Opposition to imperialist war, the unyielding defense of democratic
rights and the fight against all forms of class oppression animate our
celebration of May Day. This is the spirit in which we open today’s
rally.
However, the celebration of May Day must not be limited to
declarations of international solidarity. It must also be the occasion
for an objective analysis of the present world situation, for it is on
the basis of such an analysis that the strategy of the working class is
formulated. This task acquires the greatest urgency today, as this May
Day is being held in the midst of a critical stage in the crisis of the
world capitalist system.
*****
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was proclaimed by the
American ruling class as a historic triumph of capitalism. The so-called
“failure of socialism,” it claimed, cleared the way for the restoration
of the capitalist world as it was before the socialist October
Revolution. All that had occurred in the aftermath of the revolution—the
upsurge of the international working class, the monumental global
movement of the oppressed masses against imperialism, and the social
advances that were won in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany in
1945 and the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949—was to be
reversed.
However, this nightmarish perspective was based on a false appraisal of
the causes of the dissolution of the USSR and its global significance.
What had failed in the Soviet Union was not socialism but the Stalinist
regime of anti-socialist nationalism, which was a repudiation of the
Marxian internationalism that had inspired the October Revolution. The
Stalinist program of “socialism in one country,” which detached the
building of socialism in the USSR from the international struggle of the
working class against global capitalism, had proven economically and
politically bankrupt.
*****
Gorbachev took the first road. The dissolution of the USSR in December
1991 was the consummation of that betrayal: The Stalinist bureaucracy,
having begun as the gravediggers of the October Revolution, ended as the
most venal and rapacious faction of the new Russian oligarchy, led
today by Putin.
For American imperialism, the same underlying contradiction produced a
different response, but one no more a matter of free choice than the
Stalinist collapse had been. Confronted with the irreversible erosion of
its economic supremacy—the rise of Japanese and German industrial
competitors, the emergence of China as a powerful economic and
industrial force, the hollowing out of domestic manufacturing, the
mounting burden of trade and budget deficits—American capitalism could
not recover its position through economic means. The only instrument it
still possessed in overwhelming preponderance was military force.
The following three decades of militarism shattered Iraq, Yugoslavia,
Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and other countries. While costing
millions of lives, destroying entire societies and creating the greatest
refugee crisis since World War II, these wars ended in debacles and
failed to reverse US imperialism’s fortunes.
*****
The most visible and ominous manifestation of the US-centered global
crisis is the staggering growth of the national debt. It stood at
roughly $5.8 trillion in 2001. It is now approaching $40 trillion. An
even more historically and economically significant manifestation of the
crisis of US capitalism is the price of gold. At the Bretton Woods
conference of 1944, which established the status of the dollar as the
world reserve currency, the value of an ounce of gold was set at $35.
That
price prevailed until the Nixon administration repudiated the Bretton
Woods system in 1971. This set into motion a relentless rise in the
price of gold, which during the last year has assumed an explosive
character. The price of an ounce of gold now stands at approximately
$4,600. In other words, the value of the dollar relative to gold, which
has functioned for several thousand years as a measure of value, has
declined by more than 99 percent in just over a half century.
This
is the framework within which the 35 years from 1991 to 2026 must be
understood. They constitute a single historical process: the attempt by
American capitalism to overcome, through the application of military
violence, a contradiction that it could not overcome by economic means.
The wars are component parts of a continuous trajectory, driven by the
same unresolved contradiction between the world economy and the
nation-state system that produced the two world wars of the 20th
century.
*****
The war against Iran has exposed not only the predatory aims of American
imperialism abroad but the social and political reality of the regime
that prosecutes it at home. Trump is the product, personification and
culmination of a protracted process—economic, social and
political—rooted in the breakdown of American capitalism and the
putrefaction of its ruling class.
The political structure of the United States is being brought into
alignment with its social foundation: the domination of society by a
tiny oligarchy that controls staggering wealth and regards all legal,
democratic and moral restraints as intolerable impediments to its
interests. The rise of Trump is the expression of this reality.
The war against Iran is being financed through a frontal assault on
the social rights of the working class. Trump’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget
requests roughly $1.5 trillion for “defense”—the highest military
spending level in modern American history and a massive escalation of
preparations not only for the war against Iran but for global war
against China and Russia. This is, in the most direct sense, a budget
for world war.
*****
What is taking place in the United States is not simply a national
political crisis. It is a convulsion of world-historical significance.
The United States, the former stabilizer of world capitalism, has become
the greatest source of global instability. The breakdown of democratic
forms in the United States, the turn to open gangsterism in politics,
the subordination of all social life to the interests of the oligarchy,
and the drive to redivide the world through military violence express
the crisis of the entire capitalist order in its most concentrated and
explosive form.
The same underlying processes are evident in every major capitalist
country. The crisis of capitalism is international, and so, too, is the
turn toward dictatorship and war. The European ruling class is rapidly
and shamelessly shedding its hypocritical pacifist phrase-mongering,
reviving its long traditions of imperialist militarism, and proclaiming
that the working class and youth must be prepared to fight and die as
their grandfathers and great-grandfathers did in the two world wars of
the last century. This is not mere rhetoric. The European NATO powers
are already engaged in a de facto war against Russia. Ukraine has been
transformed into NATO’s East European equivalent of Israel.
In its analysis of the historical experiences of the last century, the
International Committee has stressed that the same contradictions that
produced World War I in 1914 resulted in socialist revolution in Russia
in 1917. The same historical dynamic is at work today. The global crisis
of capitalism that underlies the eruption of imperialist violence is
also preparing the explosion of revolutionary struggle by the
international working class.
*****
The second half of the decade is being increasingly characterized by the
eruption of the countervailing tendency of social struggle on an
international scale. In 1845, Marx wrote: “With the thoroughness of the
historical action, the size of the mass whose action it is will
therefore increase.” In an initial confirmation of this insight, masses
of working people are being drawn into social and political struggle.
