The US military seized a large oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela
on Wednesday, a brazen act of piracy that marks a major escalation in
the Trump administration’s war preparations against the South American
country.
Speaking at the White House, Trump announced the
operation in the language of a gangster: “We’ve just seized a tanker on
the coast of Venezuela, large tanker, very large, largest one ever
seized, actually.” When asked what would happen to the oil, Trump
replied, “Well, we keep it, I guess.”
*****
The seizure comes just one day after Trump told Politico that
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s “days are numbered” and refused to
rule out sending US troops into the country. Trump has also threatened
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, declaring that “Petro is next.” The
administration has authorized CIA covert operations inside Venezuela and
has developed plans for targeting Maduro and seizing control of the
country’s oil fields.
*****
The seizure must be understood in the context of the Trump
administration’s recently published National Security Strategy. The
33-page document, released on December 4, explicitly establishes a goal
of “restoring American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” while
denying “non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or
other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital
assets” in the region.
The seizure of Venezuelan oil makes clear
that Trump’s claim that he is intervening in Latin America to combat
drug smuggling is a transparent fraud. In reality, Trump is seeking to
cement US control over Latin America as a power base for war with China.
The tanker seizure takes place amid a series of drone and missile
strikes against civilian boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that have
killed at least 87 people since September. The administration claims,
without providing public evidence, that the boats are smuggling drugs.
Since September 2, the United States has launched more than 22 such
strikes. These strikes are war crimes under international law.
In
the September 2 strikes that murdered 11 unarmed civilians, Secretary of
War Pete Hegseth issued an explicit verbal order to “kill everybody,”
the Washington Post reported. Survivors of the initial attack,
who waved for rescue not knowing they had been targeted, were
deliberately killed in a second strike—a clear violation of the Geneva
Conventions’ protections for the shipwrecked.
China currently purchases roughly 80 percent of Venezuela’s oil exports.
The seizure of the Skipper, which according to TankerTrackers.com was
carrying approximately 1.1 million barrels of Venezuelan crude, is aimed
at strangling this trade and devastating Venezuela’s economy. US
officials said they expected additional seizures in the coming weeks.
The tanker seizure came on the same day the House of Representatives
passed a record $900 billion defense policy bill by a vote of 312-112.
The legislation massively expands US nuclear weapons spending, including
funding for the so-called “Golden Dome” missile defense system. The
bill includes provisions that would withhold 25 percent of Hegseth’s
travel budget until he discloses all orders authorizing the boat strikes
and releases unedited video of the operations—an absurd triviality that
amounts to a minor inconvenience for a man clearly guilty of carrying
out war crimes.
*****
The Pentagon has deployed more than 15,000 troops, a dozen warships,
including the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, scores of aircraft
and thousands of personnel to the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. This
represents the largest US military mobilization in the Caribbean since
the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
A new report
from the World Inequality Lab, the product of four years of
comprehensive research, finds that economic inequality on a world scale
continues to increase by leaps and bounds, with vast wealth concentrated
in a tiny handful of billionaires and centi-millionaires.
*****
In terms of income, the report finds levels of inequality that defy
comprehension. According to its analysis, “the top 0.1% earn as much as
the entire bottom 50%. This means that a group of people no larger than
the population of Singapore takes in the same income as half of the
world’s population.” At the very summit, “the top one-in-a-million
(about 5,600 people) earn, on average, one-eighth of what the bottom 50%
together receive. In other words, a small concert arena’s worth of
individuals has an annual income comparable to that of billions of
people.”
The brutal oppression of the vast majority of humanity by a handful
of imperialist powers was analyzed more than a century ago by V. I.
Lenin in his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
The World Inequality Report makes clear that while the mechanisms have
evolved, the underlying relations of exploitation have intensified.
As
the report explains, “While colonial powers once extracted resources to
transform deficits into surpluses, today’s advanced economies achieve
similar results through the financial system.” Poorer nations are
compelled to transfer resources outward—via debt service, profit
repatriation, and financial flows—“constrained in their ability to
invest in education, healthcare, and infrastructure.”
It is a
staggering fact that these outflows amount to over 1 percent of world
GDP, “approximately three times more than development aid flowing in the
opposite direction.”
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer within countries as well,
with the report noting that in nearly every region of the world, the top
1 percent is wealthier than the bottom 90 percent combined.
*****
Nowhere in the 200-page document from the World Inequality Lab do the
words “capitalism” or “socialism” appear. But what emerges from the
data presented, however, is the clear and unanswerable case for the
expropriation of the capitalist oligarchy.
Under
the capitalist system, some 56,000 billionaires and centi-millionaires
control the fate of the 8 billion human beings who inhabit this planet.
Their wealth, the product of the collective labor of humanity, must be
confiscated, and the global economy reorganized to serve human needs,
not private profit.
*****
While the inequality report lays out a series of reform proposals,
such as taxing the wealthy and pouring resources into education,
healthcare and other social programs, it is silent on why such policies
have been repudiated by the ruling classes of every capitalist country.
In response to a deepening crisis of the capitalist system, the ruling
elite has launched a war on every social gain won in bitter struggle by
workers in the 20th century.
The report acknowledges that
taxation of the super-rich has collapsed, which “not only undermines tax
justice; it deprives societies of the resources needed for education,
healthcare and climate action.
In other words, the control of
society by the financial oligarchy (another word that does not appear in
the 200-page report) is not merely unfair. It is the principal obstacle
to the functioning of a humane and civilized society, depriving society
of resources for necessary services and funneling them into the pockets
of the wealthy.
The goal of the report appears to be to convince sections of the
ruling elite to make reforms while there is still time. “Progressive
taxation is therefore crucial,” the report says, because it “strengthens
the legitimacy of fiscal systems by ensuring that those with the
greatest means contribute their fair share.”
But the response of
the ruling class to the growth of opposition, to the emergence of
socialist consciousness and class struggle, is the turn to dictatorship
and fascism. The reality is that democracy is incompatible with a social
order in which a tiny fraction of the population controls the vast bulk
of wealth and resources.
*****
The oligarchs will not be persuaded to relinquish their wealth
through polite appeals, as proposed by Sanders, Mamdani and their
international counterparts. What is required is a mass political
movement of the international working class to abolish capitalism and
take political power. This means the expropriation of the oligarchy. The
fortunes of the billionaires must be seized, the corporations placed
under democratic control and the global economy reorganized—not for
private gain, but to meet human needs.
The fight for equality is
the fight for socialism. It requires the building of a revolutionary
leadership, rooted in the working class, and armed with a scientific
understanding of the crisis of capitalism. We urge all workers and young
people outraged by the injustice of the present system to join the
Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth
International, the world party of socialist revolution.
Sixty-four years after Tanzania formally cast off the political yoke
of British imperialism, the population was forced to mark Tuesday’s
Independence Day under conditions resembling a state of siege.
Instead
of the usual public celebrations, parades, cultural gatherings and
popular festivities, the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) government unleashed
military-police repression. Armored vehicles and soldiers occupied road
junctions and government buildings, blocking traffic from entering city centers. Tanzania’s state house, the official residence of President
Samia Suluhu Hassan, was heavily fortified.
The government ordered civilians to remain indoors, leaving streets
deserted and shops shuttered. Fuel stations were closed and public
transport suspended. Access to social media was severely restricted,
with users struggling to share content on platforms such as Facebook,
WhatsApp, and Instagram. Police helicopters circled ominously over major
cities.
The immediate pretext for Tuesday’s repression was the announcement of
anti-government protests, organized online by Gen-Z activists to
coincide with Independence Day. The CCM regime criminalized the planned
demonstrations outright, offering the ludicrous claim that it had
cancelled the December 9 celebrations to “save money.”
*****
Today, the CCM’s response exposes the deep fear of the Tanzanian ruling
class over a renewed eruption of anger following the October 29 election
crackdown, one of the bloodiest episodes in post-independence African
history.
President Hassan’s one-candidate race, crowned with the ludicrous
official result of 98 percent, provoked mass anger. During a five-day
internet blackout, and as hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of
workers and youth, poured into the streets of major cities and towns,
security forces launched a nationwide killing spree. Death toll
estimates range from 700 to as many as 3,000. More than 2,000 people
were arrested, and hundreds remain charged with treason, facing the
death penalty.
Footage verified by the BBC and CNN showed bodies lying in the streets
and piled up outside hospitals. Police conducted door-to-door raids,
dragging young men from their homes and executing them.
*****
Imperialist powers are maneuvering amidst the crisis, each seeking to
exploit the collapse of bourgeois rule to its advantage. Seventeen
western governments, including Britain, Germany, France, Canada, and the
EU, issued a joint statement expressing regret over the loss of life
and urging the Tanzanian security forces to exercise “maximum
restraint.”
Such appeals drip with hypocrisy. These are the same
governments arming and financing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, supporting
the Saudi monarchy that saws up journalists in its consulates, backing
Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and providing billions of euros
in weaponry to the Ukrainian regime to deploy the country’s youth
against Russia. Their sudden concern for Tanzanian “fundamental
freedoms” is motivated by the scramble for resources on a continent
where China has made substantial inroads.
US Senator Jim Risch, a hardline anti-China hawk, welcomed a State
Department review of U.S.–Tanzania relations last week, seeking to shift
Tanzania from China’s orbit and disrupt Beijing’s extraction of
minerals across Africa via Dar es Salaam port.
