Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The American Hitler and the morality of the ruling class [reposted here in full]
The unavoidable conclusion that must be drawn from the speech delivered on Wednesday night by Donald Trump is that the American president is a political criminal. If one grants that there exists a moral boundary, even in the realm of imperialist geopolitics, between the generally sinister pursuit of capitalist great power interests and fascist bestiality, the leaders of the US government have passed over it. The names of Trump, Vance, Hegseth, Rubio and Miller will live in perpetual infamy alongside those of the Nazi ringleaders of the Third Reich: Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Von Ribbentrop and Goebbels. The judgment of history will be merciless.
But that judgment will be delivered not only against individuals, but also, and more profoundly, against the social class which raised them to power and in whose interest they have committed their monstrous crimes against the people of Iran. Herein lies the significance of Trump’s Wednesday night rant. It exposed the irreversible political and moral putrefaction of the American ruling class.
Trump is not the first president to commit crimes. His predecessors have ordered the invasions of countries, the overthrow of governments, and the torture and assassination of individuals identified as opponents of American interests. But some attempt was made by previous administrations to provide at least some legal and democratic justification, however threadbare, cynical, deceitful and hypocritical, for their actions. The contempt for domestic and international law—and, along with it, the repudiation of any adherence to democratic principles—could not be openly embraced as the bases of state policies. When criminal acts were exposed, they were excused, with formal expressions of regret, as unfortunate departures from official enforcement of legal norms.
That stage has passed. Trump’s speech was remarkable for its lack of disguise. He chose words that exposed with unvarnished bluntness the deliberately genocidal aims of American actions. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong,” he declared. He threatened that the United States would strike “each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously.” He boasted of the decapitation of the leadership—“They’re all dead”—and then added, with the coarse self-assurance of a Mafia don, “We have all the cards. They have none.”
Trump threatened the destruction of the material foundations of social life for an entire country, explaining that Iran’s oil sector had thus far been spared only because its destruction “would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding.”
What found expression in these remarks was not simply the pathology of an individual, but the essential character of a social layer that has become habituated to criminality and no longer feels compelled to apologize for it.
For 35 years, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the American ruling class has conducted foreign policy with a sense of impunity. The existence of the USSR, which emerged out of a socialist revolution of the working class and which had played a decisive role in the defeat of the Third Reich, imposed a certain level of restraint on the conduct of imperialist foreign policy. But the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union removed all those restraints. The ruling class was enthralled with the belief that the application of violence provided the solution to all the problems of the capitalist system.
The road to Trump’s speech runs through the initial invasion of Iraq in 1991 and the 1999 bombardment of Serbia. It continued, in the aftermath of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 assault on Iraq, through the vast machinery of torture and abuse exposed at Abu Ghraib and in the CIA black sites, through waterboarding and the whole lexicon of “enhanced interrogation” invented to give bureaucratic respectability to sadism. It runs through the 2011 bombing of Libya, where the destruction of a state and the public degradation and murder of Gaddafi were greeted in Washington by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with the chilling gloat, “We came, we saw, he died.” And it runs, above all, through Gaza, where genocide has been elevated into policy, starvation into strategy, the obliteration of hospitals and refugee camps into a recognized instrument of war.
Gaza has established a new norm. That is one of the most critical political facts of the present period. For more than two years the world has watched the methodical destruction of an entire people, carried out with the full backing of the United States and the connivance of all the imperialist powers. Tens of thousands have been killed. Whole families have been wiped out. Civilian life has been shattered with a coldness that has stunned millions. The lesson drawn in ruling circles has not been that such crimes are intolerable. It has been that they are possible. The conclusion reached in Washington, London, Berlin and Paris is that the old restraints no longer apply, that any act, however monstrous, can be normalized provided it is carried out with sufficient force and supported by a sufficiently brazen propaganda apparatus. Trump’s speech belongs to this new political environment. It is the language of a ruling class that has learned from Gaza that mass murder can be conducted in broad daylight.
The assault on Iran has given this new norm its fullest and most terrible expression. Measures that were first applied against a miniscule territory inhabited by 2.5 million people are now being used as a vast country with a population of more than 90 million. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours against Iran, timing the attack to coincide with ongoing nuclear negotiations—a deliberate act of perfidy that mocked the very concept of diplomacy. The opening salvo killed the supreme leader, decapitated the senior military and political command, and struck targets across at least 26 of Iran’s 31 provinces. What followed was a sustained campaign of devastation: over 11,000 targets struck within the first month, more than 300 hospitals and medical facilities damaged or destroyed, tens of thousands of residential buildings reduced to rubble, schools obliterated, cultural heritage sites defaced, desalination plants wrecked and a nuclear power station repeatedly bombed. The war’s most horrifying single atrocity—the destruction of an elementary girls’ school in Minab, which killed more than 170 children—was met not with contrition but with denial. The operation was christened “Epic Fury,” a name chosen not to conceal the savagery but to celebrate it.
For decades, one has been subjected to the moral lectures of petty-bourgeois journalists and academics, whose principal historical occupation has been to discover, in the conduct of the Bolsheviks and above all in Trotsky, proofs of the supposedly sinister essence of Marxist “amoralism.” They have filled libraries with denunciations of revolutionary violence, meditations on the “authoritarian impulse,” and pious reflections on the alleged contempt of Marxists for ethical restraint.
Student youth and workers are instructed to believe that the central moral problem of the modern age lies in the intransigence of those who sought to overthrow capitalism. Yet these same circles, when confronted with the actual barbarism of imperialism, display remarkable forbearance. Their categorical condemnations dissolve into nuance. Their moral fervor wanes, and their hostility to violence becomes exquisitely selective. They find endless reserves of moral outrage—which has not subsided even after the passage of more than a century—over the Russian Revolution of 1917. But they are mute when the United States incinerates a society, when Israel buries children beneath rubble, when torture is systematized, when police execute the poor and the dispossessed in American streets. The class content of morality emerges here with extraordinary clarity.
Marxism has always insisted that morality is not an eternal commandment hovering above society, equally binding upon all classes regardless of their material interests and social position. Morality has a history. It has a class basis. The ruling class, no less than its intellectual retainers, speaks endlessly of universal principles while defending a social order founded on exploitation, war and repression. What is now unfolding before the eyes of the world is the real morality of the bourgeoisie, stripped of its democratic ornamentation.
In the age of the historic democratic revolutions of the 18th century, the bourgeoisie based its morality on the second categorical imperative articulated by Kant: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”
Reformulated in the true spirit of Trumpian fascism, the moral principle that guides the bourgeoisie is: “Act always to maximize the power and profit of the oligarchy, treating human beings, whole peoples, and even civilization itself, as disposable assets in the exercise of American force.”
This is the morality of a class whose wealth rests upon financial predation and social ruin. It is the morality of political leaders who regard entire populations as raw material upon which force may be exercised.