*****
There have been 458 strikes across just eight European countries in
the first quarter of 2026 alone, including five general strikes at the
national or regional level. This represents a measurable acceleration
over comparable periods in 2025. The first quarter of 2026 has already
produced national general strikes in Belgium (March 12) and Italy (March
9), regional general strikes in Spain’s Andalusia and Basque Country
(March 8 and 17), a general strike in Northern Cyprus, and a national
general strike in Argentina in February—a density of general strike
actions in a single quarter that exceeds 2025’s already considerable
pace. Approximately 1.7 million state employees went on strike in the
Indian state of Maharashtra.
On objective indices—number of
strikes, size of mobilizations, geographic distribution, sectoral
spread, duration, strike authorization margins and frequency of
confrontation with state forces—the early months of 2026 represent a
clear and measurable escalation of class conflict beyond 2025 levels.
There
have been mass anti-ICE demonstrations drawing millions in the United
States, including 8 million in the March 28 “No Kings” mobilization.
There have been strikes by 42,000 University of California workers and
31,000 Kaiser healthcare workers.
These struggles are an objective expression of an international working
class entering into struggle against the conditions imposed by the same
crisis that drives the oligarchy toward fascism and war. These struggles
are unfolding across every continent and every major sector of the
economy, simultaneously and increasingly in direct conflict not only
with employers and governments but with the trade union bureaucracies
that function as an anti-strike corporate police force.
The decisive question of the present period is which of these two
tendencies will prevail. The ruling class has answered the deepening
crisis of its system with fascism and war, the militarization of
society, the abrogation of democratic rights, the assault on immigrants
and political dissidents, and the preparation of conflicts that carry
within them the threat of nuclear catastrophe. The working class is
answering with the only force capable of stopping this trajectory toward
disaster—the mobilization of its own collective social power. The
outcome is not predetermined. It will be settled by the struggles now
underway and by the political consciousness, organization and leadership
that the working class develops in the course of these struggles.
What can be stated with certainty is that the period of relative social
equilibrium has ended. The objective conditions identified at the start
of the decade—the breakdown of the post-war capitalist order, the
impossibility of continuing the old methods of rule, the necessity of
either revolutionary transformation or descent into barbarism—have not
only been confirmed but have intensified. The first months of 2026 mark
the point at which the resistance of the working class has emerged as a
global force, contending against the offensive of the oligarchy on a
scale that places the fundamental questions of the epoch—war or peace,
dictatorship or democracy, socialism or barbarism—directly on the
historical agenda.
*****
The demoralized cynics and skeptics of the middle class pseudo-left will
dismiss this perspective as fantasy. Groveling before the ruling class,
they are staunch believers in the invincibility and permanence of
capitalism. Their attitude to the working class is a mixture of fear and
contempt.
But the revolutionary perspective of the Trotskyist movement, led by
the International Committee of the Fourth International, is grounded in
the most realistic appraisal of objective economic and social processes
operating on a global scale.
The same globalization of production
that has driven the contradictions of the existing order has produced—as
an objective, structural fact—the largest international working class
in human history. The figure must be grasped concretely. Since 1980, the
development of the world’s productive forces has increased the size of
the working class by over 2 billion people. For the first time in human
history, a majority of the world’s population lives in cities, a figure
that rises by the millions every week.
More than 500 cities now have populations exceeding 1 million,
accounting for roughly a quarter of humanity; at least 31 of them are
megacities of more than 10 million people, and an estimated 90 percent
of world trade flows through a few dozen of these centers. An estimated 1
billion African workers are expected to enter the global labor force in
the decades ahead. The billions of workers who have moved from the
backward countryside of India, China, Latin America and Africa into the
globalized circuits of production have, as the WSWS has characterized
it, “leapt forward centuries in a single lifetime.”
Objective social and economic processes are generating revolutionary
struggles. The daily deterioration of living standards, the staggering
scale of social inequality, the grotesque corruption and crimes of the
ruling class are provoking the indignation and anger of the masses. But
this anger must be developed into a politically conscious and
internationally unified struggle against capitalism.
And this brings to the fore the central problem of this historical
epoch: the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership in the
working class. The grip of the old and reactionary instruments of
capitalist rule—the existing capitalist parties, the trade union
bureaucracies, the bourgeois nationalist organizations, the innumerable
petty-bourgeois groupings—must be broken. The political independence of
the working class from all the agencies of the ruling class must be
established.
This requires the building of the Fourth International, the world
Trotskyist movement led by the International Committee. Concentrated in
its program is a vast body of revolutionary experience spanning a
century of struggle.
*****
In May 1940, in the Manifesto of the Fourth International
written by Trotsky just three months before his assassination by a
Stalinist agent, the incomparable strategist of world socialist
revolution explained:
In history, war has not
infrequently been the mother of revolution precisely because it rocks
superannuated regimes to their foundation, weakens the ruling class, and
hastens the growth of revolutionary indignation among the oppressed
masses.
Such a situation is emerging. The very fact that the American ruling
class has placed a gangster in the White House and entrusted the
management of its affairs to the underworld is irrefutable proof of its
historical bankruptcy.
In the face of the greatest obstacles, the International Committee of
the Fourth International has worked tirelessly to prepare the advanced
sections of the working class for the present crisis. We have created
the World Socialist Web Site, which has for the last 28 years
served as an incomparable instrument of political analysis and strategic
orientation. It has waged an unrelenting struggle to preserve the
heritage of Marxism and the historical continuity of the struggle for
socialism.
The parties affiliated with the International Committee have spearheaded
the fight against the pro-imperialist and corporatist labor
bureaucracies through the development of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
Its purpose is not to influence the existing trade union bureaucracies
but to organize a rank-and-file insurrection against them and to
transfer power to the factory, shop floor and workplace committees.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE),
guided by the ICFI, educates the younger generation as Marxists,
provides a revolutionary alternative to the demoralizing policies of
protest politics and directs their energies toward the struggles of the
working class.
The ICFI has developed Socialism AI, which was launched on the World Socialist Web Site
in December 2025. While the ruling class utilizes AI for the purpose of
enriching itself, impoverishing workers and intensifying exploitation,
the International Committee is utilizing the vast potential of this
technology to advance and accelerate the struggle for socialism.