*****
Transnational corporations are plundering Tanzania’s resources, while
the government imposes staggering levels of repression against its own
population. Hassan’s anti-colonial posturing is a fraud. She waves the
nationalist flag, accusing protestors of being pawns of the West and
denouncing Western powers as “colonizers” to justify internal
crackdowns. But her government acts on behalf of these same imperialist
powers.
The CCM regime has long been a tool of imperialism. Julius Nyerere
upheld capitalist social relations and suppressed independent
working-class organization. His African socialism was a form of
bourgeois nationalism that could not transcend the colonial borders or
the economic dependency inherited from imperialism. Nyerere’s project
remained tied to and sustained by Western aid.
Trotsky’s theory of
permanent revolution demonstrated that in belated capitalist countries,
the national bourgeoisie is incapable of resolving the fundamental
tasks of democracy, economic development, or genuine liberation. Its
fear of the working class and subordination to imperialism force it
inevitably toward dictatorship. CCM’s evolution, from Nyerere through
John Pombe Magufuli to Hassan, is confirmation of this historical law.
*****
The youth-led protests, though courageous, cannot succeed without a
revolutionary leadership that unifies the struggles of workers, young
people, and the rural poor into a conscious political movement against
capitalism and imperialism.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein is a visually imaginative work to some
extent, with a number of urgent and disturbing sequences and an overall
gravitas, but its conceptions in the end fail to rise above the
relatively pedestrian and predictable. At its weakest, it may encourage
an attitude toward science that has potentially harmful implications
under present-day conditions.
“Frankenstein,” of course, has an extensive and intensely diverse
history both as a specific artistic work and a complex of imagery, with
its innumerable (generally very loose!) film and television adaptations,
the first coming out in 1910 (made by the Edison Studios). According to
one source, an astonishing total of 433 feature films (including Mel
Brooks’ wonderful Young Frankenstein), 212 short films, 85
television series and 340 television episodes feature some version or
interpretation of the “Frankenstein monster” character.
Also remarkably, Mary Shelley began writing the novel, about an
ambitious scientist who gives the “spark of life” to a creature composed
of various body parts and then regrets his action, when she was 18 and
completed it when she was 19. The work emerged from a personal,
political and artistic hothouse of extraordinary dimensions....
*****
Although adapting to modern moods and attitudes, del Toro sees himself
as Shelley’s “representative in 2025,” aligning his view of monsters as
mirrors of human imperfection, morality and emotion with her view of
Victor [Frankenstein, the scientist,] as a Miltonian Satan (Paradise Lost) or a Prometheus
defying the Gods. The filmmaker highlights the novel’s brutal
tenderness, using neo-Gothic visuals and practical effects to try and
bring forward its terror without straying into stereotypical horror
territory.
*****
Del Toro creates a new ending, setting forgiveness and redemption at
the center of things, in place of Shelley’s bleaker, unresolved
conclusion. He alters relationships and characters such as Elizabeth,
and chooses to root scientific interest in personal/childhood trauma
rather than humanity’s insatiable quest for knowledge—and yet the
director insists these changes honor the essence of Shelley’s
narratives. This is questionable.
Del Toro is free to interpret Frankenstein as
he likes, but the suggestion that he has established some sort of
continuity with Shelley’s most pressing concerns deserves to be
challenged.
*****
[A] love of and fascination with knowledge is largely absent in del
Toro’s work. Victor’s pursuit of science tends to be vengeful, bitter
and violent in the new film.
Mary Shelley did convey fears about the uncontrolled or arrogant use
of new technologies, and the possibility of their employment without
proper consideration for their broader consequences, but that is a
legitimate matter, which also finds expression in films such as Oppenheimer.
She
urges the Enlightenment scientist not to delude himself about the scope
and consequences of his activity, and insists Victor owes a moral duty
to his “offspring,” the sentient being he creates. Del Toro, however,
shifts the main “sin” to emotional denial—the chilly, even sadistic
refusal of grief and love—and focuses on cycles of trauma and
dysfunctional parent‑child bonds.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is fundamentally a cautionary tale
about the responsibilities of scientific creation and the existential
isolation of both genius and outcast.
*****
Shelley was well aware of, and genuinely interested in, the
cutting‑edge experiments of her time, including galvanism and attempts
to resuscitate the dead or apparently dead, and she weaves these ideas
into Victor’s studies. Her depiction of Victor’s early excitement about
“unfolding the mysteries of creation” reflects contemporary optimism
that science could transform human life, showing that curiosity itself
is not the problem.
The historical and intellectual setting in which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein is
a dense one. She was associated not only with Percy Shelley, an early
socialist in all but name, but the troublemaking Lord Byron and other
intellectuals of a radical bent.
In their essay, “Shelley and
Socialism,” Edward and Eleanor Marx-Aveling (Marx’s daughter) explain
that Percy Shelley “was the child of the French Revolution,” but came to
maturity during the period of the furious response of the European
ruling classes to the threat represented by that event:
Throughout
Europe in the earlier part of this century reaction was in full swing.
In England there were trials for blasphemy, trials for treason,
suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, misery everywhere.
Fear
of revolution pervaded the British ruling class, now facing a new
menace, nascent working class revolt. The first trials of the so-called
Luddites, textile workers hostile to the introduction of machinery that
would destroy their conditions, occurred in 1812, leading to severe
sentences, including hanging. Byron made his famous maiden speech to the
House of Lords that February defending starving textile workers who
smashed machinery and condemning the death penalty they faced.
*****
Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft (who died after
giving birth to her), the author of a history of the French Revolution
and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin, a semi-anarchist political thinker, author of the novel The Adventures of Caleb Williams and an associate of Tom Paine and other radicals.
Mary
met Percy Shelley when she was 16 and he was 21—and married. They
eloped to France, shocking contemporaries (and Godwin) by first living
together unmarried. They faced immense pressures, both because of their
unconventional lives and, more significantly, their subversive views.
On
top of everything else, Mary knew personal tragedy, losing her first
child in 1815. She also had to contend with Shelley’s dalliances with
other women, associated with his belief in “free love,” an idea to which
she also subscribed. It has been suggested that the criticism of
Victor’s egoism in the novel is in part directed toward Percy Shelley’s
own failings, although the two were obviously deeply in love.
The summer of 1816, when Mary began Frankenstein while
living in Switzerland, was notorious for its cold, the apparent result
of volcanic eruptions in Asia. The temperatures resulted in crop
failures and famine across the globe, also provoking social unrest and
food riots.
These are some of the “hothouse” circumstances referred to above. The
burning social questions, although they find indirect expression in the
book, are strongly felt as aspects of its emotional and intellectual
weight.
*****
Of course, it would not be possible to include all this in a film
interpretation of a single, short novel. But the most serious artists
would have done more to bring to bear the intellectual, political and
psychological circumstances that informed the writing of Frankenstein.
After all, there are many Gothic novels, but very few continue to be
read and appreciated. There is an urgency and commitment about Shelley’s
work that is unique. Why could the filmmaker not have done more to
reproduce that and take the viewer through such an experience?
As part of a Socialist Equality Party Summer School lecture series focusing on critical events related to the historic Security and the Fourth International investigation that uncovered subversion within the international Trotskyist movement, John Burton, a lead attorney for Alan Gelfand, lectures on Gelfand's successful trial in
March of 1983.
Parts one and two of the lecture “The
Gelfand Case: 1978-1982” are here and here.
Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers has announced that the Albanese Labor
government will axe its household energy bill rebates of $300 a year on
December 31. This will further shift the burden of escalating energy
costs onto working-class families, while protecting corporate profits
and meeting financial market demands for fiscal “discipline.”
*****
In recent weeks, the government has increasingly outlined an
austerity agenda. It has demanded across-the-board cuts of 5 percent
from all federal public sector departments and agencies, the slashing of
budgets for chronically underfunded public hospital budgets and deeper
cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and the
government’s main science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
On energy bills, and
across the board, it is the working class that is paying the price.
Inflation data released last month showed electricity prices had jumped
already by 37 percent in the past year, primarily driven by the
termination of similar state government rebates.
Scrapping these
temporary band-aids on the soaring prices for domestic electricity and
gas services will intensify the cost-of-living crisis. It means
inflicting even greater economic hardship on working-class households,
which have suffered about an 8 percent fall in real income since Labor
took office in May 2022.
*****
Cynically, Chalmers claimed that the government was replacing the
“temporary” energy bill relief with “ongoing cost of living help.” He
cited changes to the tax system, as well as to Medicare and the
Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, claiming that “people can use that to
help pay their electricity bills.”
Chalmers said the government’s
income tax cuts would give the average taxpayer $50 a week “by one
measure.” This is a fraud. Most of the tax benefits are going to
higher-income households, while doing nothing to alleviate the financial
pressures caused by soaring mortgage interest rates, house prices,
rents and other essentials.
*****
The energy bill crisis itself is rooted in the logic of capitalist markets:
The
corporate-controlled Australian economy remains substantially dependent
on expensive and environmentally disastrous fossil fuels to generate
electricity.
The energy conglomerates reap high profits by
exporting the vast majority of domestically drilled and produced gas,
fuelling matching domestic prices.