The same process is visible within the United States. A government that brutalizes populations abroad will employ the same methods at home. Methods developed in imperialist war find their counterpart in domestic life. The murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, carried out by federal agents, belong to a broader pattern of state violence that long predates the invasion of Iran: the epidemic of police killings, the militarization of local departments, the transformation of entire working class neighborhoods into internal security zones, the routine presumption that the lives of the poor are expendable. The violence of the American state is not divided into separate compartments, one external and the other domestic. It arises from the same source. A ruling class that maintains its wealth through fraud, theft, speculation and war governs by coercion when Constitutional norms become a hindrance.
The degeneration of political life is inseparable from the oligarchic structure of American society. There cannot be extreme concentrations of wealth without corresponding concentrations of power. The rule of a tiny financial aristocracy above the rest of society corrodes and destroys every democratic institution. The courts, the legislature, the media, the universities, the police, the intelligence apparatus, the parties of government—all become instruments through which a parasitic elite secures its interests. Under such conditions, criminal methods are inevitable. A society governed by billionaires, corporate predators, military-intelligence operatives and political swindlers acquires the character of those who dominate it. To describe such a society as ruled by criminals is a statement of political fact.
And yet the process of decay does not proceed without generating its opposite. The ruling class has moved far along the road of moral disintegration, but broad sections of the population have not followed it to the same destination. Democratic impulses, a sense of justice, an instinctive revulsion against cruelty, a hatred of lies and brutality—these remain deeply rooted among workers and young people. These sentiments are being activated and intensified by the escalation of the class struggle. The conflict between the criminality of the oligarchy and the moral consciousness of the masses is assuming an increasingly explosive character. Every boastful threat, every act of state violence, every public glorification of devastation widens the gulf between the ruling elite and the population over which it claims the right to rule.
Notwithstanding Trump’s boasts and threats, the Iranian people will not submit to American imperialism. They will continue to resist, and it is the responsibility of the American and international working class to come to the defense of the Iranian people. The power of the working class must be mobilized to stop the bombing of Iran and force the end of this illegal war.
The working class and youth must draw from the war the necessary conclusions. It is not enough to be appalled. Horror, left to itself, exhausts itself in impotence. What is required is the development of a socialist movement and genuine revolutionary morality, opposed in every respect to the depravity of the ruling class. Such a morality has nothing in common with the empty sermonizing of the academies or the selective outrage of liberalism. It arises from the struggle against capitalist exploitation and oppression. It is a morality of class struggle, grounded in solidarity, in truthfulness, in the defense of the oppressed, in uncompromising hostility to cruelty and domination, in the conviction that human beings cannot be treated as expendable objects in the service of profit and power. Within it are contained the highest principles of civilization and the deepest aspirations of humanity.
This is the answer to the old slanders against Marxism. The real “amoralists” are not the revolutionary socialists, but the ruling classes and their accomplices, who arm and finance genocide. The criminality of the American ruling class and its international collaborators is being exposed before the eyes of the world. Against that criminality there must be mobilized a force guided by a higher social principle and a higher moral conception. That force is the international working class. Its struggle for socialism is not merely politically necessary. It is the indispensable expression of all that is humane, decent and emancipatory in modern civilization. The survival of humanity depends upon its victory. -- David North
On Monday, the Health Finance Commission presented its proposals for the future of the statutory health insurance system (Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung, GKV). Its report, which the experts drafted on behalf of the government, amounts to an open declaration of war on the working class. The media is downplaying the explosiveness of the social attacks and presents the measures as a “necessary adjustment” and the “rescue of the health insurance funds.”
The report, with its 66 proposals, is a horrific catalogue of benefit cuts and higher co-payments for those with statutory insurance, as well as new and greater unreasonable demands on an already overburdened nursing staff.
*****
The claim that the health insurance funds are empty is a provocative lie. A super-rich layer is enriching itself immensely. The number of billionaires in Germany alone has increased almost sixfold in the last 20 years, from 30 to 170. If the working class had a determined, capable party and its own fighting organizations (instead of the trade unions, which are mere junior partners of the capitalists), then it would be easy to force high earners who are privately insured, shareholders, CEOs and the super-rich to pay contributions into the statutory funds, which as a pay-as-you-go insurance should be financed by “everyone.” Then there would certainly be no financial problem.
But Germany is governed in the interests of the bankers, oligarchs and business associations, and the government is on a war course. Militarism dominates, whose goal is to make society “fit for war” (SPD Defense Minister Pistorius). Germany is to take on “responsibility in Europe and around the whole world” (Klingbeil, Merz). For this, money is plentiful. According to a decision by the government, supported in both chambers of parliament, additional funds of €1 trillion have been approved for rearmament, the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) and the renewal of military-related infrastructure alone.
Of the 10 professors and business economists who make up the Commission, none is dependent on the statutory health insurance funds, nor is Health Minister Nina Warken (CDU). As a minister (according to the website parlamentjobs.de), she receives a gross monthly salary of just under €21,400, to which various allowances and surcharges of over €10,000 monthly are added. It is easy for all these decision-makers to insure themselves and their families privately.
Minister Warken politely thanked the Health Finance Commission for its “toolbox” and promised to make it “the basis of the most comprehensive financial reform of statutory health insurance to date” by the summer. Its implementation will, at the same time, be a test for another, fateful commission report: the Pensions Commission is already in the starting blocks to crack open pension payments, the largest item in the federal budget.
*****
The first statutory social insurance system, which Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck introduced 140 years ago, was a reaction to the international growth of the socialists; in Germany, it was the Social Democracy and its trade unions. Bismarck’s goal was to take the sting out of the impending class struggle. The continued payment of wages in the event of illness was also only introduced after the Second World War in order to pre-empt a social revolution. Previously, in 1956-1957, 45,000 metalworkers in Schleswig-Holstein had taken strike action for 114 days, the longest strike in West German history.
When Bismarck introduced the very first “welfare state,” Rosa Luxemburg analysed the function of this social reform in the capitalist state. She wrote: “It does not operate as a restriction of capitalist property, but on the contrary as its protection. Or, economically speaking, it does not constitute an intervention in capitalist exploitation, but a standardization, an ordering of this exploitation.”
This “standardization of exploitation” means that a small part of the entrepreneurs’ revenues does not flow directly into profit, but together with the workers’ contributions feeds the pension, health and long-term care insurance funds. This short-term renunciation of profit by the capitalists is in the long-term interest of the entire bourgeoisie. But the ruling class is in a deep crisis today. Under the pressure of globalization, trade war and war, it is more and more dispensing with financing this tried and tested means of dampening the class struggle.
*****
The policy of social devastation can, however, only be stopped if an independent, socialist mass movement is built within the working class, allying itself with the international working class. For this, it needs a new, international and socialist party. The goal must be to tear the healthcare system from the clutches of capitalism’s profit logic, to expropriate the private hospital corporations and the pharmaceutical industry without compensation and place them under workers’ control. Healthcare is not a commodity. It is a fundamental social right!
Speaking at a closed Easter lunch at the White House on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump declared that the federal government should stop paying for daycare, Medicare and Medicaid, all of which, he indicated, must be sacrificed for imperialist war.