All the different elements of the work of the International Committee
are directed to the goal of building the Fourth International as the
World Party of Socialist Revolution that will defeat capitalist
barbarism and secure the future of humanity. This party will be built by
the workers, the youth and the socialist intellectuals who draw the
necessary conclusions from the experiences of this epoch and take their
place in its ranks. To the workers fighting ICE, to the strikers on the
picket lines, to the students opposing genocide on the campuses, to the
millions in the streets of every continent: The question now posed is
not whether to fight but how to fight and under what banner.
Our answer to these questions is this: The road forward is the conscious
and organized struggle of the international working class for power.
The banner is that of the Fourth International. We say: Build sections
of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every
country. Take up the fight for socialism. Forward to the world socialist
revolution!
Congressional
Democrats joined Republicans in ending the longest Homeland Security
shutdown in US history while clearing the way for Trump’s immigration
Gestapo to receive tens of billions of dollars, without any reforms,
through a fast-track budget process requiring no Democratic votes.
One
can’t help but wondering after two months of war and countless waves of
bombing, and thousands of civilian deaths: Does that neighborhood still
look like this?
This is a first report from this year's San Francisco International Film Festival.
The
US national debt has crossed 100 percent of gross domestic product for
the first peacetime year since 1946, according to data released Thursday
by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)—a milestone that arrives as
the Trump administration is demanding a $1.535 trillion Pentagon budget
and preparing for conflict with nuclear-armed China and Russia.
Over
the past two months, the Swedish political establishment has moved to
consolidate the Sweden Democrats—the far-right party that emerged from
the neo-Nazi milieu of the 1980s—as the dominant force in official
politics.
The
more than 1,500 graduate workers who have walked out teach courses, run
laboratories, and generate the research revenue that makes the the University of Illinois Chicago function.
The
central fraud of this contract is that it conceals massive cuts just
over the horizon. A new budget proposal for the next school year is
expected in mid-May—days after the ratification vote closes.
The
reported 28 percent pay rise offer reflects the fears of state and
federal Labor governments that strikes in Victoria could become the
starting point of broader action by teachers and others nationally.
The
housing crisis is destroying the lives of tens of thousands of children
and young people: The number of homeless minors has almost tripled
nationwide.
The
case is a politically motivated fabrication and an assault on the
political conscience of millions of workers and young people in Brazil
and around the world.
The
twin executions of James Ernest Hitchcock, 70, and James Broadnax, 37,
took place as the US death penalty machinery continues its accelerating
pace in 2026.
This
scapegoating must be understood in the context of the social order the
ANC has presided over since 1994. While the legal framework of apartheid
was dismantled, the underlying class structures have been preserved.
Prime
Minister Keir Starmer responded by holding those who have protested the
Gaza genocide responsible, and promising draconian attacks on
demonstrations.
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 cause for which the Haymarket martyrs gave their lives was
embraced by the working class all over the world. Three years later, in
1889, the founding congress of the Second International, meeting in
Paris, resolved that May 1 would be the day on which workers of all
countries would simultaneously demonstrate for the eight-hour day. From
that day forward, May 1 has belonged to the international working class.
The
eight-hour day was the central demand of those first May Days. Today,
May Day is a fight for the survival of human civilization itself.
Indeed, such is the state of exploitation that even the most elementary
conquest of the workers’ movement, the eight-hour day, has been
abandoned by the trade union apparatus. While AFL-CIO functionaries
organize “May Day Strong” events with the Democratic Party, workers in
the warehouses, hospitals, schools and factories endure 10-, 12- and
14-hour shifts.
The celebration of May Day came to be embedded in the fight for the
unity of the international working class against capitalism, inequality
and exploitation—a day dedicated to advancing the struggle for workers’
power. Leon Trotsky wrote in 1918 that the original purpose of May Day
had been “by means of a simultaneous demonstration by workers of all
countries on that day, to prepare the ground for drawing them together
into a single international proletarian organization of revolutionary
action having one world center and one world political orientation.”
That
task—the construction of an international revolutionary leadership of
the working class—remains the unfinished historical work of our epoch.
It is the work of the International Committee of the Fourth
International.
*****
Speakers will include leading representatives of the ICFI and its
supporting organizations from the United States, Britain, France,
Germany, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Brazil and Russia;
along with representatives of the International Youth and Students for
Social Equality and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees.
The rally will feature statements collected from
workers and young people on every continent—postal workers, autoworkers,
teachers, dockworkers, students—who are entering into struggle and
looking for a way forward.
*****
Register now at wsws.org/mayday.
The rally begins at 3:00 p.m. US Eastern Time. Gather your coworkers,
your classmates, your families, your friends. Today, May 1, 2026, take
your place in the international socialist movement.
Dr. [Abeer] Omar, who has over 25 years of experience as a nursing educator and
researcher, has faced down persecution of her principled defense of the
human rights of Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians under imperialist
attack. That she should have had to do so comes as no surprise: Canada’s
Liberal government has backed the genocide in Gaza and the US/Israel
war on Iran to the hilt. In June 2025, she joined hundreds of academics
and civil society groups in signing an open letter to Prime Minister
Mark Carney that denounced Canada for its complicity in the Gaza
genocide and demanded Carney take action to stop any “aid and
assistance” to Israeli war crimes. Predictably, this letter fell on deaf
ears.
*****
In a video statement... in support of the International May Day Online Rally
to be held Friday, May 1, Dr. Omar denounces the systematic slaughter of healthcare workers
by Israel in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, and the US and Israel’s
targeting of civilians in their war of extermination against Iran.
Minutes after US Secret Service agents took Donald Trump from the
stage at the White House Correspondents Dinner Saturday and detained an
alleged attacker after a shooting incident, Venezuela’s interim
president Delcy Rodríguez became one of the first world leaders to
publicly condemn the attack.
In a post on X, she declared: “We
reject the attempt of aggression against President Trump and his wife,
Melania, to whom we extend our good wishes, as well as to the attendees
of the Correspondents’ Dinner. Violence will never be an option for
those of us who defend the banners of peace.”
This statement was
one of the most grotesque from any leader. Associating Trump with
“peace,” Rodriguez whitewashes the ongoing avalanche of war crimes
unleashed by Washington across the globe and directly against Venezuela
itself.