Ageing and unreliable coal
electricity generators push up wholesale prices during outages while
energy giants are not investing in renewables fast enough to replace
them, squeezing supply and pushing up costs.
The fallout from
global events such as the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine has
stoked prices and profiteering on world energy markets.
At
the same time, corporations in the Australian domestic energy industry
are extracting extraordinary profits from this crisis. For instance,
Origin Energy’s underlying profit for the 2025 financial year was $1.49
billion, a $307 million increase from the prior year.
AGL
Energy recorded an underlying net profit of $812 million for the 2024
financial year, which was almost triple its 2023 result. Analysis by the
Australia Institute think tank suggests that for every $100 of an AGL
customer’s electricity bill, $35 is profit, while only $12 is spent
generating the electricity.
The profits are even greater for
electricity generators and supply networks. The Institute for Energy
Economics and Financial Analysis, an international NGO, estimated that
electricity networks in Australia made $4.35 billion in “supernormal
profits” in 2023 alone, that is, on top of the “reasonable” profit
levels permitted by the official regulator, the AER.
*****
For working-class households, these profits translate into hundreds
of dollars added to annual bills while governments at all levels, both
Labor and Liberal-National, subsidize corporate returns.
This
assault shows the necessity for the fight for a socialist program,
including public ownership and democratic working-class control of the
energy system, with investment directed to affordable, renewable power
rather than corporate profit and war industries.
With just three weeks remaining before Zohran Mamdani takes office as
mayor of New York City, the democratic socialist is turning ever more
to the oligarchs whom he once made a pretense of fighting against.
Last week, the New York Times reported on a series of
big-ticket fundraising events that Mamdani has held with the corporate
and financial elite in an effort to amass $4 million to fund his
transition activities and inauguration. With the help of the
ultra-wealthy, Mamdani is already well on his way to meet that goal,
having pulled in more than $3 million to date. Mamdani is banking
significantly more than his predecessors, Eric Adams and Bill de Blasio,
who each raised around $2 million.
*****
Last week, on Tuesday evening, Mamdani attended a sold-out Greenwich
Village fundraiser hosted by crypto-billionaire Michael Novogratz, an
heir to the Soros fortune, and the grandson of the founder of Qualcomm.
The next morning, Mamdani was hosted by the oil heiress Leah
Hunt-Hendrix. Then, earlier this week, Mamdani hobnobbed with the
cultural elite at a reception on the Lower East Side, with tickets
starting at $1,000.
Mamdani’s courting of New York City’s rich and
powerful stands in conflict with the image he presents as a political
fighter for the interests of the broad masses of workers. His populist
appeal against business-as-usual politics dominated by the wealthy has
even been a prominent feature of his transition fund-raising appeals.
“Usually,
transitions rely on wealthy donors, special interests, and Super PACs,”
one recent message from the Mamdani camp stated, “but we want to do
this the same way we got here: with you.”
Approximately 30,000
people have responded to Mamdani’s appeals by donating to his transition
activities, which involve sorting through 70,000 applications and
preparing policy initiatives.
Mamdani’s wooing of wealthy donors,
combined with broader appeals to the multitude of lesser means who
supported him, is not merely a matter of political hypocrisy or bad
optics. It underscores a basic continuity with the Democratic
establishment that dominates New York City politics, while
simultaneously attempting to breathe new life into a hated political
setup by feigning to reconcile the irreconcilable—the social needs of
workers with the profit, property, and power of the corporate and
financial oligarchy.
*****
Mamdani’s ever more naked embrace of representatives of big business
is proceeding under the guise that these forces can be bargained with to
alleviate the affordability crisis hammering the working class in New
York.
Mamdani includes President Trump among them, meeting with
the fascist president two weeks ago and declaring a “partnership” in
their supposed common goal of lowering prices for New Yorkers. Since the
meeting, Mamdani has not made any public statements on his social media
accounts criticizing Trump.
This fraud serves only to disorient
and demobilize a struggle against inequality and dictatorship. Finance
capital, the big landlords, and the corporate chiefs whom Mamdani is
appealing to will not accept policies that significantly cut into profit
streams or threaten property rights. Their interests are diametrically
opposed to those of the working class, which is facing an intensifying
social crisis where meeting even the most basic needs is a constant
struggle.
The US Federal Reserve again lowered its interest rate by a quarter
percentage point yesterday—for the third time in a row—to bring it to
the lowest level in three years. But it was a split decision: Two
members of the committee voted against another cut and Trump supporter
Stephen Miran called for a cut of half a percentage point.
With
two members of the Federal Open Market Committee—Austan Goolsbee of the
Chicago Fed and Jeffrey Schmid of the Kansas City Fed—voting to keep
rates on hold and others leaning in that direction, expectations of a
further cut in January have been lowered.
*****
The so-called dot plot, in which Fed officials project where they
believe interest rates will go over the next 12 months, “laid bare,” in
the words of the Financial Times, “the deep discord among policymakers.”
*****
In his prepared remarks for the press conference following the
meeting, Fed chair Jerome Powell said available indicators suggested
economic activity had been expanding at a moderate pace.
But the
readings on inflation were higher than earlier in the year, reflecting
the impact of tariffs, and the labor market was weakening with job
gains slowing significantly.
*****
Estimates put the loss of manufacturing jobs at 50,000 this year as companies make announcements of significant layoffs.
Attention
has been increasingly directed to what is referred to as a “K-shaped”
economy, as higher income earners with stock holdings benefit from the
share market rise while those on lower incomes fall further behind.
After
dismissing the affordability crisis as a “hoax” and “the greatest ever
con job” fostered by the Democrats, President Trump attempted to address
it at a rally in Pennsylvania this week. This was under conditions
where, according to a poll conducted by Politico, some 46 percent of
voters said the cost of living was the worst they could recall. They
included 37 percent who said they had voted for Trump in the
presidential election.
*****
In his prepared remarks and in comments at his press conference,
Powell said there was a “reasonable base case” that the effects of
tariffs on inflation would be relatively short-lived and would only
result in a one-time shift in the price level.
But Powell said the
same thing regarding the price hike set off by the COVID-19 pandemic,
which led to the largest inflation surge in more than 40 years. The
significant dissent from the decision to cut interest rates indicates
there is concern in the Fed’s governing body this could take place
again.
*****
Wall Street welcomed the rate cut decision, with all major indexes
recording increases. The Dow was up 1 percent, or 500 points, the NASDAQ
rose 0.3 percent, the S&P 500 was up 0.7 percent, just shy of a
record, and the Russell 2000 index of smaller companies gained 1.3
percent to reach a new record.
But in an unexpected decision,
indicating fears of turbulence in financial markets, the Fed announced
that it was resuming purchases of short-term Treasury securities,
starting with $40 billion this month.
In its report of the decision, the Wall Street Journal
said the decision was “a response to recent stretches of volatility in
short-term lending markets that have caught traders’ and policymakers’
attention.”
A settlement reached between the Trump administration and Republican-led
states will bring to an end a Biden-era student loan repayment program
and force more than 7 million people to resume payments in the near
future.
President Joe Biden campaigned on a mass federal student debt loan
forgiveness program, but legislation never advanced in either house of
Congress even though the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate
in 2021-2022.
As a substitute, Biden issued an executive order to
establish the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan for
federal student loans. The program was first implemented in October 2023
as a cheaper alternative to other federal repayment programs. The
program did not eliminate student loan debt, an over $2 trillion
millstone around the neck for over 42 million people in America, but
instead used a new formula to lessen monthly payments based on income.
*****
The ending of the program comes at a time when the majority of
workers, students and their families in America are struggling to
survive. CNBC, reporting on data from the Federal Reserve Bank of
Philadelphia, found “late credit card payments have hit a record high.”
Data showed that in the fourth quarter of 2024, 0.90 percent of credit
card accounts in the US were at least 90 days past due, a 12-year high
and the most since the Fed bank began the report.
The same
report found that 11.12 percent of cardholders were only making the
minimum payment, up from 10.65 percent in 2023 and 9.91 percent in 2022.
College
is increasingly a luxury affordable only to the affluent. Recent
reports indicate that the average cost across all US colleges, per
student, per year, including tuition, housing and food, is over $38,000.
Unsurprisingly, as of this writing, nearly 12 million federal student
loan borrowers are currently behind on their repayments.
*****
While a settlement has been reached to end the program, it is not
clear exactly when loan repayments will begin. Transitioning millions of
people into other repayment plans, under conditions where the Education
Department is being disbanded and is already facing significant
backlogs, will be difficult.
This latest attack on education by
the Trump administration follows an earlier decision by the Education
Department to strip “professional” status from dozens of essential
professions, such as nursing, teaching and social work. The
reclassification imposes new caps on federal borrowing limits and an
“earnings premium” which links graduate’s earning income to federal loan
eligibility. Historically underpaid professions, such as teaching, will
see massive cost increases.
While there is “no money” in
capitalist America for workers to achieve higher education without
taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt, in a robust and
bipartisan 312-112 vote Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted to
advance the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, and with it, over
$900 billion in military spending. A majority of Democrats, 115 in all,
joined 197 of their Republican “colleagues” in passing the war budget.
