Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: A social and cultural phenomenon
“The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has reposed.”—Shelley
If Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is not a great film, it is at the very least a sincere, serious one. Parts of it are successful, other portions are not at all. In any event, it has become without question an important social and cultural phenomenon, perhaps a barometer.
More than 60 million people worldwide have already seen the new film, and sales of Homer’s epic in book form are soaring. Scholarly critics and defenders have weighed in extensively, generating an animated public debate. At the low end of things, ignoramus-oligarch Elon Musk has attacked Nolan’s effort on the grounds of its casting “diversity” and promises that an “all-white” version would be a great improvement. What the world needs most of all—trillionaire adaptations of the classics!
This version of The Odyssey raises a host of questions, more than can be properly addressed in a single article.
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It is estimated that The Odyssey was composed in the 8th or 7th century B.C. about events and a society several centuries older. The epic, along with The Iliad (set during the Trojan War’s final weeks), became central to Greek and later Roman culture and society, and it has immeasurably influenced world literature. The two works were composed independently, as part of extended oral traditions.
The Odyssey is a sensual, moving and lyrical work, profoundly engaging and thrilling. “Delight in physical existence is everything to [the Homeric poems], and their highest aim is to make that delight perceptible to us,” argues Erich Auerbach in Mimesis.
Classical scholar M. I. Finley observes that The Odyssey “in particular encompasses a wide field of human activities and relationships: social structure and family life, royalty, aristocrats and commoners, banqueting and ploughing and swineherding.”
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Nolan has taken considerable pains. The Odyssey was shot entirely on IMAX’s 70mm film cameras over the course of six months in numerous countries at an estimated cost of $250 million. It has already returned this investment several times over in the first few weeks of its release.
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The intelligent and convincing scenes in Nolan’s Odyssey include a conversation between Odysseus and Penelope, on the eve of the Trojan War, in which the former suggests the real reason for the conflict: “This is Agamemnon’s excuse to break Troy’s control of the trading routes. He won’t let it pass. Ever.” Later, Helen, with a badly scarred face (“The face that launched a thousand ships. … Now maybe just five hundred,” her husband cynically notes), pours scorn on Menelaus’s description of the Greek triumph in Troy as “a righteous victory,” referring instead to “your brother’s ambition.”
Why should we dismiss these and other perceptive observations as unacceptable “modernizations”? And there is no reason to belittle Penelope’s complaint to Telemachus about her inability as a woman to mount Ithaca’s throne (“My knowledge, my years of experience—that’s all nothing compared with the bristles on your chin”), although it feels somewhat awkward, and Circe’s fear of rape by marauding soldiers as mere feminist diversions. These were real historical issues.(Tellingly, however, Nolan has not gone out of his way to refer to slavery and the conditions of slaves, who made up a considerable portion of the ancient Greek population, except for one passing, oblique comment by Antinous. Telemachus merely speaks of Eumaeus, a household slave, as “My dad’s most loyal worker.”)
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Emily Wilson, on whose 2017 translation of The Odyssey Nolan based himself, provoked a controversy by sharply criticizing the film. Wilson asserted it “lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words.”
Her comments appear one-sided and even quasi-spiteful, but undoubtedly there are weaknesses in the drama. Although one must point out at the outset that conceiving of how people conducted themselves 2,700 years ago or more in their personal relations is no small matter. Nolan is ambitious, as his Oppenheimer admirably demonstrated, but he has been functioning in a broadly degraded cultural atmosphere, especially when it comes to the treatment of history and historical development. The tendency to impose a modern-day, middle class outlook on people in the past is pervasive.
To solve the problems would, first of all, require a more conscious grasp of the fact that people and social life have not always been the same, that social relations are alterable and that what exists presently has not always existed and will not always exist. Such an understanding is most available to those, including left-wing artists in the past, who gravitate toward Marxism.
As it is, Nolan grapples with the dramatic elements but tends at times toward earnest Hollywood cliché, toward relatively familiar language and gestures. Hathaway-Penelope’s “door-slamming,” Holland-Telemachus’ suppressed frustrations and Damon-Odysseus’s angst and long face all wear a little thin. It is difficult to say precisely how such a thing might have been carried off more convincingly, freshly, but a more “primitive,” naïve and direct style comes to mind, the opposite, in any case, of the slick and smooth.