The World Socialist Web Site opposes the kind of
attack alleged at the Washington Hilton on a principled basis. Political
violence carried out by individuals serves only to strengthen the
forces of reaction. But this opposition does not require—or
permit—portraying Trump, or US imperialism more broadly, as a victim
divorced from its own systemic violence.
Indeed, as in previous
assassination attempts, Trump is already exploiting the incident to
criminalize opposition and escalate his authoritarian drive. His efforts
to overturn democratic processes in the United States are inseparable
from a broader imperialist campaign aimed at recolonizing Latin America.
Rodríguez’s statement, along with a similar one from Mexico’s “leftist”
president Claudia Sheinbaum, objectively lends support to these
efforts, providing political cover for Washington’s aggression.
*****
The January operation was not a one-off attack. US military activity
in the region has intensified dramatically. Bombing campaigns have
expanded into Latin American waters and border regions. A joint
US-Ecuadorian operation dubbed “Total Extermination” targeted rural
areas, bombing rural homes and detaining agricultural workers.
Simultaneously,
the Pentagon has escalated maritime strikes, particularly in the
Caribbean and eastern Pacific. More attack aircraft and MQ-9 Reaper
drones have been sent to bases in El Salvador and Puerto Rico to carry
out more air strikes on fishing boats, killing at least 186 people under
the pretext of combating drug trafficking since September.
Meanwhile,
Washington is openly threatening further regime change operations,
including against Cuba. Trump has declared that “Cuba is next” after
Iran.
US naval exercises have begun near Cuba, codenamed Flex2026,
integrating artificial intelligence, unmanned systems, and traditional
forces to enhance surveillance and control. Reconnaissance drones like
the MQ-4C Triton and electronic aircraft such as the RC-135 patrol Cuban
airspace and maritime routes, tightening the noose around the island.
Within
Venezuela, Rodríguez’s statement has drawn criticism even from Chavista
circles, with some pointing out that it ignores the long campaign of US
sanctions that has caused over 100,000 excess deaths and forced over 8
million to flee the country.
Some commentators, however, argue
that the government is merely “buying time,” hoping for better
conditions—higher oil prices, geopolitical shifts, or a popular
upsurge—to reassert sovereignty and defend social programs. But such
illusions have already been exposed.
*****
This trajectory is not a betrayal of Chavismo’s principles—it is
their logical outcome. The so-called Bolivarian Revolution, proclaimed
after the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez, represented sections of the
national bourgeoisie seeking better terms within the global capitalist
system. During periods of high commodity prices and closer ties to
China, Russia and other economic powers, it used limited social programs
to contain the class struggle and negotiate a greater share of the
profits for the local ruling class.
But as conditions
changed—particularly with the slowing growth of the Chinese economy, the
weight of US sanctions and military threats—these same forces have
capitulated, prioritizing their own privileges and class rule over the
working class.
*****
The events in Venezuela confirm a fundamental lesson: the national
bourgeoisie in oppressed countries is incapable of carrying out
democratic tasks, including genuine independence from imperialism.
This
reality vindicates the Theory of Permanent Revolution advanced by Leon
Trotsky. Only the working class, leading a socialist transformation of
society, can break the chains of imperialist domination. This requires
not only the overthrow of capitalist states domestically, but an
international movement aimed at restructuring the global economy to
serve human need, not private profit.
Rodríguez’s statement is not
merely hypocritical—it is symptomatic of a deeper crisis. It reflects a
political movement that has abandoned any pretense of resistance to
imperialism and now seeks accommodation with the very forces responsible
for the immense suffering of the people it claimed to represent.
In a blatant act of censorship in late March, Sri Lankan Customs
authorities have seized books by Tamil writer Pradeepan Deepachelvan,
who teaches Advanced Level students at Murugaananda College in
Killinochchi in the war-ravaged northern province of the country. The
targeted works included three novels titled Naduhal (Memorial Stone), Bayangaravadi (The Terrorist) and Cyanide, along with a collection of essays and a volume of interviews.
Customs seized 360 copies of the five books, which were shipped from
Chennai, India and arrived in Colombo, underscoring the state’s direct
intervention to block the circulation of literature dealing with the
social and political experiences produced by Sri Lanka’s decades-long
communal war.
Customs authorities claimed without providing a
shred of evidence that the books posed a threat to “national security”
and “national harmony.” Unable to substantiate the accusation, Customs
officials reportedly referred the matter to a “special committee”
attached to the Ministry of Buddha Sasana, Religious and Cultural
Affairs, as well as to military authorities, before making any final
decision.
Such high-handed, politically charged allegations would
not be levelled by Customs officials without being prompted by the
ruling Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP)
government, which is steeped in anti-Tamil chauvinism.
Deepachelvan told the World Socialist Web Site
that officials informed his representatives in Jaffna that the books
were being held for review. Following criticism of the government’s
actions by several civil rights groups, including the Free Media
Movement, Customs has agreed to release three of the books.
The
two remaining works continue to be withheld on the grounds that they
could allegedly damage “coexistence among communities,” a claim that
remains entirely unsubstantiated.
These actions by the government
and its authorities constitute a direct and blatant attack on freedom of
expression, carried out under the fraudulent banner of protecting
“national harmony.”
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the World Socialist Web Site
condemn this act of censorship and demand the immediate and
unconditional release of all of Pradeepan’s books. Writers and artists
must have the democratic right to present their views without state
interference or intimidation.
Deepachelvan, a Tamil writer with seven poetry collections, has
consistently addressed themes stemming from Sri Lanka’s three-decade
civil war. His works have been translated into Sinhala, Malayalam,
Hindi, French and Norwegian, reflecting a broad readership that crosses
the communal divide in Sri Lanka and extends internationally.
*****
The anti-democratic action against Deepachelvan takes place amid a
deepening economic crisis and rising social anger. The Dissanayake
government is implementing the austerity dictates of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), imposing severe attacks on workers and the poor
through tax increases, spending cuts and privatisation.
Since
independence in 1948, successive Sri Lankan governments have
systematically cultivated anti-Tamil chauvinism to divert mounting
social tensions and defend capitalist rule. This policy culminated in a
protracted communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed
during the final months of military operations, and thousands more were
forcibly disappeared. The JVP, mired in Sinhala chauvinism from its
inception, was an ardent supporter of the communal war.