On the morning of December 3 in Ontario, California, 46-year-old
Union Pacific conductor Steve Crowe, known to coworkers as “Lil Crowe”
or “Baby Crowe,” was killed in a collision. The train he was riding
while backing up collided with a combination vehicle at a private
industrial crossing.
Steve was a second-generation railroader. He
followed in his father’s footsteps and was admired and cared for by
those who worked beside him. They called him “Lil Crowe” as an
affectionate acknowledgment of his youth, his energy and his family
legacy in the trade.
His death was not an unpredictable “accident”
but the result of relentless cuts to safety by US railroads and
corporations across the country.
The operation underway in Ontario was what the industry calls a “shoving
movement,” that is, when a train reverses, pushing rail cars instead of
pulling them. This is, according to every serious rail safety body, the
most dangerous procedure a conductor can be assigned.
*****
Of the 20 conductor fatalities reported to the Federal Railroad
Administration (FRA) from January 2020 to July 2025, 14 occurred during
shoving movements. The danger is completely avoidable with modern
technology, including fully integrated cameras, automated visibility
systems and remote monitoring. But to the extent that they are used at
all, it is to harass rail crews and ramp up exploitation, not make the
job safer.
*****
The freight rail industry has been transformed into a plaything of
Wall Street investors over decades of bipartisan deregulation and
financialization. The Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act
of 1976 and the 1980 Staggers Act removed public oversight and unleashed
a frenzy of profit-driven restructuring. Railroads consolidated into a
handful of financial behemoths whose primary objective is not reliable
operation but relentlessly reducing the “operating ratio” demanded by
investors.
This “efficiency revolution” reached a new stage on the
eve of the 21st century. Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) slashed
crews, cut inspection times, lengthened trains to record-breaking
lengths, closed yards and destroyed redundancy. It was first started
during the Clinton administration, but it spread under the Obama
presidency.
Shoving movements became riskier because they are now
conducted with fewer, exhausted workers under punitive attendance
regimes, often in unfamiliar territory due to constant reassignments,
and without needed maintenance or equipment.
Opposition to dangerous working conditions has been growing from below for years. In 2022, railroad workers rejected a government-backed contract
maintaining PSR and similar systems, instead pressing for a national
strike. The pro-company union bureaucracy acted as industrial police,
delaying strike action for weeks until after the midterm elections to
give Congress the chance to ban the strike before it even began.
Such is the real record of the Biden administration, the self-proclaimed “most pro-labor administration in history.”
*****
The industrial slaughterhouse continues under Trump, who is eviscerating
all regulations imposing even the slightest limits on the activities of
corporations. Union Pacific CEO Jim Vena was a recent visitor to the White House,
where he not only secured support for the railroad’s merger with
Norfolk Southern but also advised Trump which cities to send troops into
next.
Steve Crowe’s death is part of a broader and accelerating crisis.
Across the logistics sector, workers are dying under intense
productivity pressure.
At the U.S. Postal Service’s distribution center in Allen Park, Michigan, Air Force veteran Nick Acker died after falling into a mail sort machine; his body was not found for hours. A week later, Russell Scruggs, Jr. died at a facility in Palmetto, Georgia.
Rank-and-file
committees must be formed by workers to assert workers’ control of
safety, investigating and exposing such preventable deaths and asserting
the right to stop production and take other measures when a job is
unsafe. Only by removing the profit motive from safety can these
disasters be ended.
On November 25 current mayor of Washington D.C., Muriel Bowser (Democratic), announced she would not seek a fourth term.
The race for D.C.’s next mayor became crowded from the moment Bowser
made her announcement, with several current members of the D.C. Council
among those joining the primary. Similar to the recent New York City
mayoral election, the winner of the primary, set for June 16, 2026,
would almost certainly be elected mayor in the heavily Democratic city.
Among
the first to declare her candidacy was Democrat Janeese Lewis George,
currently representing Ward 4 in the D.C. Council. George, described in
the bourgeois media as a “democratic socialist,” was a member of the
Metro D.C. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) upon her election in
2020 and was endorsed again by the organization prior to the 2024
elections that won her a second term.
*****
A former D.C. prosecutor who ran in the 2020 council election on a platform of defunding the police, George voted in favor of the draconian SECURE DC crime bill. At a Ward 4 candidates’ forum in April 2024, she pleaded with her right-wing critics,
It
wasn’t that we were against police officers; it was Black people
saying, “We don’t want to be murdered.” The notion…does not mean we
don’t respect and love our officers and support them.
True
to its opportunist ways, the Metro D.C. DSA dutifully scrubbed any
mention of the word “police” from its 2024 George endorsement statement.
George also voted in favor
of providing $1 billion in public funds for the NFL’s Washington
Commanders new stadium, further burnishing her big-business credentials.
George’s pro-capitalist politics have not received a single rebuke from
the Metro D.C. DSA. In the 2024 presidential race, she loyally
campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris even as Harris made clear
she would continue the genocide in Gaza started by Biden.
The role
of the DSA, when all the left-sounding phrases and platitudes are
peeled back, is to herd workers and youth back into the waiting arms of
the Democratic Party. There is no greater warning as to the
organization’s true character than its behavior following the election
of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor-elect of New York City.
*****
For the working class in D.C. and around the world, the task is not to
elect left-talking capitalist politicians but to establish political and
organization independence from all agencies of capitalism and their
pseudo-left defenders.
General Motors workers leaving the Factory Zero plant in Detroit
Wednesday afternoon denounced the layoffs and the complicity of United
Auto Workers in the destruction of their jobs. With the permanent layoff
of 1,140 workers at the assembly plant scheduled for January 5, workers
spoke about the hardships they are facing and expressed support for a
fight to defend their jobs.
The layoffs come as General Motors
recorded $14.9 billion in profit in 2024, raised its shareholder
dividend, and spent $6 billion on stock buybacks. Despite falling EV
sales due to Trump’s elimination of consumer tax credits, Wall Street
still expects GM to make $12–13 billion in 2025. The layoffs are part of
a restructuring operation driven by investor demands for automation,
consolidation and the destruction of thousands of jobs in the global
auto industry.
Supporters of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) distributed the statement “Mobilize to stop GM layoffs at Factory Zero in Detroit—Build Rank-and-File Committees.”
It calls on workers to form independent committees capable of
organizing a real fight, unifying workers across plants and borders and
breaking out of the isolation imposed by the union bureaucracy.
*****
Far from defending workers, the UAW apparatus has not held a single
membership meeting, proposed no fight and is maintaining total silence
as workers confront the destruction of their jobs. Factory Zero sits
less than five miles from Solidarity House, but UAW President Shawn Fain
and Local 22 officials have already sanctioned the layoffs. To oppose
the Factory Zero layoffs would cut across the UAW bureaucracy’s alliance
with Trump and his trade-war agenda. Fain has embraced Trump’s tariffs
and promotes the lie that workers in Canada, Mexico, and other
countries must lose their jobs so workers in the United States can keep
theirs.
*****
The layoffs at Factory Zero are part of GM’s plan to cut production
by half, triggering mass layoffs at supplier plants including Avancez,
Dana Thermal Products, Autokiniton, and Yanfeng, as well as more than
2,000 job cuts across GM’s Ultium battery operations in Ohio and
Tennessee. This is a coordinated corporate restructuring, backed by Wall
Street and enforced by the UAW.
Autoworker and socialist leader Will Lehman in 2023
In his statement on the layoffs, Mack Trucks worker and IWA-RFC leader Will Lehman declared:
If
our livelihoods are to be protected it is up to shop floor workers
ourselves to take action. I urge workers at Factory Zero to immediately
establish a rank-and-file committee to organize a fight to stop the
layoffs. Workers must demand an immediate membership meeting, led by the
most trusted and militant workers, to map out a strategy to defend
every job. This includes organizing immediate strike action and mass
protests to rally workers throughout the Detroit area to demand no
layoffs, the shortening of the workweek with no loss of pay and
democratic control over production.
He continued:
Instead of fighting to defend our
jobs, Fain has joined the fascist Trump in pitting American workers
against our brothers and sisters in Canada, Mexico and globally… We will
not win just as American workers. We need to reach out to our
co-workers in the US and globally if we’re going to defeat the
transnational corporations.
The fight at Factory Zero
is not simply a local struggle. It is part of an international movement
of autoworkers confronting layoffs, wage cuts, speed-ups and automation
across borders. The only viable strategy is to unify workers, not
divide them, and to build rank-and-file committees independent of the
UAW bureaucracy and its nationalist program, which subordinates workers’
interests to corporate profitability.
Last week Israel was allowed to
continue competing in Eurovision after a general assembly meeting of the
European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in Geneva. The EBU, consisting of 123
public broadcasters from 56 countries, runs the Eurovision Song
Contest. The meeting was called to approve rules that the organization claimed would “reinforce trust and protect neutrality of [the]
Eurovision Song Contest”.
This was a ruse to ensure that there would be no vote on the
participation of Israel, which carries on its genocide of the
Palestinians in Gaza.
*****
Spain’s national broadcaster RTVE, the Dutch AVROTROS, Ireland’s RTE,
and Slovenia’s national broadcaster immediately said they would not
take part in the 2026 contest . On December 10, Icelandic national
broadcaster RÚV 10 joined the boycott.
The decision by the
national broadcasters in the five countries with a combined population
of around 78 million people is in response to mass opposition to
Israel’s genocide and the complicity of the major powers in it.