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The problem Nolan creates for himself with his excessively guilt-ridden Odysseus emerges sharply in the final scenes set in Ithaca, where the film is at its least convincing and most contorted. How is it possible to reconcile the “broken,” saddened voyager with the warrior who single-handedly wipes out 50 or more able-bodied young grandees? When Telemachus asks his father in the film, “How will we take on the suitors?” he is told, “Not we. Their blood has to be on my hands. Or you’d face exile.” This makes no particular sense and is simply a device for Nolan to preserve his “new,” reformed-humble Odysseus and the moral innocence of his son. In Homer, Telemachus and several servants enthusiastically take part in the “Slaughter in the Hall.”
The film ends with Odysseus and Penelope heading “into the unknown west to honor my men” and musing vaguely about “a new dawn” breaking “over the darkened world.” This is weak and not effectual.
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Nolan has told the media he filmed The Odyssey because it filled a major gap, as no one had ever made an epic action movie out of Homer’s work before. This may be immediately true, but it hardly tells the whole story. He perhaps comes a little closer when he says The Odyssey is “foundational … it truly contains all stories.”
A turn to the classics has meant different things at different points in history, and there is no need to overload Nolan’s decision. No doubt, arbitrary or accidental factors come into play. However, objectively, a large-scale filming of (and mass reception to!) The Odyssey, with everything that entails, signifies a sharp repudiation of the current cinema and its overall mass of stupidities. The success of a complex film about earthshaking matters, about humanity’s struggles with immense obstacles, puts the lie to the claims of apologists for the prevailing banal “product.” Many people, it turns out, are evidently hungering for something more elevated and demanding.
2. Nicaragua moves to ban “Yankee” agents from elections as Trump policies hit economy
On July 29, Nicaragua’s National Assembly, controlled by the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), launched formal consultations on a constitutional reform that would bar from electoral participation any party that has received foreign financing or whose representatives, in the words of Assembly president Gustavo Porras, “have promoted coups d’état, attacked national independence or violated the fundamental principles of the Constitution.” Approval is expected in early September.
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The corporate media reported widely that President Daniel Ortega had ordered the outright abolition of elections. That claim rests on a single sentence torn from a July 19 speech by Ortega, who was referring to US-backed politicians, when he said:
They’d love to win elections so they can profit from selling off the schools. But they can forget it. There won’t be any more elections here, no more elections for them to try and seize the government, to seize power... we need to create laws that will put up a wall, a barrier, against the coup-plotters, against those who sell off their country, and no matter how much money the Yankees give them, they won’t succeed!
Co-president Rosario Murillo, Ortega’s wife, clarified the following day that elections would continue: “Elections, yes, but our own elections... designed and organized based on our national sovereignty.”
The reform’s actual content, however, extends well beyond electoral exclusion. According to statements by Porras and other Sandinista officials, it would lengthen the presidential term from six to seven years, made renewable; harmonize the terms of the heads of the Army and National Police with the presidency; and grant the Supreme Electoral Council the power to cancel the legal status of parties receiving external funding or promoting sanctions and interventions.
Ortega’s charge of US interference is not fabricated. It was confirmed within days by Damon Wilson, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA’s regime-change arm in civilian dress, who announced that the NED “will continue supporting those who peacefully defend fundamental freedoms” in Nicaragua.
The record of its interference is extensive. Between 2014 and 2017, the NED funded 54 projects in Nicaragua at a cost of $4.1 million, according to opposition-aligned journalist Benjamin Waddell. In 2020 alone it disbursed $1.57 million.
During the 2018 social protests, student and NGO leaders financed by these programs traveled to Washington to openly receive instructions.
Marxists extend no defense to organizations operating as instruments of US imperialism. But the working class must be clear about what this measure is and whom it will be used against.
The timing is key to understanding its purpose. The reform is being pushed through at a moment of increased confrontation with Washington and accelerating social crisis.
Nicaragua’s free trade zones, which house the maquiladora sector that constitutes the country’s industrial base, are collapsing. Central Bank figures show employment falling from 138,027 workers in 2022 to 94,861 by March 2026—nearly a third fewer jobs. In the first quarter of this year alone, 10,954 workers were thrown onto the street.
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Wages in Nicaragua are at starvation level. The free trade zone minimum stands at 9,986 córdobas—$255 a month—while the basic basket of staples and goods reached 21,250 córdobas, or $577, in January.
