The report notes that the “past year has
been indelibly shaped by concentrated wealth and power.” It cites data
showing that in the past 12 months alone, the 10 richest US billionaires
got approximately $700 billion richer. Over this period, their wealth
grew by a staggering 40 percent, from $1.79 trillion to $2.5 trillion.
*****
The domination of the United States by a parasitic oligarchy, whose
seat of power is in the White House, is on display for everyone to see.
But
the Oxfam report makes clear that, however violent the upward
redistribution of wealth being carried out under Trump, it is the
product of decades of austerity and pro-corporate policies carried out
by both parties. As the report declares, “The story does not begin in
2025.”
Returning to the 10 richest men in America, the Oxfam report noted,
“Since 2020, their inflation-adjusted wealth is up 526%.” In other
words, from March 2020 through the present, the wealth of these 10
individuals collectively increased six-fold.
A case in point is
Elon Musk, whose wealth stood at $33 billion in March 2020, but it has
since surged to $469 billion, a 14-fold increase.
Larry Ellison,
number two on the list, saw his wealth increase from $54 billion in
March 2020 to $323 billion, a six-fold increase. The wealth of Jeff
Bezos, number three on the list, increased from $126 billion in March
2020 to $265 billion today.
The increase in wealth is driven by a relentless speculative growth
of share values on Wall Street. The Oxfam report noted that “In 2025,
the share of assets owned by the top 0.1 percent hit its highest on
record since the Federal Reserve began publishing data in 1989 (12.6%),
as did their share of the stock market (24%).”
In 1989, the top
0.1 percent of households controlled 8.6 percent of wealth, compared to
13.9 percent today. By contrast, the share of wealth controlled by the
bottom 50 percent of American society has fallen from 3.5 percent in
1989 to 2.5 percent today.
In other words, the top 0.1 percent of
US households, amounting to just over 100,000 people, control six times
more wealth than the 64 million households at the very bottom of
society.
In fact, citing figures from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel
Saez, the Oxfam report notes that “The richest 0.0001% control a greater
share of wealth than in the Gilded Age, an era of US history defined by
extreme inequality.”
*****
Oxfam noted that “The recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act
(OBBBA) will reduce the tax bill of the highest-earning 0.1% by an
estimated $311,000 in 2027, while the lowest-income households—those
making less than $15,000 annually—are expected to face tax increases.”
But
as the Oxfam report makes clear, the Trump administration marks an
acceleration, at an unprecedented pace, of processes that had been
ongoing for decades. “Policymakers have been choosing inequality, and
those choices have had bipartisan support,” the study’s author, Rebecca
Riddell, told the Guardian. “Policy reforms over the last 40
years, from cuts to taxes and the social safety net to labor issues and
beyond, really had the backing of both parties.”
This assessment is true. But it is here that the report tangles
itself up in knots. The study’s author correctly points out that the
surge in social inequality has occurred over decades, under both
political parties. But the report proceeds to make the following
assertion:
Gains made during the Biden
administration—such as reductions in poverty, improved wages for
low-wage workers, and strong antitrust action that put money back in
families’ pockets—demonstrated the real potential for organizing to
secure policy change that improves people’s lives.
This
is completely contradicted by the report’s own findings. Under the
Biden administration, the share of wealth controlled by the financial
oligarchy surged at a level only eclipsed by the Trump administration.
The combined wealth of the 10 richest individuals in America doubled,
from $976 billion in January 2021 to $1,991 billion in January 2025.
During this time, labor’s share of national income plunged to an
all-time low.
Under Biden, the food insecurity rate for American children increased
from 13 percent to 19 percent. By the last year of his administration,
the US Department of Housing and Urban Development asserted in its
annual report, “The number of people experiencing homelessness on a
single night in 2024 was the highest ever recorded.”
In other words, the Biden administration was a disaster for the working class and a bonanza for the financial oligarchy.
The preface of the report is given by Democratic Senator Elizabeth
Warren, who declares that “an economy that works great for those at the
very top and leaves everyone else hanging on by their fingernails …
happened through deliberate policy choices.”
Yet she does not
explain how a vast share of the increase in social inequality documented
in the Oxfam report took place under an administration she endorsed and
whose policies she repeatedly, and without exception, defended.
Left unsaid in the main text of the Oxfam report is one word:
capitalism. Its essential framework is to argue that the growth of
social inequality is merely a policy choice, and that another choice
could just as easily be adopted within the present social framework.
Karl Marx
In
reality, however, the persistent growth of social inequality, under
Democrats and Republicans alike, is a fundamental feature of the
capitalist system. As Karl Marx explained 150 years ago, “Accumulation
of wealth at one pole is … at the same time accumulation of misery,
agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the
opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own
product in the form of capital.”
There is mounting opposition among
broad sections of the population, including workers and young people, to
social inequality and the dictatorship of the financial oligarchy.
The Socialist Equality Party insists that the obscene fortunes of the
financial elite must be expropriated. The wealth of the oligarchs is
inseparable from their control over the giant corporations, banks and
investment funds that dominate every aspect of economic and political
life. These institutions must be transformed into publicly owned
utilities, democratically controlled by the working class and
reorganized to meet human needs, not private profit.
Such a
transformation cannot be achieved through appeals to either of the
parties of Wall Street. It requires the building of a mass movement of
the working class, organized in rank-and-file committees, united
internationally through the International Workers Alliance of
Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). The fight against inequality and
dictatorship is, in its essence, a fight against capitalism. To end
exploitation, poverty and war, the working class must take power and
reconstruct economic life on socialist foundations.
The Lee Miller retrospective at Tate Britain—the most extensive ever
staged in the UK—seeks to shift public perception of Miller (1907–1977)
from muse and model to a pioneering photographer who shaped modern
visual culture and bore witness to some of the 20th century’s most
harrowing events.
The curators assert: “Yes, she was very beautiful and very well
connected, and she had an interesting, exciting life, and lots of other
artists painted or photographed her. But she was also a really major
artist, and that’s the story we want to tell.”
*****
Spanning over five decades of creative output, the exhibition
assembles more than 230 vintage and modern photographs—some previously
unknown or rarely seen—alongside film, archival material, and personal
items. It traces Miller’s evolution from fashion model to Surrealist
photographer, war correspondent, and post-war chronicler of artistic and
political life. The breadth of material—from early Vogue covers to
searing images of liberated concentration camps—reveals a restless,
radical eye attuned to both beauty and brutality. Her independent
spirit, which she once described as “a matter of getting out on a damn
limb and sawing it off behind you,” permeates the show.
These
experiences, relationships, and creative choices deeply informed
Miller’s political orientation. Though never formally affiliated with
any party, she was staunchly anti-fascist and deeply humanist. After
World War II the MI5 spy agency launched an investigation into her
“communist sympathies” and the presence of left-wing artists in her
circle.
*****
Lee Miller lived a life of extraordinary intensity and transformation.
Her own reflection, “I didn’t waste a minute all my life… but if I had
it over again, I’d be even more free with my ideas, with my body and my
affection,” captures both her defiance and her regrets. Her legacy is
one of radical creativity, emotional complexity, and a lifelong struggle
for artistic freedom.
The Endeavor incident that killed two workers last week is far from an
isolated tragedy. It is part of a growing pattern, in Australia and
globally, of preventable workplace deaths and injuries.
The film rewrites history to promote the Labour Party and the union
bureaucracy, obscuring their role both in the 2010 mine disaster, which
killed 29 people, and in the ongoing cover-up.
A report published in the British medical journal The Lancet,
“Over 3 million life-years lost in Gaza,” provides a scientific
indictment of the ethnic cleansing operations of the Israeli military
against Palestinians in the enclave territory since October 7, 2023.
Based on the confirmed death toll from the Palestinian Health Ministry as reported on July 31, 2025, The Lancet’s
researchers—Sammy Zahran of Colorado State University and Ghassan
Abu-Sittah of the American University of Beirut—calculated that the
60,199 Palestinians killed in this period lost on average 51 years each,
amounting to over 3 million years of forfeited life.