*****
The Eurovision Song Contest is the most watched live non-sporting event
in the world, regularly pulling in well over 150 million viewers. In
addition to those viewing from the European nations who take part, the
show is also broadcast in the US and Australia. The 2023 edition held in
Liverpool in the UK attracted a viewership of 162 million people,
accounting for 291 million hours watched.
*****
In announcing their boycott, each broadcaster issued statements
explicitly citing the genocide in Gaza, the humanitarian crisis, and the
two-faced claims of the EBU to adhere to “neutrality” in the face of
such crimes.
*****
The boycotts are the culmination of growing outrage at Israel’s
participation in Eurovision, which have escalated over the past two
years. Millions abhor the inclusion of Israel, which allows the
country’s Zionist regime to present itself as a “normal” member of the
“international community” and exploit the event to sanitise its war
crimes.
*****
Eurovision’s claim that it operates based on strict neutrality and that it is a “non-political event” are a transparent fraud.
In
2019, the Icelandic act Hatari was fined by the EBU for displaying the
Palestinian flag. Belarus, an ally of Russia, was excluded in 2021 for
submitting politically charged songs and for suppressing media freedom.
Most
significantly, in 2022, Russia was banned within days of its invasion
of Ukraine on the grounds that its participation would “bring the
competition into disrepute.”
Yet when faced with the genocidal
assault on Gaza waged since October 2023, documented by international
organizations and recognized as a crime against humanity, the EBU has
not only refused to exclude Israel but has actively shielded it from
criticism.
*****
It is highly likely that there will be further boycotts of next year’s contest, given that Israel is a global pariah.
Britain
has seen millions demonstrating in its cities nationally since the
genocide began. The British Broadcasting Corporation is among the state
broadcasters backing Israel’s inclusion, under conditions where a poll
published following the EBU vote found 82 percent of respondents in the
UK believe Israel should be excluded from Eurovision in 2026. Almost
seven in 10 (69 percent) said that if Israel is permitted to take part,
the UK should withdraw from the contest.
The founding of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party is the
latest attempt to trap workers and young people looking for a socialist
leadership within a pro-capitalist “broad left” formation led by
reformist and Stalinist bureaucrats.
The crisis besetting the
party demonstrates that the objective basis for doing so has been
undermined by a deepening economic and social crisis that has not only
rendered impossible new reformist half-measures but drives the
capitalist class and its governments to destroy those implemented in the
past.
As with all past efforts, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in
Spain, the formation of Your Party is intended to fence off those
seeking an alternative to despised right-wing parties like Keir
Starmer’s Labour from a revolutionary socialist opposition to austerity
and war.
The disorientation produced by the inevitable betrayals
of such “broad-left” formations has repeatedly allowed the ruling class
to proceed with its attacks and serve to strengthen the far-right. The
key role in every case has been played by pseudo-left groups, who claim
to represent a revolutionary alternative only to insist that the working
class must accept the leadership of “left reformist” leaders or
political current emerging from the breakup of the old social democratic
and Stalinist parties.
This has led to one disaster after another for the working class. In
2015, Syriza infamously betrayed its 2015 referendum mandate to oppose
European Union and International Monetary Fund-dictated austerity that
inflicted social devastation on Greek workers, leading to the party’s
ignominious collapse.
Rivalling Syriza’s betrayal was that carried
out by Corbyn during his five years as leader of the Labour Party
between 2015 and 2020. This was hailed by pseudo-left ideologue Chantal
Mouffe as a potentially far more successful example of a new wave of
“left populism” because Corbyn stood “at the head of a great party and
enjoys the support of the trade unions”, provided that he rejected the
“traditional left political frontier… established on the basis of
class”.
Corbyn went on to carry out the worst rout in political history as he
repeatedly betrayed the hundreds of thousands who flocked to the party
and capitulated on all fundamental issues to the Blairite right.
*****
The depth and speed of Your Party’s sink into the mire provides
additional proof of its rotten political foundations. The founding
conference held in Liverpool on November 29-30 followed months of
unprincipled factional warfare between Corbyn and Sultana over control
of financial assets and membership lists that whittled down the 850,000
who signed up as supporters in July to just 55,000 becoming members, and
a forecast attendance of 13,000 ending with between 1,500-2,000 coming
to the Liverpool Arena and Convention Centre.
Politically the dispute between the two is over how left Your Party must posture if it is to have any hope of winning support.
Corbyn, who never wanted to form a party at all, wants only the most
pathetic variant of a reformist program, modeled on the Labour Party
manifestos of 2017 and 2019 which combined some re-nationalizations and
minimal tax rises for the major corporations and super-rich with pledges
to defend British capitalism, including maintaining membership of NATO
and keeping nuclear weapons.
Sultana advances a more full-throated
program, seeking to commit Your Party to nationalizing the entire
economy and running it in the interests of workers, combined with an
anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist foreign policy.
She knows that Corbyn has been substantially discredited due to his
refusal to fight Labour’s right-wing, and that the groundswell of anger
and anti-capitalist sentiment among workers and youth will not be
satisfied with his meager palliatives. However, despite her more
militant rhetoric and insistence that she is not in favor of building a
Labour Party Mark 2, Sultana has never once proposed that Your Party be
based on anything other than the pursuit of social reforms through
parliament.
*****
The pseudo-left parties for the most part have their origins in an
explicit repudiation of the revolutionary internationalist program of
Trotsky and the Fourth International following the Second World War and a
wholesale adaptation to imperialism and to the reformist and Stalinist
parties and trade unions. They are today the most insidious opponents of
revolution, led by a privileged upper middle-class stratum with a
vested interest in defending capitalism.
*****
The development of globalized production during the 1980s had in fact
fatally undermined all parties, trade unions and other organizations rooted in the nation state, destroying any possibility of securing
reforms through limited trade union action and parliamentary reform. In
every country, parties and trade unions committed to the defense of the
capitalist profit system responded by abandoning reforms, demanding
instead endless sacrifices by workers in the name of global
competitiveness and carrying out an endless series of betrayals.
This
did not lead automatically to workers breaking from reformist
illusions, but the turn by millions away from their old bureaucratic
leaderships evidenced the unprecedented objective opportunities to win
workers to a genuine socialist perspective.
As the International Committee of the Fourth International explained as early as 1988, in its perspectives document The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International, the changes in the form of capitalist production had brought with them a change in the form of the class struggle:
It
has long been an elementary proposition of Marxism that the class
struggle is national only as to form, but that it is, in essence, an
international struggle. However, given the new features of capitalist
development, even the form of the class struggle must assume an
international character… Precisely the international character of the
proletariat, a class which owes no allegiance to any capitalist
‘fatherland’, makes it the sole social force that can liberate civilization from the strangulating fetters of the nation state system.
For these fundamental reasons, no struggle against the ruling class in
any country can produce enduring advances for the working class, let
alone prepare its final emancipation, unless it is based on an
international strategy aimed at the worldwide mobilization of the
proletariat against the capitalist system….
*****
Prior to Your Party’s founding conference, the Socialist Equality
Party insisted that the issue facing workers was whether to support a
program and party based on reformist delusions or build one dedicated
to the struggle for socialist revolution. The pseudo-left stand
unambiguously for the promotion of reformist delusions.
The SEP
fights to arm the working class with a revolutionary perspective. We not
only reject entirely the demoralized argument that reformist
consciousness cannot be challenged. We are preparing the most powerful
means of doing so.
On November 22, the SEP hosted a lecture in London delivered by David North, chairperson of the World Socialist Web Site, “Where is America going?: Oligarchy, dictatorship, and the revolutionary crisis of capitalism.”
David North presenting his lecture in London
North
insisted that “a critique of capitalism based on moral outrage, however
justified that outrage may be, cannot provide the foundation for a
revolutionary struggle against it… The violence of oligarchy, the
brazenness of its power-grabs, the descent into authoritarianism—all of
these express the terminal crisis of the capitalist mode of production
itself.”
Stating that the rapidly deteriorating conditions of life
for the great majority of Americans is already producing a growing
sentiment that an alternative to capitalism is necessary, he noted that
the initial beneficiary of this, Mamdani, was already in “full Corbyn”
mode, “assuring the media and Wall Street that nothing he said during
the election campaign should have been taken seriously, and going so far
as to ask for an audience with Trump, and humiliating himself in the
process.”
Mamdani’s treachery “demonstrates again that the central
issue of our time is the crisis of revolutionary leadership… Objective
economic processes create both the necessity and conditions for the
overthrow of capitalism. But the socialist revolution is the outcome of
the conscious intervention of the working class in the historic
process,” led by a revolutionary Marxist party.
Explaining that
the conditions now exist for an extraordinary advance in the political
consciousness of the working class, North announced the launching
December 12 of Socialism AI.
*****
This is our answer to the efforts to corral workers behind Sultana and
Corbyn’s doomed project. We are the sole tendency that not only sets out
to build a revolutionary leadership, but which has, in the rich
political heritage of the World Socialist Web Site and now the essential tool of Socialism AI, the necessary means to do this.
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.
Bogdan Syrotiuk in front of a poster of Leon Trotsky
The campaign to free the Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk has
reached an important turning point with the publication of a forensic
linguistic analysis that shatters the fraudulent case against him.
