Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
In his concluding remarks in Ann Arbor, North explained why the US election anticipates an eruption of class struggle and posed the task of building a revolutionary movement in the working class.
[The entire lecture can also be viewed.]
Months after the UAW forced through a sellout agreement, workers at Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan are facing layoffs and the imposition of a new tier of part-time workers who receive no vacation or benefits.
Days after the Republican defeat in the midterms, Trump boasted of having “won Venezuela.” The Democrats, who will control Congress in January, have no intention of stopping the plunder.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders appeared alongside Michigan Senator and former Central Intelligence Agency officer Elissa Slotkin at a press conference Tuesday at the Capitol to call for “change” in the Democratic Party. The self-described “democratic socialist” offered workers and youth an empty program centered on an alliance with the military-intelligence agencies.
The occasion was Sanders’s announcement that he would not support Chuck Schumer’s reelection as Senate Democratic leader. But the political significance extended beyond the question of which Democrat would preside over the party’s new majority. Sanders was presenting one of the most prominent “CIA Democrats” as a partner in renewing a party discredited by its service to Wall Street and American imperialism.
Tuesday’s joint conference came after an election expressing mass hostility to the Trump administration and its attacks on immigrants, war mongering and corruption. Democrats secured control of both chambers, with at least 55 Senate seats and projections of roughly 260 House seats.
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Throughout the event, Sanders referred affectionately to “Chuck” and approvingly to “Elissa.” Sanders began with his familiar denunciations of inequality, declaring that “the billionaire class has never ever had it so good.” The election, he said, was “about change” and “the need for the Democratic Party, in my view, to move in a new and bold direction.”
He continued: “I personally have known Chuck Schumer for over 30 years, and I like Chuck... [T]here’s nobody who works harder than Chuck Schumer. But in my view, the time is now for change, and I will not be supporting Chuck to be re-elected as the Democratic leader.”
After calling for a “vigorous debate” to demonstrate “that a new day has come,” Sanders handed the microphone to Slotkin.
Slotkin was a prominent example in Patrick Martin’s 2018 series, “The CIA Democrats,” which documented the Democratic leadership’s systematic recruitment of candidates from the military-intelligence apparatus. Before entering Congress, she served three CIA tours in Iraq, worked as an aide to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and held national security positions under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Her election to the Senate exemplifies the growing authority of these forces within the party.
This process has accelerated. As Martin documented in his latest series, the Democrats nominated 67 congressional candidates from the military-intelligence apparatus in 2026, including 10 incumbents, more than double the number in any of the previous four elections. Meanwhile, figures from the first wave have moved into statewide office. Slotkin and former National Security Council official Andy Kim entered the Senate, and former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger and former Navy helicopter pilot Mikie Sherrill were elected governors of Virginia and New Jersey last year.
Republicans and the pseudo-left alike have seized on the election of a handful of DSA-affiliated Democrats, the former to warn of a “communist” takeover of the party, the latter to claim it is moving left. The far more substantial development is the influx and promotion of military officers, intelligence operatives and national security officials, which is making the Democrats ever more openly a party of the military-intelligence apparatus.
Sanders’s appearance beside Slotkin shows how the party’s nominal left helps legitimize this transformation by presenting its leading personnel as partners in the fight for social reform.
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The exchange demonstrated the relationship the World Socialist Web Site has long identified between the “CIA Democrats” and the party’s nominal left. They perform complementary functions within the same capitalist party. The former bring the personnel and priorities of the military-intelligence apparatus directly into Congress; the latter supply rhetoric aimed at keeping workers and young people tied to it.
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Virtually the entire press conference concerned domestic issues, and Sanders’s remarks on foreign policy were brief. Standing beside a former CIA officer who served three tours in occupied Iraq, he declared:
Foreign policy is a very important part of that debate, in my view. Uh, the war in Vietnam was based on a lie. The war in Iraq was based on a lie. The war in Iran is based on a lie, in my view. I think US military aid to Israel is certainly a very sensitive subject among tens of millions of people. These are issues that have got to be debated and discussed.