The overwhelming majority of these losses occurred among civilians,
including an estimated 1 million life-years lost among children under 15
years old. The figures presented in this study are staggering and
testify to the barbarism pursued by the Israeli regime with the backing
of the US and European imperialist powers.
The analytical framework adopted by The Lancet makes
clear that these calculations are rooted in the explicit, recorded
fatalities linked directly to Israeli military actions, excluding
thousands killed indirectly through the systematic destruction of
essential infrastructure, food, water supplies, medical facilities and
personnel.
The thesis of The Lancet report is
unequivocal: Israeli military operations have generated direct,
quantifiable social devastation that is not adequately portrayed by
death toll numbers alone. By excluding “indirect deaths resulting from
the ruin of infrastructure and medical facilities, restriction of food
and water, and the loss of medical personnel that support life,” the
true impact of the Israeli genocide is far greater than even the
horrific numbers calculated in the study.
While advocating a “yes” vote on the ballot, the WSU Rank-and-File
Committee warns that the NTEU is seeking such a vote only for the
purpose of negotiating yet another treacherous deal.
Task Force Philippines will place the supervision and control of
maritime confrontations between the Philippines and China under the
command of a US general.
On October 30, around 1,400 registered nurses staged a one-day strike
at Keck Medicine of USC (University of Southern California) facilities,
including Keck Hospital of USC, the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer
Center, USC Arcadia Hospital and USC Verdugo Hills Hospital in Glendale.
Workers are being pushed to the breaking point. The strike took
place amid massive attacks on social programs by the Trump
administration, which is using the shutdown to eliminate or cripple
programs on which tens of millions rely. Around 42 million Americans are
dealing with delays in the distribution of food stamp benefits this
month, which the Trump administration is only distributing at a reduced
rate following court orders.
The strike encompassed some of the
most advanced medical institutions in Southern California. Keck Hospital
of USC, a 401-bed acute care facility affiliated with the University of
Southern California, boasts cutting-edge research and clinical trials.
The
USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, a 60-bed hospital specializing
in 13 areas of cancer treatment, reported approximately $2 billion in
patient revenue and $121.9 million in net profit in 2023 alone.
Since
May 2025, nurses have been locked in contract negotiations with Keck
Medicine, following an informational picket in July and a strike
authorization vote in August. The central grievance raised by nurses is
the severe understaffing that endangers patients and exhausts
caregivers.
Amarasuriya’s comments expose the government’s claims to oppose communal
politics, want “reconciliation” with minorities, including Tamils, and
to “heal the wounds” of war.
Every day, as part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing mass
deportation operation, federal immigration police, backed by local cops,
violate the constitutional rights of citizens and immigrants alike. In
scenes that mirror US-backed dictatorships in Latin America, residents
of United States, regardless of immigration status, are being
brutalized, shot and disappeared without due process.
According to
his lawyers, last Thursday in Ontario, California, US citizen Carlos
Jimenez, 25, was shot in the back by Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) agents after he tried to warn them that children would soon be
gathering at a nearby school bus stop. Jimenez was on his way to work at
a food bank when he came upon ICE agents conducting a traffic stop near
the bus stop.
The Michigan state budget has exposed the widening chasm between the
state’s rhetoric of “equity” and “universal access” and the concrete
policies being implemented to satisfy the demands of Wall Street, credit
rating agencies, and the corporate elite.
Key
elements in the CAQs class-war agenda include: slashing and privatizing
public services; gutting environmental regulations; continued attacks
on immigrants; and further coercive measures to suppress working-class
opposition.
Around 120 people packed into the far too small cinema auditorium at the
Left Literature Fair in Nuremberg on Sunday, where Mehring Verlag
presented two books by the American socialist David North, chairman of
the World Socialist Web Site: The Logic of Zionism and Socialism Against War.
*****
It was the only event at the fair to focus on the ongoing genocide in
Gaza and the danger of a third world war. The Left Party and other
pseudo-left groups support Trump’s “peace plan” for Gaza, declare the
genocide to be over and play down the danger of a third world war.
The
Mehring Verlag event stood in complete contrast; it analysed both theaters of war in Gaza and Ukraine as part of the worldwide development
towards war, explained their causes in the deep crisis of capitalism
and outlined a socialist perspective in opposition to them.
The
City of Nuremberg responded by politically censoring the event: only 30
hours before the fair began, it demanded that the fair management change
the event description and threatened to exercise its rights as the
owner of the venue to “exclude the book launch from the program of the
Left Literature Fair” if this did not happen. Even the posters with the
event text, which had been put up in the building as all publishers at
the fair do, had to be removed under threat of the event being banned.
The
city objected to the description because it accused the German
government of “bloody war crimes” and referred to the genocide in Gaza
as such. In the city’s view, this was unlawful. This argument amounts to
the suppression of any criticism of the government’s war policy.
Supporters of Mehring Verlag responded to the censorship with a political offensive: hundreds of leaflets condemning the censorship were
distributed to the fair’s visitors, so that in the end everyone knew
about it. Some even extended their stay in Nuremberg by a day in order
to be able to attend the event.
On the morning of the event, all
the publishers exhibiting at the fair adopted a resolution sharply
protesting against the censorship of Mehring Verlag’s event text and
calling on the City of Nuremberg to refrain from any future attempts at
censorship against book launches at the Left Literature Fair.
*****
Against this background the event was of central significance. The
speaker, Peter Schwarz, a member of the World Socialist Web Site international editorial
board, began by explaining that the event was taking place 80 years
after the Nuremberg Trials, at which the chief Nazi war criminals were
convicted.
That the City of Nuremberg now declared that one may
not call the crimes of capitalist governments by their name because this
would relativize the Holocaust, Schwarz said,
turns
the significance of the Nuremberg Trials on its head. They were meant to
ensure that genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes would
never be committed again—or that those responsible for such crimes would
have to reckon with severe punishment.
Schwarz made
clear what the city administration’s argument amounts to: “From being a
weapon against war crimes, it transforms the Nuremberg Trials into a
general amnesty for them. One may no longer call a crime a crime because
in doing so one would relativize another crime.”
In this context, Schwarz presented David North’s first book, The Logic of Zionism: From Nationalist Myth to the Gaza Genocide,
which explains the background to the current genocide and demonstrates
that the Zionist project has from the outset been based on a reactionary
ideology.
*****
The lecture met with a great response from the audience, with
listeners repeatedly applauding at key points in the speech. Afterwards,
many visitors came to the Mehring Verlag stand to continue the
political discussion and to purchase the two books and other Marxist literature.
The World Socialist Web Site will
publish a video recording of the lecture in the coming days. The author
of the two books presented, David North, will speak in Berlin on November 18 and in London on November 22 on the topic “Where is America heading? Socialism or barbarism.”
It took the CPM–K five days to issue anything beyond a pitiful tweet
from its leader, Booker Omole, lauding Raila Odinga, the long-time
opposition leader, former prime minister, and political fixer for
Kenya’s ruling elite, as a champion of “Kenya’s bourgeois democratic
struggle.” Now, the CPM–K is moving to politically exploit Odinga’s
death seeking to launch a new pseudo-left alliance aimed at containing
growing social opposition to Kenyan capitalism.
The CPM–K’s letter acknowledges the scale of the crisis engulfing the
ruling class. It declares: “The death of Raila Amolo Odinga, long-time
opposition figure and symbol of Kenya’s liberal-reformist politics,
marks a turning point in the political history of our nation. It brings
to an end a political era dominated by charismatic personalities,
populist reform agendas, and cyclical pacts with the ruling
bourgeoisie.” Odinga’s death, it states, has “shaken the imagination of
millions who saw in him the last remaining link between popular struggle
and state power.”
Indeed, since coming to power in 2022, the
government of President William Ruto has faced the accelerating collapse
of the entire post-independence order as he has rammed through
International Monetary Fund tax hikes, privatizations and social
spending cuts. These measures triggered the eruption of the GenZnationwideprotestslastyear,
amid soaring inequality. The government responded by deploying the army
and gunning down protestors, carrying out abductions and using
state-funded goons to attack demonstrators.