Commissioned by Syrotiuk’s defense attorneys, the 65-page report by
Professor Yuri Borisovich Irkhin—one of Ukraine’s most prominent
criminologists—demonstrates unequivocally that the charge of “state
treason” is a political frame-up aimed at outlawing socialist and
internationalist opposition to the NATO–Ukraine war against Russia.
Syrotiuk,
26, is a leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists
(YGBL), the Trotskyist youth movement in Ukraine affiliated with the
International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). He was
arrested in April 2024 and charged under wartime statutes with “state
treason,” a crime carrying a sentence of 15 years to life. The
“evidence” consists almost entirely of political analyses published by
the WSWS and the YGBL—denounced as “Russian propaganda” because they
oppose both the NATO-backed war and the capitalist regimes in Kiev and
Moscow.
For years, Ukrainian courts have weaponized so-called
“linguistic expertise” to criminalize dissent. State-appointed “experts”
scour political texts searching for phrases that can be twisted into
proof of a supposed crime. In Bogdan’s case, the official expert,
functioning as an arm of the Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU), declared
that his writings supported Russia’s invasion.
But Professor
Irkhin’s independent review is a devastating repudiation of this
fraudulent conclusion. From that standpoint it also will be an important
tool before the European Court of Human Rights, which accepted
Bogdan’s case earlier this year. After examining more than a dozen WSWS
and YGBL publications—including articles by Syrotiuk, speeches at the
2023 International May Day Rally and statements on the Gaza
genocide—Irkhin concluded:
There are no statements,
phrases, sentences, or word combinations that contain public calls aimed
at undermining the national security of Ukraine … and NO statements
that have signs of propaganda aimed at supporting the armed aggression
of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. (Emphasis in original)
The
report’s thoroughness and Irkhin’s stature—he is a widely cited
criminologist and former deputy head of the psychological service of
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry—forced even a hostile court in Pervomaisk to
order a third expert review. This is far from a guarantee of justice,
but it constitutes a significant legal blow to the SBU and a major
advance for the international campaign demanding Syrotiuk’s release.
The implications of this development extend far beyond Bogdan’s
individual defense. From its inception, the prosecution of Syrotiuk has
been a political show trial aimed at banning opposition to the war. The
SBU’s case rests on the reactionary premise that any critique
of NATO, denunciation of the Putin regime from the left or call for the
unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers constitutes treason.
In
their attempt to criminalize internationalism, the authorities
effectively placed the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) itself on trial. This strategy has now
exploded in their hands. Irkhin’s report confirms what every honest
reader already knows. In analyzing statements produced by Bogdan and
fellow YGBL leading member Andrei Ritsky to the 2023 May Day rally,
Irkin concluded:
The speeches express the position of
the Trotskyist movement, which condemns both the policies of the US and
NATO and the actions of Putin’s regime, viewing the war as a consequence
of the global crisis of capitalism and imperialist rivalry. The text
contains criticism of historical Ukrainian nationalism and the cult of
the OUN-UPA, as well as condemnation of Putin’s regime and the Russian
oligarchy as heirs to Stalinism. Both speeches contain a call for the
unification of the international working class on the basis of the
anti-war movement and revolutionary internationalism.
*****
The timing of this blow to the prosecution is politically
significant. The NATO-Ukraine war is in deep crisis. After sacrificing
hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives and exhausting tens of billions
of dollars, the much-heralded NATO offensive has failed
catastrophically. Zelensky’s government, which rules on the basis of
martial law, is disintegrating under corruption scandals, and he has
dismissed his closest confidant, Andriy Yermak. European governments,
facing mass opposition at home, openly accuse Washington of strategic
betrayal.
These internal fractures are driving both the Zelensky
regime and NATO to ever more desperate and reckless measures. The
European imperialist powers—above all, Germany and France—are sharply
escalating discussions about the deployment of troops to Ukraine, the
expansion of long-range strike capabilities and the shift to wartime
economies.
The Ukrainian state’s persecution of Bogdan Syrotiuk is
an integral part of this broader war policy. The imperialist powers
fear above all the emergence of a conscious, internationalist movement of workers and youth
against the war. They intend to silence those who oppose the propaganda
lies used to justify the slaughter and who fight to unite the working
class across borders.
*****
The refutation of the frame-up provided by Irkhin’s report places
immense responsibility on the international working class. The fight for
Bogdan’s freedom is inseparable from the struggle to build a conscious,
organized movement against the drive to world war.
The
fight for Bogdan’s freedom must be taken up by workers, students and
all those who are committed to the defense of democratic rights and
opposed to the escalation of imperialist wars that, unless stopped,
threaten humanity with a nuclear catastrophe.
*****
The fight to free Bogdan Syrotiuk is in essence the struggle to mobilize
the working class in Ukraine, Russia and internationally against the
war. His defense is inseparable from the struggle to build a global
movement of the working class capable of ending the system that is
plunging humanity toward catastrophe.
The strike by teachers in the West Contra Costa Unified School
District (WCCUSD) in California has reached its fourth day, under
conditions of intensifying pressure from the district, the Democrats and
the union apparatus to shut it down. Negotiators from the United
Teachers of Richmond (UTR) are entering another round of talks tonight.
The
Teamsters 856 bureaucracy yesterday ordered 1,500 classified workers
back to work and announced a tentative agreement that has not even been
voted on. This sellout, almost identical to the deal workers already
rejected, has effectively split the strike in half in order to weaken
and isolate teachers.
The World Socialist Web Site calls for a resounding NO vote
by classified workers, but a NO vote alone is not enough. The central
question is how to place the conduct of this struggle into the hands of
rank‑and‑file workers themselves. A rejection of the tentative agreement
must be tied to demands for the reinstatement of the strike by
classified workers, unification with teachers on the picket lines, and
the formation of democratically elected rank‑and‑file committees in
every school and worksite to take the struggle out of the hands of the
union bureaucracy.
*****
San Francisco teachers voted 99 percent to strike this week, with no
date yet announced by the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF)
bureaucracy. In Los Angeles and Berkeley, talks have reached formal
impasse, with Berkeley facing a steep budget deficit. Other districts
statewide confront cuts.
Every immediate demand raised by teachers
and classified staff—substantial inflation‑beating raises, full
staffing, no cuts, safe and well‑resourced schools—poses the broader
question: who controls society’s resources, and in whose interests are
they deployed? The working class cannot place any confidence in the
Democratic Party or the union apparatus that ties them to the capitalist
state. Only the independent political mobilization of the working
class, nationally and internationally, can force a massive reallocation
of wealth from billionaires and war spending to schools, healthcare and
social services.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke with two educators in
Northern California on the West Contra Costa teachers strike and the
broader conditions facing public education. Karen is a striking English
teacher in WCCUSD and Dan is a teacher in Berkeley who lives in WCCUSD
(El Cerrito).
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday reneged on his earlier statement
that he would have “no problem” with releasing the full video of the
September 2 murder of 11 unarmed civilians in the Caribbean Sea off the
coast of Venezuela. In a bald-faced lie, he declared, “I didn’t say
that.”
Trump now says he has left the decision with Secretary of
War Pete Hegseth, declaring, “Whatever Hegseth wants to do is OK with
me.”
*****
Trump hurled insults at the reporter who asked about his earlier
pledge, calling her “fake news,” “obnoxious” and “terrible” for asking
him about his earlier statement that “whatever they have, we’d certainly
release no problem.”
Trump’s comments came after NBC confirmed earlier reporting by the Washington Post
that Hegseth had given an explicit verbal order to kill everyone on
board the boat, claiming that they were on a list of terrorism suspects.
Hegseth “ordered the US military on September 2 to kill all 11 people”
on board the boat, NBC wrote.
Last week, the New York Times
reported that the full video, shown to two congressional committees in
closed-door hearings, shows that “two survivors of the US military’s
first boat strike on Sept. 2 climbed atop the overturned hull and waved
to something overhead.” The people who saw the video told the Times
the “most logical explanation was that the two survivors had seen the
American aircraft above them and started signaling for a rescue.”
The Pentagon’s law of war manual declares that soldiers have a duty
to refuse to carry out “clearly illegal” orders, such as killing
shipwrecked sailors. “Orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be
clearly illegal,” the manual declares.
The Geneva Conventions
states that “persons … who are at sea and who are wounded, sick or
shipwrecked … shall not be murdered or exterminated.”
*****
The Trump administration has surged military assets off the coast of
Venezuela, approved covert military actions inside the country in
October and last month pledged to begin ground attacks “very soon.”
On
Tuesday, two US fighter jets, launched from the USS Gerald R. Ford
stationed off the coast of Venezuela, circled the Gulf of Venezuela and
came within 20 nautical miles of Venezuelan territory. The move follows
similar overflights by nuclear-capable B-52 and B-1 bombers.
*****
Last week, the Trump administration published a new National Defense
Strategy that places central emphasis on US domination of Latin America
as a supply base in the conflict with China and other states.
The
document declares: “We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere …
remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets,
and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our
continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will
assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.”
The
document makes clear that the Trump administration is seeking to reduce
Latin America to colonial slavery through war, regime change, economic
strangulation and other destabilization operations. The criminality of
Trump’s murders on the high seas is just a foretaste of the vast crimes
that this administration is hoping to unleash on the people of Latin
America.