The Human
Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, a toothless, government-appointed body,
has criticised the seizure of Deepachelvan’s books as a violation of
freedom of expression. The Free Media Movement, condemning the seizure,
has also questioned the authority of Customs officials to determine
whether literature constitutes a threat to “national security.”
*****
Such attacks on freedom of expression are not unique to Sri Lanka.
Across South Asia, governments increasingly invoke “national security,”
“religious harmony” and “public order” as pretexts to suppress dissent.
In India, the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party government has
encouraged censorship and attacks on intellectuals accused of offending
religious sentiments. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, journalists and
writers face arrest and intimidation under allegations of spreading
“anti-state propaganda.”
These developments are inseparable from
the deepening global crisis of capitalism and the intensification of
imperialist rivalries. Governments around the world are strengthening
authoritarian forms of rule as they prepare for social upheavals driven
by war, inequality and economic breakdown.
*****
The Socialist Equality Party insists that Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim
workers must reject all forms of communal politics and defend the
democratic rights of writers, artists and intellectuals.
The
immediate release of Deepachelvan’s books must become part of a broader
struggle against state repression, austerity and the capitalist system
itself, which breeds dictatorship, war and communal division.
The observance of Workers Memorial Day 2026 took place amid an
escalating assault on workplace safety in the United States of
breathtaking scope. Trump has vastly accelerated the dismantling of
already inadequate safety regulations and enforcement mechanisms.
According
to “Death on the Job,” the annual report issued by the AFL-CIO in
conjunction with Workers Memorial Day, based on 2024 figures, an
estimated 380 workers die each day from illness and traumatic injury.
The
report notes that over the past year, job fatality rates increased in
several sectors, including leisure and hospitality (from 2.3 to 2.4
deaths per 100,000 workers) and government (from 1.8 to 2.0).
Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting remain the most dangerous
industries (20.9 per 100,000), followed by mining, quarrying, and oil
and gas extraction (13.8 per 100,000).
At
the same time, staffing at the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) has fallen to historic lows, with only five
inspectors per 1 million workers. The fatality rate for young workers
has nearly doubled since 2020. Environmental rules are being repealed
wholesale, including limits on the emission of toxic chemicals,
greenhouse gases and other pollutants.
Despite these conditions,
the American trade union bureaucracy marked the day with largely
boilerplate statements that neither accept responsibility for worsening
conditions nor propose meaningful initiatives to defend workers’ lives,
beyond appeals to employers, lobbying in Washington and electoral
activity.
The AFL-CIO stated that its officials “will be in the streets and at
worksites to peacefully engage our co-workers and neighbors on the
issues at stake in the next election so we can ensure that everyone can
vote and every vote is counted.” This only underscores the union
bureaucracy’s efforts to subordinate workers’ lives to the Democratic
Party, a party of Wall Street and corporate America no less than the
Republicans.
Similarly, the American Postal Workers Union
encouraged members to participate in symbolic actions such as moments of
silence, candlelight vigils and AFL-CIO events.
The death of 64-year-old autoworker Greg Knopf on March 16,
2026, at the Ford Sharonville Transmission Plant in Ohio, when a press
machine activated during maintenance.
Two workers killed on April 23 at a chemical facility in Institute, West Virginia, with dozens more injured.
The death of April Flores following a forklift accident on April 4 at an H-E-B warehouse in San Antonio, Texas.
A 53-year-old worker crushed by an excavator on February 6 at RJ Industrial Recycling in Flint, Michigan.
The
November 8, 2025 death of maintenance mechanic Nick Acker at a Detroit
mail facility, where safety features were reportedly disabled, followed
by the death of Russell Scruggs Jr. days later in Georgia.
It
has also been more than one year since the death of Stellantis Dundee
Engine worker Ronald Adams Sr., who was killed on April 7, 2025, when a
gantry crane activated during repairs. Stellantis has not been held
accountable, and the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health
Administration has released no findings. The only detailed investigation
was conducted by rank-and-file workers associated with the
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
Globally,
the International Labour Organization estimates that 2.93 million
workers die annually from work-related causes, including up to 380,500
from workplace injuries.
*****
The lack of seriousness with which the American labor bureaucracy
views the question of workplace safety was perhaps best highlighted by
the short shrift paid by UAW President Shawn Fain, who posted a short
statement on X on the occasion of Workers Memorial Day. Following a year
of fires, explosions and workplace carnage, the only actual incident he
referenced was the recent death of Ford worker Gregg Knopf. He said
nothing about the continued stonewalling and cover-up by MIOSHA and
Stellantis of the circumstances of the death of Dundee Engine worker
Ronald Adams Sr.
The reason for this is clear. The UAW is part and
parcel of the cover-up of Adams’ death. Last year, the UAW bureaucracy
used the occasion of Workers Memorial Day to issue a joint video with
Stellantis executives praising their joint efforts to protect workers’
lives. This insulting video, which made no mention of Adams, was
released the same day as the 63-year-old skilled tradesman was buried in
Detroit.
Far from fighting for strengthening safety, the UAW
actively collaborates with management to cover up safety violations and
to ensure that management is not held accountable when deaths and
injuries occur. This is because the union apparatus is joined at the hip
with Stellantis and other automakers through the UAW-Stellantis safety
committees and a host of other similar corporatist programs that
essentially funnel company cash into UAW coffers.
*****
Even the actual tracking of official statistics is undermined by the
patchwork of state, federal and local oversight and reporting in the US,
largely the product of corporate lobbying. While the federal OSHA
implemented a Severe Injury Dashboard
in 2024, which compiles all the reports from 2015 to the present, there
are major limitations. The data only covers just over half the US
population, which works in the 28 states covered by federal OSHA
programs. Injuries to workers in the 22 “state plan” states, which
administer the OSHA program at the state government level, do not appear
in the data, unless covered by federal OSHA, like United States Postal
Service workers. Federal OSHA does not cover state and municipal
workers, so those workers are not represented in the data.