Facing this
opposition, Ruto, in close consultation with Washington and the European
Union, turned to Odinga, the leader of the bourgeois Orange Democratic
Movement (ODM), to stabilize his collapsing rule. Odinga’s entry into
government was the final act of a man whose political authority had
already evaporated. The protests had completely bypassed him, signalling
the rise of a new generation entering political life independently of
Kenya’s bankrupt, tribalist parties of the ruling elite.
However,
in the absence of a clear program, perspective and political
leadership, this mass movement proved inadequate to defeat a ruling
elite that is determined to impose the full weight of International
Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity.
The anger did not subside. Protests
erupted again this year, this time targeting the joint Ruto-Odinga
“broad based” government, and were met with even greater state violence.
On July 7, months before Odinga’s death, security forces opened fire on
demonstrators, killing 57 people in one of the bloodiestmassacres carried out by the Kenyan bourgeoisie since independence.
The
death of Odinga is a political crisis for the Kenyan ruling class. It
takes place amid a growing wave of social unrest spreading across the
world. From Tanzania, Cameroon, Peru, Nepal and Bangladesh to
Madagascar, Morocco, Mozambique and Angola, workers and youth are rising
against soaring prices, mass unemployment, and IMF austerity
programs.
The same anger is erupting in the imperialist centres. In the US, the
“No Kings” protests sparked by Trump’s efforts to install a
dictatorship drew millions. Across Europe, millions have joined
demonstrations opposing the Western-backed genocide in Gaza. These
struggles express the reawakening of the working class under conditions
of a deepening crisis of world capitalism.
Amid this intensifying
global and domestic crisis, the CPM-K Letter claims, “The death of Raila
Odinga opens space for the advance of revolutionary consciousness”. But
their rediscovery of Odinga’s “legacy” is an act of political
rehabilitation. It conceals the Odinga dynasty’s decades-long service to
Kenyan capitalism, whitewashes Stalinism’s complicity in this project,
and falsifies the revolutionary tasks posed before the working class. It
is on these rotten foundations that the CPM-K seeks to build a
“Revolutionary United Front”.
*****
The CPM-K traces its lineage to the Social Democratic Party (SDP),
but like Mwakenya all of its leading figures ultimately found their way
into the political establishment. The SDP’s presidential candidates in
the 1997 and 2002 general elections—Charity Ngilu (1997) and James
Orengo (2002)—and senior party figures like Anyang’ Nyong’o, all went on
to join Odinga in power. Ngilu was appointed Minister of Health
(2003–2007) in Mwai Kibaki’s administration and Orengo served as
Minister for Lands (2008–2013) in Kibaki’s second government, while
Nyong’o became Minister for Planning and National Development
(2003–2005) and later Minister for Medical Services (2008–2013).
Out
of the SPD emerged Booker Omole and Mwandawiro Mghanga, who in 2019
relaunched it as the Communist Party of Kenya (CPK). Mghanga had long
been integrated into the Kenyan capitalist state. Elected to parliament
in 2002 under the Odinga-backed National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), he
later served as Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs in Mwai Kibaki’s
government. After losing his seat in 2007, he became chairperson of the
SDP, continuing the party’s long record of collaboration with bourgeois
governments under the banner of “progressive reform.”
The split between Mghanga and Omole came only in 2022, when Mghanga
joined William Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza Alliance in the run up of the
presidential elections that year. Until then, there had been no
fundamental difference in orientation between them. Omole and his
supporters objected to joining Ruto—a politician with a long record of
violence against the working class—at a time of soaring food prices,
mass youth unemployment, and worsening living conditions that threatened
to erupt into social unrest. Omole judged it more effective to suppress
opposition and contain social anger from the outside.
In late 2024, Omole founded the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya. The CPM-K’s Congress
reaffirmed what was already clear: despite adding “Marxist” to its
name, the party has no orientation to the working class. It remains a
pro-capitalist organisation rooted in nationalism, representing the
interests of sections of the bourgeoisie and middle class, centered on
its orientation to capitalist China. It advocates for the preservation
of the profit system, calling for a “mixed economic system where the
state, private sector, and cooperative sector coexist”. It explains that
“[u]ltimately, CPM-K aims to build an independent, nationally
integrated, and self-sustaining economy by mobilizing Kenya’s
resources.”
Across its successive incarnations, from Mwakenya to the SDP, from the
CPK to today’s CPM-K, Kenya’s Stalinist current has performed the
historical function of propping up bourgeois nationalism and preventing
the emergence of an independent revolutionary movement of the working
class. Whether under Kenyatta, Moi, Odinga or Ruto, these organizations have urged workers to subordinate their struggles to supposedly
“patriotic” and “progressive” sections of the elite. In every case, the
result has been a political disaster for the working class.
*****
In its “Letter to the Broad Kenyan Left”, the CPM-K identifies the
vacuum left by Odinga’s death as a “moment of historical rupture” in
which “the revolutionary party must intervene with ideological clarity
and political firmness.” To fill this vacuum and build a new political
vehicle to shore up the collapsing authority of the capitalist state,
the CPM-K proposes a “Revolutionary United Front” of “workers, peasants,
women, youth, [and] progressive intellectuals,” and campaigns for
“unity of the exploited classes”.
Beneath this rhetoric lies a
familiar Stalinist script, including the characterization of Kenya as a
“semi-feudal, neocolonial economy” and the denunciation of certain
unnamed elites as a “comprador-bureaucratic bourgeoisie tied to
imperialism”. This is the inherited vocabulary of Maoism, devised to
rationalize alliances with so-called “patriotic” sections of the
bourgeoisie under the banner of the “New Democratic Revolution.”
In 1939, Mao published The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party,
where he argued that imperialism had made China a “semi-feudal,
semi-colonial” country, whose “basic contradictions” lay “between
imperialism and the Chinese nation” and “between feudalism and the great
masses of the people.” On this basis, Mao proposed a “national
revolution to overthrow foreign imperialist oppression” alongside a
“democratic revolution to overthrow feudal landlord oppression.” He
divided Chinese society into classes—landlords, bourgeoisie, petty
bourgeoisie, peasantry, and proletariat—insisting that the “national
bourgeoisie can become a revolutionary force” distinct from the
“comprador big bourgeoisie.”
The Chinese revolution, Mao wrote, had a “twofold task”: first, to
complete the “bourgeois-democratic” or “new-democratic” revolution
through a coalition with the national bourgeoisie; and second, to
“transform it into a socialist revolution when all the necessary
conditions are ripe.”
It was on this foundation that the term
“bureaucrat capitalism” arose. For Maoist forces like the CPM-K, it is
not a category describing the class character of the capitalist state,
but a moral condemnation of its corruption. It is a deviation from what
is imagined to be the “progressive” function of a capitalist government.
Bureaucrat capitalists, like compradors, are portrayed as traitors to
the nation and puppets of imperialism, to be replaced by “patriotic”
capitalists who will supposedly defend the interests of the “people” to
carry out the “national democratic revolution”. Thus, the capitalist
state is not to be abolished, but reformed under new leadership.
The implication is that the CPM-K’s call for a “Revolutionary United
Front” today is to replace the “bureaucrat capitalists” with more
“patriotic” figures loyal to the nation. In reality, the repressive and
exploitative character of the Kenyan state is not the product of
individual betrayals or of a lack of patriotism, but of irreconcilable
class antagonisms rooted in the global imperialist system. There is no
progressive national bourgeoisie waiting to complete Kenya’s “unfinished
revolution,” nor can any “patriotic” government liberate the working
class from IMF austerity or imperialist domination.
*****
The only genuine alternative lies in the theory of Permanent
Revolution developed by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky warned, “The national
bourgeoisie of the colonial and semi-colonial countries, being
economically, politically and spiritually dependent upon the imperialist
bourgeoisie, is incapable of waging a consistent struggle against
imperialism.”
As he had already written in Results and Prospects
(1906), “The bourgeoisie of the backward countries is not capable of
conducting a revolutionary struggle against imperialism; it is linked to
it by a thousand ties.” These historic tasks fall to the working class,
which must seize power at the head of the rural poor, expropriate the
capitalist class, and reorganize society on a socialist basis. The
revolution must be international, linking struggles across Africa with
those of the working class in the imperialist centers.
