The cause for which the Haymarket martyrs gave their lives was
embraced by the working class all over the world. Three years later, in
1889, the founding congress of the Second International, meeting in
Paris, resolved that May 1 would be the day on which workers of all
countries would simultaneously demonstrate for the eight-hour day. From
that day forward, May 1 has belonged to the international working class.
The
eight-hour day was the central demand of those first May Days. Today,
May Day is a fight for the survival of human civilization itself.
Indeed, such is the state of exploitation that even the most elementary
conquest of the workers’ movement, the eight-hour day, has been
abandoned by the trade union apparatus. While AFL-CIO functionaries
organize “May Day Strong” events with the Democratic Party, workers in
the warehouses, hospitals, schools and factories endure 10-, 12- and
14-hour shifts.
The celebration of May Day came to be embedded in the fight for the
unity of the international working class against capitalism, inequality
and exploitation—a day dedicated to advancing the struggle for workers’
power. Leon Trotsky wrote in 1918 that the original purpose of May Day
had been “by means of a simultaneous demonstration by workers of all
countries on that day, to prepare the ground for drawing them together
into a single international proletarian organization of revolutionary
action having one world center and one world political orientation.”
That
task—the construction of an international revolutionary leadership of
the working class—remains the unfinished historical work of our epoch.
It is the work of the International Committee of the Fourth
International.
*****
Speakers will include leading representatives of the ICFI and its
supporting organizations from the United States, Britain, France,
Germany, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Brazil and Russia;
along with representatives of the International Youth and Students for
Social Equality and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees.
The rally will feature statements collected from
workers and young people on every continent—postal workers, autoworkers,
teachers, dockworkers, students—who are entering into struggle and
looking for a way forward.
*****
Register now at wsws.org/mayday.
The rally begins at 3:00 p.m. US Eastern Time. Gather your coworkers,
your classmates, your families, your friends. Today, May 1, 2026, take
your place in the international socialist movement.
Dr. [Abeer] Omar, who has over 25 years of experience as a nursing educator and
researcher, has faced down persecution of her principled defense of the
human rights of Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians under imperialist
attack. That she should have had to do so comes as no surprise: Canada’s
Liberal government has backed the genocide in Gaza and the US/Israel
war on Iran to the hilt. In June 2025, she joined hundreds of academics
and civil society groups in signing an open letter to Prime Minister
Mark Carney that denounced Canada for its complicity in the Gaza
genocide and demanded Carney take action to stop any “aid and
assistance” to Israeli war crimes. Predictably, this letter fell on deaf
ears.
*****
In a video statement... in support of the International May Day Online Rally
to be held Friday, May 1, Dr. Omar denounces the systematic slaughter of healthcare workers
by Israel in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, and the US and Israel’s
targeting of civilians in their war of extermination against Iran.
Minutes after US Secret Service agents took Donald Trump from the
stage at the White House Correspondents Dinner Saturday and detained an
alleged attacker after a shooting incident, Venezuela’s interim
president Delcy Rodríguez became one of the first world leaders to
publicly condemn the attack.
In a post on X, she declared: “We
reject the attempt of aggression against President Trump and his wife,
Melania, to whom we extend our good wishes, as well as to the attendees
of the Correspondents’ Dinner. Violence will never be an option for
those of us who defend the banners of peace.”
This statement was
one of the most grotesque from any leader. Associating Trump with
“peace,” Rodriguez whitewashes the ongoing avalanche of war crimes
unleashed by Washington across the globe and directly against Venezuela
itself.
The World Socialist Web Site opposes the kind of
attack alleged at the Washington Hilton on a principled basis. Political
violence carried out by individuals serves only to strengthen the
forces of reaction. But this opposition does not require—or
permit—portraying Trump, or US imperialism more broadly, as a victim
divorced from its own systemic violence.
Indeed, as in previous
assassination attempts, Trump is already exploiting the incident to
criminalize opposition and escalate his authoritarian drive. His efforts
to overturn democratic processes in the United States are inseparable
from a broader imperialist campaign aimed at recolonizing Latin America.
Rodríguez’s statement, along with a similar one from Mexico’s “leftist”
president Claudia Sheinbaum, objectively lends support to these
efforts, providing political cover for Washington’s aggression.
*****
The January operation was not a one-off attack. US military activity
in the region has intensified dramatically. Bombing campaigns have
expanded into Latin American waters and border regions. A joint
US-Ecuadorian operation dubbed “Total Extermination” targeted rural
areas, bombing rural homes and detaining agricultural workers.
Simultaneously,
the Pentagon has escalated maritime strikes, particularly in the
Caribbean and eastern Pacific. More attack aircraft and MQ-9 Reaper
drones have been sent to bases in El Salvador and Puerto Rico to carry
out more air strikes on fishing boats, killing at least 186 people under
the pretext of combating drug trafficking since September.
Meanwhile,
Washington is openly threatening further regime change operations,
including against Cuba. Trump has declared that “Cuba is next” after
Iran.
US naval exercises have begun near Cuba, codenamed Flex2026,
integrating artificial intelligence, unmanned systems, and traditional
forces to enhance surveillance and control. Reconnaissance drones like
the MQ-4C Triton and electronic aircraft such as the RC-135 patrol Cuban
airspace and maritime routes, tightening the noose around the island.
Within
Venezuela, Rodríguez’s statement has drawn criticism even from Chavista
circles, with some pointing out that it ignores the long campaign of US
sanctions that has caused over 100,000 excess deaths and forced over 8
million to flee the country.
Some commentators, however, argue
that the government is merely “buying time,” hoping for better
conditions—higher oil prices, geopolitical shifts, or a popular
upsurge—to reassert sovereignty and defend social programs. But such
illusions have already been exposed.
*****
This trajectory is not a betrayal of Chavismo’s principles—it is
their logical outcome. The so-called Bolivarian Revolution, proclaimed
after the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez, represented sections of the
national bourgeoisie seeking better terms within the global capitalist
system. During periods of high commodity prices and closer ties to
China, Russia and other economic powers, it used limited social programs
to contain the class struggle and negotiate a greater share of the
profits for the local ruling class.
But as conditions
changed—particularly with the slowing growth of the Chinese economy, the
weight of US sanctions and military threats—these same forces have
capitulated, prioritizing their own privileges and class rule over the
working class.
*****
The events in Venezuela confirm a fundamental lesson: the national
bourgeoisie in oppressed countries is incapable of carrying out
democratic tasks, including genuine independence from imperialism.
This
reality vindicates the Theory of Permanent Revolution advanced by Leon
Trotsky. Only the working class, leading a socialist transformation of
society, can break the chains of imperialist domination. This requires
not only the overthrow of capitalist states domestically, but an
international movement aimed at restructuring the global economy to
serve human need, not private profit.
Rodríguez’s statement is not
merely hypocritical—it is symptomatic of a deeper crisis. It reflects a
political movement that has abandoned any pretense of resistance to
imperialism and now seeks accommodation with the very forces responsible
for the immense suffering of the people it claimed to represent.
In a blatant act of censorship in late March, Sri Lankan Customs
authorities have seized books by Tamil writer Pradeepan Deepachelvan,
who teaches Advanced Level students at Murugaananda College in
Killinochchi in the war-ravaged northern province of the country. The
targeted works included three novels titled Naduhal (Memorial Stone), Bayangaravadi (The Terrorist) and Cyanide, along with a collection of essays and a volume of interviews.
Customs seized 360 copies of the five books, which were shipped from
Chennai, India and arrived in Colombo, underscoring the state’s direct
intervention to block the circulation of literature dealing with the
social and political experiences produced by Sri Lanka’s decades-long
communal war.
Customs authorities claimed without providing a
shred of evidence that the books posed a threat to “national security”
and “national harmony.” Unable to substantiate the accusation, Customs
officials reportedly referred the matter to a “special committee”
attached to the Ministry of Buddha Sasana, Religious and Cultural
Affairs, as well as to military authorities, before making any final
decision.
Such high-handed, politically charged allegations would
not be levelled by Customs officials without being prompted by the
ruling Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP)
government, which is steeped in anti-Tamil chauvinism.
Deepachelvan told the World Socialist Web Site
that officials informed his representatives in Jaffna that the books
were being held for review. Following criticism of the government’s
actions by several civil rights groups, including the Free Media
Movement, Customs has agreed to release three of the books.
The
two remaining works continue to be withheld on the grounds that they
could allegedly damage “coexistence among communities,” a claim that
remains entirely unsubstantiated.
These actions by the government
and its authorities constitute a direct and blatant attack on freedom of
expression, carried out under the fraudulent banner of protecting
“national harmony.”
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the World Socialist Web Site
condemn this act of censorship and demand the immediate and
unconditional release of all of Pradeepan’s books. Writers and artists
must have the democratic right to present their views without state
interference or intimidation.
Deepachelvan, a Tamil writer with seven poetry collections, has
consistently addressed themes stemming from Sri Lanka’s three-decade
civil war. His works have been translated into Sinhala, Malayalam,
Hindi, French and Norwegian, reflecting a broad readership that crosses
the communal divide in Sri Lanka and extends internationally.
*****
The anti-democratic action against Deepachelvan takes place amid a
deepening economic crisis and rising social anger. The Dissanayake
government is implementing the austerity dictates of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), imposing severe attacks on workers and the poor
through tax increases, spending cuts and privatisation.
Since
independence in 1948, successive Sri Lankan governments have
systematically cultivated anti-Tamil chauvinism to divert mounting
social tensions and defend capitalist rule. This policy culminated in a
protracted communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed
during the final months of military operations, and thousands more were
forcibly disappeared. The JVP, mired in Sinhala chauvinism from its
inception, was an ardent supporter of the communal war.
The Human
Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, a toothless, government-appointed body,
has criticised the seizure of Deepachelvan’s books as a violation of
freedom of expression. The Free Media Movement, condemning the seizure,
has also questioned the authority of Customs officials to determine
whether literature constitutes a threat to “national security.”
*****
Such attacks on freedom of expression are not unique to Sri Lanka.
Across South Asia, governments increasingly invoke “national security,”
“religious harmony” and “public order” as pretexts to suppress dissent.
In India, the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party government has
encouraged censorship and attacks on intellectuals accused of offending
religious sentiments. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, journalists and
writers face arrest and intimidation under allegations of spreading
“anti-state propaganda.”
These developments are inseparable from
the deepening global crisis of capitalism and the intensification of
imperialist rivalries. Governments around the world are strengthening
authoritarian forms of rule as they prepare for social upheavals driven
by war, inequality and economic breakdown.
*****
The Socialist Equality Party insists that Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim
workers must reject all forms of communal politics and defend the
democratic rights of writers, artists and intellectuals.
The
immediate release of Deepachelvan’s books must become part of a broader
struggle against state repression, austerity and the capitalist system
itself, which breeds dictatorship, war and communal division.
The observance of Workers Memorial Day 2026 took place amid an
escalating assault on workplace safety in the United States of
breathtaking scope. Trump has vastly accelerated the dismantling of
already inadequate safety regulations and enforcement mechanisms.
According
to “Death on the Job,” the annual report issued by the AFL-CIO in
conjunction with Workers Memorial Day, based on 2024 figures, an
estimated 380 workers die each day from illness and traumatic injury.
The
report notes that over the past year, job fatality rates increased in
several sectors, including leisure and hospitality (from 2.3 to 2.4
deaths per 100,000 workers) and government (from 1.8 to 2.0).
Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting remain the most dangerous
industries (20.9 per 100,000), followed by mining, quarrying, and oil
and gas extraction (13.8 per 100,000).
At
the same time, staffing at the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) has fallen to historic lows, with only five
inspectors per 1 million workers. The fatality rate for young workers
has nearly doubled since 2020. Environmental rules are being repealed
wholesale, including limits on the emission of toxic chemicals,
greenhouse gases and other pollutants.
Despite these conditions,
the American trade union bureaucracy marked the day with largely
boilerplate statements that neither accept responsibility for worsening
conditions nor propose meaningful initiatives to defend workers’ lives,
beyond appeals to employers, lobbying in Washington and electoral
activity.
The AFL-CIO stated that its officials “will be in the streets and at
worksites to peacefully engage our co-workers and neighbors on the
issues at stake in the next election so we can ensure that everyone can
vote and every vote is counted.” This only underscores the union
bureaucracy’s efforts to subordinate workers’ lives to the Democratic
Party, a party of Wall Street and corporate America no less than the
Republicans.
Similarly, the American Postal Workers Union
encouraged members to participate in symbolic actions such as moments of
silence, candlelight vigils and AFL-CIO events.
The death of 64-year-old autoworker Greg Knopf on March 16,
2026, at the Ford Sharonville Transmission Plant in Ohio, when a press
machine activated during maintenance.
Two workers killed on April 23 at a chemical facility in Institute, West Virginia, with dozens more injured.
The death of April Flores following a forklift accident on April 4 at an H-E-B warehouse in San Antonio, Texas.
A 53-year-old worker crushed by an excavator on February 6 at RJ Industrial Recycling in Flint, Michigan.
The
November 8, 2025 death of maintenance mechanic Nick Acker at a Detroit
mail facility, where safety features were reportedly disabled, followed
by the death of Russell Scruggs Jr. days later in Georgia.
It
has also been more than one year since the death of Stellantis Dundee
Engine worker Ronald Adams Sr., who was killed on April 7, 2025, when a
gantry crane activated during repairs. Stellantis has not been held
accountable, and the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health
Administration has released no findings. The only detailed investigation
was conducted by rank-and-file workers associated with the
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
Globally,
the International Labour Organization estimates that 2.93 million
workers die annually from work-related causes, including up to 380,500
from workplace injuries.