“Don’t send any money for daycare,” Trump said, because “we’re fighting wars.” He went on, “You gotta let states take care of daycare and they should pay for it too ... Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” insisting that Washington had to concern itself with only “one thing, military protection.”He added that the federal government’s role was to “guard the country,” before dismissing Social Security, which serves more than 70 million people; Medicare, which covers about 68 million; and Medicaid and CHIP (the Children’s Health Insurance Program), which together cover more than 75 million people, including about 36 million children, as “little scams.”
The remarks, delivered in a setting where Trump evidently felt free to speak more openly than usual, were a blunt threat against programs on which millions of workers and their family members depend. Capitalist politicians generally avoid such direct attacks on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security because these programs remain deeply embedded in the lives of working people who have paid into them for decades. Trump, however, stated with unusual candor the real priorities of the ruling class.
The significance of the remarks lies not only in their content but in the circumstances under which they were made. The Easter lunch was closed to the press, and video of the event was briefly posted by the White House and then deleted. In contrast to Trump’s later scripted primetime address on Iran, the lunch exposed a more direct statement of policy: Social spending is to be gutted, while war spending is treated as the only indispensable function of the state.
Bloomberg reported Thursday morning that Trump is preparing to release a Fiscal Year 2027 budget plan on Friday centered on a “massive defense buildup, partially paid for by cuts to domestic agencies.” The administration, which is demanding $200 billion for the current illegal war on Iran, is also advancing a $1.5 trillion defense budget proposal for FY2027, up from the roughly $1 trillion level reached last year.
Trump’s remarks confirm in the most brazen possible way the Marxist analysis of the state. The capitalist state is not a neutral institution standing above society. It is an instrument of class rule, defending the interests of the financial oligarchy at home and imperialist predation abroad. Under conditions of intensifying global war, deepening economic crisis and a national debt that has now passed $39 trillion, the ruling class is seeking to offload the burden onto the working class through cuts to healthcare, childcare and every other social program, while funneling ever larger sums into the military and domestic police forces, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
*****
The remarks stripped away the propaganda that the US wages war for “democracy,” “human rights” or the liberation of women. Trump said plainly what American imperialism is after: resources, strategic domination and profit.
The composition of the gathering underscored its fascist political character. Vice President JD Vance was present, as were right-wing religious figures including Franklin Graham and Paula White, along with Erika Kirk, the widow of fascist Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. Trump singled her out repeatedly, thanking “Charlie and Erika.” Turning Point USA is continuing to host events following the assassination of its racist founder on college campuses with Trump administration officials.
After Trump’s remarks, Paula White-Cain, Trump’s “spiritual adviser” and a televangelist, led prayers over Trump in language that cast him in a Christ-like martyr role. “Jesus taught us so many lessons,” she said, before telling Trump, “No one has paid the price like you have paid the price.”
“God always had a plan,” she continued. “On the third day he rose, he defeated evil, he conquered death, hell and the grave, and because he rose, we all know that we can rise. And sir, because of his resurrection, you rose up because he was victorious, you were victorious. And I believe that the Lord said to tell you this, because of his victory, you will be victorious in all you put your hands to,” she added.
Catholic Bishop Robert Barron, also in attendance, appeared to clap after White-Cain’s comments.
*****
Franklin Graham’s prayer was even more explicit. Invoking the Book of Esther, Graham said “the Persians, the Iranians” wanted “to kill every Jew” and “destroy them with an atomic fire.” Graham’s rhetoric erased the fact that Israel is the only state in the Middle East with a nuclear arsenal.
*****
The embrace of Christian nationalism extends well beyond the White House Easter lunch. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has used official events to insist that America is a Christian nation “in our DNA.” He has made Pentagon prayer services, where he prays for “overwhelming violence” against America’s enemies, into a regular feature of the top leadership of the US war machine.
The elevation of Christianity as state doctrine goes hand in hand with attacks on Muslims, immigrants and political opposition. It is a central ideological component of the turn toward dictatorship.
The infusion of Christian nationalism into the state is part of the ruling class’s turn away from science, reason and the Enlightenment, and toward the Dark Ages. While Trump and Hegseth threaten to bomb Iran into the “Stone Age,” it is the American ruling class and its financial oligarchy that are dragging humanity toward the abyss of barbarism.
*****
The fight to preserve social programs for workers and end US imperialism cannot be left to the Democratic Party. The Democrats have worked with the Republicans to create this situation and continue to fund the state apparatus that wages war abroad and prepares austerity and repression at home. The way forward is the intervention of the working class, the social force that produces society’s wealth and the only revolutionary class in capitalist society.
Workers in the United States, Iran and throughout the world have no interest in being driven into war against one another while housing, healthcare, education and childcare are slashed. The fight to direct the wealth created by society toward the needs of all requires a socialist and anti-capitalist perspective, since there can be no serious struggle against war except through the fight to end the dictatorship of the oligarchy and its economic system, which is the fundamental source of war.
The agencies now being gutted, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and globally, the World Health Organization, were not the automatic products of civilizational progress. They were built under specific historical conditions, won through specific social struggles and they have always been vulnerable to reversal under conditions of broader social crisis. Understanding what is being destroyed today requires understanding how and why it was built.
It is in this context that the career of Dr. Stanley Plotkin demands serious attention. Plotkin, widely revered as the “godfather of vaccines,” is 93 years old. In the March 2, 2026 edition of STAT News, journalist Helen Branswell traced the arc of his career and recorded his despairing assessment of the present moment, in a profile titled, “A titan of vaccine development sees his field’s achievements slip away.” Plotkin’s verdict was unsparing: that the field’s achievements are slipping away, that vaccine nihilism is rising, and that he does not know how to counter it. His longtime colleague Walter Straus noted that Plotkin is watching his life’s work dismantled, in some cases repudiated, on specious grounds.
14. NASA's Artemis II launches crew to the Moon for first time in 54 years
Artemis II is... a welcome development amid a world dominated by the ongoing criminal war against Iran launched by the Trump administration, the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by the fascistic Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE) Gestapo and the vast growth of social inequality and dictatorship under capitalism.
At the same time, the mission is largely overshadowed by these same developments. The war in Iran, a new front in the many wars globally of American imperialism, has cost thousands of lives and destroyed tens of thousands of structures, including historical sites dating back thousands of years. Costs of fuel and other basic necessities have skyrocketed as the supply chain issues caused by the war continue to intensify. And the growth of dictatorship in the US becomes ever more stark, with Trump’s deployment of ICE to airports only the latest in a series of measures to suppress social opposition to the administration’s fascistic policies.
*****
It is worth noting that while many breathless media reports, and NASA itself, note that the orbit will take humans “farther from Earth than anyone in history,” this is not a significant technical accomplishment since all of these missions go the same approximate distance, with minor variations forced by the orbit chosen. The one selected for Artemis II is a particularly conservative one that doesn’t require significant maneuvers at the Moon.
The low points of the mission, on the other hand, have not been technical but the litany of reactionary and nationalist sentiments surrounding the launch. Trump posted on Truth Social that, “America doesn’t just compete, we DOMINATE, and the whole World is watching.” Numerous media commentators are placing identity politics front and center, focusing solely on the fact that Koch and Glover will be the first woman and first black person, respectively, to enter lunar orbit. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, the billionaire SpaceX-linked entrepreneur appointed by Trump, framed the mission explicitly in terms of competition with China, stating, “Competition can be a good thing. We certainly have competition now.”