*****
The way forward lies not in completing a bourgeois democratic
revolution, but in overthrowing the bourgeoisie altogether. This
requires building a Kenyan section of the International Committee of the
Fourth International—a revolutionary leadership committed to
international socialism. Only such a party can unify the most advanced
layers of workers and youth, and lead the fight for the United Socialist
States of Africa.
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.
The US Department of Labor (DOL) has issued a 36-page document defending
one of the most undemocratic union elections in US history: The 2022–23
vote for top UAW officers. Its October 31 “Supplemental Statement of
Reasons” dismisses the complaint of Will Lehman, a socialist Mack Trucks
worker and candidate for UAW president in 2022, who documented mass
disenfranchisement in the government-supervised election that installed
Shawn Fain.
The report was released only after a federal judge in Michigan
repeatedly ordered both the Biden and Trump administrations to reply. It
justifies every abuse committed by the UAW bureaucracy. It portrays an
election in which fewer than 9 percent of 1.1 million members voted as
the product of “reasonable efforts” by the UAW to ensure the right to
vote and support candidates of their choice. That 91 percent of the
members were effectively excluded did not overturn the DOL’s conclusion
that “no violations occurred that may have affected the outcome of the
election.”
Lehman’s complaint exposed how the UAW deliberately
failed to inform members of the election, refused to update mailing
lists and allowed tens of thousands of ballots to go undelivered. The
DOL’s response repeats, almost word-for-word, the defenses offered by
the bureaucracy itself.
In a statement responding to the DOL’s decision, Will Lehman said:
This
report proves that the government, the UAW bureaucracy, and the
corporations are part of one system of control. The Department of Labor
admits that my reports were true—that tens of thousands never received
ballots and that only 1 in 10 workers voted—yet declares this
meaningless because it supposedly did not affect the outcome. UAW
members and retirees will recognize this as a violation of logic and
common sense that serves to ratify violations of their rights.
Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) has proposed a boycott/divest/unsubscribe campaign against the New York Times on
the basis of that newspaper’s “manufacturing consent for war, for
exploitation, for genocide.” Several hundred writers, scholars and
public figures have expressed support for the effort, pledging not to
write for the Times Opinion section “in a collective effort to
hold the paper accountable for its role in the genocide in Gaza,”
according to one media report. The signatories include nearly 150 past Times contributors.
The broader list of 300 includes the names of whistleblower Chelsea
Manning, journalists Chris Hedges and Dave Zirin, filmmaker Elia
Suleiman, physician and author Gabor Maté, activist Greta Thunberg,
novelists Mary Gaitskill and Sally Rooney, artist Nan Goldin and Rep.
Rashida Tlaib, the Democratic congresswoman from Michigan.
WAWOG, as part of its indictment, focuses specifically on a filthy December 2023 article published by the Times,
“‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct.
7,” in which the newspaper passed on various wild allegations about rape
and sexual violence during the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. The
piece, WAWOG notes, was
bylined by a Times reporter
with a long history of fabrication (Jeffrey Gettleman); a filmmaker who
served in the IOF’s intelligence division and works for Israeli state
media (Anat Schwartz); and a 24-year-old food blogger (Schwartz’s nephew
by marriage, Adam Sella). Schwartz had never reported for the Times—or,
in fact, for any newspaper—before being recruited by Gettleman himself
to help produce evidence of “widespread sexual assault.”
The
article and the associated claims about sexual assault and other
outrages have been exposed by investigators. Cited by WAWOG, Intercept reporters Ryan Grim, Jeremy Scahill and Daniel Boguslaw, in the course of debunking the Times article, observed that Anat Schwartz was not primarily responsible for the fraud:
She
may harbor animosity toward Palestinians, lack the experience with
investigative journalism, and feel conflicting pressures between being a
supporter of Israel’s war effort and a Times reporter, but
Schwartz did not commission herself and Sella to report one of the most
consequential stories of the war. Senior leadership at the New York Times did.
*****
The exposure and discrediting of the New York Times is an important task of political and intellectual hygiene, indispensable to the development of socialist consciousness. The Times, the
“paper of record,” plays a significant role in shaping public opinion
in the US. It hypocritically, deceitfully postures as the voice of
civilization, democracy and liberal moderation while functioning in
practice as an instrument of American imperialist propaganda, often as
the obvious conduit for CIA and Pentagon—or Mossad—disinformation (e.g.,
the December 2023 article on alleged October 7 sexual violence).
Speaking
generally for the Democratic Party, the newspaper is most vigorous at
present in attempting to smother opposition to Donald Trump and prevent
it from challenging the domination of the corporate-financial oligarchy
and the two-party system.
Such a critique of the Times is not the perspective, however, of WAWOG. It argues that
The New York Times is
a failed institution that serves only the powerful and the morally
lazy. By refusing to name the perpetrator—the Israeli occupation
forces—of the deadliest war on journalists in history, the editorial
board of Times has shown that they do not even serve their own
profession. By shaping its coverage in accordance with Israeli state
dictates and Zionist threats, the executives of the Times have become not only complicit in, but accountable for, the slaughter of Gaza.
Overstatement, that the Times is “accountable” for the Gaza slaughter, here combines with a dangerously false assertion. To argue that the Times is
a “failed institution” suggests that its proper role would be to inform
and alert the population to imperialist atrocities, for example. But
this is not so.
Granted that the newspaper’s editorial board has shifted far to the
right, along with the rest of the American political and media
establishment, since the Vietnam War era, the Times is
performing precisely the role that capitalist society sets out for it
and other such publications. Marxists understand as ABC that “All over
the world,” in Lenin’s words, “freedom of the press means freedom to buy
up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake ‘public opinion’
for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.”
*****
So, the newspaper that “exists to serve the interests of U.S.
imperialism” can relatively easily be pushed into telling the truth
about Gaza and related matters and, moreover, entering into opposition
against central features of American imperialist foreign policy. This is
unserious, to say the least, and it is difficult to believe that the
statement’s authors or signatories believe this themselves. The Times,
an experienced, crafty imperialist leopard, will not change its spots,
nor does it have the slightest motive or desire to do so.
So, the newspaper that “exists to serve the interests of U.S.
imperialism” can relatively easily be pushed into telling the truth
about Gaza and related matters and, moreover, entering into opposition
against central features of American imperialist foreign policy. This is
unserious, to say the least, and it is difficult to believe that the
statement’s authors or signatories believe this themselves. The Times,
an experienced, crafty imperialist leopard, will not change its spots,
nor does it have the slightest motive or desire to do so.
*****
It fails to make such a condemnation. And here one must refer to the
inclusion of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as part of the
WAWOG coalition and the presence of Tlaib among the statement’s
signatories. The DSA and Tlaib are indispensable components of the
Democratic Party, one of the two parties of the American ruling elite, indispensable in particular to the current effort to channel mass opposition within the existing political set-up.
Hence the half-politics of the statement. It denounces the Times and
its complicity, the crimes of imperialism, in sharp terms, but says
nothing about concrete political life in the US, in particular, the
pernicious role of the Democrats, who stand behind and loom over the Times.
It feebly refers to “accountability” and “failed institutions,” which
ought to convince no one. In the end, it proposes another version of
discredited, single-issue protest politics.
It is time to say
clearly what is. Capitalism is the central question. Homicidal Zionism
is an agency of world capitalism. The mass murder in Gaza emerges from
the intense crisis of imperialism, its reckless abandonment of any “red
lines” and its counterrevolutionary ferocity against the gains and
rights of the international working class.
There are angry,
serious writers and others who have attached their names to the WAWOG
declaration. They and others need to think seriously about these issues.
The orientation today must be toward the independent organization and
socialist political development of the working class, the only force
capable of putting an end to the horrors in Gaza and elsewhere.
Changes in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), run under the
direct control of the president since it was established by Richard
Nixon in 1970, will transform the mission of the agency from protecting
human health from environmental toxins to directly serving the profit
interests of corporate polluters. Field workers and scientists are being
terminated by the Trump administration, and the leadership of EPA
divisions is being replaced by corporate flunkies.