*****
The basic social rights of the working class, such as workplace
safety, can only be defended and advanced through the independent
mobilization of the working class in opposition to the parties of the
ruling class and their defenders in the trade union bureaucracy. Over
the past year, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees (IWA-RFC) has taken the initiative in defense of workers’
safety by conducting independent investigations into the deaths of
Ronald Adams Sr. and postal workers Nick Acker and Russell Scruggs Jr.
The
IWA-RFC calls on workers to form rank-and-file committees in every
factory, warehouse and workplace to counterpose the will of shop-floor
workers to the dictates of management and the union apparatus. This
includes fighting for workers’ control over line speed, safety
conditions and production, enforced through collective strike action
against any unsafe conditions.
The fight for health and safety is
bound up with the fight to put an end to a global social system based
on the exploitation of wage labor for private profit. This requires the
building of a socialist and internationalist leadership in the working
class.
Two more workplace deaths have been reported this week in Queensland,
taking the total number of workers known to have been killed in
Brisbane, the state capital, and its surrounding region to four in
recent weeks.
On Tuesday, a 36-year-old worker was crushed while
employees were moving large crates filled with stock at around 5:36 p.m.
at a workplace in Wellcamp, near Toowoomba, a regional city about 130 kilometers west of Brisbane.
Initial police and media reports
indicated that crates slipped and landed on the worker below. The man,
from Harristown, a Toowoomba suburb, was assessed by paramedics at the
scene for critical injuries but was declared dead a short time later.
Also reported this week was that Miikael “Mikey” Varuhin, 32, a
Finnish construction worker, fell about four meters through scaffolding
at a development site in Clayfield, an inner northern suburb of
Brisbane, on April 6, suffering a catastrophic brain injury.
Varuhin
was declared brain dead later that night. He had reportedly raised
concerns about the scaffolding on site on the day he fell and had sent a
photo from his phone.
The young worker’s sister, Anniina, told
the media: “This is an injustice what happened—no one should go to work
and never come back.” She said her young brother had moved to Brisbane
seven years ago and planned to make the city his home.
The known
workplace fatalities around Brisbane now total seven in six months. This
is part of a rising toll due to unsafe conditions, increased rates of
exploitation by employers, official coverups and government complicity
in Australia and internationally.
The latest shocking deaths follow two others just reported in April.
*****
In all these cases, the official state safety agency, Workplace
Health and Safety Queensland (WHSQ), said it would investigate the
circumstances with assistance from police, but few details have been
released. Such investigations can take many months or years and always
end up in whitewashes or, at best, paltry fines on employers.
Even
where trade unions have members on sites, they work hand-in-hand with
managements and the supposed government safety bodies to cover over the
real cause of dangerous working conditions—the subordination of workers’
health and lives to the interests of corporate profit, notably through
speed-ups, subcontracting and casualisation.
As a result, workers’
deaths continue. Data from Safe Work Australia indicates that by April
9, 30 workers had died nationally in 2026, following 180 deaths in 2025.
These figures understate the true toll because chronic occupational
illnesses and unreported incidents are often excluded from official
counts.
*****
Workplace deaths and serious injuries are on the rise globally, as corporations cut costs and impose productivity increases to satisfy the demands of their financial backers.
To
fight this, workers need to take matters into their own hands.
Rank-and-file committees, independent of the union apparatuses, must be
established in workplaces everywhere to fight for improved safety, wages
and conditions.
Hegseth spoke as the representative of a completely criminal
government, personally advocating that US troops commit war
crimes—including upon direct questioning at the hearing.
In the
face of a broadly unpopular administration, the Democrats made it their
highest priority to emphasize—despite tactical disagreements—their
solidarity with the Trump administration’s megalomaniacal program of
world conquest. Their objections were that Trump’s plans do not go far
enough, or that the Iran war has left the United States unprepared for
war with nuclear-armed China and Russia.
Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York called for doubling
the number of nuclear-capable stealth bombers in the request, from 100
B-21 Raiders to 200. “We’ve been working together to grow the industrial
base because we’re all worried about how our stockpiles would hold up
in a conflict against China,” Gillibrand said. The B-21, she added,
“will be a critical part of both our conventional and our nuclear
deterrence against China and Russia.”
Democratic Senator Mark
Kelly of Arizona voiced his support for expanding military spending,
saying: “I’ve always been supportive of defense spending in my entire
time here. After 25 years in the Navy, I want to make sure our folks
have what they need.”
Democratic Ranking Member Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the senior
Democrat on the committee, opened his remarks by saluting the war
against Iran. “Tactically the United States military performance against
Iran has been remarkable,” Reed said, “and I salute the service members
who executed this mission with skill and bravery.”
His criticism
was that the war has left the United States less prepared for war with
China. Three carrier strike groups have been pulled into the Middle
East, leaving the Pacific thinly covered. “In terms of … where we’re
putting … the most powerful part of our Navy,” Reed asked, “can you
explain again what that means in terms of the situation in INDOPACOM
where China is watching?” His argument was for a larger war, redirected
at Beijing.
Democratic Ranking Member Adam Smith of Washington took the same line at
the parallel House hearing Wednesday, telling Hegseth he had heard “the
chairman on the need for an increased” budget and attacking popular
opposition to the war: “I strongly disagree with the folks on the far
left who say that we don’t really face any threats.”
After Iran, Everyone Knows It.” The Iran war, the Times
argued, exposed weaknesses adversaries can now see. “The good news is
that Congress, the administration and the Pentagon can all now see our
military shortcomings,” the editorial concluded.
At Thursday’s
hearing, Republican Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi endorsed the
Trump administration’s military budget as necessary to prepare for
military conflict with China.
“First and foremost, we’re locked in
a competition with Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party,” Wicker
said. “The competition is high stakes, and it is about whether this will
be an American-led century or a century defined by authoritarian,
autocratic regimes that care little for the needs of their citizens or
those in neighboring countries. The Chinese Communist Party has
accelerated its historic military buildup and its predatory economic
practices against Americans and countries the world over. Xi Jinping
leads not only China, but also an axis of aggressors.” Of the budget:
“Every penny of it should be money well spent.”
*****
The criminal character of the administration was on open display at
Thursday’s hearing. Asked to retract his March 13 order that US troops
give enemies in the Caribbean “no quarter, no mercy,” Hegseth refused.