5. Trump fires Bondi as US Attorney General
[Pam] Bondi is the second top-level internal security official dismissed by Trump in a month, following the firing of Kristi Noem as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. The twin actions suggest that the administration is in deep crisis over Trump’s plans to establish himself as a president-dictator, unanswerable to the law, the courts or Congress, let alone the American people.
*****
On Wednesday, Trump took Bondi with him as he attended oral arguments before the Supreme Court on his executive order to do away with birthright citizenship, a key provision of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. As it became clear that nearly all the justices were likely to rule his order unconstitutional, as they peppered Justice Department Solicitor General John Sauer with questions and objections to his argument, Trump stormed out, with Bondi in his wake.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will take over as Acting Attorney General. He was Trump’s personal lawyer, serving as the top attorney during Trump’s corruption trial in New York City, when he was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying documents to cover up his payment of hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels.
Press reports suggested that Lee Zeldin, a former Republican congressman and current administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, was a strong possibility as a permanent replacement, but during his first administration, Trump kept “acting” officials in their position for months, even years, in order to avoid Senate hearings and keep these officials on a short leash.
Not that Blanche will need any whipping to do Trump’s bidding. In addition to his record as Trump’s personal lawyer, he acted as the point man in protecting Trump from the Epstein scandal; going to meet Epstein’s collaborator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison and obtaining her agreement to exonerate Trump of any involvement in Epstein’s crimes. As a reward, Maxwell was then moved to a minimum-security facility, despite serving a 20-year sentence on child sex trafficking.
Blanche attended the fascistic Conservative Political Action Conference last week, and during one interview, endorsed sending agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to polling stations during this year’s mid-term elections. “Why is there an objection?” he asked, dismissing concerns that the presence of ICE agents might discourage voters from going to the polls.
6. Dismissal of Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Andris Nelsons provokes uproar
The Latvian-born Nelsons, music director and chief conductor in Boston for the last 13 years, has won a devoted following among the BSO musicians as well as the concert-going public. This did not concern the orchestra’s Board of Trustees when it fired Nelson via an email announcement sent to the press and to BSO subscribers on March 6. The musicians, without whom the BSO would, of course, not exist, found out about it at the same time.
The email announced that the board, led by president Chad Smith and chair Barbara Hostetter, had taken the decision to make Nelsons a lame duck until the expiration of his contract in 2027 “because, beyond our shared desire to ensure our orchestra continues to perform at the highest levels, the BSO and Andris Nelsons were not aligned on future vision.”
Nelsons said the parting of the ways was unexpected and not sought by him. The musicians were angry and, as the initial shock subsided, in a fighting mood. The following night, while Nelsons was still conducting in Vienna, they registered their disquiet by entering the stage en masse, instead of slowly tuning up as usual before the concert. They held an urgent meeting and issued a statement on behalf of the players’ committee the next day. “We strongly oppose the decision by the Board of Trustees to end the appointment of Maestro Nelsons,” the musicians said, as reported in the Boston Globe and elsewhere. “The musicians believe in Andris’s vision for the future.”
Nelsons received what was called a “hero’s welcome” when he returned to conduct the orchestra about two weeks after the announcement that his contract had not been renewed. The general sentiment among the musicians was summed up by one who spoke anonymously: “It felt like we were being asked to invest in something that’s been artistically bankrupted without a concrete plan for its recovery. Their explanation for everything was, basically, we’re running deficits. ... What they’re saying is the first and best way to balance the budget is to get rid of Andris.”
A few days earlier, when Nelsons returned to Symphony Hall, 95 orchestra musicians assembled on the steps in wintry weather to demonstratively display their support. Principal oboist John Ferrillo wrote about the atmosphere, according to the classical music blog Slipped Disc: “Why is the pain of this so deep? Why does the act of last week feel like such a violation? This is OUR house, my family’s house, that has been violated.”
The public also registered its opposition. A petition organized by a former BSO subscriber, George Whiting, rather modestly appealed to the board to meet with members of the community. “The ones who are impacted the most, in this case the musicians and audience, are being affected by a small group of people who behind closed doors decided they weren’t going to renew Andris’ contract,” he told the Boston Globe. “It’s pretty obvious how upset people are.”
The Globe, the voice of the city’s economic, political and social establishment, registered its concern in a lengthy editorial. It read, in part:
The orchestra’s musicians, and now patrons, have taken every opportunity to show their displeasure with a recent decision by the BSO’s Board of Trustees to part ways with conductor Andris Nelsons, who has been at the podium since 2013.
More than blindsiding the distinguished cadre of musicians—who found out about the board’s decision to jettison Nelsons only moments before the press release hit patrons and the public—it has been the continuing failure of the board to explain how declining to renew Nelsons’ contract is going to fix the orchestra’s longstanding fiscal woes.
A candid, public explanation of what the board thinks Nelsons did wrong is the least the community is owed.
Or is it that Nelsons, whose recordings with the orchestra have garnered two Grammy awards this year, is merely collateral damage—a human sacrifice to the gods of change for the sake of change?
And what, by the way, is plan B? What wunderkind will the BSO Board of Trustees find willing to take over a job where the current occupant has been so disrespected?
The Globe was reacting to the musicians’ outrage. The players’ committee had stated that Chad Smith “no longer has the trust or buy-in of the musicians.” What especially provoked the concern of the Globe editors was that the class struggle had erupted in the hallowed halls of Boston’s Symphony Hall. The whole corporate model of multi-millionaire boards of trustees running the musical field was called into question by the arrogance of the board and the furious reaction of the musicians.
The Boston symphony was founded 145 years ago. With one of the oldest histories in the US, it is among the most renowned orchestras. Boston, along with the orchestras in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago, was long considered one of the “Big Five,” the ensembles that set the pace and led the field. While other orchestras—in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco and elsewhere—have certainly laid claim to greatness in recent years, the “Big Five” label has not lost all of its historical luster.
*****
Nelsons is not merely a scapegoat, however. As the Globe discussed in a subsequent article, the orchestra board and management have been pushing for “change,” for what they call modernization of the orchestra. To the extent that they have any program, it is to hollow out the orchestra’s offerings and use identity politics to appeal to broader sections of the upper-middle class. They say nothing about the evisceration of federal funding, either agreeing with it or accepting it as inevitable. They are silent on the elimination in the last few decades of public education in music and all of the arts. As far as they are concerned, the orchestra must pay its own way, even if that means minimizing the importance of the classics—not only of the 18th and 19th centuries, but of the 20th as well.
To the extent that their vision for the future is not “aligned” with Nelsons’, it is their view that he is dragging his feet on these issues. It is significant that one of the complaints about Nelsons is that when asked, in 2017, whether classical music had a sexual harassment problem, he responded, quite reasonably, “No… many things are artificially exaggerated or made too important.” This was just as the MeToo movement was being heavily promoted by the ruling class.