Earlier this
month, President Trump declared that during the federal government
shutdown, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought
would decide “which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a
political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts
will be temporary or permanent.” Trump added, “I can’t believe the
Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”
*****
In late June, hundreds of EPA scientists submitted an open letter of protest titled a “Declaration of Dissent.” Addressed to Zeldin, the letter centered on “Five Primary Concerns” over policies that “recklessly undermine the EPA mission:”
1. Undermining public trust
2. Ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters
3. Reversing EPA’s progress in America’s most vulnerable communities
4. Dismantling the Office of Research and Development
5. Promoting a culture of fear, forcing staff to choose between their livelihood and the population’s well-being.
*****
The response of Trump to the protest was to retaliate. An
investigation was carried out to identify the signatories, including
those who signed the letter anonymously. Some 140 employees, including
drinking water field workers, were subsequently placed on administrative
leave.
The signatories are to be permanently fired. The Trump
administration announced a “zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats
unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the
administration’s agenda.”
Modern
science and technology have made it possible to wipe out hunger and
disease, vanquish ignorance and mysticism, and provide a high standard
of living for every human being on the planet. Moreover, the
revolutionary developments in transportation and communications, most
recently through the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, have
shattered the barriers to human interaction and made possible the
education and integration of all humanity on a scale never before seen
in history.
The fight for science and human progress can only take
place through the building of a socialist movement in the working
class. Scientists are experiencing the same process of
proletarianization now affecting doctors, teachers and other
professionals. Scientists must recognize their common interests with all
workers facing attacks on their living standards, jobs and democratic
rights. No matter your education level or salary, to the oligarchy that
rules America, you are as expendable as any other worker.
With 92 percent voting to strike, Minneapolis educators confront a
politically engineered budget crisis and a union leadership seeking to
suppress their struggle, highlighting the need for rank-and-file
committees to defend public education and connect the struggle to the
broader fight of the working class.
In the two months since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and ASIO, the
domestic spy agency, claimed that Iran had been involved in antisemitic
incidents in Australia, no evidence whatsoever has been produced to
support their assertion.
Instead, everything that has emerged
since has undermined the claim, indicating that it was politically
motivated and that the story came largely or solely from Israel’s spy
agency Mossad, which is notorious for disinformation and dirty tricks,
including assassination and sabotage.
US President Trump’s much anticipated summit with his Chinese
counterpart Xi Jinping last week in South Korea finished with nothing
more than an uncertain one-year truce in an economic war that has been
dramatically escalated by Trump since returning to office this year.
While the meeting might temporarily halt the fighting over trade, the
US-led economic war and military build-up against China is certain to
continue.
*****
Alongside large tariffs, the White House has sought to cripple
hi-tech Chinese industries by restricting the sale of advanced
semiconductors and chip-making equipment to China because of “national
security.” China responded in kind by limiting the sale of rare earths
required across a broad range of industries, including auto, electronics
and defence.
Last month, in the lead-up to the summit, the Trump
administration provocatively upped the ante once again—restricting
semi-conductor sales not only to nominated Chinese corporations but any
company in which they held a majority stake. According to one estimate,
it expanded the scope of the bans from about 1,300 China-related
entities to more than 20,000.
Clearly angered by what it regarded
as a breach of previous agreements, China extended its restrictions on
the export of rare earths. It also established its own licensing
requirements for the export of equipment for mining and processing rare
earths, specifically banning exports with applications in sensitive
areas like military operations. China has a virtual global monopoly in
both the mining and processing of these essential materials.
Trump exploded, threatening to impose an additional 100 percent tariffs
on China and call off the summit before shelving the extra tariffs. But
as he was about to sit down with Xi, Trump, in gangster fashion, tweeted
that he had ordered the restarting of US nuclear testing, specifically
naming China and Russia as responsible. The resumption of nuclear
testing, halted by all three countries in the 1990s, was not only a
crude attempt to bludgeon concessions from Xi but also demonstrates that
Trump’s economic warfare is intimately connected to advanced US-led
preparations for military conflict with nuclear-armed China.
*****
The global markets and corporate elites collectively breathed a sigh
of relief that the summit had averted an immediate rupture between the
world’s two largest economies. But no one is under any illusion that the
truce is anything but temporary and could blow up at any time. The
detail of what was agreed to is not even clear, as no joint press
conference took place and a signed agreement is yet to be reached.
*****
The response of the Democratic Party has been to criticise Trump for
not being aggressive enough and caving in to Xi. Senate Minority Leader
Chuck Schumer wrote on Twitter, “Don’t believe his bullshit. Trump
folded on China.” Journalist John Harwood, summing up the critique by
the Democratic-aligned critics, declared that “Xi wiped the floor with
Trump.”
The Democratic Party-aligned New York Times
accused Trump of compromising American national security by backing off
from extending the ban on US advanced technology exports to Chinese
majority-owned entities. Journalist Ana Swason declared that “the move
appeared to be one of the first concessions the United States had made
on national security-related technology controls as part of a trade
negotiation.”
The response of the Democrats demonstrates that the
entire US political establishment, whatever their tactical differences,
regards China as the chief threat to the global economic and military
supremacy of US imperialism. For more than a decade, beginning with the
“pivot to Asia” by the Obama administration, Washington has engaged in
an escalating diplomatic and economic offensive and military build-up
throughout the Indo-Pacific region in order to debilitate and ultimately
subordinate China to its US economic and strategic interests.
*****
The only social force capable of halting the plunge towards a global war
and a nuclear catastrophe is the international working class. The
International Committee of the Fourth International calls for the
building of a unified, antiwar movement of workers in the US, China and
around the world based on a revolutionary, socialist program to abolish
capitalism and its reactionary division of the world into rival
nation-states.
The crisis in the German and European automotive and supplier industries
is assuming catastrophic proportions. Not a day passes without new
disastrous news. The major manufacturers—Volkswagen, Mercedes, Bosch,
ZF, Porsche, Ford, Audi, etc.—are announcing ever more extensive job
cuts, often running to four or five figures. At the same time, hundreds
of posts are being eliminated every day in countless medium-sized
companies.
A study by the EY consultancy shows that more than 50,000 jobs in the
automotive industry in Germany were destroyed within a year.
*****
On top of this come the ever sharper effects of the global tariff and trade war. Although the import tariffs of 25 percent on vehicles and vehicle parts from the EU, which the Trump administration announced in the spring, were later reduced to 15 percent, they still lie well above the previous level of 2.5 percent. Volkswagen, Europe’s largest car manufacturer, reported a 37 percent decline in operating profits in the first quarter of 2025 and cites the US tariffs as a key factor.
Last week the crisis intensified again. The Dutch government, under pressure from the US, took control of the chip manufacturer Nexperia, which belongs to the Chinese electronics group Wingtech, and removed the Chinese chief executive. In response, the Chinese government imposed an export stop on the world’s largest supplier of simple semiconductor chips.
The effects are devastating. Nexperia manufactures half of the world’s standard chips that are found in almost every electrical device and are needed in the automotive industry for window regulators, airbags, LED headlights, engine controllers and much more.
*****
IG Metall, which has more than 2 million members and likes to call
itself the largest single trade union in the world, is doing nothing to
defend jobs. On the contrary, its officials sit on corporate supervisory
boards and are well informed at an early stage about all plans for
redundancies. On essential points, they share the employers’ and
managers’ assessment of the economic situation and help to draw up the rationalization programs, redundancy and closure plans.
In the
trade war, the union officials stand unreservedly on the side of the
German corporations, are deepening their collaboration with the
government and call for a “national industrial policy”—meaning a
stronger and more aggressive assertion of German economic interests
around the world. To the Trump administration’s economic war and the
slogan “America first!” they respond with “Deutschland über alles!”
*****
Many workers are asking what can be done in this situation and are
looking for a way to break out of the straitjacket of the trade union
apparatus.
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) proposes the following strategy:
1. Build new organizational structures....
2. Link the fight against job cuts to the fight against war....
3. Make internationalism the central strategy....
4. Build action committees as independent organs of struggle and socialist education....
In a further act of international piracy, the US military carried out
a lethal strike on a small boat in the Caribbean Sea Saturday, killing
three men whom Secretary of War Pete Hegseth labeled “narco-terrorists,”
without offering any evidence.
