverse a 2016 National Labor Relations Board ruling that gave governmental sanction to student workers unions, thereby jeopardizing their dues base. They are also fearful that a movement of student workers, opposing not only poverty-level wages but also the fascistic assault on immigrants and genocidal wars, can serve as a nucleus for a broader offensive of the working class far beyond what the union bureaucracy can control.

In New York City, 34,000 building workers are poised to strike next week. Next month, the contract expires for 40,000 transit workers, raising the prospects for a strike that could cripple the city.

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The working class is the only social force with the potential to bring down the Trump administration, stop the war against Iran, and end social inequality, but it cannot do so without breaking free of the shackles imposed by the union bureaucracy and building independent organizations controlled directly by the rank and file. Columbia student workers: Do not let the UAW bureaucracy sabotage your struggle. Seize the initiative, build rank-and-file committees and get involved with the International Youth and Students for Social Equality today.

9. Reject the Writers Guild of America sellout contract!

The World Socialist Web Site urges members of the Writers Guild of America to reject the tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers by the widest possible margin in voting from April 16 to April 24. This is not a “contract” but a slave charter, surrendering key positions without even the pretense of a fight.

The contract contains huge givebacks on healthcare, accepts sub-inflation pay increases and has no meaningful AI protections. The union did not even seek a strike authorization vote before springing the contract a full month before the expiration of the old one. It is dealing far more ruthlessly with the strike of its own staffers than with management: cutting off healthcare and taking punitive measures against them.

Not only the current struggle, but future ones are at stake. The four-year deal moves WGA workers off the schedule of SAG-AFTRA, who are also currently in contact talks. This splits the industry and allows management to divide and conquer.

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A growing “Vote No” movement has formed among rank-and-file writers. They reject claims that there is no alternative, considering unprecedented levels of wealth.

But this opposition must be organized. Writers and other workers in the entertainment industry must be organized, with a particular appeal to SAG-AFTRA members, and support must be built across the entire working population. Rank-and-file committees must be organized to build a movement from below, freeing writers from the straitjacket of the WGA bureaucracy and taking the initiative to build a broader movement. 

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The Writers Guild leadership presents the four-year deal as necessary to stabilize a health plan it says is close to insolvency. The deal would add $321 million to the plan, but $41 million of this is obtained by cutting benefits and shifting money from other union funds, including parental leave.

For decades, the “Guild Shop” model provided a basic level of security in a highly unstable freelance industry, with employer-funded benefits helping offset irregular work. The new agreement breaks with this model. Writers who previously had fully covered healthcare will now face higher premiums, deductibles and out-of-pocket costs.

For a family of four, these changes mean thousands of dollars in new annual expenses. This is effectively a cut in real income, especially for lower-paid writers already struggling with high living costs in cities like Los Angeles and New York. 

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Under the deal, writers receive a 1.5 percent raise in the first year, followed by 3 percent annual increases, provocative numbers that fail to keep pace with inflation.

The 2026 agreement does not stop the use of AI to slash jobs. It allows studios to use writers’ work for training through union-approved deals, without giving individual writers the right to refuse. AI can still be used in early stages such as outlines and concepts, letting studios reduce the role of writers and lower pay.

Loopholes around “source material” remain: The 2026 deal allows studios to work around it indirectly, especially through early-stage AI use and ownership control. Disclosure rules are weak, making it difficult to verify how AI is used. At the same time, any financial gains from licensing may not go directly to writers. In practice, the deal regulates AI use while leaving the main threats to jobs, pay and creative control intact.

The agreement does include limited improvements, such as minimum standards for “page-one” rewrites and expanded eligibility for guaranteed second steps. But enforcement is weak, and the long-standing practice of unpaid “shadow rewrites” remains largely untouched. 

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These tensions are unfolding alongside major industry consolidation. The proposed merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery creates a media giant with unprecedented control over film and television production. This reduces the number of buyers for scripts, weakens writers’ bargaining power and allows studios to impose lower rates and stricter terms.

Streaming platforms further reinforce this shift. Viewership data is tightly controlled, reducing transparency and weakening residual payments. At the same time, short-term contracts, “mini-rooms” and other forms of contingent work are becoming more common, deepening the “gig-ification” of writing work. 

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The defense of democratic and social rights is bound up with the defense of culture. Corporate America is carrying out a massive vandalism operation, laying off tens of thousands of cultural workers and millions across all industries. AI is being used not only to eliminate writers and actors, but to undermine genuine independent artistic expression.

In its place, the corporations hope to have made-to-order, homogeneous, machine-produced content aimed at the highest possible margins and the lowest common denominator. A related goal is to deaden the public’s senses, as a way to deal with a growing mass movement as it develops against dictatorship and inequality. Media consolidation is cementing a framework where a handful of huge corporations, integrated with the state, are working to censor critical voices.