*****
The lack of seriousness with which the American labor bureaucracy
views the question of workplace safety was perhaps best highlighted by
the short shrift paid by UAW President Shawn Fain, who posted a short
statement on X on the occasion of Workers Memorial Day. Following a year
of fires, explosions and workplace carnage, the only actual incident he
referenced was the recent death of Ford worker Gregg Knopf. He said
nothing about the continued stonewalling and cover-up by MIOSHA and
Stellantis of the circumstances of the death of Dundee Engine worker
Ronald Adams Sr.
The reason for this is clear. The UAW is part and
parcel of the cover-up of Adams’ death. Last year, the UAW bureaucracy
used the occasion of Workers Memorial Day to issue a joint video with
Stellantis executives praising their joint efforts to protect workers’
lives. This insulting video, which made no mention of Adams, was
released the same day as the 63-year-old skilled tradesman was buried in
Detroit.
Far from fighting for strengthening safety, the UAW
actively collaborates with management to cover up safety violations and
to ensure that management is not held accountable when deaths and
injuries occur. This is because the union apparatus is joined at the hip
with Stellantis and other automakers through the UAW-Stellantis safety
committees and a host of other similar corporatist programs that
essentially funnel company cash into UAW coffers.
*****
Even the actual tracking of official statistics is undermined by the
patchwork of state, federal and local oversight and reporting in the US,
largely the product of corporate lobbying. While the federal OSHA
implemented a Severe Injury Dashboard
in 2024, which compiles all the reports from 2015 to the present, there
are major limitations. The data only covers just over half the US
population, which works in the 28 states covered by federal OSHA
programs. Injuries to workers in the 22 “state plan” states, which
administer the OSHA program at the state government level, do not appear
in the data, unless covered by federal OSHA, like United States Postal
Service workers. Federal OSHA does not cover state and municipal
workers, so those workers are not represented in the data.
*****
The basic social rights of the working class, such as workplace
safety, can only be defended and advanced through the independent
mobilization of the working class in opposition to the parties of the
ruling class and their defenders in the trade union bureaucracy. Over
the past year, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees (IWA-RFC) has taken the initiative in defense of workers’
safety by conducting independent investigations into the deaths of
Ronald Adams Sr. and postal workers Nick Acker and Russell Scruggs Jr.
The
IWA-RFC calls on workers to form rank-and-file committees in every
factory, warehouse and workplace to counterpose the will of shop-floor
workers to the dictates of management and the union apparatus. This
includes fighting for workers’ control over line speed, safety
conditions and production, enforced through collective strike action
against any unsafe conditions.
The fight for health and safety is
bound up with the fight to put an end to a global social system based
on the exploitation of wage labor for private profit. This requires the
building of a socialist and internationalist leadership in the working
class.
Two more workplace deaths have been reported this week in Queensland,
taking the total number of workers known to have been killed in
Brisbane, the state capital, and its surrounding region to four in
recent weeks.
On Tuesday, a 36-year-old worker was crushed while
employees were moving large crates filled with stock at around 5:36 p.m.
at a workplace in Wellcamp, near Toowoomba, a regional city about 130 kilometers west of Brisbane.
Initial police and media reports
indicated that crates slipped and landed on the worker below. The man,
from Harristown, a Toowoomba suburb, was assessed by paramedics at the
scene for critical injuries but was declared dead a short time later.
Also reported this week was that Miikael “Mikey” Varuhin, 32, a
Finnish construction worker, fell about four meters through scaffolding
at a development site in Clayfield, an inner northern suburb of
Brisbane, on April 6, suffering a catastrophic brain injury.
Varuhin
was declared brain dead later that night. He had reportedly raised
concerns about the scaffolding on site on the day he fell and had sent a
photo from his phone.
The young worker’s sister, Anniina, told
the media: “This is an injustice what happened—no one should go to work
and never come back.” She said her young brother had moved to Brisbane
seven years ago and planned to make the city his home.
The known
workplace fatalities around Brisbane now total seven in six months. This
is part of a rising toll due to unsafe conditions, increased rates of
exploitation by employers, official coverups and government complicity
in Australia and internationally.
The latest shocking deaths follow two others just reported in April.
*****
In all these cases, the official state safety agency, Workplace
Health and Safety Queensland (WHSQ), said it would investigate the
circumstances with assistance from police, but few details have been
released. Such investigations can take many months or years and always
end up in whitewashes or, at best, paltry fines on employers.
Even
where trade unions have members on sites, they work hand-in-hand with
managements and the supposed government safety bodies to cover over the
real cause of dangerous working conditions—the subordination of workers’
health and lives to the interests of corporate profit, notably through
speed-ups, subcontracting and casualisation.
As a result, workers’
deaths continue. Data from Safe Work Australia indicates that by April
9, 30 workers had died nationally in 2026, following 180 deaths in 2025.
These figures understate the true toll because chronic occupational
illnesses and unreported incidents are often excluded from official
counts.
*****
Workplace deaths and serious injuries are on the rise globally, as corporations cut costs and impose productivity increases to satisfy the demands of their financial backers.
To
fight this, workers need to take matters into their own hands.
Rank-and-file committees, independent of the union apparatuses, must be
established in workplaces everywhere to fight for improved safety, wages
and conditions.
Hegseth spoke as the representative of a completely criminal
government, personally advocating that US troops commit war
crimes—including upon direct questioning at the hearing.
In the
face of a broadly unpopular administration, the Democrats made it their
highest priority to emphasize—despite tactical disagreements—their
solidarity with the Trump administration’s megalomaniacal program of
world conquest. Their objections were that Trump’s plans do not go far
enough, or that the Iran war has left the United States unprepared for
war with nuclear-armed China and Russia.
Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York called for doubling
the number of nuclear-capable stealth bombers in the request, from 100
B-21 Raiders to 200. “We’ve been working together to grow the industrial
base because we’re all worried about how our stockpiles would hold up
in a conflict against China,” Gillibrand said. The B-21, she added,
“will be a critical part of both our conventional and our nuclear
deterrence against China and Russia.”
Democratic Senator Mark
Kelly of Arizona voiced his support for expanding military spending,
saying: “I’ve always been supportive of defense spending in my entire
time here. After 25 years in the Navy, I want to make sure our folks
have what they need.”
Democratic Ranking Member Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the senior
Democrat on the committee, opened his remarks by saluting the war
against Iran. “Tactically the United States military performance against
Iran has been remarkable,” Reed said, “and I salute the service members
who executed this mission with skill and bravery.”
His criticism
was that the war has left the United States less prepared for war with
China. Three carrier strike groups have been pulled into the Middle
East, leaving the Pacific thinly covered. “In terms of … where we’re
putting … the most powerful part of our Navy,” Reed asked, “can you
explain again what that means in terms of the situation in INDOPACOM
where China is watching?” His argument was for a larger war, redirected
at Beijing.
Democratic Ranking Member Adam Smith of Washington took the same line at
the parallel House hearing Wednesday, telling Hegseth he had heard “the
chairman on the need for an increased” budget and attacking popular
opposition to the war: “I strongly disagree with the folks on the far
left who say that we don’t really face any threats.”
After Iran, Everyone Knows It.” The Iran war, the Times
argued, exposed weaknesses adversaries can now see. “The good news is
that Congress, the administration and the Pentagon can all now see our
military shortcomings,” the editorial concluded.
At Thursday’s
hearing, Republican Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi endorsed the
Trump administration’s military budget as necessary to prepare for
military conflict with China.
“First and foremost, we’re locked in
a competition with Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party,” Wicker
said. “The competition is high stakes, and it is about whether this will
be an American-led century or a century defined by authoritarian,
autocratic regimes that care little for the needs of their citizens or
those in neighboring countries. The Chinese Communist Party has
accelerated its historic military buildup and its predatory economic
practices against Americans and countries the world over. Xi Jinping
leads not only China, but also an axis of aggressors.” Of the budget:
“Every penny of it should be money well spent.”
*****
The criminal character of the administration was on open display at
Thursday’s hearing. Asked to retract his March 13 order that US troops
give enemies in the Caribbean “no quarter, no mercy,” Hegseth refused.
Kelly read him the definition from his own department’s Law of War
Manual—that no “legitimate offers of surrender will be refused or that
detainees will be executed”—and asked twice whether he stood by the
statement. Twice Hegseth replied: “We fight to win.”
The character of “the mission” the Democrats endorsed was thus on the
record. Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan told Hegseth: “I
agree with the Chairman … that the world has never been more dangerous
and complicated, and … we can all agree that we want our military to
come out of it safely and successfully.” A successful mission, by the
secretary of defense’s own definition, means offering “no quarter” to
those targeted by US imperialism and the destruction of “a whole
civilization,” in the words of Trump.
Thursday’s hearing took place as the administration moved to defy the
60-day War Powers Resolution clock on the Iran war. Friday is the
statutory deadline by which the president must either seek congressional
authorization or certify in writing that more time is required to
withdraw US forces. The administration intends to do neither. Hegseth
said the White House takes the position that a current ceasefire pauses
the clock—a reading with no basis in the statute.
Trump was scheduled to be briefed Thursday evening by U.S. Central
Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper on new military options against Iran,
including, per news reports, a “powerful” series of strikes on Iranian
infrastructure, a ground operation to seize part of the Strait of Hormuz
and a special forces mission to secure Iran’s stockpile of highly
enriched uranium.
The Senate Democrats speak for the same
capitalist oligarchy as Donald Trump. Their disagreements were
operational—anxiety that the Iran war is going badly, anxiety that the
United States is unprepared for the larger conflict with China both
parties expect. On the question of whether US military spending should
surge toward $1.5 trillion to wage that war, Thursday’s hearing revealed
no disagreement at all.
His predecessor Olaf Scholz “always said he did not want to play
security policy off against social policy,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz
told Der Spiegel in a detailed interview. “We can no longer afford that,” Merz said. “We must set priorities.”
The
cabinet did just that on Wednesday. Military spending has priority. It
is being increased sharply, and social spending slashed accordingly.
According to the financial benchmarks presented by Finance Minister
Lars Klingbeil (Social Democratic Party, SPD) and adopted by the
cabinet, the Defence Ministry’s spending financed from the core budget
will rise from €82.2 billion this year to €179.9 billion in 2030. Almost
one in three euros from the federal budget will then flow directly into
rearmament and war. In the next two years, additional billions will be
added from the “special fund for the Bundeswehr [Armed Forces]” passed
in 2022, which expires at the end of 2027.
Outlays on debt
servicing are also rising, as rearmament spending is largely financed
via additional loans. According to Klingbeil’s plans, the government’s
interest expenditure will climb to €78.7 billion by 2030, which is about
12.5 percent of the budget. This year it still amounts to €30.3
billion. Little will be left for social spending.
Parallel to the benchmarks for the budget, the cabinet has initiated a
draft law to reform statutory health insurance from Health Minister
Nina Warken (Christian Democratic Union, CDU). It will now be debated in
the Bundestag (federal parliament) and is to be passed before the
summer holidays. It will deliver the death blow to healthcare in its
current form.
As
early as next year, the spending of the statutory health insurance
funds is to be reduced by €16.3 billion. This is to be achieved by
cutting and increasing the cost of services as well as imposing strict
savings targets for hospitals and doctors. The latter are to bear the
main burden of the cuts.
Overall, spending in the healthcare
sector may only rise as fast as the average contributory income per fund
member. This is supposed to save €11.3 of the total €16.3 billion. The
consequence will be that hospitals and doctors’ practices are faced with
the alternative of cutting salaries or laying off staff. Many will go
bankrupt or no longer be able to find enough staff willing to do the
demanding work while understaffed and poorly paid.
*****
What is completely missing from the draft law—apart from a slight
increase in the contribution assessment ceiling, i.e., the income limit
up to which health insurance contributions are payable—are measures that
make the rich pay. The massive wealth accumulated through rising stock
market prices, exorbitant real estate values and inherited fortunes do
not contribute to these costs. In Germany, there is not even a wealth
tax.
The problem, therefore, is not that there is not enough money
available for good healthcare for everyone, but that healthcare stands
in the way of the enrichment and war plans of the ruling elites. It is
of interest to them only insofar as it yields profit.
*****
Klingbeil’s budget plan contains numerous further austerity measures
at the expense of the wider population. Federal subsidies for long-term
care insurance and pension insurance are also to be cut, and social
benefits slashed. In pension insurance alone, €4 billion a year are to
be saved, even though its requirements are growing due to the increasing
number of pensioners; the pension commission set up by the government
will not present its report until the summer.
Overseas development
aid is also to be massively curtailed. In addition, all ministries are
to reduce their spending by 1 percent, even though inflation is rising
sharply again. The Ministry of Defense is, of course, exempt from this.
The integration of the RIO Morenoites into the Left Party marks a
further political shift to the right by this pseudo-left tendency, which
can only be understood in the context of the current crisis of
capitalism. It is taking place against a backdrop of escalating
imperialist wars, growing social attacks and increasing political radicalization, particularly among young people and workers.
Worldwide,
the development towards a Third World War is intensifying dramatically.
NATO is escalating its confrontation with the nuclear-armed power
Russia in Ukraine. Israel is committing genocide in Gaza with the
support of the US and European powers. The US-Israeli attack on Iran
threatens to plunge the entire region into war. At the same time,
Germany is witnessing the largest military buildup since the Second
World War, while social and democratic rights are being systematically
dismantled.
This development is meeting with growing resistance.