But this is more than an issue of personalities. While the details are of some interest, there is no huge mystery about what is taking place in the field of classical music. As the WSWS explained just two months ago (“Twilight at the Met: Capitalism’s Contempt for Culture”), institutions like the Metropolitan Opera (and the BSO) are being transformed by the crisis of decaying capitalism.
We wrote:
New York City—the world capital of financialized capitalism, home to the Wall Street banks and hedge funds that have looted trillions from society and presided over levels of inequality that almost defy comprehension—cannot apparently muster the resources to support its own opera company.
The composition of the ruling class has changed, reflecting the deepening of the crisis of its system. These institutions have always depended upon the wealthy. Today’s oligarchy, however, has no way to defend its system except through an orgy of financial speculation and war against the working class at home and all over the world.
Culture is one of the first items to be sacrificed. There is no money for symphony orchestras but there are trillions of dollars for war and to bail out the same elements who inhabit the boards of trustees of such institutions as the BSO.
Trump is the most depraved example of a broader trend. He takes a sledgehammer to culture, whereas the BSO board, undoubtedly including, if not dominated by, supporters of the Democratic Party, has slightly different methods. They are backed by different factions of the same ruling elite—venture capitalists, private equity vultures and tech titans.
*****
BSO musicians and all those concerned with the fate of classical music must concern themselves with these political issues. The defense of culture cannot be entrusted to the ruling class. It requires a new perspective—genuine change and not honeyed phrases about change from the alleged “progressives” leading the BSO.
Professionally trained musicians are part of the working class, and their fate is bound up with that of the working class as a whole. They must reach out to other sections of workers and youth. A common struggle against decaying capitalism will bring new audiences and new talents to the field of culture. Only the socialist reorganization of economic life can provide a future for art, music and all the conquests of human civilization.
7. Pseudo-lefts work to chain Mexico’s strike wave to US-trained union apparatus
Mexico is experiencing an upturn in strikes across industry, education and services as layoffs, inflation, plant closures and contract conflicts drive workers into struggle. But the decisive issue is not only the sharpness of the attacks; it is the role played by the union bureaucracy, including the supposedly “independent” unions, in channeling this anger back behind the labor courts, the capitalist state and the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum.
As part of its now clearly defined tasks on behalf of this bureaucracy, the Movement of Socialist Workers (MTS) and its publication La Izquierda Diario have sought to provide a “left” cover for this entire operation aimed at suppressing the class struggle and protecting the investment interests of transnational corporations, while keeping Mexico “competitive” as a low-wage platform for global production.
Significantly, in each case, the MTS has focused on underpinning the authority of the National Union of Workers (UNT), New Workers Central (UNT) and other unions most openly backed and trained by the American union bureaucracy and government through the Solidarity Center, a direct agency of US imperialism.
*****
The political role of the UNT and related “independent” unions must be understood historically. They were not created as organs of working-class self-emancipation but as mechanisms to replace the hated and gangster-ridden Mexican Workers Central (CTM) with a more adaptable structure under conditions of growing class unrest and US intervention.
It fits a long pattern of AFL-CIO operations in Mexico and throughout Latin America. The US labor bureaucracy has repeatedly acted as an auxiliary of Washington’s foreign policy, using “democratic unions” as instruments to discipline labor and block revolutionary movements. In Mexico, it helped build and consolidate the CROM and later the CTM, both of which tied workers to the bourgeois state and to US corporate interests.
After decades of supporting the CTM, Washington shifted to promoting “independent” unions. Since its launch in 1997, the UNT was financed and trained as the prime example of this model. But the goal remained the same: to create a more flexible mechanism for containing labor unrest and preventing it from escaping national and bureaucratic bounds.
This is why the MTS is such a useful partner for the AFL-CIO. The MTS gives this entire apparatus a pseudo-left veneer. It can speak the language of solidarity and organizing “from below” while directing workers back into the orbit of the very forces that police labor on behalf of capital. That is the real political function of its interventions.
The alternative is clear. Mexican workers need rank-and-file committees independent of the union bureaucracy, the courts and the state, and linked across sectors and across borders, especially with workers in the United States who are themselves seeing an escalation of strike activity and mass protests against war, dictatorship, and capitalist exploitation.
8. Britain hosts Strait of Hormuz crisis summit amid breakdown of relations with US
The Strait of Hormuz virtual summit hosted by Britain on Thursday underscored the disaster confronted by the European powers in the war in Iran, their limited powers of intervention, and the clash with the working class which will inevitably result.
Foreign ministers from 40 countries reportedly took part. Leading the meeting, UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper made the obligatory denunciation of Iran for the consequences of a criminal war begun by the United States and Israel.
“Iranian recklessness towards countries who were never involved in this conflict,” she said, “is not just hitting mortgage rates and petrol prices and the cost of living here in the UK and in many different countries across the world, it is hitting our global economic security.”
Cooper is lying about who is responsible, but not about the consequences. In the UK, food inflation is expected to hit 9 percent even if the conflict ends within the next few weeks. Energy bills are expected to spike 18 percent in the summer. Petrol has already climbed 14 percent and diesel 27 percent. The head of the National Health Service has said he is “really worried” about medicine supplies.
The most significant feature of the summit was the absence of the United States. President Donald Trump has rocked the European powers by declaring that reopening the Strait of Hormuz is not his concern.
*****
Trump’s increasingly hostile attitude towards Europe, and substantial pull-out from the war in Ukraine, has promoted years of declarations about the need to remilitarize the continent. However, these plans are still in their initial stages. British military spending increased from 2.2 to 2.4 percent of GDP in the last five years; French from 2 to 2.3 percent; German from 1.4 to 2.4 percent.
“At the end of the cold war,” the Guardian reports, “the UK had 51 destroyers and frigates… The number had halved to 25 by 2007 and is now at 13, with much of that fleet ageing…
“Britain had maintained four minehunters and a mothership in Bahrain for 20 years, in the belief that Iran might, in a crisis such as now, try to mine the Gulf and the strait of Hormuz. But the final three were removed in the past year…”
The newspaper noted the House of Commons Defense Committee expressing “grave concerns over whether the navy had the ‘capacity and resilience’ to respond to the crisis in the Middle East” and a report from the Center for European Policy Analysis warning the Royal Navy was ‘on course for national embarrassment’.”
The UK-led summit was therefore focused on efforts to “assess all viable diplomatic and political measures we can take to restore freedom of navigation, guarantee the safety of trapped ships and seafarers and to resume the movement of vital commodities,” according to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
*****
This week Starmer held his third Cobra (national emergency) meeting since the war on Iran began, saying vaguely it would be “making sure that everything that we need to have in place” to respond to economic collapse.
Leaks from Cobra meetings seven years ago planning for a no-deal Brexit and “shortages of fuel, food and medicine” revealed “Operation Yellowhammer” discussions of “curfews, bans on travel, confiscation of property [and] deployment of the armed forces to quell rioting,” according to the Times. Thousands of troops were to be placed on standby.
The same discussions and worse will be taking place today.