A huge share of the economy depends on remittances, approaching 30 percent of GDP. More than 850,000 have fled the country since 2018. That lifeline is now being severed by the Trump administration’s deportation of some 15,000 Nicaraguans between January 2025 and June 2026. The IMF projects remittances will contract from this year onward.
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The regime’s response to a tariff war is to offer foreign capital permanently untaxed operation and a labor force paid $255 a month, policed by a state that has criminalized independent organization.
The same logic governs the handover of the country’s resources. Significantly, gold has become Nicaragua’s principal export at nearly $2 billion in 2025—and its principal market is the United States.
While much of US propaganda presents Managua as a puppet of China and Russia, the United States is the destination for over 50 percent of Nicaraguan exports, and US corporations remain the top beneficiaries of the Ortega regime.
Despite [US Secretary of State Marco] Rubio’s denunciations, there is no indication of an intervention on the scale of Venezuela and Cuba.
The FSLN administration continues to try to play off commercial and political ties with Beijing and Moscow to negotiate more favorable conditions from US imperialism for the sections of the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie around the regime. However, Ortega has increasingly accommodated to Trump’s pressures.
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Nicaragua has had no IMF program since 2020 and requires none. The Fund’s January press release commended the government’s macroeconomic and financial policies: in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries, Ortega runs consecutive fiscal surpluses while ignoring even the IMF’s call for higher social spending.
After the seizure of Maduro, Ortega moved to appease Washington by freeing prisoners and reimposing visa requirements on Cubans to obstruct migration.
This is not an aberration but the logical result of the FSLN’s bourgeois nationalist character, following the same pattern of subordination to imperialism and adoption of right-wing policies seen across the so-called Latin American “Pink Tide.”
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The Nicaraguan working class can support neither the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship nor the forces Washington funds against it. The way forward lies in the construction of an independent revolutionary party on the perspective of permanent revolution, a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
3. Canada’s ruling class exploits “anti-scab” legislation hailed by union bureaucracy to break strikes
Bill C-58, hailed by Canada’s trade union bureaucracy and social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) when it came into force last year as an “anti-scab law” for workers in federally regulated industries, was condemned by the World Socialist Web Site as a means of strengthening state control over collective bargaining—one, moreover, that would in practice prove to be no serious impediment to the ruling class’ deployment of scabs to break strikes. While the unions used this law as a major argument to rally around prime minister and former central banker Mark Carney after his victory in the 2025 federal elections, the accuracy of the WSWS’s analysis is being borne out by recent developments at the Bank of Canada.
The Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) ruled for the second time in less than a month on July 22, that management at the strikebound central bank, a key institution of the Canadian capitalist state, were in violation of the recently enacted revisions of the Canada Labour Code in Bill C-58. The CIRB ordered the bank to cease using outside contract workers to perform the duties of striking security guards at its facilities.
Management had been found to be illegally using the services of security guards employed by Pinkerton Consulting and Investigation. The replacement workers had been hired shortly after the central bank had been ordered only two weeks earlier to cease deployment of strike-breakers from Garda Canada Security Corporation. After the first ruling against them, management cynically wrote that it had fully complied with the CIRB ruling.
Some 49 security guards at the Bank of Canada in Ottawa and Montreal, organized by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) have been on strike since June 23 in pursuit of wage and benefit increases and to retain shift scheduling rights to ensure a more equitable work-life balance. They are also resisting bank management attempts to cut their parental leave top-ups.
In response to the July 22 ruling, management has insisted that it did not contravene any federal regulations. “The bank contends that it adhered to the Canada Labour Code and to the previous ruling by the CIRB, despite still not having been provided the reasons behind the prior decision,” it stated. “After the first ruling, the bank took alternative measures to secure the physical security of its facilities.” The statement went on to say that the bank is considering “all its legal options” in response to the CIRB ruling.
Management at the Bank of Canada has clearly taken the measure of the state-run labor board that has already been used as the spearhead for recent Liberal government actions to unilaterally and unconstitutionally end strikes and force binding arbitration on the docks, on the railways, at the post office and at the airlines.
But when it comes to disciplining employers in line with the new revisions to the Labour Code under Bill C-58, the CIRB prefers to limit itself to verbal slaps on the wrist. The law provides for fines of up to $100,000 for violations of its regulations. Since the new law came into effect in June 2025, not a single fine has been levied, despite multiple rulings against strikebound companies over the past year.