In Germany, in the past year, before and after the federal election,
thousands—primarily young people—have joined the Left Party, often in
the hope of finding there a political instrument in the struggle against
war, fascism and social inequality.
“There is a huge discrepancy
between the hopes that young people associate with the Left Party and
what it actually is. The former want to oppose the fascists, they reject
the refugee agitation, and they want reasonable incomes and affordable
rents,” wrote the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) in a statement
on the result of the 2025 federal election. “But the Left Party has no
program to counter the shift to the right by those in power. It is
spreading the illusion that the main parties of the ruling class can be
persuaded to change course through a combination of parliamentary
opposition and pressure from the streets.”
The statement continued: “The Left Party claims it is possible to reform
capitalism, not abolish it. But that is a dangerous illusion. The
ruling elites’ turn to the right is not simply the product of mistaken
policies that can be corrected by a bit of pressure. The ruling class
everywhere is resorting to dictatorship and war because it is confronted
with the deep crisis of its social system.”
*****
Officially, RIO justified its entry into the Left Party by citing a
focus on the party’s new, predominantly young members. Yet instead of—as
would be the task of Marxists—educating them about the character of the
Left Party, breaking them away from it and winning them over to an
independent socialist perspective, RIO pursues the opposite goal: It
deliberately ties these potentially oppositional forces to a party that
is itself deeply integrated into the capitalist state apparatus and
actively supports the reactionary offensive of German imperialism.
*****
The reactionary nature of this orientation can only be understood by
clearly defining the character of the Left Party itself. It is not a
contradictory “arena” in which different class interests vie for
influence but a historically developed bourgeois party that represents
the interests of the state and the wealthy middle classes.
Its
roots lie in the SED (Socialist Unity Party), the Stalinist ruling party
of the GDR (East Germany), which oppressed the working class for
decades and organized the capitalist restoration in 1989–90. With the
fall of the Berlin Wall, the Stalinist bureaucracy transformed itself
into a bourgeois force, secured property rights and integrated itself
into the reunified German state. In doing so, it carried the nationalist
and anti-Marxist character of Stalinism to its ultimate conclusion.
As resistance to the consequences of the Schröder government’s Agenda
2010 intensified, the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism), the
successor party to the SED, merged in 2007 with the Electoral
Alternative for Labour and Social Justice (WASG) to form the Left Party,
in order to absorb and neutralise the resistance. The WASG was an
alliance of former SPD and trade union officials who feared that the
SPD, due to its right-wing policies, was no longer capable of
suppressing the class struggle.
Since then, the Left Party has
established itself as an integral part of the capitalist profit system.
Its participation in government, particularly in the state of Berlin,
was inextricably linked to massive social spending cuts. Under its
shared responsibility, tens of thousands of public sector jobs were cut,
public housing was privatized and comprehensive austerity programs
were implemented. The party thus proved that it is prepared to enforce
the interests of capital just as consistently as the SPD or the CDU.
At the same time, it played a central role in laying the political
groundwork for the return of German militarism. The involvement of its
foreign policy spokesperson, Stefan Liebich, in the 2013 strategy paper
“New Power—New Responsibility” was a decisive step in this direction.
This document openly articulated Germany’s ambition to once again assume
a leading military role on the international stage and served as a
blueprint for the bellicose speeches delivered by Gauck, Steinmeier and
von der Leyen at the 2014 Munich Security Conference.
In the years
that followed, the Left Party increasingly and openly supported this
course. It backed the NATO war offensive against Russia, the regime
change war in Syria, the genocide in Gaza and, most recently, the
US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.
The party’s political
callousness is particularly evident in the statements of its chairman,
Jan van Aken, who welcomed the assassination of Iranian leaders by
saying they should “rot in hell.” This statement is not a personal lapse
but an expression of the political character of a party that has placed
itself entirely at the service of imperialist interests and the
barbarism that goes hand in hand with them.
The Left Party also bears primary responsibility for the rise of the far
right. In its former strongholds in the east, the Alternative for
Germany (AfD) is now the strongest party. On the one hand, it has itself
contributed significantly to the social misery that is driving many
workers, in particular, to despair. On the other hand, the fact that it
pursues right-wing policies under the guise of “left-wing” rhetoric
fuels the disappointment and political frustration that the AfD and
other far-right forces deliberately exploit. And like all other
bourgeois parties, the Left Party is also prepared to cooperate even
with the far right and its supporters within the ruling class and to
implement their anti-refugee and anti-worker policies.
RIO’s role is deeply rooted in the history of Morenoism. This
current, named after the Argentine politician Nahuel Moreno, has for
decades been characterized by its adaptation to non-proletarian forces.
As early as the 1950s, it broke with the world Trotskyist movement and
aligned itself with Peronism. Moreno and his followers joined this
bourgeois-nationalist movement and declared that their organization acted “under the discipline of General Perón.” In doing so, they
abandoned the fundamental principle of Marxism—the political
independence of the working class.
This accommodation had
devastating political consequences. In 1958, on the instructions of
Perón, who had fled abroad to escape the military, Moreno supported the
election of a right-wing bourgeois president, even as sections of the
Peronist rank and file opposed this course.
In the 1960s, this
pattern was repeated in the attitude towards the Cuban Revolution.
Initially, Moreno denounced Fidel Castro because the Peronist movement
glorified his opponent, the dictator Fulgencio Batista, as the “Cuban
Perón.” Moreno subsequently made a 180-degree turn, describing Cuba as a
workers’ state and hailing Castro, a petty-bourgeois nationalist, as a
model for the revolution throughout Latin America. Underlying both
positions was Moreno’s refusal to formulate an independent policy for
the working class.
The full extent of the reactionary role played
by Morenoism became apparent in Argentina in the 1970s. While the
country was in the throes of a deep revolutionary crisis, Moreno’s party
aligned itself with the Peronist government and advocated for its stabilization. It signed declarations in defense of the “institutional
order” and pledged to fight for the “continuity of the government” at a
time when paramilitary forces were murdering workers and left-wing
activists. This policy contributed to the political disarmament of the
working class and paved the way for the 1976 military coup, which cost
tens of thousands of lives.
*****
For workers and young people who wish to fight against war, fascism
and social inequality, a clear conclusion follows: This struggle cannot
be waged within parties that are themselves part of the bourgeois state
and political reaction. It requires a conscious break with all such organizations and the building of an independent revolutionary movement
of the working class on an international basis.
RIO’s entry into
the Left Party is therefore not merely a political declaration of
bankruptcy on the part of this organisation. It creates political
clarity. The struggle for a socialist perspective is inextricably linked
to the struggle against pseudo-left tendencies which, under the guise
of radical rhetoric, defend the political pillars and interests of the
capitalist system. It requires the building of an independent
revolutionary world party—the International Committee of the Fourth
International (ICFI), which is represented in Germany by the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) and its youth organization, the IYSSE.
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.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified before the House Armed
Services Committee on Wednesday on the Trump administration’s plan to
increase military spending by 50 percent, from $1 trillion this year to
$1.5 trillion in Fiscal Year 2027.
Hegseth, who has rebranded the
Pentagon as “the Department of War,” told the committee the budget would
put the defense industrial base “back on a wartime footing.”
The
request is the sharpest single-year jump in US military spending in the
postwar era. It would lift outlays to 4.5 percent of gross domestic
product, with House Republican leaders calling for 5 percent as the
eventual target.
The buildup is preparation for war with
nuclear-armed China and Russia, the two states Trump’s National Defense
Strategy names as principal adversaries.
In the face of a broadly
unpopular administration openly stating its intent to commit war crimes
in pursuit of global domination, the Democrats on the committee made it
their highest priority to emphasize—despite tactical disagreements—their
solidarity with the Trump administration’s megalomaniacal program of
world conquest.
*****
Republican Don Bacon of Nebraska summed up the bipartisan consensus
for global war. “We are the most bipartisan committee out of 20 in
Congress. We have a tradition of voting on NDAAs with large, large
majorities year after year,” Bacon said. “And it’s important not to be a
Republican first in here or a Democrat first. We’re Americans trying to
ensure that our country is well defended. And in that spirit, I
compliment the operations in Iran.”
Bacon is correct about the
bipartisanship of the war drive. The Democrats funded the buildup before
the Iran war began and refused to halt it once it was under way. The
House passed the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act on December 10,
2025, by 312 to 112, with the entire Democratic House leadership voting
yes; the Senate followed 77 to 20. On January 22, 2026, the House
cleared an $839 billion defense appropriations bill 341 to 88. On
February 2, 21 House Democrats supplied the margin for a continuing
resolution to keep the government funded; the same day, a US F-35 from
the USS Abraham Lincoln shot down an Iranian drone over the Arabian Sea.
Twenty-six days later, the US-Israeli assault on Iran began. Once it
had, both chambers voted down War Powers Act resolutions to stop it.
*****
The defense secretary spoke the vocabulary of a crime boss. He said
the spending would build a military that “instills nothing less than
unrelenting fear in our adversaries.” He cited the year’s operations as
proof. “That matters when you go 37 hours around the world for Midnight
Hammer,” he said, referring to the June 2025 B-2 bombing of Iranian
nuclear sites. “That matters when you go downtown in Venezuela and grab
the indicted dictator of a country in the middle of the night.” Russian
air defenses sent to protect Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro before
his January 3 abduction, Hegseth said, “were defeated in 15 minutes.”
Democratic
Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts questioned Hegseth over
his March 13 press conference order to give boats in the Caribbean “no
quarter, no mercy.” Moulton, a former Marine Corps officer with four
combat tours in Iraq from 2003 to 2008, said, “An order for no quarter
or no survivors is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.” Hegseth
did not retract the order. “The Department of War fights to win,” he
replied.
Shock waves are continuing to spread throughout the technology sector
as mass layoffs accelerate across the United States. Hundreds of
thousands of jobs are being cut as the ruling class utilizes artificial
intelligence and other technological advances to eliminate vast sections
of the workforce.
In just the past week, Meta announced 8,000
layoffs and froze 6,000 open positions, while Microsoft unveiled plans
for up to 8,750 voluntary buyouts. These follow a wave of earlier cuts,
including 30,000 layoffs at Oracle in March and 4,000 job eliminations,
nearly 40 percent of the workforce, at Block, the parent company of
Square and Cash App. Block CEO Jack Dorsey spelled out the broader
implications, declaring, “Within the next year, I believe the majority
of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural
changes.”
The scale of the offensive is enormous. In the first
quarter of 2026 alone, 217,362 job cuts were announced across the US
economy, according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas. Of these, 27,645
were explicitly attributed to artificial intelligence, including a full
quarter of all layoffs in March.
What is striking is that these cuts are not the product of economic
weakness. The companies carrying them out are among the most profitable
in the world. At the very moment they are shedding tens of thousands of
workers, they are pouring unprecedented sums into AI infrastructure.
Meta has projected capital expenditures of up to $145 billion this year.
Amazon spent $44.2 billion on its cloud division in just the first
quarter, while Microsoft reported surging growth in its AI-driven cloud
business. A recent Wall Street Journal article declared the era
of the “mega layoff,” noting that the stock market is actively
rewarding companies for announcing large-scale job cuts, particularly
when they are tied to AI restructuring.
Driving this process is
not only the promise of higher productivity, but the expectation within
ruling circles that new technologies will sharply reduce, or even
eliminate, the need for human labor. Mustafa Suleyman, head of
Microsoft’s AI division, recently predicted that “most, if not all,
professional tasks” could be automated within the next 12 to 18 months.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has likewise declared that “we are the last
generation to manage only humans.” OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla
predicted to Fortune magazine that 80 percent of all jobs “will be capable of being done by an AI” by 2030.
*****
The largest cuts by any private employer are taking place at UPS,
which is carrying out a sweeping “network of the future” restructuring
aimed at eliminating large portions of its warehouse workforce. On
Wednesday, the company announced plans to close 27 additional parcel
centers this year. Meanwhile, a manufactured financial crisis at the
U.S. Postal Service is being used to slash pension obligations and push
forward plans for privatization.
But for a whole layer of software
engineers, developers, analysts and other technical workers, the jobs
bloodbath in the high tech sector is a particularly abrupt collapse.
During the decades-long expansion of the tech sector, they were
encouraged to see themselves as part of a privileged “middle class,”
insulated from the insecurities faced by other workers. High salaries,
stock options and the mythology of the startup economy fostered the
belief that they stood outside the basic class divisions of capitalist
society.
*****
In those workplaces that are unionized, the union bureaucracy has for
decades collaborated with management in the name of “competitiveness,” a
process that is now reaching its logical conclusion. Under conditions
in which the ruling class is seeking to permanently displace vast
sections of the workforce, the old slogan of a “fair day’s pay for a
fair day’s work,” which left capitalist property unchallenged, itself
has become untenable.
At the same time, workers must reject all
political subordination to the Democratic Party. As the party of Wall
Street, it has responded to the crisis with occasional liberal rhetoric
while refusing to seriously oppose the authoritarian policies of the
Trump administration. In various forums, Bernie Sanders has advanced
proposals for regulating AI—such as a 32-hour workweek, profit-sharing
schemes and worker representation on corporate boards—but these amount
to calls for self-regulation by the corporations themselves. On the last
proposal in particular, Sanders cites Germany as a model, but this has
only served as a mechanism through which German union officials
collaborate in enforcing layoffs and suppressing strikes in the name of
“social partnership.”