According to material released at the Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan,
a UK special forces unit had a “deliberate policy” to “kill
fighting-aged males... even when they did not pose a threat” during the
US-led imperialist occupation (2001-2021). Evidence proves there was a
“conscious decision” made by the chain of command to cover it up.
The
Inquiry, now in its third year, was established by the then
Conservative government to investigate allegations of 80 unlawful
killings by UK Special Forces in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013. This
was forced by a July 2022 broadcast of an episode of the BBC Panorama documentary series, SAS Death Squads Exposed: A British War Crime?
Chaired by Judge Charles Haddon-Cave, the inquiry’s hearing began in
October 2023. It is specifically investigating alleged extra-judicial
killings by the Special Air Service (SAS), the main special forces unit
of the British Army. The inquiry opened after years of allegations of
unlawful killings, and was pre-empted by a legal challenge made by
bereaved family members and media outlets into the conduct of UK special
forces (UKSF).
*****
Among the documents released by the inquiry was a summary of an
interview between [a senior officer codenamed] N1466 and the Royal Military Police (RMP) in October
2018.
During the exchange, the officer described an incident where
members of UKSF1 went to clear a compound and found a room where some
Afghans were hiding under a mosquito net.
N1466 stated, “They did
not reveal themselves, so the UKSF1 shot at the net until there was no
movement. When the net was uncovered it was women and children.
“The
incident was covered up and the individual who did the shooting was
allegedly given some form of award to make it look legitimate.”
“I will be clear, we are talking about war crimes,” he said.
*****
N1466 is the highest-ranking former special forces officer to provide
evidence of war crimes. He was the assistant chief of staff for
operations in UKSF headquarters.
*****
In 2021, Boris Johnson’s Tory government enacted the Overseas
Operations Act (OOA) which provides the Armed Forces with increased
protection against legal scrutiny on overseas activities. The
legislation also introduced a “presumption against prosecution” for
criminal offences five years after an alleged incident and a time limit
on civil claims for torture and murder. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party
refused to oppose the bill, penalizing MPs who voted against. Now in
government, Labour has kept the legislation on the books.
While
providing more evidence for what is already widely known—that UK forces
were involved in a brutal military occupation which saw the murder of
many civilians—the current and previous inquiries provide no justice for
these crimes.
Operation Northmoor
was opened in 2014 to examine allegations of over 600 offenses by
British forces in Afghanistan, as well as executions by special forces,
including of children. The investigation was terminated in 2019, and
resulted in no prosecutions.
An investigation by the RMP,
Operation Cestro, resulted in just three soldiers being referred to the
Service Prosecuting Authority. None were prosecuted.
In the first 11 months of this year China’s trade surplus reached $1.08
trillion beating the previous record of $993 billion for 2024 with still
a month to go. The Wall Street Journal characterized it as a “remarkable figure, never before seen in recorded economic history.”
*****
Southeast Asia is a crucial destination for Chinese exports, some of
which are aimed at skirting around the imposts imposed on its goods by
the US. The Financial Times (FT) reported over the weekend that
Chinese exports to this region “are growing at almost twice the rate of
the past four years, as Donald Trump’s trade war pushes Beijing to
tighten trade links with its neighbors.”
In the first nine months
of this year Chinese exports to the six largest economies in the
region—Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and
Malaysia—have risen by 23.5 percent for the first nine months of this
year.
*****
China has been accused of “dumping” its products in the region but... “much of what they are exporting is
actually pro-growth.” As much as 60 percent of exports were components
for products manufactured in the region that were exported to other
countries. In other words, Chinese exports are part of the operation of a
global supply chain, rather than finished products.
*****
One of the fastest growing areas in finished goods is cars which is
hitting Japan. The market share of Japanese companies in the region’s
auto market has fallen from 77 percent in the 2010s to 62 percent in
2025, with car buyers shifting “in droves” to more affordable electric
vehicles made by the Chinese company BYD, according to the FT.
Apart from the superiority and lower cost of Chinese manufacturing in a
range of products from pharmaceuticals, steel, solar panels, EVs and a
vast array of high-tech products, Chinese exports have benefited from
what is considered to be the undervaluation of its currency, the
renminbi, possibly by as much as 30 percent.
*****
Plans for restrictions by the EU are already well under way. A draft law
is due to be submitted today under which the EU is considering setting a
“made in Europe” content of up to 70 percent for certain products,
including cars.
According to a report in the FT, the policy would cost EU companies
more than €10 billion annually by pushing them to buy more expensive
European components.
The plan is being overseen by Stéphane
Séjourné, France’s executive vice-president for Prosperity and
Industrial Strategy at the European Commission.
Students in Oregon and Minnesota walked out of class this week to
protest ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) kidnapping
operations in their communities and across the country. Following the
mass walkouts in North Carolina last month, the actions this week reveal
widespread revulsion and opposition to attacks on immigrants among
large sections of youth.
On Tuesday morning, hundreds of students
at Burnsville High School, located about 15 miles south of downtown
Minneapolis, Minnesota, walked out of class to protest ICE raids in
their community. Video shows students carrying signs and chanting, “No
more ICE! No more ICE!”
The walkout was triggered in part by a
raid on a multi-family home in Burnsville this past weekend. On December
6, more than a dozen heavily armed immigration agents raided the home,
shattering doors and breaking locks in the process. In the course of the
raid, immigration agents disappeared four people, three of whom left
behind children.
Speaking to local media, a family living upstairs
was able to prove their citizenship to prevent being kidnapped, but a
young couple living downstairs were taken by immigration thugs when they
returned home from the grocery store, leaving their 7-year-old child
behind. According to an attorney representing the parents, the father of
the 7-year-old has a valid work permit yet was still taken by ICE.
During the same raid, ICE agents also arrested two other men, one of
whom leaves behind a pregnant wife. Speaking to NBC KARE 11 in Spanish,
the pregnant mother said, “They opened the door for me, when I went out,
they were pointing their guns at me. My daughter was with me, and I had
the little boy asleep on my shoulder.”
Hundreds of students also
walked out of class on Monday morning across high schools in Washington
County, Oregon, to protest ongoing immigration raids in their community
and across the country. Of the over 611,000 people that call Washington
County home, some 105,000 were born outside the United States. Major
cities in the county, located to the west of Portland, include Hillsboro
(110,000), Beaverton (98,000), Tigard (55,000) and Forest Grove
(27,000).
Walkouts occurred Monday at high schools located in Beaverton, Hillsboro
and Forest Grove. Students carried signs that read: “Education not
deportation” and “Stop separating families.”
*****
In addition to terrorizing longtime community members and separating
families, ICE thugs continue to illegally detain and assault US
citizens. Early Tuesday morning, a 55-year-old American citizen was
taken by ICE while she was filming them in north Minneapolis. Minnesota
Public Radio (MPR) News reported that Susan Tincher was taken by ICE
after she responded to an alert from a local group she is a part of that
ICE was conducting operations in the Willard Hay neighborhood.
Tincher,
armed with a cell phone and standing 5 foot 4 inches tall, said she
approached what appeared to be an ICE agent standing on the sidewalk
across the street from a house that was being raided. Tincher said she
asked the person if they were with ICE. The person did not identify
himself but simply yelled, “Get back.”
Tincher did not move, at
which point multiple agents descended on her. She told MPR News, “Pretty
soon they were throwing me on the ground and handcuffing me and then
putting me in their unmarked truck.” She guessed the whole interaction
happened in a matter of seconds. “There were other watchers, who were
asking me what my name was and everything,” she said, “so I identified
myself to them, then I started yelling, ‘Help!’ because I was being
kidnapped.”
*****
While Tincher was handcuffed in the vehicle, ICE thugs menaced and
threatened her saying that if she did not “watch herself,” they were
going to pull over and pepper spray her. Jim Tincher, Susan’s husband,
told the outlet he did not know where his wife was for hours. He said it
is “incredible” to see that the “government can do this, arrest
somebody for doing nothing illegal, and throw her down, handcuff her.”
He added that seeing video of his wife being thrown down to the ground and handcuffed “was chilling.”
*****
Even after being illegally detained, Susan Tincher told MPR News she
will not stop supporting immigrants. “I’m just so concerned about our
neighbors, our peaceable neighbors being abducted and the worries their
families are going through,” she said. “I just don’t want this to be
happening in our country.”
*****
The raids in Minnesota are part of a fascist and racist campaign
launched by the Trump administration aimed at stoking fear and dividing
the working class. Since the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in
D.C. last month, Trump has embarked on a concerted campaign to paint all
people from Somali as uniquely criminal and subhuman. Minneapolis-St.
Paul is home to the largest Somali diaspora outside of Africa and is
also represented in Congress by Democratic lawmaker Ilhan Omar, the
first Somali American elected to Congress.
At a tiny fascist rally
in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, President Donald Trump again attacked
Somalis and Omar. Speaking on the former, Trump grunted, “They oughta
get ‘em the hell out of here. They hate our country.”
Referring to
Omar, he said, “And she hates our country and [Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez] hates our country. They all do.” Trump later mocked
Omar’s “little turban” and accused her of doing “nothing but bitch.” He
again accused her of being in the country “illegally,” prompting the
small crowd of human dust to chant, “Send her back!”