Sanders did not ask Slotkin to account for her years with the CIA in occupied Iraq. He did not name the genocide in Gaza, describing military aid to Israel only as a “very sensitive subject.” Ukraine and Yemen went unmentioned.
Even the war against Iran, which Sanders called a lie, was presented as one more issue to be “debated and discussed.” No demand to end military aid to Israel or halt the war emerged from the event. Nor did anyone explain how the Democrats would address people’s “pocketbooks” while spending billions on war and police.
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Both senators mentioned Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen as a possible leadership candidate. Neither endorsed him. The recurring demand was for a vague plan, with the political content left to future negotiations among Democratic senators.
Asked where Schumer had fallen short, Sanders again began by saying he did not want to get too deeply into the issues. After describing the healthcare system as broken and unaffordable, he declared: “I don’t want to get into specific proposals.
“The time is now to deal with the need to create an economy that works for all, not just the people on top,” he said. “And do I think Chuck has been leading in that direction? No, I don’t.”
Even so, Sanders praised Schumer’s fundraising. “I think Chuck and Kirsten [Gillibrand] raised a whole lot of money, which is a great help to many candidates, and I think they do deserve credit.”
Schumer’s supporters, meanwhile, rallied behind him. Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said Tuesday that Schumer’s role in winning the Senate majority “certainly justifies another term as leader.”
Schumer’s service to the financial oligarchy is hardly a discovery. Sanders has worked alongside him for years while urging workers to support the Democratic Party. His presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020 ended in endorsements of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and in 2024 he campaigned for Kamala Harris. Each time, opposition to inequality was channeled behind the preferred candidate of the Democratic establishment and Wall Street.
Tuesday’s press conference continued this record, now with a former CIA officer at his side. Sanders’s denunciations of billionaires go hand in hand with appeals to support their political representatives and illusions that capitalism can be reformed. Workers and youth moving toward socialism confront the need to break with this party and its defenders.
5. Democrats rescue War Secretary Hegseth a week after election repudiates war
On Tuesday evening, one week after midterm elections that delivered a massive popular repudiation of the Trump administration and its war against Iran, the Democratic Party saved War Secretary Pete Hegseth from impeachment.
The House voted 211-204 to refer to the Judiciary Committee a resolution containing eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth, killing the measure for the remainder of the lame duck session. Every Democrat who voted opposed the referral, but 11 Democrats did not vote. Had they all cast their ballots, the motion would have failed 215-211, and the House would have been compelled to vote on impeachment itself.
The reasons given for the Democratic Party absences are rubbish. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in San Francisco receiving a “Lifetime Advocate for Veterans Award.” Four others blamed traffic. Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan offered no explanation at all. Nine days earlier, Stevens endorsed Trump-backed Republican candidate Mike Rogers for Senate, against the party’s nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, in particular over the latter’s criticism of the Gaza genocide.
All claims that the missing 11 Democrats were the product of unfortunate traffic patterns or important “lifetime” awards are rubbish. Had the vote been for funding Ukraine, the members would have been raised from their death beds if necessary.
This was a political decision made in coordination with the White House and the first major political test since the midterms. Under the banner of “bipartisanship,” the Democrats chose not to inflict a political defeat on the administration over the war, in the midst of their discussions with the White House on Russia and the military budget.
The Republicans understood what they had been given. Trump hailed the outcome as an “EXONERATION of a Great American Patriot” and declared that the impeachment had “miserably FAILED!” Hegseth, for his part, answered the impeachment effort at a press conference earlier in the day by calling it “sabotage” and implying those who backed it were traitors.
The calculation behind the vote was spelled out the following day in a Newsweek analysis headlined “The 11 Missing Democrats Saved Pete Hegseth—and the Party From Itself.” Its author, senior editor Shane Croucher, argued that Democrats “don’t need the chaos of impeachment to scrutinize Hegseth.” What “chaos” means here is anything that might encourage popular opposition to the war or disrupt the bipartisan operations of American imperialism.