At the same time, the longer the Strait is closed, the more desperate the pressure the European and other powers will be placed under to reopen it and alleviate their economic distress. Whether through deeper involvement in Trump’s criminal war, or some ramshackle force of their own, either course would court disaster and a deeper and more extensive eruption of social opposition at home.
The conviction Wednesday of Chris Nineham, vice chairman of the Stop the War Coalition (STWC), and Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), is a major escalation in the onslaught on democratic rights by the Starmer Labour government in again criminalising protest against genocide and war.
At Westminster Magistrates’ Court, Judge Daniel Sternberg convicted Nineham and Jamal of failing to comply with conditions imposed by London’s Metropolitan Police on the national March for Palestine on January 18, 2025. Jamal was additionally convicted of two counts of inciting other protesters to breach police conditions, after the judge ruled that a speech he made at the rally constituted “a suggestion, persuasion, and inducement” to break the law.
The judge said in a verdict whose implications are vast: “Protest rights, while fundamental, are not absolute and do not permit breaching lawfully imposed conditions.”
Both defendants were given conditional discharges—18 months for Jamal, 12 months for Nineham—and ordered to pay fines of £7,500 each related to court costs. Outside the court, Nineham described the verdict as “an extraordinary and shocking decision, and a huge setback for civil liberties in this country. It is an attempt to send a chilling message across society that people shouldn’t be protesting.” He said both would appeal their conviction.
A key part of Nineham and Jamal’s legal defense was their contention that the conditions imposed on the January 18 march were unlawful. Following the judge’s ruling the Palestine Coalition said, “Extraordinarily, in dismissing this argument… Sternberg informed the court he was not obliged to give any reasons for his decision.
*****
In his statement outside Westminster Court, Jamal noted that they had not been afforded a fair trial: “Consider these two basic facts: six days were allocated for this case; the judge allowed the prosecution to take four days to make their case and did not allow any additional time for defense submissions. It was never proved that we offered any threat to the synagogue or to anyone worshiping at a synagogue.”
Of their peaceful protest, he explained, “We led a symbolic walk. We made clear that, if we were stopped by police, we would lay flowers at their feet. The police told us to filter through and we stopped when we reached the second police line. Chris was violently arrested — the only violence that occurred that day. We will not allow this to distract us from the reasons we have been campaigning on the streets.”
The PSC leader said their conviction was in the context of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians and the Starmer government’s backing it: “Yesterday, Israel became the world’s first state to enact a law which mandates execution only for people of one ethnic background. Even apartheid South Africa did not have such a law, but still our government offers Israel diplomatic, economic, political, and military support. And instead of ending its complicity, it devotes its energy to bringing in even further laws to repress the right to protest. It will not work. We will not be silenced.”
In a parallel chilling development, the day prior to the main part of Nineham and Jamal’s trial, the Met issued a March 25 statement, warning: “The Metropolitan Police has revised the enforcement approach officers will take in response to displays of support for Palestine Action, which is a proscribed organization under the Terrorism Act.” Stating that “Anyone showing support for the group is likely to be arrested,” the Met declared, “This is a change from an interim position adopted following last month’s High Court judgment which indicated that while officers would identify and gather evidence of offenses, arrests would be unlikely.”
10. Israel adopts the death penalty only for Palestinians
By a vote of 62 to 48, Israel’s Knesset approved a law Monday enshrining the death penalty as the default punishment for Palestinians who carry out an “act of terrorism” on citizens of Israel. The law does not apply to the state-backed terrorism of far-right Zionist settlers, who routinely assault and kill Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank.
Anyone who deliberately kills a person with the intent of “negating the existence of the state of Israel” is to be executed by hanging. The law restricts access to legal counsel for the accused in Israel’s civil courts and grants immunity to all persons involved in carrying out such state executions.
*****
Monday’s parliamentary vote was held two-and-a-half years into an ongoing genocide carried out by Israel with the backing of the imperialist powers against the people of Gaza. This has been accompanied by a vast expansion of far-right settler violence across the West Bank, which is coordinated with the government under the watch of former settler and fascist Finance Minister Bezalil Smotrich. The annexation of Gaza and the West Bank, combined with the expansion of Israeli territory into southern Lebanon being pursued as part of Tel Aviv’s ongoing participation in the US-led war on Iran, are component parts of a Greater Israel policy that enjoys strong support within the far-right Trump administration.
The blatantly discriminatory, racist law is the logical outcome of the Zionist project. Zionism drew on a 19th-century ethno-nationalist ideology that sought to base the establishment of a “Jewish state” based on racial and religious exclusivism. Always dependent on securing the backing of imperialism, the founders of Zionism and Israel as a state explicitly conceived of and pursued their program through the violent dispossession of the Arab population to secure the “return” of a “chosen people” to their homeland after 2,000 years of exile.
*****
It is fitting that the law was presented to parliament by the fascist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who described the measure as the most important piece of legislation in decades and toasted its passage with a glass of champagne. He and his fellow celebrants wore a lapel pin in the shape of a noose, to celebrate the hangings to come.
Ben-Gvir is a follower of the fascist ideologue Meir Kahane, who advocated the conception that Israel must pursue “redemptive revenge” against its gentile enemies by all necessary means to redeem God and his “chosen people.” The Zionist regime can now add institutionalized murder to the long list of means at its disposal to pursue this goal, alongside systematic torture, military and paramilitary violence, and assassinations.
*****
Reflecting its affinity with the fascist policies pursued by the Israeli government, the Trump administration responded to the death penalty law by simply declaring that Israel has the right to pass its own laws. The European imperialist powers felt compelled to issue a token statement of protest that portrayed the vote as a dangerous misstep in an otherwise healthy democracy. The foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Australia,
express[ed] our deep concern about a bill that would significantly expand the possibilities to impose the death penalty in Israel...We are particularly worried about the de facto discriminatory character of the bill. The adoption of this bill would risk undermining Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles.
What hypocrisy! All of the signatories to this statement are close allies of the Zionist regime. They have not only sanctioned, but also facilitated the Gaza genocide, while at the same time relentlessly suppressing the democratic rights of anyone in their countries who dared to oppose the genocide. In the case of Germany, it is Israel’s second-largest weapons supplier behind the United States. Berlin outrageously exploits the German bourgeoisie’s responsibility for the Holocaust to justify unquestioning support for Zionism, even as Israel’s fascist regime carries out crimes against humanity akin to those of Hitler’s Third Reich.
Netanyahu now passes fascistic legislation, prompting a murmur of criticism from Berlin, London, Paris, and Rome animated solely by concern that it makes their continued collusion in Israel’s crimes more politically difficult.
*****
Israel’s descent into barbarism underscores the urgency of Jewish workers breaking decisively from the national exclusivist politics of Zionism, which has shaped Israel not as a “safe haven” for the Jews but as a fascist outpost of imperialism steeped in monumental historic crimes.
Above all, workers throughout the region, Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds, Azerbaijanis and Jews, must fight for a United Socialist States of the Middle East, ending its division into rival bourgeois states dominated by imperialism, in alliance with the working class of the imperialist centers in a revolutionary struggle to put an end to capitalism.