*****
Capitalism, not the development of technology, is the cause of mass
layoffs. Artificial intelligence has the capacity to automate vast
amounts of repetitive labor, increase productivity and lay the material
foundation for a dramatic reduction in the amount of labor required to
sustain society. The problem is that under capitalism, every advance in
labor-saving technology is transformed into a means of intensifying
exploitation and destroying jobs.
As long as technology remains in
private hands, it will be used to enrich a financial oligarchy at the
expense of society as a whole.
This raises the necessity for a
program based on the expropriation of the major technology firms and
their transformation into publicly owned utilities, under the democratic
control of the working class. The same must apply to the banks,
investment funds and other financial institutions that direct the flow
of capital into these industries.
On this basis, workers must
fight for concrete demands: no layoffs; guaranteed employment; a shorter
workweek with no loss in pay; workers’ control over the implementation
of new technologies; and the use of productivity gains to expand
healthcare, education, housing and public infrastructure. The
construction of data centers and related infrastructure must be carried
out on the basis of rational, democratic planning, rather than the
anarchic pursuit of profit.
Tech workers must unite with the
broader working class. Their struggle is not separate but part of a
common fight against a system that subordinates all aspects of social
life to private profit. The fight against layoffs is, in the final
analysis, a fight against capitalism itself.
The theme of the International Committee of the Fourth International’s May Day rally—to unify workers internationally in the struggle against
capitalism, imperialist war and the global assault on democratic
rights—finds direct expression in this developing movement. The fight
for workers’ control over technology is a central component of that
struggle.
As with affirmative action, there is a right-wing critique of the racial
identity politics of the Democratic Party, the blatant racism of Trump
and his fascist cabal, —and a left-wing critique, the fight for the
unity of the working class, waged by the Socialist Equality Party.
The SEP opposes the claim by the Democrats that black workers are
appropriately represented by black capitalists and multi-millionaires.
More than a half century of experience with the advancement of black
mayors, congressmen, CEOs and the first black president, the imperialist
war criminal Barack Obama, show beyond any doubt that the class
divisions within capitalist society are far more significant than the
racial divisions.
The civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s produced lasting
gains in terms of democratic rights and the ability of the working class
to overcome the racial divisions exploited by right-wing demagogues
like George Wallace. Interracial marriages now number in the millions,
and the children of such marriages are many millions more.
What is
required to defend these gains is the mobilization of the working class
against the capitalist system as a whole, based on political
independence from all sections of the capitalist class, including the
black Democratic politicians who invariably side with the billionaires
and the military-intelligence apparatus against the working class.
The most immediate effect of the Supreme Court ruling will be to
damage the prospects of the Democratic Party in the midterm elections
set for November 5. Hence the outcry from the congressional Democrats
and the sections of the corporate media aligned with them.
Republican
state legislatures in Louisiana, Alabama and other states where a
handful of minority districts have been carved out—in large measure to
guarantee Republican control of most districts—are expected to redraw
lines to eliminate even that handful, eliminating as many as 12
Democratic-held seats by one estimate.
Some states will be unable
to redraw the boundaries in time, so the impact on the 2026 vote remains
uncertain. Given the poll numbers showing a likely large swing to the
Democrats, it is entirely possible that the rigging of district lines
will backfire on the Republicans, causing them to lose the larger number
of marginal seats that gerrymandering will create.
*****
The entire process demonstrates the sclerotic character of capitalist
democracy in America, which has been fatally undermined by deepening
social inequality. Both parties defend the interests of a few thousand
billionaires, bankers and corporate CEOs, who control the economy, the
media, and the government, but live in constant fear of a movement from
below, from a vast working class majority.
While the Voting Rights Act ruling captured the headlines, oral
arguments held the same day suggest that an even more ominous and
anti-democratic ruling is imminent. Two cases are being consolidated, Trump v Miot, which challenges the termination of Temporary Protective Status for 365,000 Haitian refugees, and Mullin v Doe, which does the same for 6,000 Syrian refugees.
The TPS cases were heard on the final day of oral arguments for this
term, so the decision is not likely to be announced until late June or
early July. The plaintiffs, individual TPS holders, Haitians and
Syrians, challenged the decision by Secretary of Homeland Security
Kristi Noem to revoke their status. The precedent set would apply to
more than one million immigrants who presently have legal status under
TPS which the White House wants to revoke.
*****
Even if the court finds for the plaintiffs, this would only delay the
mass deportation, since the DHS will go through the formality of
consultation, and then obey Trump’s predetermined decision, issuing the
order to leave the country.
Haitian immigrants were first granted
TPS status in 2010, after the earthquake that killed 300,000 and leveled
much of the impoverished country, the poorest in the Western
Hemisphere. TPS has been repeatedly extended, as security conditions
have collapsed and armed gangs, in the pay of the tiny Haitian elite,
effectively rule the country.
Syrian refugees received TPS after
civil war broke out in the country in 2011, instigated by the CIA and
Saudi Arabia. It was extended several times as the conflict ebbed and
flowed, and again after the 2023 earthquake which hit northern Syria and
adjacent portions of Turkïye, killing 60,000. After the ouster of
longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia, the country is now
ruled by an offshoot of Al Qaeda, Hay’at Tahrir al‑Sham, whose leader
Ahmed al‑Sharaawas was welcomed at the White House earlier this year.
Negotiations between the Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 and the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) are underway on a new labor
agreement for more than 40,000 New York City transit workers. The
current contract for subway and bus workers expires on May 15. This
coincides with a potential walkout of more than 3,500 Long Island Rail
Road (LIRR) workers in five unions, who will be legally free to strike
against the MTA on May 16.
At the heart of both contract battles is a determination by workers
to offset the deepening affordability crisis and reverse decades of
union givebacks. Over the last decade, contracts have provided transit
workers with paltry wage increases of around 2-3 percent per year while
the cost of living has skyrocketed. As of March this year, annual
inflation in the New York City metro area stood at 4.0 percent. Housing
increases are even worse: Median rents in the city are up 6.6 percent
compared to last year. President Trump’s criminal war in Iran and tariff
schemes threaten to blow inflation rates off the charts.
The
cost-of-living crisis has been exacerbated by past concessions,
including added healthcare costs and the hated Tier 6 pension scheme in
New York, which generally requires transit workers and other public
sector employees hired after 2012 to work longer, contribute more of
their salary to retirement and often results in lower or delayed pension
benefits. In the last contract, retiree benefits were squeezed further
by forcing retirees onto privatized Medicare plans. Meanwhile,
union-management committees were initiated at the MTA to impose cost
savings onto workers’ backs while providing a financial incentive for
the union apparatus.
At the start of negotiations on April 9, TWU Local 100 presented its
37 demands. The union is asking for a three-year deal with “substantial
wage increases in each year of the agreement,” but has not publicly
specified what it considers “substantial.” The MTA, in its financial
plan for 2027 and beyond, has budgeted for a provocative 2 percent
annual wage increase.
The LIRR unions, which are still negotiating
a deal stretching back to 2023, have already agreed to wage increases
identical to what TWU 100 pushed through in the last contract (3
percent, 3 percent, and 3.5 percent for 2024, 2025, and 2026
respectively). The unions are asking for 5 percent in 2027, but the MTA
is offering just 3 percent.
Jai Patel, the MTA’s Chief Financial Officer, said at a finance board
meeting on April 27 that allowing 3,700 LIRR workers to set the pattern
for the rest of the workforce (i.e., the 40,000 subway and bus workers)
would be unprecedented. Patel claimed that granting a 5 percent wage
increase this year would hurt the budgets of both the city and the state
and threatened that labor cost increases would trigger a doubling of
the planned fare increases.
Patel’s comments highlight the
fraudulent limits imposed on the negotiations that both the MTA and the
union apparatus accept without question. The MTA pleads poverty,
pointing to the burden of its $49 billion in long-term debt, its backlog
of necessary upgrades and its projected operating budget shortfalls in
2027 and beyond. Any wage increases are to be paid for by fare hikes. On
the other hand, the union apparatus argues that the MTA has enough
money, with the injection of revenues from congestion pricing and the
planned casinos, to spare some additional crumbs for workers.
What
the union bureaucrats and the political operatives in the MTA conceal
is that there is more than enough to provide every transit worker with
immediate double-digit wage increases, cut fares to zero and make
investments to expand service if the vast resources that exist are used
for social need rather than to line the pockets of the city’s 123
billionaires.
At the national level, there are virtually no limits on public spending
for bank bailouts or war. President Trump has proposed a budget next
year for the military of a staggering $1.5 trillion—a one-year
expenditure that could fund the MTA capital program 30 times over.
Among workers and young people, there is a growing desire to
challenge a system where workers’ livelihoods and basic social services
are sacrificed for the profit motives of a corporate and financial
elite. Zohran Mamdani was elected the mayor of New York City precisely
because he appealed to this sentiment. He promised, among other things,
fast and free buses, paid for by taxing the rich and corporations.
However,
in just four months in office, Mamdani has amassed a record that
betrays the aspirations of those who look to him to wrest power from the
oligarchy. The demand for free buses has largely been dropped. Taxing
the rich has been replaced with a nebulous plan to charge a modest fee
on pieds-à-terre (secondary residences). Mamdani is now attempting to
balance the $4.5 billion budget deficit largely through cost-cutting,
including by delaying pension repayments, adding risk for tens of
thousands of transit workers in one of the largest pension systems
managed by the city.
*****
With the MTA controlled by the state, Hochul is playing the most
direct role in attacking transit workers. Last December, she vetoed a
bill mandating two-person train operations, signaling her intent to use
the long-term threat of job cuts for conductors and train operators to
force through concessions. Hochul has upbraided LIRR workers for
refusing to accept work-rule changes that cut pay and has demanded
binding arbitration to impose a deal.
In the New York City nurses’
strike earlier this year, the governor signed executive decrees
enabling scab nurses to work without a license to weaken the strike.
Hochul’s MTA is likewise preparing a scabbing operation in the event of
an LIRR strike, one that will attempt to rely on the TWU bureaucracy to
force bus drivers to run buses as a substitute.
The TWU
enthusiastically endorsed Hochul for governor in 2022, only recently
reversing course, calling her a “straight-up enemy of the TWU and a
disaster for blue-collar New York,” in the words of TWU International
President John Samuelsen.
The current tiff with the governor
notwithstanding, the TWU has long been integrated into the Democratic
Party establishment. Samuelsen notably hobnobbed with former Governor
Andrew Cuomo at a $25,000-a-plate fundraiser. Samuelsen also joined
Mamdani’s transition team, taking part in the mayor’s Committee on
Transportation, Climate, & Infrastructure. The fact that Mamdani has
embraced the “enemy of the TWU” has not prevented their collaboration.
Meanwhile, the LIRR unions appealed to the Trump administration to
intervene by appointing a Presidential Emergency Board, which delayed a
potential strike by 8 months.
The struggle of transit and rail
workers for livable wages is not just a fight against the MTA, but
against all the political representatives of the ruling class and their
servants, from Trump, Hochul and Mamdani, to the union bureaucracies.
These forces function to uphold a system which demands that workers
accept cuts while the wealthy cash in. Nothing can be accomplished
without challenging this state of affairs.
A
great deal was at stake for British imperialism when it decided to play
its king in the great geopolitical game in Washington.
But the
fact that it was ever considered likely that soaring rhetoric from
Charles III before both Houses of Congress might restore the “special
relationship” between the UK and the USA only underscored the depth of
the crisis facing Britain’s ruling elites.
Charles’s speech was a confused mess of diplomatic and historical
evasions on every major issue that he raised, bar one: his prolonged
argument for the importance of continued transatlantic ties, based above
all on the bloody, decades-long history of British collusion in US-led
wars of imperialist conquest.
*****
The Financial Times editorialized:
UK-US
relations are at their lowest ebb since the 1956 Suez crisis. Sir Keir
Starmer’s refusal to back the US-Israeli war with Iran has led Trump to
denigrate the UK military and belittle the prime minister. A Pentagon
memo reportedly floated reviewing the US position on Britain’s claim to
the Falkland Islands in retaliation.
Tensions were already
simmering after Starmer joined in condemnations of the president’s
ambitions towards Greenland. For Buckingham Palace, there were other
disincentives. Trump has indicated designs, too, on Canada — of which
Charles III also happens to be king.
The monarch’s brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is being investigated for his links to Jeffrey Epstein.
Hence
the FT’s conclusion: “Yet whatever the outcome of the trip, this is a
moment for the UK to start to recalibrate ties… Britain rightly wants to
preserve all it can of the special relationship. But in the harsh new
world of the 21st century, other connections are going to matter a lot
too.”
A tall order for the king, then, which he tried to fulfill
by appealing, mostly over Trump’s head and hopefully without rousing him
to anger, to Democrat and Republican lawmakers to recognize that the US
still needs allies if it is to successfully rule and exploit the world.
Given the occasion of his visit on its 250th anniversary, Charles was
forced into tortured efforts to minimize the War of Independence as a
brief and unfortunate spat. “With the spirit of 1776 in our minds, we
can perhaps agree that we do not always agree – at least in the first
instance,” he said. But for the next 250 years, “our destinies as
nations have been interlinked.”
This common destiny was attributed
firstly to a shared “commitment to uphold democracy” between an
unelected parasite and the assembled crooks and political criminals
gathered within the “United States Congress, this citadel of democracy…”
*****
The conflicts between Trump and the European powers, like those with the
Democrats, are not about the waging of murderous wars to seize control
of vital resources and markets, but over where in the world should be
targeted first, based on which alliances and how the spoils are then to
be divided.
Reporting on the meeting was dominated by the announcement by Powell
that he would stay on as a governor after he steps down as chair, citing
the legal attacks by the Trump administration as his reason for doing
so.