The union bureaucracy everywhere is doing its best to disrupt this movement in order to avoid disrupting its connections with management and the political establishment. This latest sellout follows the cancellation of the strike in Los Angeles of 70,000 teachers and school workers, as well as the struggles of New York City nurses, Kaiser Permanente nurses, San Francisco educators and others. 

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The fight against this agreement is inseparable from the broader struggle of the working class against austerity, censorship and authoritarianism. Writers are not alone! Teachers, nurses, logistics workers and others are confronting the same attacks and the same apparatus of suppression. A unified movement, built from below and across industries, can break this stranglehold and open the way for a genuine defense of jobs, living standards and artistic freedom. 

10. German government prepares frontal attack on healthcare

The German government is planning the most comprehensive attack on public healthcare since Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck introduced statutory health insurance in 1883.

In this, Bismarck was reacting to the growth of the officially banned Social Democratic Party (SPD), which under August Bebel advocated a Marxist program. By protecting workers in the event of illness, and later also with pensions, Bismarck sought to weaken the influence of the SPD and prevent a revolutionary development.

After the November Revolution of 1918, and again after the Second World War, Germany’s statutory health insurance system was further expanded. Through income-based contributions and the free co-insurance of family members, low-income wage earners could also access relatively good healthcare, even if it never reached the level of care of the wealthy privately insured.

This is now over. The squandering of hundreds of billions of euros on war and rearmament and the boundless enrichment of billionaires and multimillionaires can no longer be reconciled with equitable social compensation. The defense of health, pensions and other social rights requires nothing less than a social revolution. 

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Central is the attack on free family co-insurance. For the time being, it is only to be abolished for spouses who have no children under 7 years of age and no relatives in need of care. In the future, a contribution of 3.5 percent of the family income is to be levied. Children, pensioners, caring relatives and parents of children under age 7 will remain co-insured for the time being. But once the ice is broken, the cuts will continue.

A further focus is directed against the chronically ill and the elderly, who regularly rely on medication. For them, the 50 percent increase in co-payments means a considerable financial burden. Instead of €5 to €10, they will in future have to pay €7.50 to €15 for each individual medication. Many will not be able to afford this, will fall ill more often and die earlier.

Another austerity measure, the effects of which can only be guessed at so far, is the capping of hospital expenditure. From now on, expenditure on nursing staff is not to grow faster than the income of the health insurance scheme, and the refinancing of contractually agreed pay increases is to be curtailed. This will further exacerbate the catastrophic situation in hospitals and the miserable working conditions of nursing staff, which were already unbearable during the COVID pandemic. 

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Other austerity measures also show the inhumane brutality with which the government is acting. For example, the free skin cancer screening previously available every two years is to be abandoned. This does not save the health insurance any money, since cancer treatment is much more expensive than the relatively simple screening. But many cancer patients will die earlier and thus relieve the pension and social security funds—which is likely the actual purpose of the austerity measure.

No one should underestimate the aggressiveness with which the government is proceeding against social achievements and democratic rights in order to realize its rearmament and war plans. It unconditionally defends the Israeli war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, Iran and Lebanon and acts against anyone in Germany who criticizes them. It supports the goals of Trump’s war against Iran, even though the US president has threatened to bomb the country with its 90 million inhabitants “back to the Stone Ages.”

A government that endorses such war crimes is also capable of any atrocity against its own population. 

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The resistance against the government’s social devastation can only come from those affected themselves. It requires the independent mobilization of the international working class based on a socialist program directed against war, social cuts and capitalism.

11. Australia’s National Defence Strategy outlines military build-up for war against China

Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS), released yesterday, is a statement of the Labor government’s complete commitment to US-led wars globally, and above all to Washington’s advanced preparations for a catastrophic war against China.

The NDS has been accompanied by a commitment to increase military spending by $53 billion over the coming decade, on top of record defense expenditure of almost $60 billion this financial year.

As significant as the size of the outlay is the focus of the NDS and an associated “Integrated Investment Program” on the acquisition of missiles, drones and other weaponry of a plainly offensive character. That is in line with Labor’s 2023 Defence Strategic Review, which called for every branch of the military to be overhauled, with the aim of “impactful projection” and strike capacity, above all in the Indo-Pacific. 

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The entire build-up is occurring as part of a deepening of the US-Australia alliance. That includes the establishment of a vast naval precinct in Perth, Western Australia, which will function as one of the main US maritime bases adjacent to the strategically critical Indian Ocean, and the transformation of the north of the continent into a launching pad for aerial operations far into the Indo-Pacific, including by US B-52 bombers, which can carry nuclear weapons. 

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

Bogdan Syrotiuk in 2015

"Peace for the world! Down with war!"