11. University of Michigan Chinese researcher takes his own life after interrogation by federal agents
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement condemning the actions of US law enforcement. A spokesperson declared:
The heartbreaking death of a Chinese postdoctoral scholar, who took his own life after being subjected to hostile questioning by US law enforcement personnel, calls into question once again the impact and legitimacy of unwarranted US interrogation and harassment targeting Chinese researchers and students.
The ministry said that these actions “poison the atmosphere for people-to-people exchanges between the two countries and continue to create a serious chilling effect.” It demanded that the US “carry out a full investigation, give the family of the victim and the Chinese side a responsible explanation, and stop discriminatory enforcement.”
*****
U-M students, faculty and staff must demand answers from the administration and the federal government. Has there been any official report from the university regarding the death of this researcher? How have university officials facilitated these interrogations? What other laboratories have been investigated?
The role of U-M acting president Domenico Grasso must be scrutinized. A week after the death of Wang, at a March 26 hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce titled “US Universities Under Siege: Foreign Espionage, Stolen Innovation, & the National Security Threat,” Grasso boasted of the university’s collaboration in the witch-hunting of Chinese researchers and its role in persecuting opponents of American imperialism and Trump’s drive to dictatorship. Grasso’s testimony exposed the university administration as a willing enforcer for the national-security apparatus, helping to frame up Chinese scientists and attack democratic rights to protect institutional funding and status.
*****
The tragic death of this young scientist must not be swept under the rug by U-M administrators and politicians of both parties. The student and faculty unions and other organizations at U-M and IU were largely silent during the persecutions of Han, Jian, Bai, Zhang, Zhang and Xiang.
The Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) have defended these researchers from the start. We call on students, researchers and campus workers to demand:
- A full, independent investigation: University and federal authorities must release all information regarding the harassment and interrogation of this researcher.
- The outing of the agents involved: The federal agents who conducted the hostile interrogation that apparently precipitated this tragedy must be publicly identified and held accountable.
- An end to the anti-China witch-hunt. All investigations, surveillance and harassment of Chinese scholars based on unscientific, fabricated claims of “national security threats” must cease immediately. All pending charges against targeted researchers, including Youhuang Xiang, who faces sentencing on April 7, must be dropped.
- Halt the drive to war. The persecution of Chinese nationals is the domestic front of the imperialist war drive against China. Workers and students must oppose the militarization of society and the xenophobic campaigns that enable it.
We call for the immediate formation of an independent committee of U-M campus workers, researchers and students to investigate this death. The perpetrators of the campaign against Chinese researchers—from the interrogators to the officials in the Trump administration, the members of Congress and the U-M officials who have incited this hysteria—must be held to account.
12. New Zealand government, media discourage vaccination amid COVID wave
New Zealand is currently experiencing a spike in COVID-19 cases, with 50 people hospitalized with the coronavirus in the first week of March and 82 in the second week. Test kits are not freely available, so there is no reliable data on the number of people who have the virus.Since July last year the Ministry of Health has not provided updates on the number of people dying each week from COVID. It reports there have been 5,630 COVID-related deaths since the pandemic began, up from around 4,500 in December 2024. In other words, COVID is linked to around 1,000 deaths per year—twice as many as influenza.
The vast majority of these deaths occurred after the previous Labour Party-led government, led by Jacinda Ardern, caved in to the demands of big business and abandoned its elimination strategy, which had kept New Zealand almost entirely free from COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021. The virus spread rapidly in 2022, infecting millions of people and overwhelming hospital emergency departments.
The media, the National Party-led government and the entire political establishment have almost stopped talking about COVID, leading fewer people to get regular booster vaccines. While they do not stop the spread of COVID, vaccines can significantly reduce the severity of the virus.
*****
According to Health NZ data, 6,661 children and teenagers have been hospitalized with COVID and 28 have died of COVID-related causes.
The media and politicians have buried these facts. The government is preparing to follow the criminal policies of the Trump administration in the US, and other governments, which are restricting access to life-saving vaccines. While it starves the healthcare sector of funding, placing profits ahead of lives, the ruling class is working to undermine basic public health principles.
In these videos, Nexteer workers in Saginaw, Michigan describe why they voted nearly unanimously to reject a concessions-laden contract pushed by the UAW bureaucracy.
14. Australia: Labor government targets the elderly in public housing tower demolition [videos included]
The state Labor government in Victoria is pressing ahead with its plans to demolish state capital Melbourne’s 44 public housing towers. The program is the biggest destruction of public housing in Australia’s history and will displace more than 10,000 residents, the vast majority of whom come from the most vulnerable sections of the working class, including immigrants, low-income families, those living with disabilities and the elderly.
As the next stage of the program, Homes Victoria has earmarked the destruction of seven public housing towers that accommodate elderly citizens. The towers are spread across six estates in Albert Park, Flemington, Kensington, North Melbourne, Prahran and St Kilda. This is more than half of the 13 towers dedicated to aged communities with on-site support workers for residents over 55.
*****
Labor’s destruction of public housing is a component part of a wholesale assault on the living and social conditions of the entire working class while billions of dollars are funneled into the military to fund war crimes abroad amid an explosion of global imperialist violence led by the fascistic US administration of Donald Trump.
*****
The way residents have actually been treated in the towers at Racecourse Rd, Holland Court and Alfred Street provides the opposite of “reassurance.” In the foyers of the targeted towers, Homes Victoria mounted a glossy advertising campaign to pressure them. Large photos of smiling residents accompanied statements saying “we’re here to support residents every step of the way.”
Residents suffered coercive relocation processes, incomprehensible paperwork and threats to their priority status if they refused unsuitable offers. Those without English as a first language were routinely denied interpreters. The residents in the elderly towers will be treated no differently.
A World Socialist Web Site reporting team visited residents in the towers now earmarked for demolition.
15. “Four Corners” covers up Labor and union role in Australian university restructuring
The government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship television public affairs program, “Four Corners,” this week produced an episode, titled Campus Chaos, that purported to expose the causes of the job destruction and pro-corporate restructuring wracking the country’s 39 public universities.
National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) leaders urged union members to watch and share the program and even hosted online watch parties. NTEU New South Wales state division secretary Vince Caughley sent an email to all members saying: “Four Corners is shining a light on the crisis in our universities.”
It did nothing of the sort. From the start to the finish, the show amounted to a whitewash of the true roots of the restructuring, accompanied by the destruction of some 4,000 jobs nationally over the past 18 months.
Most glaringly, there was not a single mention of the Albanese Labor government’s Universities Accord report, released in 2024. That document set out the blueprint for what is taking place—the total subordination of the tertiary education sector to the teaching and research requirements of the corporate ruling class and the development of a war economy.
In fact, the episode promoted those centrally responsible for the imposition of the Accord agenda. That is, Education Minister Jason Clare and the NTEU apparatus itself. The NTEU bureaucrats and their supporters have opposed and blocked any unified fight by university staff against the restructuring and job cuts, as have the officials of the other main campus trade union, the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU).