While he insisted that he would not act as a “shadow chair”
and would work with Warsh, the decision means that the board of
governors under Warsh could grow deeply divided, with Powell, whatever
his statements to the contrary, becoming the leader of the opposition.
Powell’s
decision reflects deep divisions within the ruling financial
establishment between those backing Trump’s lower-rates regime and those
who see it necessary to maintain the appearance of Fed independence to
maintain its credibility in financial markets in the US and globally.
*****
Powell’s decision was immediately attacked by US Treasury Secretary
Scott Bessent, indicating that the conflict within the financial and
political establishment is far from over.
*****
At this point, the position of the Fed is that it will continue to
“look through” the inflationary impact of the Trump tariff hikes and the
oil price shock and not immediately react by raising rates.
But
that position is becoming more difficult to maintain, as their effects
spread throughout the economy and the pressure for a rate rise is
increasing, of which the dissent vote is a sign. Powell indicated as
much when he said that the outlook could change as early as the next
meeting.
Even Trump supporters are starting to question his demand
for lower interest rates. Fed governor Christopher Waller, who was at
one point under consideration as the next Fed chair, has warned that a
series of price shocks emanating from the tariff hikes, as well as the
Iran war, threatened to erode confidence in the Fed’s ability to bring
down prices. There was a danger of inflation becoming “embedded” across
the US economy and that households and businesses would expect that
price hikes would continue.
The overriding fear, though not expressed openly, is that workers,
seeing rising inflation becoming permanent, will push forward with wage
demands and break through the strenuous and ongoing efforts of the trade
union apparatuses to contain and suppress their struggles.
*****
As the Fed was meeting, the price of Brent crude oil went back over
$120 a barrel after Trump indicated he did not want to end the US
blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The oil price rose by almost 10
percent, hitting $122.15 a barrel late yesterday in its eighth
consecutive day of rises.
The renewed price hike helped spark a
selloff of US debt, with the yields on 30-year Treasury bonds hitting 5
percent with “traders betting on lasting inflation in the American
economy” as the Financial Times noted.
Last week, a federal grand jury indictment was unsealed against Dr.
David M. Morens, the former senior adviser to National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci. The
Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that Morens conspired to conceal and
falsify federal records related to the COVID pandemic.
Specifically, the charges center on his communications with the
EcoHealth Alliance and its scientific collaborators during a period of
intense political scrutiny over the origins of the virus. Dr. Peter
Daszak, the former head of EcoHealth Alliance, and Dr. Gerald Keusch,
associate director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases
Laboratory at Boston University, are identified as co-conspirators,
although their names do not actually appear in the indictment.
Morens
operated at the center of the early pandemic response and origins
discussions at the NIAID. Now, his indictment is being paraded by the
DOJ and key Republican figures as a breakthrough in exposing a supposed
cover-up of the Wuhan lab leak, a conspiracy theory promoted by fascists
and advocates of imperialist war against China. This legal action is
not a simple matter of record-keeping violations. It is a politically
motivated witch-hunt designed to scapegoat the very scientists who
worked to understand the virus and prevent future outbreaks.
The
prosecution of Morens serves as a critical instrument in a broader
campaign to weaponize the pandemic narrative for geopolitical aggression
against China. This reactionary campaign aims to distract from the
policies of social murder implemented by the ruling class, which allowed
the virus to spread unchecked, while elevating a manufactured
anti-science narrative into official state doctrine.
*****
To be blunt, the Trump administration is alleging there was a conspiracy
to commit crimes, but there were no crimes committed. There was no
money that was falsely taken from the government. The grants in question
were processed and awarded according to established regulations. And it
wasn’t a crime for David Morens to confer with experts in the
scientific field over factual material and forward these to Anthony
Fauci, who was heading the work on the COVID pandemic as it emerged from
Wuhan city; that was Morens’ primary responsibility in his position at
NIAID. And it was not a crime for EcoHealth Alliance to ask Morens to
intercede with Fauci on why Trump terminated their grant. It was
illegally terminated, only later to be reinstated by the NIH because no
fault was found.
That the government has constructed a grand criminal conspiracy from
this material, threatening a maximum statutory sentence of up to 51
years in prison, is a sign of political desperation. None of Morens’
actions had any bearing on the trajectory of the pandemic, the content
of the science or the disastrous federal decisions that allowed the
virus to rip unchecked through the working class.
The campaign against Morens cannot be understood outside the
systematic politicization of the origins of the pandemic. What began in
early 2020 as a fringe conspiracy theory promoted by fascist figures
like Steve Bannon and Miles Guo was rapidly elevated into a mainstream
political weapon. This reactionary drive found its institutional center
in the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus
Pandemic. Operating as a modern-day inquisition, the committee publicly
vilified and grilled Morens in 2024 over his email practices, utilizing
his administrative missteps to validate a broader witch-hunt against
scientists who advocated for evidence-based public health measures.
This
anti-science crusade reached a dangerous milestone in April 2025 when
the Trump administration hijacked the federal public health apparatus.
The government abruptly repurposed the covid.gov website, transforming
it from a vital portal for vaccines, testing and Long COVID support into
a propaganda hub titled “Lab Leak: The True Origins of COVID-19.” By
scrubbing essential health information and officially adopting a
debunked conspiracy theory, the government demonstrated its complete
abandonment of public health. This action codified a manufactured lie
into official state doctrine, deliberately disregarding the overwhelming
consensus of international scientists who continue to track the natural
evolution of the virus.
The relentless promotion of the Wuhan lab leak fiction serves an
explicit geopolitical purpose. It provides the ideological scaffolding
for aggressive anti-China rhetoric, punitive trade tariffs and the
preparation for global military conflict. Although multiple United
States intelligence agencies could only muster low-confidence
assessments to support a laboratory origin, the political messaging of
the capitalist state has entirely detached itself from evidence. To
sustain this war drive, reactionary politicians and the aligned
corporate media have deliberately constructed a false narrative that
situates Morens, Peter Daszak and other leading experts as part of a
nefarious cabal that suppressed the lab leak theory in favor of a
zoonotic origin.
*****
Morens, Daszak and Gerald Keusch did not set national policy, control
reopening timelines, or determine the guidance issued by the CDC and
OSHA. They had no hand in the catastrophic abandonment of viral
suppression or the political decision to simply let the virus burn
through the population. The administrative irregularities the DOJ has
seized upon—emails routed to avoid a politicized FOIA process, a bottle
of wine shared between colleagues—had no bearing whatsoever on the
pandemic’s death toll, which excess mortality modeling places in the
tens of millions globally. To present these minor incidents as the hinge
of a criminal conspiracy is not law enforcement, but the ongoing
fabrication in service of their fascist political agenda.
*****
The catastrophic trajectory of the pandemic was shaped by deliberate
government choices to force early reopenings, abandon elimination
strategies and allow airborne transmission to rip through the working
class so production could continue. Elected officials systematically
downgraded public health capacities and dismantled vital testing and
surveillance systems. These life-and-death decisions were taken by the
political leadership of the capitalist state and corporate interests,
prioritizing economic throughput. They were definitively not made by
scientists like Morens, Daszak or Keusch, who have been scapegoated and
maligned across social and corporate media.
The profound hypocrisy of this witch-hunt lies in who is, and who is not, standing in the dock.
No
head of state, no governor, no corporate executive faces prosecution
for knowingly adopting policies of mass infection that killed more than 1
million people in the US alone. The architects of social murder, those
who gutted public health infrastructure, forced workers back into unsafe
conditions and subordinated pandemic response to the demands of the
financial markets, enjoy absolute impunity. Instead, the DOJ trains its
apparatus on a senior scientific adviser, a circle of researchers and a
bottle of wine, inflating this into a grand conspiracy so that the
structural crimes of the capitalist state can remain forever beyond the
reach of accountability. The message to the scientific community is
unmistakable: align with the ideological and geopolitical requirements
of the ruling class or face personal and professional annihilation.
*****
Real accountability will never emerge from capitalist courts or
politically motivated congressional witch-hunts. It requires open and
public inquests into the pandemic policies of the ruling class, such as
the Global Workers Inquest initiated by the World Socialist Web Site. It
requires democratic control of public health and the fierce protection
of scientific independence from state and corporate interference, and
against the threat of politically motivated prosecutions. Above all, it
requires a fundamental social reorganization by the international
working class to ensure that private profit is never again allowed to
override the preservation of human life.
Trump’s blockade of Iran and his threat to exterminate Iranian
civilization mark a new era in the international class struggle. The
setback suffered by Trump—whose war of aggression has not yet succeeded
in imposing a neocolonial regime on Iran—is evident. But the European
bourgeoisie is responding by preparing a social and economic offensive
targeting workers’ rights and living standards.
This is perhaps
most clearly the case with French President Emmanuel Macron, who has
condemned neither the war against Iran nor the blockade cutting off
Europe’s energy supply. Ignoring the threat of economic depression, his
government is preparing to use it as a pretext to impose austerity
measures already overwhelmingly rejected by the French people.
*****
Asked by a journalist about the danger of an energy shortage, Macron
replied that he had nothing to say on the subject: “We are not in the
scenario that is one of the worst-case scenarios you have described,
which is not today the most probable and which I need not comment upon …
I think I can tell you at this stage that the situation is under
control, and today the situation does not lead us to envisage any
shortage.”
In fact, the energy crisis very much threatens
shortages not only in Asia, but also in Europe. While it takes, for now,
the form of soaring prices rather than a generalised shortage, it is
because on March 11 the International Energy Agency’s 32 member
countries—including the US and European powers—released 400 million
barrels of oil from their strategic reserves. It was the largest release
of reserves in IEA history. But this will not resolve the crisis if the
war continues and, within a few months, these strategic reserves begin
to run out.
*****
In reality, the risk of energy shortages and economic depression is
not an alarmist fairy tale invented by scaremongers. Trump’s war against
Iran is creating a real crisis. The current surge in oil prices and the
shortages at certain gas stations in France are the forewarnings of a
wider economic and military earthquake that will shock the world if
workers fail to stop the war.
*****
If Macron covers for Trump while the latter grips Europe’s economy by
the throat, it is because Macron and French imperialism does not want a
US defeat, at least for now. It fears the impact of such a defeat on its
own military bases in the Middle East, its arms exports to Arab
sheikdoms, and the role of its banks in the world oil trade. Condemning
Trump’s genocidal threats against Iran would also call into question
Macron’s friendship with the Israeli regime amid the Gaza genocide.
The military crisis of French imperialism is inseparable from the
social crisis it wishes to resolve at workers’ expense. Since the
sellout of the strikes against pension cuts by the parties of the New
Popular Front and the union bureaucracies in 2023, Macron has ruled
openly against the people. A series of minority governments has tried to
impose drastic austerity. But this policy, based on a refusal to tax
the wealthy, has not managed to reduce the deficit, as Paris is also
increasing military spending by tens of billions of euros.
The
French government is now trying to use the crisis provoked by Trump’s
war of aggression against Iran for its domestic political agenda of
class war. The government is exploiting the genocide and US military
aggression to create a political framework to intensify austerity
against workers.
This is clearly indicated by the statements of
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu. Last week, he declared in a letter to
his ministers that “the total cost of this crisis could therefore amount
to at least 6 billion euros, to date.” Public Accounts Minister David
Amiel responded by declaring that “any new public expenditure that might
be made necessary” by the energy “crisis” would entail “the
cancellation of previously planned expenditure, euro for euro.”
Macron is thus seizing on the Iranian crisis to enshrine the principle
of zero increase in net spending, which, without taxation of the
wealthy, inevitably means draconian austerity.
Last week, the federal Labor government announced
it would slash $35 billion in funding for the National Disability
Insurance Scheme (NDIS) over the next four years, forcing hundreds of
thousands of people off the scheme entirely and drastically cutting the
support provided to those who remain.
The World Socialist Web Site
is speaking with NDIS participants and disability support workers about
the implications of Labor’s brutal measures for their lives and
livelihoods....
Last week, members of the Ann Arbor Education Association (AAEA)
voted 1,084 to 4 (99.6 percent) to reject a tentative contract the
union’s bargaining team had signed after months of state-mediated
negotiations. With 97 percent of the membership turning out, the vote
was not a protest. It was a verdict.
The proposed contract offered
teachers a 1.5 percent raise for this year and next—in a city where
housing costs are among the highest in Michigan and inflation is running
at 4.7 percent. Additionally, the district demanded class size
increases of three students at every grade level, raising high school
classes to 36, along with an 18 percent cut in elementary planning time
and the elimination of art and music programs. The district also wants a
hard cap on health insurance contributions that would, by design, keep
the district’s payments below the floor a pending state bill would
legally require—locking teachers out of the limited protections they are
about to gain.
Teachers exploded in anger on Reddit. One noted
that many classes already exceed the proposed limits: “Some of the
classes at Pioneer have 38 in them. They wanted to have 45 in the AP
Calc BC classes until parents threw a fit in August.”
Another teacher cut to the core of what is at stake:
Administrators
currently pay one-eighth of what teachers pay for the exact same health
care coverage. One-eighth. Teachers’ premiums have increased by
thousands of dollars in back-to-back years. [District Superintendent]
Jazz Parks can write all the bland, corporate press releases she wants
but it won’t stop the fact that the room is on fire.
Parks—who
received a pay package of $454,223 in 2024—characterized the offer as
“a genuine, good-faith effort.” The irony was not lost on educators—a
36-year classroom veteran replied that their biggest raise in two
decades had been “a 2.5 percent raise in 2006.”