The blatant class justice on display takes place in the context of a massive onslaught by finance capital on the living conditions and democratic rights of the working class. Carney’s Liberals have pledged to hike spending on the military and related infrastructure to 5 percent of GDP by 2035, and continue handouts to big business and the financial oligarchy by keeping taxes low and subsidies to the corporate elite flowing. This class war agenda necessitates the destruction of what remains of the public services and welfare state provisions won in previous periods of bitter class battles by the working class, and the abrogation of basic democratic rights, like the right to strike.
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The unions, which in every case enforced the government’s back-to-work orders, are currently challenging Ottawa’s new strikebreaking powers—sometimes wielded days or even hours after a strike had begun—in the courts. They argue they violate the Canadian constitution’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, while making the obvious point that over the past several years employers in key industries brought contract negotiations to a virtual standstill as they awaited favorable government intervention.
Showing the utter bankruptcy of the unions’ legalistic appeals, CLC President Bruske recently remarked, “If you’re going to break a strike, at the very least debate it in Parliament and let Canadians see where their MPs stand on protecting workers’ rights,” Bruske went on to peddle the labor bureaucracy’s absurd definition of the state as simply a neutral referee, “ensuring fairness and respect for the rules.”
4. Ultimate Classroom: War propaganda in Australian schools
A gameshow television program, Ultimate Classroom, completed its second season on Australia’s Network 10 in March, following the first season in September 2022. The program, still available for streaming, is a full-throated promotion of militarism, seeking to counter the animosity toward war among young people.
In each program a member of the Australian Defense Force (ADF) sets a problem for six teenagers arranged into two competing teams of three each. The tasks relate to Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) learning, and include activities like programming drones, designing robotics, building structures and solving complex code-breaking puzzles.
The students are mentored by two hosts, much-publicized mathematics teacher Eddie Woo and TV presenter and gaming expert Stephanie Bendixsen, along with ADF specialist personnel, such as military engineers, cyber specialists and flight instructors.
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The program is designed to meet the needs of the military to channel students into the armed forces. This is a travesty of education and science, which should be dedicated to fully developing young people as human beings and to meeting the needs of humanity.
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Ultimate Classroom is part of a growing international phenomenon. In Germany, the state broadcaster’s children’s news program Logo! has been transformed into a platform for promoting conscription and military recruitment, with moderators attacking children who express anti-war views. In Britain, the Army’s “This is Belonging” campaign targets working-class schoolchildren. In Poland, military indoctrination programs have been introduced into schools.
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The Albanese government is transforming Australia into a frontline state for US war plans against China through AUKUS. It requires a population that accepts militarism as normal and even exciting. A game show that makes weapons technology look like a fun classroom challenge is a revealing addition to that project.
The working class has no interest in preparing its children for war. The scientific and technological capacities that capitalism subordinates to the military would, under socialism, be directed toward solving humanity’s most pressing problems: climate change, disease and poverty.
5. FBI targets Chinese-American media executive in expanding anti-China campaign
In late July, the FBI carried out coordinated raids across Southern California targeting the home and offices of James Su, founder and CEO of EDI Media Inc., the largest Chinese-American multimedia company in the United States. Simultaneous search warrants were executed at the properties of San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman, Ontario City Councilmember Alan Wapner, and attorney Frank Lizarraga.
No arrests were made and the affidavits remain sealed. But the thrust of the investigation is clear from law enforcement disclosures: Federal authorities are examining whether Su's media operations, political donations and annual Chinese American Film Festival constitute undisclosed foreign agent activity on behalf of the People's Republic of China.
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The class character of this campaign is exposed by what it leaves untouched. While the FBI raids a Chinese-American media company over its relationship to a state-affiliated newspaper, China's state-owned sovereign wealth fund, the China Investment Corporation, has invested billions of dollars in major American financial institutions, including Blackstone and Morgan Stanley, without provoking comparable scrutiny. Such investments are treated as ordinary commercial transactions and exempt from FARA requirements.
When Amazon complies with Chinese government censorship requirements to preserve access to the Chinese market, it is considered routine business. When a Chinese-American publisher distributes a newspaper connected to Chinese state media, it becomes the target of a national security investigation.