According to a press release issued in November by the Federal Working
Group on Assistance for the Homeless (BAGW), the number of people
without housing in Germany has, for the first time, risen to at least
1,029,000 in 2024. This increase directly reflects the policies of the
federal and state governments, which are driving through savage social
cutbacks to finance insane levels of military rearmament.
*****
Of the more than 1 million people currently without housing, around
840,000 are accommodated within the so-called “emergency housing
assistance” system, that is, in municipal shelters. Seventy-four
percent—around 765,000 people—are adults. Around 26 percent are children
and young people, who are mostly housed together with their parents. In
total, around 820,000 people affected do not hold German citizenship.
War
refugees from Ukraine make up the largest group, accounting for around
25 percent. While the federal government is doing everything to escalate
the war against Russia, deporting ever more Ukrainians and sending them
back to the slaughter of war, refugees here are forced to live under
miserable conditions.
*****
Facilities for people without housing are increasingly being used by
people in work. Almost 15 percent now have a job, an increase of 2
percentage points compared to 2015.
The bold declarations from
federal and state governments that homelessness and rough sleeping in
Germany will be “overcome” by 2030 are sheer cynicism. Berlin’s Senate
administration recently stated that the so-called “needs forecast” for
accommodation, which currently stands at around 55,000 places, will rise
to more than 85,000 by the end of 2029. This corresponds to an increase
of 55 percent.
In 1995 there were still 2.7 million social
housing units in Germany. Thirty years later, fewer than 1 million
remain. In Berlin, the number of social housing units fell from 340,000
in 2000 to around 85,000 today—only a quarter of the original stock—as a
result of selloffs by state governments of the SPD and the Party of
Democratic Socialism (PDS) or its successor, the Left Party. In 2024
there were 2,495 forced evictions in Berlin, an increase of 5.3 percent
compared to 2023, when there were 2,369. Across Germany, the number of
forced evictions rose over the same period from 32,669 to 35,028 in 2024
(an increase of 7.2 percent).
*****
For the beginning of 2026, the municipal housing companies in Berlin
have announced substantial rent increases for around 99,000 households,
between 2.5 and 5.5 percent.
The practices of unscrupulous
property corporations are further fueling the precarious situation on
the housing market. The property giant Vonovia has been forced to
withdraw recent rent increases of 15 percent. The blue-chip company,
listed on the DAX stock index, had justified this brutal increase in
tens of thousands of cases by inventing fictitious features not provided
for in the local rent index. Recently, the Berlin Regional Court ruled
that this practice was unlawful. However, as Vonovia has pointed out,
tenants must accept the unlawful rent rise if they have already agreed
to it.
The widely influential guitarist Steve Cropper self-effacingly and all too modestly told Guitar Player Magazine in
2024, “My playing has always sucked, but it sells … I keep it simple, I
guess. I’m not a guitar player. I never took the time.” By that time,
he was early into his ninth decade and had been in the forefront of the
Memphis soul-rock scene for a full six of them.
Cropper died in a rehabilitation facility on December 3 at 84. He was
well-renowned as a soul rock music icon among millions of fans. It can
be safely assumed that many who love his music may not even know him by
name. As Booker T. & the MGs’ guitarist, he contributed to an
informal jam session which was recorded and became a top hit nationally
in 1962. “Green Onions” has since become an early soul rock classic.
Eschewing flashy guitar solos and pretentious showmanship, Cropper was known for “playing for the song.” In a 2021 interview on guitar.com,
he said “I’ve always thought of myself as a rhythm player … I get off
on the fact that I can play something over and over and over, while
other guitar players don’t want to even know about that. They won’t even
play the same riff or the same lick twice.”
He told Total Guitar Magazine in October 2024, “In the early
days when I was playing guitar, I knew the world didn’t need another
B.B. King, Chet Atkins or Les Paul. So, what are you gonna do now? I
thought, ‘Just be yourself and do your thing. Don’t go changing.’”
*****
Special note must be taken of his work with Otis Redding. He
described working with him (also in 1984) at Stax: “Otis was one of
those type of people that really walked around with a guitar full, or a
handful, or a suitcase full of songs. He always had 10, 12, whatever,
how many ideas, running around of unfinished things. And usually when he
came to town, it was a very short stay. I mean, it was never longer
than, like, a couple weeks.
So we really had to burn
the midnight oil, so to speak, in the first two, three days he was here.
And I just sort of, he’d throw this at me, and I’d throw something at
him that I’d been doing. And we just sort of, together, collaborated on
certain ideas, and I just sort of picked the best of it.
And I
think, of course, I was very fortunate to be working with somebody like
Otis Redding, who was so talented, but he really influenced me, and the
funny thing that I, every time I look back on it, I used to write, if
anybody ever listens to the songs themselves, a lot of the songs that we
wrote together.
“Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” was
cowritten and produced by Cropper. It was released in 1968 after
Redding’s untimely death at the age of 26 in an airplane crash.
*****
Money was tight at Stax in those early days. “I get asked sometimes,
‘How come there was only one guitar player on those records?’ I tell
them, ‘Because they couldn’t afford a second guitar player!” And that’s
why. Stax couldn’t even afford me! In fact, I think I did a lot of those
sessions for nothing.”
From starting out producing country music
tunes in a garage in North Memphis, the label transitioned to recording
black artists. It’s first hit on the Satellite label #101 was “Fool In Love” by the Veltones in 1959.
What
was striking about collaboration at Stax Records is that it was
interracial. Memphis was completely segregated at the time Cropper and
Stax started out, but inside the studio, “there was no color.” Cropper
described it as “family.” When doing tours, there were issues “which we
had no control over.”
*****
Cropper’s last days at Stax coincided with the financial insolvency
of the label. He went on to form his own label and moved on to other
ventures. In 1978, he and Duck Dunn appeared in the cast of the film
starring two Saturday Night Live veterans, John Belushi and Dan Akroyd, called Blues Brothers.
Not a great film, but it was successful at the box office due to
featuring popular music stars Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Chaka Khan,
Cab Calloway and others. A 1998 sequel, Blues Brothers 2000 also featured Cropper and Dunn with many of the same artists in addition to B.B. King, harmonicist John Popper and many others.
Cropper
was known widely as humble and unassuming. Later in his career, he
played with many of the most renowned popular music artists in the
world. He performed, recorded and gave interviews until recently. His
last album was released in 2024 called Friendlytown.
Barnaby Joyce’s decision to join the far-right party is another
expression of the crisis of the conservative Liberal-National Coalition
and the lurch to the right by the entire political establishment.
Drug commissioner Hendrik Streeck (CDU) has underlined the inhumane and
de facto murderous measures the ruling class is prepared to take by
proposing drastic cuts to medical care for the elderly.
Denmark’s Social Democrat-led government has used its six-month
chairmanship of the European Union (EU) Council to expand the country’s
cooperation with fascist Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni,
especially in the fields of immigration and refugee policy.
This
strategy culminated Monday with the decision by EU interior ministers to
adopt a hardline package escalating the persecution of immigrants,
including by expanding the list of countries that people can be deported
to and clearing the way for the establishment of “return hubs” outside
the EU.
*****
Copenhagen has long pursued a hardline approach on immigration, which
the Social Democrats have spearheaded by embracing wholesale the far
right’s policy demands. The “Danish model,” formerly held up by liberal
reformists to bolster their claim that capitalism could be “humanised,”
now inspires far-right parties and governments across the continent.
In
May this year, Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen joined Meloni to
initiate a letter ultimately signed by nine EU states that called for a
break with the European Convention of Human Rights. The letter also
demanded the curtailing of the European Court of Human Rights’s ability
to enforce basic rights like the right to asylum and right to residency.
The document advanced the typical arguments of Europe’s far right,
demanding “more room nationally to decide when to expel criminal foreign
nationals.” It denounced ECHR decisions that have “in some cases
limited our ability to make political decisions” and insisted, “There is
much more to be done before Europe regains control of irregular
migration.”
*****
Meloni, an admirer of the fascist dictator Mussolini, heads a
government that is notorious for systematically blocking efforts by
private humanitarian organizations to rescue refugees in the
Mediterranean, where thousands drown every year due to the EU’s
“Fortress Europe” policies. Italy is working to set up a “return hub”for
asylum seekers in Albania, where applications would be processed
outside of the EU’s borders.
The fact that Frederiksen and
Denmark’s Social Democrats solidarize themselves with this record and
demand that Europe’s governments go even further exposes the hostility
to basic principles of international law throughout Europe’s entire
political establishment, in both its nominal “left” and right flanks.
Denmark has pursued one of the strictest anti-immigrant courses in
Europe for over two decades. When governments want to launch crackdowns
on migrant rights, like Keir Starmer’s Labour government in Britain, they cite Denmark as a model.
*****
These developments underscore how the fight to defend the rights of
immigrants, who are a key component of the working class across Europe,
is inseparable from the struggle to mobilise the working class
continent-wide against militarism and war, and the attacks on wages,
public services, and jobs imposed by the ruling elites.
Workers
in Denmark, Italy, and throughout Europe disgusted by the sharp shift to
the right of official politics and the witch-hunt against immigrants,
which recalls nothing so much as the rabid antisemitism of the Nazis and
other fascist regimes of the 1930s, must take this struggle forward on
the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.
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.