*****
Ann Arbor is not alone. When Michigan’s 2025 school year opened,
teachers in more than fifteen districts were told to return to work
without a contract—including Grand Rapids, Pontiac, Clinton Township,
Utica, Kalamazoo, Northville, Birmingham, Walled Lake, Waterford and
Brighton. Far from upholding the principle of “no contract, no work,”
the unions in every one of these districts (all National Education
Association-affiliated, like Ann Arbor) enforced management’s work
order.
As of this week, Pontiac teachers have worked 301 days
without a contract. In order to cover up their own complicity,
officials from the Pontiac Education Association filed an unfair labor
practice charge in December and held a no-confidence vote against
district leadership in February. When talks resumed, teachers were
offered two pennies per hour. One paraprofessional described the
reality: “Two pennies equals $11 over a year. Would that help you and
your family out? I leave here most days and I’ll DoorDash for a couple
of hours.”
In Clintondale, NEA-affiliated teachers are entering their second
consecutive year without a contract. Since 2023, over two-thirds of
certified staff—75 of 115 professionals—have resigned or retired.
In
Grand Rapids, Michigan’s eighth-largest district, the board voted to
close 10 schools by 2029 while teachers remain the lowest-paid in Kent
County, with the worst five-year retention rate of comparable districts.
A parallel restructuring scheme in Pontiac was developed by a
consultant notorious for destroying Muskegon Heights Public
Schools—firing all teachers and converting the district to charter
management.
Across the state, the share of district budgets
devoted to teacher compensation has fallen from 82 percent in 2004 to 75
percent today. The Michigan Education Association’s approximately
117,000 active members and the American Federation of
Teachers-Michigan’s 35,000 members have watched their leadership stall
contracts, advance concessionary agreements and block any serious
mobilization.
In Ann Arbor, the union signed the rotten tentative
agreement not as part of a fighting strategy, but to manage and suppress
educator anger. Nationally, the NEA and AFT partnered to shut down the Los Angeles school workers’ strike of 80,000 workers and impose an austerity contract in the nation’s second-largest district. In San Francisco, a four-day strike was shut down with a settlement offering 2 percent annual raises, followed by immediate layoffs.
*****
In Ann Arbor, administrators and union officials alike claim raising pay
requires finding cuts elsewhere in the budget. This is categorically
false. America is the richest country in the world, and if resources for
public education are limited, it is only because of the political
decisions by Democrats and Republicans to starve the public schools in
order to prioritize tax cuts for the wealthy and military spending.
*****
At the federal level, the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan
delivered $5.6 billion in ESSER relief funds to Michigan schools—then
allowed the spending deadline to expire in September 2024 with no
replacement revenue. Districts that used those funds for staff and other
expenses faced an immediate fiscal cliff. At the same time, the
Biden-Harris administration funded the military at $886 billion in
fiscal year 2024.
The Trump administration accelerated the damage.
In March 2025, Education Secretary Linda McMahon revoked a previously
approved extension allowing Michigan districts to claim $42 million in
pre-approved reimbursements for school safety improvements—effective
that same day. In July 2025, the administration withheld $156 million in
Michigan school funding. By year’s end, at least $12 billion in K-12
education funding had been disrupted nationally. Trump’s proposed fiscal
2026 budget would cut K-12 grant programs by 70 percent while raising
the military budget by 42 percent to $1.5 trillion!
*****
The cumulative diversion of School Aid Fund money from K-12 since
2010 now approaches $9.5 billion. The Michigan League for Public Policy
stated the conclusion plainly: “The state is paying for tax cuts with
money taken from its K-12 students.”
Charter schools are another
conduit for public education dollars to wealthy for-profit interests.
Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, charter schools
have proliferated in Michigan. Seventy percent are run by for-profits,
the highest percentage in the nation. The cost to public education is
now approximately $1.4 billion per year, as funds are drained from
neighborhood schools.
The claim that there is “no money” for
teachers is not an accounting fact. It is a political choice—one made
consistently, across party lines, over fifteen years, in favor of
corporations, military contractors and the financial elite.
*****
Teachers in Ann Arbor, Pontiac, Clintondale, Grand Rapids and dozens
of other Michigan districts face the same manufactured crisis, the same
empty promises and the same union bureaucracies that have proven
unwilling and unable to lead a genuine fight. What unites these teachers
is more powerful than what divides them—whether they are MEA members,
AFT members or unaffiliated educators.
The 1,084-4 vote in Ann
Arbor did not come from the union leadership. It came from the rank and
file—educators who have absorbed two decades of declining real wages,
exploding healthcare costs, growing class sizes and the slow dismantling
of the profession, aided and abetted by the labor bureaucracy. That
spirit must now be organized, not managed.
What is required is the
formation of rank-and-file committees in every district to transfer
power and decision-making from the union hierarchy to classroom teachers
and support staff. These committees can coordinate action across
district lines, demand full public accounting of school finances and
build a genuine political mobilization of teachers, school workers,
parents and the broader working class in defense of public education.
In late March, a petition was launched on Change.org to award the
Order of Military Merit, the highest decoration of the Brazilian Army,
to the Metalworkers Union of São José dos Campos and Region
(SindmetalSJC). The petition, which had surpassed 21,000 signatures by
April 26, holds that the union’s work in the “defense of our strategic
assets and the promotion of national sovereignty”—particularly in
preserving Avibras—qualifies it to receive the honor from the hands of
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party-PT).
Although
the petition was formally created by geopolitics podcasters, it was
politically orchestrated by the union’s leadership, tied to the Unified Socialist Workers Party (PSTU), the principal section of the
International Workers League (LIT-FI) founded by the Argentine
revisionist Nahuel Moreno. The president of SindmetalSJC and PSTU
leader, Weller Gonçalves, hosted the military affairs consultant
Robinson Farinazzo on his YouTube interview program to promote the
petition.
Farinazzo, who has assumed the role of a kind of
“ambassador” for the campaign, is a naval reserve officer and an
explicit defender of the Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964-85,
with political ties to far-right sectors, including the Russian fascist
ideologue Alexander Dugin. In his appearance on Weller’s program,
Farinazzo argued that Brazil needs to develop nuclear bombs to repel
threats by American imperialism—a position the Morenoite union leader
endorsed by sharing the segment on his Instagram profile.
Under a
presidential decree from 2000, the Order of Military Merit can be
awarded not only to military personnel, but also to “civil institutions,
national or foreign, that become deserving of special tribute from the
Army.” Historically, the medal has been given out to Brazilian military
dictators and torturers as well as their US “advisors.” There is no
precedent, however, for bestowing the decoration on a trade union.
The
campaign is a defining political act, signaling a sharp lurch to the
right by the PSTU Morenoites in a conjuncture marked by two converging
processes: the escalation of imperialist world war and, internally, the
resurgence of dictatorial threats directly tied to the military. The
deepening crisis of the capitalist order is exposing the fundamental
political divisions between an internationalist revolutionary
position—the genuine Trotskyism represented by the International
Committee of the Fourth International—and the reactionary nationalist
perspectives of the pseudo-left.
*****
The traditions of the Brazilian Army are violently hostile to the
working class, with a record of multiple coup attempts, culminating in
the seizure of power in 1964 and the two subsequent decades of political
terror. One of the first acts of the military in power was the
persecution of trade union leaders and combative workers and the
imposition of state intervention over the unions, which deepened the
dictatorial policies of Getúlio Vargas’s 1937 Estado Novo.
*****
The military’s recognition of SindmetalSJC is a public confirmation that
the Morenoite trade union bureaucracy has fallen into line with the
role required by the bourgeois state in an era of war: the integral
subordination of the workers to the “patriotic interests” and sacrifices
demanded by war.
*****
This is not a uniquely Brazilian phenomenon, but rather a
characteristic shared by the trade union apparatuses in many countries,
including the United States. There the United Auto Workers bureaucracy
headed by Shawn Fain has offered its services in transitioning to a war
economy, extolled the union’s history in creating the World War II-era
“arsenal for democracy” and supported “strategic tariffs,” including
against Brazil itself.
In September 2022, the workers of Avibras,
one of the largest weapons manufacturers in Brazil, launched a strike in
response to the company’s entry into judicial recovery, with debts of
around 600 million reais (US$120 million), and the non-payment of wages.
The strike continued until last March 11, when SindmetalSJC signed an
agreement for the resumption of production. The agreement, celebrated by
the Morenoite bureaucracy as a victory, entailed the elimination of
half of the factory’s jobs. Hundreds of the 1,400 workers originally
employed by Avibras were forced to migrate or resort to informal work.
*****
The Morenoites at the head of SindmetalSJC try to sell their program
of building up the Brazilian war industry as a radical policy of
“defense of national sovereignty” and even of combating imperialism.
This is a thoroughgoing political fraud.
Far from constituting an
obstacle to imperialist domination, this nationalist program is bound to
deepen Brazil’s integration, as a semi-colonial country, into the war
interests of the imperialist powers. This political truth has been
clearly demonstrated by the Morenoites’ efforts to tie the prospects of
Avibras’s financial recovery to Brazil’s participation in the US-NATO
imperialist war against Russia in Ukraine.
*****
The Morenoites at the head of SindmetalSJC try to sell their program
of building up the Brazilian war industry as a radical policy of
“defense of national sovereignty” and even of combating imperialism.
This is a thoroughgoing political fraud.
Far from constituting an
obstacle to imperialist domination, this nationalist program is bound to
deepen Brazil’s integration, as a semi-colonial country, into the war
interests of the imperialist powers. This political truth has been
clearly demonstrated by the Morenoites’ efforts to tie the prospects of
Avibras’s financial recovery to Brazil’s participation in the US-NATO
imperialist war against Russia in Ukraine.
The International Committee of the Fourth International and its daily
publication, the World Socialist Web Site, are organizing the
International Online May Day Rally at 3pm US Eastern Time this Friday,
May 1, to provide a unified revolutionary socialist program to workers
around the globe in the struggle against imperialist war, dictatorship,
and austerity. Workers and young people have issued statements urging
the broadest participation in the event, which will feature speakers
from throughout the world.
A federal worker from Ontario said:
My name is Erik, and I fully support the World Socialist Web Site,
the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the
Fourth International’s drive to mobilize the working class in
revolutionary action. With the Trump administration and genocidal
Netanyahu regime’s flagrant attacks on Iran, the world lurches forward
toward total war between all the major parties. It is clear that the
capitalist ruling class does not operate in a manner conducive to the
flourishing of humanity, but rather takes steps to ensure a future for
no one but the wealthiest few. The rest of us are to be left to languish
in the misery incurred by a world ravaged by war, environmental
catastrophe and territorial domination, driven by an insatiable appetite
for profit.
This is not the world we deserve nor the one we have
to endure: through a united, international mobilization of the working
class we represent the greatest revolutionary force capable of standing
up to the crisis of capitalism and abolishing the plague of imperialism
that serves as its natural and inevitable expression. We will find no
allies or victories within the bourgeoisie, the trade union
bureaucracies or the multitude of pseudo-left parties looking to funnel
our political grievances back into the corpse of electoral politics. The
charge must be spearheaded by worker-led rank-and-file committees
guided by socialist thought and infused with revolutionary aspirations.
Reform is fantasy; revolution is survival.
*****
Shashwat, a student from Bihar, India in discussion with an SEP (Canada) member, wrote:
I hope my comrades in the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the World Socialist Web Site
(WSWS) are in good health and continue their determined struggle
against worldwide reaction. I express my solidarity with their efforts
to organize the International Online May Day Rally.
For many of
us, May Day stands as a reminder of the oppression and exploitation
inherent in capitalism, as well as the struggle and sacrifice of brave
working-class fighters. It teaches us that to effectively confront
capitalism, we must strive for its abolition, with revolutionary organizations serving as the necessary vehicles for this struggle. In
support of May Day, I stand with workers across the world in their fight
against oppression and tyranny, and for justice. Today, only a
socialist transformation of society can offer a lasting answer to war
and the broader degradation of social life. It is through such a
transformation that humanity and our planet can be freed from reaction,
superstition, hatred, and cruelty. A struggle grounded in solidarity
remains the only path forward—towards progress, scientific advancement,
peace, and, most importantly, liberation from exploitation and
oppression.
On university campuses, the crackdown on critical thought continues.
Sharp and legitimate criticism of Trump, of ICE, of Israel’s genocide,
of the illegal war against Iran ... any and all of this is now termed a
“disturbance,” a “disruption,” as though anything important has ever
been learned or accomplished except through “disturbance” and
“disruption.”
One skirmish in the ongoing war:
In February,
at the University of North Texas (UNT) in Denton, in the Dallas-Fort
Worth metroplex, officials canceled a solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based
artist Victor “MARKA27” Quiñonez, nine days after its opening.
The show, “Ni de Aqui, Ni de Allá”
(“Neither from here nor from there”), was on display at the
university’s main College of Visual Art & Design (CVAD) Gallery.
The Art Newspaper reports that
the exhibition was closed without advance notice, and its street-facing windows were covered with brown paper.
The
exhibition included large-scale translucent paleta sculptures embedded
with handcuffs and firearms, an illuminated paleta cart bearing the
phrase “U.S. Department of Stolen Land Security” and paintings
juxtaposing Indigenous iconography, pop cultural imagery and references
to contemporary border politics. A public reception had been scheduled
for 19 February and the exhibition was to remain on view until early
May.
The exhibition originated at the Boston University Art Galleries in September 2025
and
featured sculptures and mixed-media works from Quiñonez’s I.C.E. Scream
series, which include large sculptural paletas (Mexican popsicles) and
implicitly critique the violent enforcement activities of US Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (Ice).