Yet the targeting of James Su is not simply an expression of anti-Chinese chauvinism. Su is neither a dissident nor an opponent of US foreign policy. He is a businessman integrated into American capitalism, a donor to both major parties, whose film festival has enjoyed official political support. He has done nothing fundamentally different from what major corporations do on a vastly larger scale with full legal protection.
The significance of the raids lies in the fact that they are part of the construction of a political and legal apparatus for criminalizing dissent. The Trump administration has repeatedly made clear that foreign policy is to provide the framework for suppressing domestic opposition.
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American imperialism is engaged in a widening global military offensive. The Trump administration has launched war against Iran, blockaded the Strait of Hormuz and escalated preparations for conflict with China. The American ruling class requires a $1.5 trillion annual military budget to sustain that confrontation.
Such a war drive demands the cultivation of an internal enemy and the legal mechanisms to silence opposition. Anti-Chinese chauvinism, from visa revocations to the China Initiative and now the raids on James Su, portrays Chinese nationals and Americans of Chinese descent as a fifth column.
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The raid on James Su’s home is an expression of this process. A businessman thoroughly integrated into American capitalism is being made an example, not because of any demonstrated crime, but because his prosecution helps legitimize the equation of opposition to US policy with service to a foreign power.
The working class must reject this reactionary framework. The defense of democratic rights is inseparable from the struggle against imperialist war and from the building of an independent international socialist movement of the working class.
6. First deaths in US cyclosporiasis outbreak reported in Michigan
Two residents of Michigan are dead, the first reported fatalities in what has become the largest outbreak of cyclosporiasis ever recorded in the United States. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) announced on Monday, August 3, that both individuals had “significant underlying health conditions that may have been impacted by cyclosporiasis and dehydration.” Officials said no further information would be released, including the ages of the deceased, their counties of residence or the dates of death. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had recorded no fatalities nationally through July 27.
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This is not an accidental failure of food handling. It is a form of social murder, in which the food monopolies and the capitalist state expose the working class to a preventable hazard whose mechanism of contamination they have understood since 2013.
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Cyclospora cayetanensis infects only humans, and person-to-person transmission is improbable because of the time required for the organism to mature.
The timeline carries political consequences. Contamination in a commercial field is never a momentary lapse of personal hygiene. It is a week or a fortnight during which human feces sat in a growing field or an irrigation source while the crop grew around it.
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Human infection with Cyclospora was first described in scientific literature in 1979. What the modern food system produced is not the organism but the route and the exposed population: a supply chain engineered to move raw, uncooked produce year-round from regions where the parasite is endemic to supermarkets and restaurant franchises in the imperialist centers.
In endemic countries, repeated exposure from childhood builds immunological tolerance, and infected adults are frequently asymptomatic. In Michigan, the population has no acquired immunity, so nearly everyone who ingests the oocysts falls ill.
The vehicles are exclusively the categories the fresh-cut industry spent three decades expanding. No food other than raw fresh produce has ever been associated with this parasite. Of the 154 outbreaks recorded in the National Outbreak Reporting System between 1971 and 2021, not one involved food processed beyond cutting and bagging. Centralizing preparation in high-volume cutting facilities converted a localized hazard into a mass one.
The global dimensions are only now being measured. On June 4 the World Health Organization published estimates covering 42 foodborne hazards across 194 countries. Unsafe food causes about 866 million illnesses and 1.5 million deaths a year and costs some $310 billion in lost productivity in 2021. Children under five, 9 percent of the world’s population, suffer nearly one-third of all cases. Africa and Southeast Asia account for nearly three-quarters of illnesses.
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Food safety cannot be secured by agencies being defunded, by companies that audit themselves, or by consumers washing lettuce at the sink. It requires that the agribusiness and food processing monopolies be taken out of private hands and placed under the democratic control of the workers who grow, cut, pack and serve the food, as part of the reorganization of the world economy to meet human needs. That requires the political independence of the working class from both parties of American capitalism and the building of rank-and-file committees in the fields, plants and restaurants.
7. BMW cuts 8,000 jobs in Germany
As the last of the major German carmakers, BMW has now joined the ranks of corporations destroying jobs on a massive scale, agreeing with IG Metall to cut around 8,000 positions—almost one in 10 of its 84,000 jobs in Germany.
8. ICE shackles Haitian workers with GPS monitors after stripping legal status
Hundreds of Haitian immigrants in Ohio are being fitted with GPS ankle monitors after the Trump administration stripped them of legal status, work authorization and, in many cases, their driving privileges.