*****
According to reports stemming from a military briefing Thursday for
members of the House of Representatives, the Pentagon could not even
provide the names of those killed, because their identities were not
known, despite claims of “exquisite intelligence” by House Speaker Mike
Johnson.
The latest strike on a small boat coincided with the
arrival of the USS Gerald R. Ford in the Caribbean Sea, off the coast of
Venezuela. The largest ship in the US Navy, with a displacement of
100,000 tons and a crew of more than 4,500, the aircraft carrier can
deploy nearly 100 warplanes and attack helicopters, three times as many
as the entire Venezuelan air force.
The arrival of the aircraft
carrier completes the assembling of a flotilla capable of waging war on
the South American country, which has been targeted by successive US
administrations because it has the world’s largest oil reserves and a
government, headed for 15 years by Hugo Chavez and, since 2013, by
Nicolas Maduro, which has been at odds with US foreign policy in the
region.
*****
The White House and Pentagon have steadily increased the pressure on
the Maduro regime over the past three months. On August 7, the State
Department doubled to $50 million the bounty offered for the capture or
demise of Maduro. On September 2, attacks on small Venezuelan fishing
boats began. On October 10, the Norwegian parliament awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize to Maria Corina Machado, the ultra-right politician and coup
plotter selected by Washington as Maduro’s replacement. Also last
month, Trump announced that he had authorized CIA covert action inside
Venezuela against the country’s government.
While boasting of the
great military “success” of blowing small boats out of the water with
satellite-guided missiles and bombs, Trump indicated last week that
there would be operations on land as well, although he portrayed them as
air strikes against “drug labs,” continuing the pretense that the US
goal is to shut down drug trafficking rather than carrying out regime
change.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) informed Congress last
week that Trump had initiated a formal armed conflict with “drug
cartels” on September 4, and that this started the 60-day clock running
for the president to report on the outcome of this conflict. Under the
1973 War Powers Resolution, the president “shall terminate” such
military operations after 60 days, unless authorized to continue by
Congress, but there is no indication that Trump will comply with that
requirement on Monday, November 3.
Instead, according to the head of the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, T.
Elliot Gaiser, the Trump administration does not regard the boat strikes
as “hostilities” covered by the 60-day limit, because there is no
danger to US forces.
*****
There has been little criticism of the strikes themselves, and no
Democrat has suggested that ordering these killings is grounds for
impeachment. Under the Supreme Court’s ruling last year, Trump cannot be
prosecuted criminally for any action he takes in his official capacity,
such as issuing an order to the Pentagon to carry out remote-controlled
murders.
Moreover, the rationale offered by Trump and Hegseth for
the boat strikes is virtually identical to that provided by Obama, when
the Democratic president ordered drone missile strikes against supposed
Al Qaeda supporters—including American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, killed
by a drone-fired missile in Yemen in September 2011.
On Saturday, food stamp processing for over 42 million American
households came to a halt as the Trump administration enacted one of the
cruelest attacks on working people in American history.
The
administration’s “hunger plan” is aimed at starving the population into
submission. It is part of his attempt to build a fascist dictatorship
to police record levels of inequality which are only growing as a result
of his policies, while also sending enormous sums to expand the
military and prepare for world war.
*****
Meanwhile, federal workers, having already been culled by hundreds of
thousands since Trump took office, have now gone more than a month
without pay under the shutdown. Nowhere has that been felt harder than
in the Washington D.C. region.
The region is home to the largest
concentration of federal workers in the United States. About 186,500
federal jobs are based in Washington D.C. alone, making up nearly a
quarter of all jobs in the city. Across the broader metro region, about
449,500 federal employees are located in D.C. and the adjoining states.
Washington
D.C. was reported to have been in recession as early as the summer,
following the Elon Musk-driven “Department of Government Efficiency”
mass firings.
The Capital Area Food Bank (CAFB) has organized a
series of food distribution events in the Washington D.C. region to meet
the colossal need for food facing federal employees in District of
Columbia, Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia. A spokesperson for the
charity told
the World Socialist Web Site that “over 36 percent of the folks in our area, which is about
1.5 million households, are experiencing some level of food insecurity
already” before the shutdown occurred.
*****
Some federal workers have not received a full paycheck in three pay
periods. Nearly one in six federal workers employed by the Executive
Branch alone make less than the national median salary of $62,000 a
year.
Nationally, over 1.4 million federal workers out of 2.4
million federal jobs in total nationwide are either furloughed or
working without pay during the shutdown. Broken down proportionately,
since no exact data on the number of impacted workers exists regionally,
that means approximately 125,000 Washington D.C.-region workers are
currently without pay.
“My
whole life I have planned on a crisis that never happened. It’s now
that time,” one worker said at the Beltsville charity. The worker, who
had nearly 40 years of government service, stated “here I am today, all
these years later, being on the dependent end, something I had never
wanted to be.”
The federal government shutdown, ongoing since October 1, has
produced a disaster for workers who have been furloughed. Texas, home of
the most reactionary state government in the country, has been hit hard
by the shutdown. Governor Greg Abbott, a staunch supporter of the Trump
administration, has done nothing to alleviate the hardship being
experienced by a significant portion of the population he governs.
There
are approximately 130,000 civilian federal employees in Texas, the
third largest concentration in the country, behind California and
Washington D.C. Another 100,000 military personnel are stationed at the
14 bases located in the state. This does not count the thousands of
civilian contractors, who are also out of work.
Food banks
throughout the state are preparing for an influx of people seeking
assistance, both out-of-work federal employees and recipients of aid
programs, such as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). More
than 3.5 million Texas residents, about 11 percent of the population,
participate in SNAP. The administrator of SNAP in the state, the Texas
Health and Human Services Commission, has stated that it will not be
able to issue benefits for November.
*****
Some workers have begun to resist, albeit in a very limited way. Air
traffic controllers have handed out leaflets at over 20 airports. This
action, coordinated by the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
(NATCA), will not solve the problem and is intended to divert the
discontent that workers feel into harmless channels. Still, the fact
that the union called this toothless action, which it has not done
during previous shutdowns, expresses an understanding by union officials
that anger and opposition are mounting among its members.
While
active-duty members of the military did receive paychecks on October 15
because of the reallocation of funds within the Department of Defense,
there have been reports of discrepancies in paychecks, and some have
apparently been paid less than expected. The National Military Family
Association reported that in a survey of 369 military families, 164
reported being underpaid on their previous paycheck. Discrepancies
ranged from $148 to around $2,000, with the majority between $600 and
$800. About 55 families reported not being paid at all.
Those
military families who have undergone a permanent change of station have
been especially hard hit. While families are reimbursed for any moves
they have to make, these payments have been stopped. One family reported
that it was living in a hotel because the housing inspector at the base
to which it was moving to had been furloughed, preventing them from
moving into base housing.
Governor Abbott has predictably repeated
the Trump administration’s line on the shutdown, saying that the
quickest way for it to end is for Senate Democrats to approve the
legislation that Trump wants. Abbott is fully aware of the grave nature
of the situation yet has counseled Texans to call 2-1-1 for information
on food, housing and other essential resources.
Hundreds of protesters are feared dead after Tanzanian security
forces launched a savage crackdown on demonstrations against the
fraudulent elections of October 29, 2025. In what many are calling a
coronation at gunpoint, President Samia Suluhu Hassan of the ruling
Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the bourgeois nationalist party that has
ruled uninterrupted for 64 years, was declared the winner with 98
percent of the vote on Saturday.
The fraudulent vote unleashed
three days of mass demonstrations and violent clashes with police. In
major cities including Dar es Salaam, Arusha, Mbeya, Mwanza, Tunduma,
and Kahama, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, have poured into
the streets, defying curfews, teargas and live ammunition from security
forces.
Demonstrators have torched police stations, destroyed ballot boxes,
and set fire to vehicles, homes, and businesses belonging to CCM
officials and their wealthy associates. Portraits of President Hassan,
once displayed in every public building, have been burned.