The closing down of
the show is an obvious and blatant capitulation to ultra-right Texas
state authorities, who have gone on a rampage against any hint of social
opposition or left-wing ideas.
*****
Quiñonez’s publicist released a statement, which asserted in part that the exhibition’s
removal,
without transparent explanation, raises urgent questions about artistic
freedom, academic responsibility, and whose stories are permitted to
occupy institutional space...
Universities have historically
functioned as sites for dialogue, critical thinking, and the exchange of
complex ideas. The cancellation of this exhibition interrupts that
dialogue.
Faculty at the university, which has more
than 50,000 students, responded angrily to the exhibition’s closure.
Members of the CVAD addressed an open letter to UNT President Harrison
Keller “expressing concern about what they characterized as a lack of
transparency and the potential erosion of academic standards.”
*****
Students organized a candlelight
gathering outside the shut-down gallery. “Flowers, electric candles and
handwritten notes were placed on the floor beneath the papered-over
windows,” according to one report.
University officials have not publicly explained or justified the act of censorship. However, writes the Art Newspaper,
some
speculated that the decision was related to the shifting political
landscape for public higher education in Texas. Since the 2023 passage
of Senate Bill 17, diversity, equity and inclusion offices and
programming at public universities have been targeted as administrators
across the state have navigated heightened scrutiny over campus events
and exhibitions.
According to transcripts obtained by Glasstire, in Feburary
meetings, Karen Hutzel, the dean of CVAD, said that the exhibition’s
cancellation was the result of an “institutional directive” that came
from higher-ups.
She reportedly said that while CVAD has its own policies, these are ultimately superseded by the university’s authority.
The
disgraceful episode has not passed off quietly, to the credit of the
artist and the angry students and faculty. CBS News reported April 10
that a mobile billboard, mounted on the back of a truck driving around
the campus, “carries a five‑word message that has sparked conversation
among students.” It reads in large letters: “UNT ADMIN CENSORED
MARKA27’s ART.”
Quiñonez, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American
Civil Liberties Union organized the billboard campaign. A QR code links
to a statement from Quiñonez and shows images of the art removed from
the university gallery.
The university has not directly addressed
the mobile billboard. In a statement about the exhibition, UNT officials
told CBS News Texasthat “after careful review of multiple
considerations, the decision to conclude the agreement [with Boston
University] was made by university leadership due to concerns about the
potential for disruption to the educational environment and the possible
impact on university operations and resources.” Again, that dreadful
possibility, “disruption”!
On Monday, management at Aldi DX (the digital and IT arm of the ALDI SÜD
Group) announced that more than one in three jobs were being rationalized away at Mülheim an der Ruhr, exceeding the worst fears of
the workforce. After 400 employees lost their jobs last year, a further
1,150 posts are now to be cut. Of what was once a workforce of 4,300,
only 2,750 will remain by the end of 2027.
In recent weeks, the workers, who develop software for 7,500 Aldi Süd
branches on four continents, have shown their willingness to confront
management. On March 31, over 2,000 of them voted to establish an
electoral board to prepare for the first-ever election of a works
council.
In our last article,
we supported the workers’ combativeness while simultaneously warning
them not to rely on the election of a works council, but to
simultaneously found a rank-and-file action committee to participate in
the works council election and take up the struggle to defend jobs.
The
future works council will certainly include representatives of
candidate slates that want to regulate and, in fact, impose the drastic
job cuts in accordance with the Works Constitution Act – via so-called
“social plans” and 'job placement exchanges,' as Mülheim's Mayor Marc
Buchholz CDU (Christian Democratic Union) has already proposed. This
would mean giving up the fight to defend jobs before it had even begun.
What
would be the consequence? Many of the mostly younger workers have only
just started families or acquired a home; in other words, they have
linked their future to their job at Aldi DX. And this was done in good
faith, as the IT subsidiary had expanded only a few years ago,
recruiting highly sought-after IT experts and specialists from all over
the world and offering relatively good working conditions.
Now
that has come to an end. This is a blow for all those affected; for
international co-workers, it is a double blow. Their residence permit in
Germany is usually linked to their job, often involving an “EU Blue
Card.” If they do not find another well-paid job within three to six
months, their residence permit expires.
*****
From the beginning of the year to the end of April 2026, around 100,000
IT job cuts have already been reported worldwide, with the majority
occurring in the US. Oracle is cutting up to 30,000 jobs, Amazon around
16,000, Meta 8,000, Microsoft up to 9,000, Snap and Disney around 1,000
each. But Aldi DX is not an isolated case in Germany either. For
example, insurance company Ergo, a subsidiary of Munich RE, has
announced the slashing of 1,000 jobs due to AI.
AI is now taking over large parts of software development and
programming – without needing breaks, rest periods or holidays. AI
generates vast amounts of code, which then only needs to be checked and
post-processed by a few experts. For them, the work pressure increases
noticeably, while the rest are sent into the wilderness.
*****
On Monday, the mood of the workforce was at a low point immediately after receiving the bad news. Many with whom we spoke were shocked and dismayed.
Aldi DX has assured them it would avoid compulsory redundancies, also to save costs. Employees who are to leave will be offered individual redundancy packages. Those who do not live in the Ruhr area, due to the 100 percent work-from-home regulation that was valid until last autumn, will also be under pressure. For months, they have had to come from Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and other cities nationwide to the office in Mülheim for two days a week.
*****
The attacks on IT employees at Aldi are the result of a global crisis
of the capitalist system, in which AI is systematically being used to
destroy jobs, intensify exploitation and increase profits.
At the
top of society, the power and wealth of a super-rich financial
aristocracy are growing, while the ruling class everywhere is acting
aggressively against the working class. Consequently, workplace disputes
must be closely linked to the struggle against the capitalist profit
system.
The Trump administration and the German government under
Friedrich Merz are reacting to the crisis of capitalism with an
aggressive policy of rearmament and war. Germany is rearming on a scale
not seen since Hitler, financing the war against Russia in Ukraine and
preparing for new wars.
This policy is being financed by
destroying jobs and imposing social cuts. The defense of jobs and
conditions at Aldi DX must be seen in this context. Just as the ruling
class is once again taking up its reactionary traditions, the working
class must link up with its revolutionary, socialist traditions and
counterpose its interests to the profit maximization of the capitalists
and shareholders.
Labour-run Birmingham City Council (BCC) leader John Cotton announced
Monday that a negotiated settlement was “now within sight” to end the
15-month dispute with the city’s refuse workers.
Cotton walked
away from negotiations last July. His return to the negotiating table
represents a rapprochement with Unite to finalise an agreement on the
authority’s terms—with the union leadership being relied upon to spin
the sellout.
Unite’s April 27 press release described an “improved offer based on
the ‘ballpark deal’” agreed in arbitration talks last year. What is
being presented as a breakthrough are reportedly lump sum payments per
worker of £16,000. This is offered in return for ending resistance to
pay cuts, the cull of jobs and overhaul of terms and conditions.
Unite
General Secretary Sharon Graham claimed, “The move made today by the
leader of the council is a vindication of the bin workers’ struggle for a
decent deal.”
This is a fraud. Bin workers launched their strike
to oppose the abolition of the safety-critical role of Waste Collection
and Recycling Officers (WRCO), affecting around 150 bin loaders. Graham
repeatedly told the press she was backing members who faced overnight
pay cuts of up to £8,000. Yet the “compensation” payments eliminate
these jobs permanently, entrenching long-term loss of earnings amounting
to tens of thousands of pounds per worker over the coming years.
The elimination of the WRCO role is designed to cut crew sizes
by a quarter. Downgrading has been extended to bin lorry drivers, who
walked out alongside loaders and have suffered similar attacks on pay
and conditions, in some cases up to £10,000.
Unite now describes
the proposed one-off payments as a “decent deal following their job
evaluation regrading.” This is a whitewash of methods deployed by the
Labour authority to enforce the process Graham previously described as
“fire and rehire.”
*****
The Unite bureaucracy is preparing to sacrifice bin workers to stabilize the Starmer government and preserve its own position as an
industrial enforcer.
On April 1, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that
Amazon must negotiate with the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which has 5,000
members at the JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York.
According to the ruling, by refusing to negotiate or even recognize the
ALU, Amazon “has engaged in unfair labor practices.”
The
Teamsters, with which the ALU has been affiliated since 2024, called the
NLRB decision a “historic victory.” In fact, it is anything but. The
enforcement of the decision is in question, and it has not changed the
hazardous conditions and low pay for which Amazon is notorious.
The NLRB ruling came four years to the day since warehouse workers
voted to join the ALU, becoming the first Amazon workers in the US to
unionize. Workers took a stand in order to fight one of the world’s
largest corporations, which in the eyes of millions is a poster child
for high-tech sweatshops and, through founder and centi-billionaire Jeff
Bezos, massive inequality. It came out of a genuine upsurge in what has
proven before and since to be one of the most rebellious workforces at
any Amazon facility.
*****
ALU was founded by Chris Smalls, a former assistant manager at JFK8,
in 2021. Smalls had been fired by Amazon after he organized walkouts at
the warehouse in March of 2020 to protest the unsafe conditions during
the opening weeks of the coronavirus pandemic.
The
actions that Smalls and other workers organized were part of a broader,
worldwide spontaneous rebellion which forced temporary shutdowns that
spring and summer. The same month, autoworkers, acting in defiance of
attempts by union officials to keep them on the jobs, carried out
wildcat strikes which spread from Italy and Spain to Canada and the
United States. Other walkouts, organized from below and often without
official union approval, also took place in meatpacking plants,
shipyards and other industries that year.
The World Socialist Web Site and
the International Committee of the Fourth International insisted that
these rebellions had to take organized form if they were to advance the
interests of the working class. Workers had to seize the initiative out
of the hands of the labor bureaucracy. The sacrifice of workers’ lives
to profit had to be answered with a movement of the working class as a
whole, directed against the corporate oligarchy. Workers had to insist
on the right to stop production if conditions were unsafe, to control
safety protocols and to establish workers’ control over production
itself.
The widespread refusal of the union bureaucracy to organize strikes to
force the shutdown of unsafe industry was a particularly obscene
expression of its integration, over decades, into corporate management.
One contract after another had been used to sign off on the destruction
of millions of jobs, enforce speedup and concessions, and block or
isolate strikes. An organic movement of the working class
threatened to disrupt the bureaucracy’s relations with management, the
Democratic Party and the six-figure salaries financed by workers’ dues
money. For that reason, these forces opposed every independent
initiative from below.
*****
For years, the established unions had tried to gain a foothold at Amazon
without success. The year before the ALU victory, the Retail, Wholesale
and Department Store Union (RWDSU) suffered a debacle at Amazon’s
Bessemer, Alabama facility. This was not because Amazon workers
were complacent or lacked a fighting spirit. Rather, after decades of
betrayals the established unions were unable to generate real support
because their aim was not to organize a genuine struggle, but to
increase their dues base and establish labor-management relations with
Amazon as they had with other employers.
The ALU won support because it presented itself as something
different. It turned heads because it was identified with rebellion from
below, especially given the role of Smalls in the 2020 walkouts. It
presented itself as an “independent, democratic” alternative to the
existing bureaucratically controlled unions, over which workers exercise
little to no influence. The ALU victory came as a shock to the
political establishment, which had largely ignored the campaign. The
result was a sign of the deep-going alienation and hatred felt by
workers toward all official institutions. Workers believed the ALU could
be an instrument of their own control over conditions on the shop
floor. But real independence means more than a lack of formal
affiliation from the Democrats or the established trade union
bureaucracy. It means a new strategy, a new political framework based on
the struggle for workers’ power and the mobilization of the working
class on the basis of its own distinct and independent interests.
*****
The ALU, in spite of its origins and its initial formal independence,
did not have such a program. The struggle remained on the terrain of
trade-unionism in the broad political sense: seeking recognition,
bargaining rights and institutional legitimacy within the existing
order, rather than developing the independent struggle of workers
against that order.
To be sure, the ALU proposed to do this in a more rank-and-file and
“democratic” way than the existing unions. But rank-and-file and
democratic organization are impossible when separated from the struggle
for workers’ power. Whatever the intentions of its leaders, a grouping
that avoids the issue of political independence inevitably ends up
serving the established capitalist order. This was confirmed with
remarkable speed.
*****
From that point on, there was a dramatic change in the union’s
fortunes. Election campaigns increasingly relied on newfound political
and financial allies, Democratic Party officials and support from the
White House rather than the independent mobilization of workers
themselves. This rapidly alienated workers. The ALU suffered a
decisive election loss at the adjacent LDJ5 sorting center just one
month later in May 2022. The union subsequently lost another election at
the ALB1 warehouse in Schodack, New York, and twice withdrew petitions
for an election at the ONT8 fulfillment center in Moreno Valley,
California.
This was a disaster for workers at JFK8. Amazon saw no reason to give in
and dug in its heels, refusing to bargain. Instead of expanding the
struggle outward—mobilizing Amazon workers nationally and
internationally around wages, speedup, surveillance, injuries and
inequality—the focus shifted toward legal appeals to the NLRB and the
courts.
Following these setbacks, financial support from the trade unions began
to dry up, and the union went into debt in 2023. Factional disputes
emerged into the open. Facing increasing financial difficulties, the ALU
leadership looked to the Teamsters to bail it out. In June 2024, JFK8
workers voted to affiliate with the Teamsters.