Kelly read him the definition from his own department’s Law of War
Manual—that no “legitimate offers of surrender will be refused or that
detainees will be executed”—and asked twice whether he stood by the
statement. Twice Hegseth replied: “We fight to win.”
The character of “the mission” the Democrats endorsed was thus on the
record. Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan told Hegseth: “I
agree with the Chairman … that the world has never been more dangerous
and complicated, and … we can all agree that we want our military to
come out of it safely and successfully.” A successful mission, by the
secretary of defense’s own definition, means offering “no quarter” to
those targeted by US imperialism and the destruction of “a whole
civilization,” in the words of Trump.
Thursday’s hearing took place as the administration moved to defy the
60-day War Powers Resolution clock on the Iran war. Friday is the
statutory deadline by which the president must either seek congressional
authorization or certify in writing that more time is required to
withdraw US forces. The administration intends to do neither. Hegseth
said the White House takes the position that a current ceasefire pauses
the clock—a reading with no basis in the statute.
Trump was scheduled to be briefed Thursday evening by U.S. Central
Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper on new military options against Iran,
including, per news reports, a “powerful” series of strikes on Iranian
infrastructure, a ground operation to seize part of the Strait of Hormuz
and a special forces mission to secure Iran’s stockpile of highly
enriched uranium.
The Senate Democrats speak for the same
capitalist oligarchy as Donald Trump. Their disagreements were
operational—anxiety that the Iran war is going badly, anxiety that the
United States is unprepared for the larger conflict with China both
parties expect. On the question of whether US military spending should
surge toward $1.5 trillion to wage that war, Thursday’s hearing revealed
no disagreement at all.
His predecessor Olaf Scholz “always said he did not want to play
security policy off against social policy,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz
told Der Spiegel in a detailed interview. “We can no longer afford that,” Merz said. “We must set priorities.”
The
cabinet did just that on Wednesday. Military spending has priority. It
is being increased sharply, and social spending slashed accordingly.
According to the financial benchmarks presented by Finance Minister
Lars Klingbeil (Social Democratic Party, SPD) and adopted by the
cabinet, the Defence Ministry’s spending financed from the core budget
will rise from €82.2 billion this year to €179.9 billion in 2030. Almost
one in three euros from the federal budget will then flow directly into
rearmament and war. In the next two years, additional billions will be
added from the “special fund for the Bundeswehr [Armed Forces]” passed
in 2022, which expires at the end of 2027.
Outlays on debt
servicing are also rising, as rearmament spending is largely financed
via additional loans. According to Klingbeil’s plans, the government’s
interest expenditure will climb to €78.7 billion by 2030, which is about
12.5 percent of the budget. This year it still amounts to €30.3
billion. Little will be left for social spending.
Parallel to the benchmarks for the budget, the cabinet has initiated a
draft law to reform statutory health insurance from Health Minister
Nina Warken (Christian Democratic Union, CDU). It will now be debated in
the Bundestag (federal parliament) and is to be passed before the
summer holidays. It will deliver the death blow to healthcare in its
current form.
As
early as next year, the spending of the statutory health insurance
funds is to be reduced by €16.3 billion. This is to be achieved by
cutting and increasing the cost of services as well as imposing strict
savings targets for hospitals and doctors. The latter are to bear the
main burden of the cuts.
Overall, spending in the healthcare
sector may only rise as fast as the average contributory income per fund
member. This is supposed to save €11.3 of the total €16.3 billion. The
consequence will be that hospitals and doctors’ practices are faced with
the alternative of cutting salaries or laying off staff. Many will go
bankrupt or no longer be able to find enough staff willing to do the
demanding work while understaffed and poorly paid.
*****
What is completely missing from the draft law—apart from a slight
increase in the contribution assessment ceiling, i.e., the income limit
up to which health insurance contributions are payable—are measures that
make the rich pay. The massive wealth accumulated through rising stock
market prices, exorbitant real estate values and inherited fortunes do
not contribute to these costs. In Germany, there is not even a wealth
tax.
The problem, therefore, is not that there is not enough money
available for good healthcare for everyone, but that healthcare stands
in the way of the enrichment and war plans of the ruling elites. It is
of interest to them only insofar as it yields profit.
*****
Klingbeil’s budget plan contains numerous further austerity measures
at the expense of the wider population. Federal subsidies for long-term
care insurance and pension insurance are also to be cut, and social
benefits slashed. In pension insurance alone, €4 billion a year are to
be saved, even though its requirements are growing due to the increasing
number of pensioners; the pension commission set up by the government
will not present its report until the summer.
Overseas development
aid is also to be massively curtailed. In addition, all ministries are
to reduce their spending by 1 percent, even though inflation is rising
sharply again. The Ministry of Defense is, of course, exempt from this.
The integration of the RIO Morenoites into the Left Party marks a
further political shift to the right by this pseudo-left tendency, which
can only be understood in the context of the current crisis of
capitalism. It is taking place against a backdrop of escalating
imperialist wars, growing social attacks and increasing political radicalization, particularly among young people and workers.
Worldwide,
the development towards a Third World War is intensifying dramatically.
NATO is escalating its confrontation with the nuclear-armed power
Russia in Ukraine. Israel is committing genocide in Gaza with the
support of the US and European powers. The US-Israeli attack on Iran
threatens to plunge the entire region into war. At the same time,
Germany is witnessing the largest military buildup since the Second
World War, while social and democratic rights are being systematically
dismantled.
This development is meeting with growing resistance.
In Germany, in the past year, before and after the federal election,
thousands—primarily young people—have joined the Left Party, often in
the hope of finding there a political instrument in the struggle against
war, fascism and social inequality.
“There is a huge discrepancy
between the hopes that young people associate with the Left Party and
what it actually is. The former want to oppose the fascists, they reject
the refugee agitation, and they want reasonable incomes and affordable
rents,” wrote the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) in a statement
on the result of the 2025 federal election. “But the Left Party has no
program to counter the shift to the right by those in power. It is
spreading the illusion that the main parties of the ruling class can be
persuaded to change course through a combination of parliamentary
opposition and pressure from the streets.”