The
political reckoning has also targeted Tanzania’s most prominent artists
and celebrities. Diamond Platnumz, the most streamed artist in East and
Central Africa and one of the top African artists globally, his protégé
Zuchu, one of the region’s most streamed female artists, and rapper Bill
Nas have all become targets. Protesters have attacked their homes and
set fire to their cars and businesses. For years, these artists
performed at CCM rallies, praised President Hassan in their songs, and
helped to sanitize the regime’s image
The government has responded with savage repression. Opposition party
CHADEMA alleges that as many as 800 people have been killed. A
diplomatic source told the BBC that deaths could exceed 500. With
restrictions to social media, foreign journalists barred from entering
and domestic outlets such as The Citizen and Daily News parroting official CCM statements, the full scale of the bloodshed cannot be confirmed.
On Saturday, Hassan, who had remained silent and whose whereabouts
were unclear since election day, made a brief appearance in the
country’s capital, Dodoma, to collect the winner’s certificate from
electoral authorities. Speaking afterwards, she claimed that the result
showed Tanzanians had “voted overwhelmingly” for her.
Hassan
threatened protestors: “When it comes to the security of Tanzania, there
is no debate—we must use all available security avenues to ensure the
country remains safe”
She has since vanished from public view, perhaps reflecting on her former counterparts in Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Madagascar, each forced to flee amid mass uprisings.
*****
There is no precedent for protests of this scale in Tanzania’s
post-independence history. Over the years there has been small, isolated
struggles by the Maasai communities resisting eviction from ancestral
lands to expand national parks, by miners and villagers exploited by
mining corporations, and by workers and youth angered by the theft of
natural gas revenues. Never has there been a unified national eruption
of class anger.
*****
Presidential spokesperson Jonas Mbambo of neighboring Malawi, which
currently chairs the SADC Organ on Defence and Security Cooperation,
said the country is closely monitoring the situation. Landlocked Malawi
is feeling the ripple effects of the protests, facing fuel shortages and
disrupted trade. The protests have also disrupted the movement of goods
to Rwanda, under the three-decade dictatorship of Paul Kagame.
There are growing fears among the ruling classes across East Africa that they could be next. According to Africa Intelligence,
Hassan reportedly held separate phone calls with Kenyan President
William Ruto and Uganda’s long-time ruler Yoweri Museveni. Ruto last
year faced massive Gen Z–led protests
against IMF austerity measures that left hundreds dead. Museveni,
widely despised after nearly four decades in power, is preparing yet
another fraudulent election in January 2026, marked by intimidation and violent repression of the opposition.
*****
The
panic gripping East Africa’s ruling circles is well founded. They all
preside over societies with some of the world’s youngest populations,
facing mass unemployment, hunger, and the absence of any future under
capitalism. As the ruling class enriches itself from the misery of
millions and enforces austerity through police-state repression, the
spectre haunting East Africa’s elites is that a whole new generation is
rising that is opposed to the whole post-independence order. The task
facing Tanzanian workers and youth is to build their own independent
political leadership, armed with a revolutionary and internationalist
perspective.
Asylum seekers in Britain are to be housed within weeks at two former
military sites in Inverness, Scotland and East Sussex in England, as
the Starmer government enforces a policy to remove them from hotels.
There
are no humane facilities to house people arriving in the UK seeking
asylum, meaning successive governments have housed them in hotels. From a
peak of over 56,000 asylum seekers in hotels at the end of September
2023, there are still 32,000 living in them. This situation has been utilized by far-right to wage a xenophobic campaign aimed at deporting
asylum seekers, culminating this summer in a series of often violent demonstrations outside hotels.
Seeking to appeal to the far-right constituency of Reform UK, which has a
significant poll lead, the government has ramped up its own
anti-immigrant offensive. Last week, The Times reported that
the government was to move hundreds of asylum seekers out of hotels and
into the Cameron Barracks in Inverness and the Crowborough army training
camp in East Sussex. Up to 900 people will be held in the barracks. In a
dog whistle to the far-right, the Home Office stated, “We are furious
at the level of illegal migrants and asylum hotels,” and claimed that
the move will “ease pressure on communities”.
*****
The Starmer government is planning to house up to 10,000 migrants in
hovel-like conditions in detention centers created from the former
military bases. This is the fate that awaits many fleeing from poverty
and societal collapse in countries in the Middle East and Africa
devastated by wars backed by British imperialism.
In laying siege
to hotels, the far-right and its echo chamber media claim day in day
out that asylum seekers are living a life of luxury at tax payers’
expense. This is a pack of lies.
Under the Immigration and Asylum
Act 1999, the Home Office has a statutory duty to provide accommodation
for asylum seekers who appear to be destitute. But the government
support they receive is the absolute minimum. Asylum seekers are
provided financial “support” of about £7.02 per person per day and from
this must coverall basic needs like food, clothing, and transport. They do not have any choice in the accommodation they are assigned, or its location.
This
can be in multiple occupancy house, a hotel, where they often must
share a room, or barracks. Asylum seekers are not allowed to work while
waiting for their claim to be processed, which can take months.
The
lying claim that asylum hotels are luxurious was repeated by Prime
Minister Keir Starmer’s spokesperson saying, “Military sites can provide
proper security, health and wellbeing standards, and that is what we’re
intent on delivering, instead of luxury sites, as we’ve seen over recent years.”
A team of international scientists led by researchers from Australian
universities has found the first evidence that woody biomass in
tropical rainforests is acting as a long-term source of carbon dioxide.
This has global implications.
Tropical rainforests are the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystems
on earth, covering less than 10 percent of the world’s land surface, yet
containing over half of the earth’s plant and animal species. One of
the most valuable ecosystem services that rainforests provide is carbon
sequestration—the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,
thereby removing its ability to act as a greenhouse gas and contribute
to global warming.
A 2021 study
led by NASA scientists estimated that from 2000 to 2019 tropical
rainforests acted as a net “carbon sink,” absorbing 410 million tonnes
more carbon per year than they emitted. That team found that live woody
biomass—the roots, wood, bark and leaves of living trees—was responsible
for 80 percent of the carbon sequestration effect. The rest came from
other components of the ecosystem, such as soil and dead organic matter.
The new research conducted by Dr Carle’s team however, found
that live woody biomass “in Australian tropical forests now loses more
carbon to the atmosphere on an annual basis than it absorbs.” Moreover,
this “shift” from carbon sink to carbon source likely occurred around 25
years ago, at the turn of the century.
*****
The study found that an increase in tree mortality, without a
corresponding increase in growth by surviving trees, was the main driver
behind the trend. Tropical rainforests in Australia are experiencing
tree mortality rates twice as high as compared to the 1970s. This was
the finding of a study published earlier this year using the same monitoring sites as the new research.
The
principal drivers of the increased death rates of rainforest trees are
increased vapour pressure deficit (an increased atmospheric “demand” for
water from plants which can cause water deficits) and increased
atmosphere temperature. Both these effects are largely driven by climate
change.
In addition, the new paper found that cyclones, which
are increasing in severity under climate change (including in northern
Queensland), played a significant role in tree mortality. The study
found that “the carbon sink capacity of woody AGB was markedly depressed
in the 6 years following a cyclone” and that cyclones “increased the
mortality rate above background levels by 19 percent.”
The
study’s findings “suggest the potential for a similar response to
climate change by woody aboveground biomass in moist tropical forests
globally, which could culminate in a long-term switch from carbon sinks
to carbon sources.”
*****
More research is needed to get a full, global picture of this danger, in
particular focusing on rainforests on other continents and
investigating the role of other components of the ecosystem, such as the
soil. Nevertheless, enough evidence is presented here for the authors
to conclude their paper by declaring that “action on climate change must
be a key priority if we are to safeguard the carbon sink capacity of
tropical forests.”
*****
The warnings issued by scientists will not be heeded by capitalist
governments anywhere. Acting in the interests of big business, they
defend not the health of the planet but the profit dictates of the
capitalist system, which is causing the world to warm to such a degree
that one of the most productive ecosystems on the planet is beginning to
contribute to the climate crisis itself.