“Four Corners” focused on the destructive course closures and job losses at three universities—University Technology Sydney (UTS), Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Wollongong (UoW). But “Four Corners” hid the fact that the managements at these institutions each succeeded in ultimately substantially pushing though their plans, slightly modified, with the help of “voluntary” redundancies agreed to by the NTEU.
*****
“Four Corners,” echoing the NTEU, falsely depicted the job cuts at UTS and ANU as the product of artificially-concocted financial deficits. Only one fleeting reference was made to fact that the level of federal government funding for domestic student enrollments has halved from 80 percent to 40 percent since the Hawke Labor government of the 1980s reintroduced student fees.
That statistic points to the reality of the systemic under-funding of universities of successive governments, Labor and Liberal-National Coalition alike, for decades, forcing the universities to rely on corporate sponsorship and exorbitant fees charged to international students.
Since taking office in 2022, the Albanese government has intensified the financial pressure on universities by cutting international student enrollments, as part of a wider reactionary push to blame immigrants for the cost-of-living and housing affordability crises.
Labor also has continued the previous Coalition government’s Job-ready Graduates (JRG) scheme, which has hiked fees for three-year undergraduate humanities students to more than $50,000, while stripping the universities of about $1 billion a year for teaching them.
*****
To divert from Labor’s record, as its headline item, “Four Corners” reported: “Australia’s universities are paying external consultants and contractors an estimated $1.8 billion a year without disclosing which firms they are hiring and what the money is being spent on.”
The program further disclosed that 12 of the 14 universities it surveyed had members of their governing councils “who had substantive roles as consultants from firms such as Ernst & Young, PwC, KPMG, Deloitte, McKinsey, and Boston Consulting Group.”
But “Four Corners” presented this corporatization of the universities as something unknown, and even as an alarming revelation, to Clare and other Labor government representatives. Clare claimed that he was stunned by the news, saying it was “shocking” because “we invest a lot of money in our universities.”
Labor senator Tony Sheldon, an ex-Transport Workers Union bureaucrat who chaired an NTEU-backed federal parliamentary inquiry into university governance, described the $1.8 billion figure as “shockingly high.”
The truth is that the hiring of corporate consultants to reshape universities along corporate lines is inextricably bound up with Labor’s agenda, spelt out in the Universities Accord report. Its core axis is a radical transformation of universities to satisfy the employment and research demands of the corporate elite and preparations for war.
*****
For years, despite claiming to oppose the corporatization of universities, the union apparatuses have suppressed educators’ hostility to this transformation. They have blocked any unified mobilization against it while pushing through enterprise agreements that enable such restructuring and promoting deadly illusions that Labor-majority federal and state parliamentary inquiries will stop the assault.
In order to fight this reactionary agenda, university workers and students need new forms of organization. That means forming rank-and-file committees, independent of the trade unions, that can link up with workers in struggle in Australia and worldwide through the International Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. This is part of a broader necessary struggle against capitalism itself and its program of ever-greater corporate wealth and plunge into barbaric and catastrophic wars.
16. A view from Germany: The war against Iran and the normalization of war crimes
US President Donald Trump’s threat to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age has met with no reaction in the European media, or at best a shrug of the shoulders. Trump’s threat to destroy the livelihood of a country with 90 million inhabitants and a 5,000-year-old culture was not deemed worthy of protest by any of the editorial writers and commentators who otherwise can’t keep their mouths shut about Russian President Putin.
Trump made the threat several times in his tweets and, on Wednesday, also in a televised address to the American people. “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We are going to send them back to the Stone Age,” he said.
There is no doubt that Trump means this threat seriously. The only question is how far he will go. As far as using nuclear weapons? That cannot be ruled out.
Since the start of the war, Israel alone has dropped over 6,500 bombs on Iran; the number of US bombs is likely to be even higher. Thousands of people have already been killed, tens of thousands injured. The destruction of oil fields, nuclear power stations, energy and water supplies threatened by Trump, and the destruction of hospitals, schools and industrial facilities that has already begun, would condemn millions more to starvation, disease and death.
It is not only Trump’s actions, but also his language that is reminiscent of the Nazis’ genocidal policies. Shortly before the start of the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, Hitler’s propaganda chief Goebbels wrote in his diary: “It will be a massive offensive on the grandest scale, probably the most powerful that history has ever seen… Bolshevism will collapse like a house of cards. We are on the verge of an unparalleled triumph.”
Yet none of this is deemed worthy of comment by the opinion-makers in the newsrooms. They did report on Trump’s “Stone Age” threat, in some cases even in the headlines. But outrage or dissent? None whatsoever. At most, they are concerned about the consequences for oil prices, share prices and the future of NATO.
*****
Ten years and several wars later, legal consciousness in the media has sunk so low that even Trump’s call to bomb a country of 90 million people back to the Stone Age is accepted without batting an eyelid.
17. The disinterest of Australian pseudo-left Socialist Alternative in the war on Iran
The illegal US war against Iran marks a turning point. It is not only a return to the most blatant forms of imperialist criminality, a war of extermination waged against a country of 93 million people, but a component of a developing global conflict that threatens the very future of humanity.
In Australia, as internationally, there is mass opposition to the war, with the latest opinion polling showing that 72 percent of the population is hostile to the attack on Iran. Anger over the bombardment itself is intersecting with growing concern over the spike in petrol costs and inflation being imposed on the working class.
The fight against this war is at the cutting edge of the struggle waged by genuine socialists. As the world Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its sections, the Socialist Equality Parties, have explained, the war is a concentrated expression of the breakdown of capitalism. It is not the result of the grotesque and criminal persona of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, but the only means by which a crisis-racked American imperialism attempts to resolve its crisis at the expense of its rivals and of the working class internationally.
Contained within it are all the central issues facing the working class: the threat of a world war, the real danger of nuclear annihilation, the turn to authoritarianism and the relationship between war abroad and the offensive on social and democratic rights domestically.
Above all, the ICFI has stressed that the war underscores the urgency of building an independent movement of the working class, based on a socialist and internationalist perspective, as the only means of halting the descent into catastrophe.
*****
A major war is a test of every political tendency, and from that standpoint the assault on Iran has exposed SAlt’s utter bankruptcy.
Workers and young people should reject the pro-imperialist politics of the pseudo-left, and their cynical evasions, and instead take up the fight to build a socialist and internationalist anti-war movement of the working class. It is the International Committee of the Fourth International and the Socialist Equality Party that are dedicated to that fight.
18. Workers Struggles: Africa & Europe
Africa
Ghana:
Mozambique:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Zimbabwe:
Europe
Belgium:
Postal workers in wildcat strikes against deteriorating working conditions
France:
Thousands of teachers strike against government cuts in education
Northern Cyprus:
Thousands join general strike, riot police used against demonstrators
United Kingdom:
Gas distribution network workers in Stockport to walk out over excessive overtime working
Lecturers in Glasgow, Scotland walk out over health and safety concerns
Administrative staff at British Medical Association to hold further stoppages over payMental health support workers in Manchester begin two-week stoppage over pay
19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
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.