The Teamsters had already blocked a strike by 340,000 UPS workers and
were helping management carry out one of the deepest rounds of job cuts
in the company’s history. But they gained a “rank-and-file” cover
through the ALU affiliation. The Teamsters limited strike of Amazon
workers in the area in 2024 deliberately excluded JFK8 workers.
The
trade union bureaucracy long ago became an instrument of management not
because of corruption alone, but because it defends a nationalist and
pro-capitalist program fundamentally incompatible with workers’
interests in the present epoch. Bureaucracy is not an accident, but the
necessary product of an organization that rejects the independent
political mobilization of the working class. The ALU’s joining of the
Teamsters was the logical outcome of this contradiction.
*****
Workers need organizations based on a fundamentally different
principle: not bargaining for a place within the existing order, but the
independent democratic control of struggle by workers themselves.
The
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees is leading
this struggle. The IWA-RFC is fighting to establish rank-and-file
committees in every factory, warehouse and workplace, and unite Amazon
and other workers in the US with their class brothers and sisters
internationally.
These committees, made up of the most
class-conscious and militant workers, will counter-pose the will of
shopfloor workers to the will of corporate management and its enforcers
in the trade union bureaucracy. They will organize collective action to
fight management abuse, unsafe working conditions and speed up and job
cuts.
Rank-and-file committees will establish lines of
communication between workers in every department and facility and
across Amazon and other logistics companies throughout the United States
and internationally. They will educate workers on the rich history of
the class struggle in the US and internationally, and the decisive role
of socialist consciousness for the liberation of the working class from
capitalist exploitation. Most decisively, rank-and-file
committees, organized under the leadership of the IWA-RFC will connect
the fight against Amazon to the fight against war, dictatorship and the
capitalist oligarchy as a whole.
Normally, once a defendant surrenders to law enforcement to face charges
in another state, they appear before a judge who describes the counts
against them and then hears arguments over whether the defendant should
be detained. Comey is expected to appear in court in North Carolina at a
later date. Comey is being defended by attorneys Michael Dreeben and
Patrick Fitzgerald. Dreeben told the court the prosecution is meant to
“punish and deter” those who criticize Trump, and Fitzgerald said
Comey’s team would pursue claims of “vindictive and selective
prosecution.”
*****
A declination memo is an internal prosecutorial document explaining
why prosecutors decided against bringing charges in a case. It typically
summarizes the reasons why a case was declined.
In the Comey
case, the defense has argued that such a memo may exist and could show
prosecutors initially recommended against charging him, which would
support the claim of vindictive prosecution.
The indictment
against Comey centers on a social media post from last year showing
seashells arranged on beach sand spelling out “86 47,” which the Justice
Department has portrayed as a threat to harm or kill President Trump.
According
to the DOJ’s charging theory, a “reasonable observer” familiar with the
context would interpret the meme as a serious threat against the
president. This kind of legal reasoning would be laughable if it were
not being used by the president to target a political enemy and attack
fundamental democratic rights.
According to Comey, he thought the seashell image was a political
message, not a threat. He has said he “didn’t realize some people
associate those numbers with violence,” that he “opposes violence of any
kind,” and took the Instagram post down.
Prosecutors claim the
numbers amounted to a threat because “86” can colloquially mean to
remove or eliminate someone. The leap from an ambiguous social media
post to the allegation of attempted murder is obviously concocted for
political reasons. A conviction on the charges would carry penalties of
up to 10 years in prison for each charge.
The essential issue the
prosecution is trying to bury beneath the barrage of media
sensationalism over the Instagram meme is proving that Comey not only
threatened but intended to harm the president.
*****
The prosecution of Comey is part of a campaign by the White House to
use prosecutorial powers to punish those involved in enforcing criminal
accountability for Trump’s January 6 coup attempt at the US Capitol.
Comey has been targeted because he is a longtime enemy whom Trump wants
humiliated and imprisoned.
The clash between Trump and Comey dates
to the president’s first term, when Trump fired Comey in 2017. The
former FBI director resisted being subordinated to the White House and
was part of the investigations into Trump’s alleged, but never proven,
“collusion” with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential
elections.
*****
James Comey is a trusted veteran of the state apparatus and a former
FBI director who spent his career defending the capitalist state, the
electronic surveillance system, and the repressive machinery used to
attack democratic rights and uphold the exploitation of the working
class. He was nominated to head the FBI by Barack Obama and was approved
by the Senate in a 93-1 vote on July 29, 2013. Comey’s record is that
of a ruthless guardian of the interests of the ruling elite.
He
was previously indicted in 2025 on charges of lying to Congress and
obstruction, but that case was later dismissed because the prosecution
was built on the unlawful appointment of Lindsey Halligan as interim US
attorney. Halligan, a former personal attorney of the president, was
installed by Trump without any lawful procedure required for such a
role.
*****
A court ruling voided the cases against both Comey and New York
Attorney General Letitia James. The collapse of these cases confirms how
politicized the prosecutorial enterprise has been in the Trump White
House.
Trump’s second term has featured a widening campaign of
threats and prosecutions against his enemies, including former National
Security Advisor John Bolton. While the earlier cases against Comey and
James were tossed out, Bolton’s prosecution is still in process.
In
August 2025, FBI agents searched Bolton’s home and office, and in
October 2025 a federal grand jury in Maryland indicted him on 18 counts
alleging unlawful transmission and retention of national defense
information. Bolton surrendered, pleaded not guilty and was released
while the case moved forward.
*****
The ongoing abuse of DOJ is one example of Trump running roughshod
over democratic and constitutional norms in the drive toward a
presidential dictatorship. The issue is not a single indictment but the
use of the power of the state as an instrument of targeted repression,
which is a hallmark of authoritarian rule. It is one form of the
implementation of the Führer Principle, i.e., the “leader” has
unquestioned and absolute authority above all written law.
Trump
has disfigured democratic government by pardoning political allies and
convicted rioters while seeking criminal punishment for political
opponents. He has used his pardon and clemency powers to free roughly
1,500-plus January 6 defendants in one sweep, many of whom were
convicted and sentenced in jury trials, while also commuting the
sentences of 14 leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
Among
those set free were Stewart Rhodes, Enrique Tarrio, Kelly Meggs, Roberto
Minuta, Ethan Nordean, Jeremy Bertino, Joseph Biggs and Dominic
Pezzola. The release of violent far-right and fascist individuals proves
that criminality is being normalized in the halls of state power.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer survived the latest parliamentary
confrontation over the Mandelson/Epstein affair this week, but his
position is increasingly untenable.
In a House of Commons
statement Monday, Starmer defended his handling of his appointment of
Peter Mandelson as UK Ambassador to Washington, maintaining that it had
been carried out with “full due process”.
Before handing Mandelson
the job in December 2024, Starmer was fully aware of his intimate
connections with the billionaire child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein,
including Mandelson’s continued relationship with the paedophile even
after he was convicted and jailed.
As more revelations came out, leading to Mandelson’s arrest, Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney resigned in February this year to take the heat off the prime minister.
This month, the Guardian
revealed that in January last year the UK Security Vetting Service
informed the Foreign Office that risk factors involving Mandelson meant
his clearance for one of the most critical posts in the state apparatus
should be denied.
Starmer found another scapegoat: Sir Olly
Robbins, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign, Commonwealth and
Development Office (FCDO), and head of the diplomatic service, who was
sacked. The prime minister insisted he was not told of Mandelson failing
vetting until as late as April 14 this year.
This set the stage for Robbins, who appeared last week, his predecessor Philip Barton, and McSweeney to be called to testify before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
Robbins
worsened problems for Starmer, telling the committee that FCDO
officials were under “constant pressure” from Downing Street over the
decision to appoint Mandelson.
*****
Starmer has been given a very short breathing space. The May 7 local
elections are predicted to see Labour fall to as low as fourth place in
some polls, with a staggering loss of up to 1,850 seats. The
Conservatives will also suffer heavy losses, up to 600 seats.
The
main beneficiaries will be the far-right Reform UK, who are set to win
up to 1,550 seats, and the Greens, who could gain 500.
How brazen
the discussion is in ruling circles of Starmer being removed was
revealed in the leaked comments of Sir Christian Turner, Mandelson’s
successor as US Ambassador.
The Financial Times revealed
this week that Turner, speaking to a group of UK sixth-form students
visiting the US in early February, had told them it was “extraordinary”
that the Epstein scandal had “brought down a senior member of the royal
family [Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor], a British ambassador to Washington,
potentially the prime minister, and yet here in the US, it really
hasn’t touched anybody”.
In an extraordinary breach of protocol,
addressing Starmer’s premiership, he told the youth that “at one stage
he was pretty clearly on the ropes” and his future looked “quite touch
and go”.
*****
For the working class, the issue is not the personal fate of Starmer,
or his replacement by another right-wing Labourite—whether parading as a
“soft-left”, or a Blairite such as Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves or
Yvette Cooper. None of these forces will change the fact that Labour is a
right-wing, pro-business government of austerity and militarism.
The
central danger is that, in the absence of a movement of the working
class, based on a socialist programme and independent of any faction of
the ruling elite, the main beneficiary of the hostility to the Starmer
government to date is Reform UK. Nigel Farage’s party has been able to
channel discontent behind an anti-immigrant agenda as it prepares to step up the offensive against workers to fund huge increases in military spending.
There is no parliamentary solution to this crisis, with no other party, including the Greens—who
present themselves as a left-wing alternative—representing a genuine
alternative. The central issue facing workers and youth is building
their own party, the Socialist Equality Party.
The Unite trade union, representing 230 Doncaster First Bus drivers
striking for pay parity with drivers in nearby Sheffield, has agreed to
suspend industrial action. This so union officials can meet with
management under the remit of the arbitration service, Acas.
After
initially escalating the dispute at the Leger Way depot, Unite
officials are now seeking to shut it down through closed-door talks with
First.
After
eight days of strike action since March 28, Unite confirmed further
stoppages for April 27 and 29 and May 1. However, on Tuesday the union
announced that the May Day walkout was cancelled.
Regional officer
Christian Ratcliffe declared: “The employer has agreed to a meeting
with Unite and Acas. Therefore, we have suspended strike action this
Friday for negotiations,” adding that further action on May 6 depends on
the talks.
The cancellation of action set for international workers’ day by the union speaks volumes.
The May Day strike would have provided a platform to appeal beyond their depot—to bus workers and the wider working class.
First
has resorted to strike-breaking operations and used a gagging clause in
drivers’ contracts to deny them the right to speak publicly. Unite has
not opposed these methods. Instead, it tells workers not to broaden
their struggle but to place faith in the officials accommodating the
company’s suppression of wages and rights.
*****
The shutdown of May Day action must be seen alongside the secret
talks Unite officials staged with Reform UK over reaching a similar
sellout agreement were the far-right party to win control of Birmingham
council from Labour in the May 7 local elections.
Bus drivers in
Doncaster, bin workers in Birmingham, and other workers in struggle are
not engaged in isolated disputes but confront the attacks of the
corporate and financial elite—and are part of an international struggle.
No solidarity action is organized by the trade unions because
they are dominated by an apparatus acting as an arm of government and
corporations—demobilising the class struggle and opposing any effort to
unite workers across sectors and national borders. Ending this isolation
requires workers establishing democratic structures under the control
of the rank-and-file.
Warning signs of a sellout are evident,
with Unite officials entering talks when First has not offered a single
penny after drivers rejected a 7 percent pay offer backdated to January.
First drivers in Doncaster earn £14.15 an hour, compared to Sheffield
drivers £15.30 (rising to only £15.60 last month). Trainees
receive much less). Such disparities between depots and regions are
used to suppress wages across the sector, which remain below the
national median.
*****
The government’s Bus Services Act enables franchising, under which
private operators run services under contract while councils set routes,
timetables and fares. In South Yorkshire, the Mayoral Combined
Authority proposes a hybrid “South Yorkshire People’s Network,”
scheduled to begin in Doncaster in 2027.
The model guarantees
fixed payments to private operators while limiting flexibility on costs,
making profits increasingly dependent on the margin between subsidy and
spending on wages, stock and infrastructure.
*****
The central concern of First and other operators is to prevent a
unified fightback that could challenge the privatisation model—relying
on Unite’s isolation tactics and its alignment with the government.
The WSWS has urged drivers to form a rank-and-file committee, warning the struggle cannot be entrusted to Unite officials.
A
genuine escalation of the dispute cannot remain confined to a single
depot. The demand for pay parity raises the need for a coordinated
struggle across depots, companies and regions. By setting up a
rank-and-file committee, Doncaster drivers can conduct such a struggle.
This
requires clear, non-negotiable demands: full pay parity across all
depots; a shorter working week with no loss of pay; predictable shift
patterns; abolition of tier contracts; and mass recruitment to address
chronic understaffing.
Such a struggle cannot be left to a
union apparatus that has tolerated gagging orders and intimidation and
repeatedly isolated disputes. Leadership must be taken into the hands of
democratically elected rank-and-file committees to ensure full
transparency and control over negotiations.
Workers must demand
the removal of the gagging order, to assert their right to speak openly
to each other, to other workers, and to the public.
Rank-and-file
committees would enable coordination across First depots in South
Yorkshire, linking workers across the wider FirstGroup network and with
drivers at Stagecoach, Arriva and others facing similar attacks.
FirstGroup
is operating nationally, shifting drivers and resources to break
strikes. Workers must respond with coordinated action across depots and
companies.
The fight for pay parity is inseparable from
opposition to a system subordinating transport to corporate profit, as
does the franchise model. The alternative is genuine public ownership
under democratic working-class control.
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.