Many have received Department of Homeland Security “Call-In Letters” ordering them to appear at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices within 30 days.
The electronic shackles are a modern-day version of the yellow stars of David that the Nazis forced Jews to wear in the years leading up to the Holocaust. They identify, stigmatize and continuously track a persecuted population whose legal rights were abolished virtually overnight.
Workers who were legally employed and protected from deportation less than two weeks ago are now being monitored with devices generally associated with people convicted of crimes or awaiting trial. Some are being ordered to travel dozens of miles to ICE offices after losing their legal right to drive.
This is a warning to the entire working class. If the government can revoke the rights of hundreds of thousands of people who have lived, worked, paid taxes and raised families in the United States for years, there is no barrier separating the persecution of immigrants from similar attacks on US citizens.
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The Democratic Party is not opposing this campaign.
A small number of Democrats have called on the Senate to approve H.R. 1689, which would extend Haitian TPS through April 2029. Even this limited measure would leave the machinery of raids, surveillance, detention and deportation intact.
Leading Democrats have otherwise remained silent, including the most prominent members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has issued no public statement since Haitian TPS was terminated. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has likewise remained silent despite governing a city with one of the country’s largest Haitian populations.
Bernie Sanders has also refused to defend Haitian workers. Appearing on the far-right Tim Dillon Show last October, Sanders praised Trump’s border policy: “Trump did a better job. I don’t like Trump, you know, but we should have a secure border.”
There is nothing accidental about this silence. The Democrats quibble with Trump over tactics while defending the border and deportation regime they helped construct. Obama deported more than three million people. Biden maintained the camps, carried out millions of summary expulsions under Title 42 and sent mounted Border Patrol agents against Haitian refugees in Del Rio.
The defense of Haitian immigrants cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party or the courts. Workers must organize independently through rank-and-file committees to oppose ICE raids, restore legal status and work authorization to all affected immigrants, remove the ankle monitors, close the concentration camps and abolish ICE and the Border Patrol.
The attack on immigrants is the spearhead of a police state directed against the entire working class. Its answer must be the unified industrial and political mobilization of workers, regardless of nationality, against the capitalist system and its entire repressive apparatus.
The Socialist Equality Party does not call for “safe and legal routes” within a fundamentally unchanged militarized border regime. That accepts the premise of the ruling elite that only certain people have the right to enter and live in the UK, while the refugees created by the wars of European imperialism do not. Our demand is the universal recognition of the right to asylum: for those fleeing persecution, war or destitution to cross any border and receive protection.
In our Statement of Aims we demand, “Defend Immigrants! Oppose Nationalism and Racism! For the international unity of the working class!”
The statement reads: “The vicious scapegoating of immigrants and refugees for the social crisis caused by capitalism is the stock in trade of all capitalist parties, from Labour to Reform UK. The entire framework of ‘border controls’ and anti-immigrant legislation must be abolished. Full democratic and citizenship rights must be granted to all immigrants, including those classified as ‘illegal’. Against the noxious fumes of racism and nationalism, the working class must unite globally in the fight for socialism.”
10. Australia: Queensland teachers face longer freeze on pay and conditions
Despite two widely supported 24-hour strikes last year, educators in Queensland remain straitjacketed in an arbitration system, facing a more than two-year pay freeze and no relief from intolerable workloads.
11. Japanese PM makes brief visit to Kumamoto quake zone
Takaichi announced her government would designate the earthquake “a disaster of extreme severity,” but only provided $US127 million in assistance for the devastated prefecture.
Brasher is the fourth Stellantis worker and at least the sixteenth UAW member killed on the job since 2022.
13. Month-long strike by Norwegian oil service workers ended
For appearances’ sake, the capitalist Norwegian state invokes democracy and equality before the law. In practice, however, this has long been countered by a strike law designed to suppress industrial action.
Mehring Verlag, the publishing house of the ICFI in Germany, has published the highly topical volume Der Ukrainekrieg und der Kampf für Sozialismus. Der Fall Bogdan Syrotjuk (The War in Ukraine and the Struggle for Socialism: The Case of Bogdan Syrotjuk). It is edited by Johannes Stern, editor-in-chief of the German-language edition of the WSWS. The foreword is published here. Translations into English and other languages are in preparation.
15. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