The statement continued: “The Left Party claims it is possible to reform
capitalism, not abolish it. But that is a dangerous illusion. The
ruling elites’ turn to the right is not simply the product of mistaken
policies that can be corrected by a bit of pressure. The ruling class
everywhere is resorting to dictatorship and war because it is confronted
with the deep crisis of its social system.”
*****
Officially, RIO justified its entry into the Left Party by citing a
focus on the party’s new, predominantly young members. Yet instead of—as
would be the task of Marxists—educating them about the character of the
Left Party, breaking them away from it and winning them over to an
independent socialist perspective, RIO pursues the opposite goal: It
deliberately ties these potentially oppositional forces to a party that
is itself deeply integrated into the capitalist state apparatus and
actively supports the reactionary offensive of German imperialism.
*****
The reactionary nature of this orientation can only be understood by
clearly defining the character of the Left Party itself. It is not a
contradictory “arena” in which different class interests vie for
influence but a historically developed bourgeois party that represents
the interests of the state and the wealthy middle classes.
Its
roots lie in the SED (Socialist Unity Party), the Stalinist ruling party
of the GDR (East Germany), which oppressed the working class for
decades and organized the capitalist restoration in 1989–90. With the
fall of the Berlin Wall, the Stalinist bureaucracy transformed itself
into a bourgeois force, secured property rights and integrated itself
into the reunified German state. In doing so, it carried the nationalist
and anti-Marxist character of Stalinism to its ultimate conclusion.
As resistance to the consequences of the Schröder government’s Agenda
2010 intensified, the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism), the
successor party to the SED, merged in 2007 with the Electoral
Alternative for Labour and Social Justice (WASG) to form the Left Party,
in order to absorb and neutralise the resistance. The WASG was an
alliance of former SPD and trade union officials who feared that the
SPD, due to its right-wing policies, was no longer capable of
suppressing the class struggle.
Since then, the Left Party has
established itself as an integral part of the capitalist profit system.
Its participation in government, particularly in the state of Berlin,
was inextricably linked to massive social spending cuts. Under its
shared responsibility, tens of thousands of public sector jobs were cut,
public housing was privatized and comprehensive austerity programs
were implemented. The party thus proved that it is prepared to enforce
the interests of capital just as consistently as the SPD or the CDU.
At the same time, it played a central role in laying the political
groundwork for the return of German militarism. The involvement of its
foreign policy spokesperson, Stefan Liebich, in the 2013 strategy paper
“New Power—New Responsibility” was a decisive step in this direction.
This document openly articulated Germany’s ambition to once again assume
a leading military role on the international stage and served as a
blueprint for the bellicose speeches delivered by Gauck, Steinmeier and
von der Leyen at the 2014 Munich Security Conference.
In the years
that followed, the Left Party increasingly and openly supported this
course. It backed the NATO war offensive against Russia, the regime
change war in Syria, the genocide in Gaza and, most recently, the
US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.
The party’s political
callousness is particularly evident in the statements of its chairman,
Jan van Aken, who welcomed the assassination of Iranian leaders by
saying they should “rot in hell.” This statement is not a personal lapse
but an expression of the political character of a party that has placed
itself entirely at the service of imperialist interests and the
barbarism that goes hand in hand with them.
The Left Party also bears primary responsibility for the rise of the far
right. In its former strongholds in the east, the Alternative for
Germany (AfD) is now the strongest party. On the one hand, it has itself
contributed significantly to the social misery that is driving many
workers, in particular, to despair. On the other hand, the fact that it
pursues right-wing policies under the guise of “left-wing” rhetoric
fuels the disappointment and political frustration that the AfD and
other far-right forces deliberately exploit. And like all other
bourgeois parties, the Left Party is also prepared to cooperate even
with the far right and its supporters within the ruling class and to
implement their anti-refugee and anti-worker policies.
RIO’s role is deeply rooted in the history of Morenoism. This
current, named after the Argentine politician Nahuel Moreno, has for
decades been characterized by its adaptation to non-proletarian forces.
As early as the 1950s, it broke with the world Trotskyist movement and
aligned itself with Peronism. Moreno and his followers joined this
bourgeois-nationalist movement and declared that their organization acted “under the discipline of General Perón.” In doing so, they
abandoned the fundamental principle of Marxism—the political
independence of the working class.
This accommodation had
devastating political consequences. In 1958, on the instructions of
Perón, who had fled abroad to escape the military, Moreno supported the
election of a right-wing bourgeois president, even as sections of the
Peronist rank and file opposed this course.
In the 1960s, this
pattern was repeated in the attitude towards the Cuban Revolution.
Initially, Moreno denounced Fidel Castro because the Peronist movement
glorified his opponent, the dictator Fulgencio Batista, as the “Cuban
Perón.” Moreno subsequently made a 180-degree turn, describing Cuba as a
workers’ state and hailing Castro, a petty-bourgeois nationalist, as a
model for the revolution throughout Latin America. Underlying both
positions was Moreno’s refusal to formulate an independent policy for
the working class.
The full extent of the reactionary role played
by Morenoism became apparent in Argentina in the 1970s. While the
country was in the throes of a deep revolutionary crisis, Moreno’s party
aligned itself with the Peronist government and advocated for its stabilization. It signed declarations in defense of the “institutional
order” and pledged to fight for the “continuity of the government” at a
time when paramilitary forces were murdering workers and left-wing
activists. This policy contributed to the political disarmament of the
working class and paved the way for the 1976 military coup, which cost
tens of thousands of lives.
*****
For workers and young people who wish to fight against war, fascism
and social inequality, a clear conclusion follows: This struggle cannot
be waged within parties that are themselves part of the bourgeois state
and political reaction. It requires a conscious break with all such organizations and the building of an independent revolutionary movement
of the working class on an international basis.
RIO’s entry into
the Left Party is therefore not merely a political declaration of
bankruptcy on the part of this organisation. It creates political
clarity. The struggle for a socialist perspective is inextricably linked
to the struggle against pseudo-left tendencies which, under the guise
of radical rhetoric, defend the political pillars and interests of the
capitalist system. It requires the building of an independent
revolutionary world party—the International Committee of the Fourth
International (ICFI), which is represented in Germany by the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) and its youth organization, the IYSSE.
The
fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an
essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide,
dictatorship and fascism.