It is ever clearer that
this descent into ecological collapse can be halted only with a
socialist perspective, taken up by the international working class and
principled scientists everywhere in the world.
Support for victimized labor historian and professor Tom Alter is
growing among Texas students. Alter, a professor of history at Texas
State University and a historian of American labor, particularly in
Texas, was summarily fired September 10 for remarks he made at an online
event called the “Revolutionary Socialism Conference.” During the
event, held September 7, Alter expressed views in opposition to the
capitalist system and in favor of socialism.
In violation of his
First Amendment rights to free speech, Alter was dismissed from his
position without any review or chance to defend himself. The university
claimed that he had violated Texas State’s “academic neutrality” and
accused him of supporting “overthrowing the United States government.” A
lawsuit filed by Alter resulted in a court order for the university to
reinstate him—though he is barred from teaching—until a hearing can be
held. Alter’s dismissal, however, was upheld by the university on
October 13.
Alter’s politically motivated firing was swiftly
condemned by graduate students in the Texas State History Department.
Joining them were the student newspaper and the Organization of American
Historians, the American Historical Association, the Labor and Working
Class History Association, and the Canadian Committee on Labour History.
*****
Other academics in Texas have also been targeted. Shortly before
Alter’s initial dismissal, Melissa McCoul, an English lecturer at Texas
A&M, was fired after a video circulated of a conservative student
objecting to a lecture that featured content on gender identity. The
video provoked virulent attacks from state Republicans that resulted in
the additional firing of College of Arts and Sciences Dean Mark Zoran
and department head Emily Johansen.
Hundreds of teachers were
hounded by Republican officials and right-wing groups for statements and
interactions on social media critical of fascist agitator Charlie Kirk,
in some cases for simply not being sufficiently mournful of Kirk.
Texas
State University has also moved to restrict course material on gender
identity and LGBTQ+ subjects, and, according to the Academic Freedom
Monitoring Project’s “Free to Think” report, the Trump administration
launched 40 attacks on academic freedom in the first half of 2025,
ranging from threats to cut funding to attacks on scholars of foreign
nationalities.
The attack on Tom Alter must be understood in this
broader context as the Trump administration and the Republican Party,
with no serious opposition from the Democrats, move to gut academic
freedom, purge critical political speech and attack anything related to
socialism and the class struggle.
Amid a wave of mass protests against social inequality Peru’s nominal
opposition parties are doing everything possible to disarm and block
any actions against recently installed President José Jerí’s attempt to
solidify a right-wing dictatorship.
Aside from scattered
rhetorical protests, their actions fail to challenge the continuation of
an illegitimate and repressive regime that took power through the
overthrow of the elected President Pedro Castillo in December 2022. The
installation of his vice president, Dina Boluarte, was accomplished
through brutal repression and homicidal violence.
*****
Peru has seen a wave of strikes driven by growing anger over the
killing of transport workers (more than 180 so far this year) by
extortionist and politically connected gangs demanding protection money.
The transport unions, dominated by bus owners, have attempted to divert
this anger into support for repressive legislation, including a
so-called “urban terrorism” law, and a harsher police crackdown.
Outside
the Congress there are a few critical voices, like the journalist César
Hildebrandt or Glatzer Tuesta, lawyer of the NGO Ideele, who has a
radio program. However, all their criticisms and are framed a the
defense of the Peruvian state and the model of capitalist democracy.
These
forces promote a supra-classist and nationalist narrative: that the
state belongs to everyone, and that some mafia or corrupt sectors of
politics “have captured institutions” and now control key institutions.
According to this discourse, new elections could be beneficial as long
as the masses who reject capitalist politics and all of the current
politicians, “learn to vote.” However, none of the parties seek to
impinge on the interests of the corrupt and blood-soaked ruling class.
The
nominal left, both in the Peruvian Congress and outside it, has
repeatedly defended private property and the sanctity of so-called
capitalist democracy. The pseudo-leftist parties, including Together for
Peru, People’s Voices, New Peru, the Magisterial Bloc and Socialist
Bloc, are dedicated to channeling the overwhelming rejection of millions
of Peruvians back into the electoral swamp. It is this “left” that
capital, both domestic and foreign, needs.
*****
The deepening political crisis in Peru reflects widespread anger
among the working population, driven by numerous intersecting factors
that highlight the illegitimacy and corruption of the current regime.
One key flashpoint has been the recently issued arbitrary ruling by the
Constitutional Court, whose members were appointed by the current
Congress. In a blatantly partisan decision, the court annulled the money
laundering trial against Keiko Fujimori, leader of the dominant party
in Congress, the far-right Popular Force, on the technical pretext that
the illegal campaign contributions she received were not contemplated
under current legislation. This ruling occurred at the height of the
electoral season, sparing Fujimori from facing justice and provoking
widespread repudiation across Peru.
The Constitutional Court’s
ruling ignited a backlash from reactionary forces, emboldening a
counterattack that has even targeted the prosecutor who led the
investigation.
Meanwhile, Congress exploited the political
turmoil following the removal of President Boluarte by installing José
Jerí Oré, a little-known political figure, as head of state and granting
a vote of confidence to a new right-wing cabinet led by Prime Minister
Ernesto Álvarez. This government openly seeks extraordinary powers to
govern by decree on citizen security issues. Álvarez himself slandered
protesters killed by undercover police provocateurs as “terrorists,”
signaling the government’s commitment to repress dissent. The initial
security operations, including a night raid in the port city of Callao
that involved notorious reactionary figures, have been widely condemned
as a farce and provocation by Peruvian workers and popular sectors.
Perhaps
the most ominous development has been the placing of Lima and Callao
under a state of emergency on October 22, a political tool used to
suspend fundamental constitutional rights and justify mass
militarization and police repression.
The resident doctors’ national strike in England planned for November
14–19 must become a rallying point for all National Health Service
(NHS) workers against the Starmer government.
50,000 resident
doctors in the British Medical Association (BMA) have waged a two-year
battle for pay restoration. They have now added the fight to end
widespread unemployment facing doctors in the NHS.
This struggle pits them against Labour Health Secretary Wes
Streeting, frontman for Starmer’s cuts and drive for corporate control
and privatization of the NHS.
The NHS workforce and the entire
working class must defeat this assault to defend public healthcare,
defeat plans to curtail the right to strike, resist jobs cuts and
reverse decades of pay erosion and crushing and unsafe workloads.
This
is a situation confronting millions of workers in the public and
private sectors facing a Starmer government representing the interests
of big business and the oligarchy.
The resident doctors action is
the first national strike the Starmer government has faced since it
took office last July. Streeting has accused them of “holding the
country to ransom,” echoing Thatcher’s denunciations of “the enemy
within” against the 1984-85 miners’ strike. During the last round of
walks out in July, he claimed resident doctors were waging a “war”
against the government they could not win.
The Labour government
fears this action is the tip of the iceberg, as Streeting warned of a
“contagion” of strikes. Imposing a defeat on resident doctors is seen as
a deterrent against every other struggle the Starmer government
anticipates against its austerity agenda. For months the Starmer
government has backed its flagship Labour council in Birmingham
conducting a strike breaking operation against 400 bin workers resisting
vicious pay cuts of up to a quarter of their wages and slashing jobs as
part of a £300 million cuts package.
*****
The cost of restoring resident doctors’ pay—around £1.7 billion—is a
fraction of the billions squandered on outsourcing and war. There is
always money for war, the City of London, and private profit, but not
for health, education, or housing.
The defence of the NHS cannot
be achieved within capitalism. Every government—Tory, Labour, or
coalition—has pursued pro-market restructuring incompatible with
universal, high-quality healthcare. The only way forward is to fight for
socialism:
• End all the profit racketeering in the NHS—No more PFIs and Subcos—to restore a universal high quality public health service
• Bring the private health corporations, pharmaceutical giants into public ownership and under workers control
• Redirect the billions spent on war and corporate subsidies to healthcare and social services
The
struggle of resident doctors is part of an international fight by
healthcare workers facing the same conditions—from strikes in Germany,
New Zealand, Australia and Sri Lanka to the United States. The global
assault by governments and corporations can only be met with a unified,
international counter-offensive by the working class.
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.