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The resolution the Democrats allowed to die was itself introduced by Thomas Massie, not the Democrats themselves. Massie is a libertarian Republican, but the content of the resolution is significant in that it sets down as formal charges what the Democrats would not say. It charges that the war against Iran was “unlawful” from its inception. It describes the US strike on an elementary school in Minab on the first morning of the war, which killed at least 120 children, and charges that Hegseth “effected the murder of civilians.”
It accuses him of the “extrajudicial killings” of at least 243 people in the boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific, including “secondary strikes against shipwrecked survivors.” It calls the January seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “an act of war against a sovereign country,” carried out to “assert U.S. control over Venezuela’s oil reserves,” and charges that the bombing of Yemen last year killed an estimated 224 civilians in less than eight weeks.
It also records that on June 3 and June 23, both houses of Congress passed a resolution under the War Powers Act directing the president to withdraw US forces from Iran, the first such action since the law was enacted in 1973. The administration ignored it, and for nearly five months the Democrats did nothing to enforce Congress’s own decision.
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The Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus. Its differences with Trump are over how best to defend the global interests of American imperialism, not over whether to wage war.
The faction of the party most directly bound up with this orientation is what the World Socialist Web Site has termed the “CIA Democrats,” candidates drawn from the military and intelligence agencies. The Democrats ran 67 of them for Congress this year. Thirteen won House seats, joining all 10 incumbents and more than doubling the faction’s ranks.
The Democratic Socialists of America and its representatives in Congress provide the political cover. Their central claim, that the election has shifted the Democratic Party to the left and that it can be pushed further, is a fiction.
Since the election, from the New York Times editorial board to Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, the chorus has been for “bipartisanship.” What this means is collaboration with Trump and the Republicans: an agreement on war, and a joint assault on social programs and the working class to meet the dictates of Wall Street. The DSA’s function is to direct the opposition to war and inequality back behind a party controlled by Wall Street and the intelligence agencies, in which the CIA Democrats count for far more than the self-styled socialists.
The midterm elections expressed the deep opposition of the working class to the war, to social inequality and to the drive toward dictatorship. The sentiments expressed in the vote are on a collision course with the entire political system. This conflict must and will find its expression in the class struggle. The fight against imperialist war and dictatorship can be waged only on this foundation: the independent mobilization of the working class, internationally, against the capitalist system that is the source of both.
6. South Korea to expand naval mission in the Middle East
Seoul intends to approximately double the area of operations of its Cheonghae Unit, based in Djibouti, by deploying additional troops, a P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, an explosive ordnance disposal team, and mine-clearing equipment.
7. Columbia University postdocs narrowly ratify contract with cuts in real wages
The UAW dropped key housing, immigration and job-security demands in its final contract for Columbia’s postdocs.
8. Australia: Union pressures council workers to lower wage demand
In the lead-up to the Victorian state election, the dispute poses political questions extending well beyond negotiations with individual councils.
9. China trade surplus on track for new record as tensions with EU grow
The Chinese trade surplus for the year has already passed the $1 trillion mark, amid a continued slowing of the domestic economy.
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The Xi Jinping regime insists that its focus on the development of high-tech goods will provide a new basis for the Chinese economy. But industries such as EVs, batteries and solar panels account for less than 10 percent of GDP compared to the around 25 percent which used to come from the property sector.
The slowdown of the domestic economy—growth is around 4.5 percent, far below the levels of the past—is having employment effects, particularly for young people who often have significant educational qualifications, but who cannot find work in their field. Youth unemployment is around 19 percent, and the prospect of a secure job is fading.
According to the China-based think tank China New Employment Forms Research Center, the number of people with so-called “flexible employment”—that is, without a permanent contract—is set to grow to 326 million this year, comprising some 40 percent of urban employment.
Critics of the policies of the Xi Jinping regime, both within China and internationally, have warned that the domestic economy needs to be stimulated and the reliance on exports lessened or China will face an even slower economy and escalating trade conflicts.
Beijing has undertaken some measures to try to boost consumption, but they are regarded as very limited. No doubt the commitment by the regime to the development of high-tech and the drive into global markets as the way forward for China’s advance is a key factor.
But there are objective factors severely limiting the possibility of major stimulus of the kind launched in response to the global financial crisis of 2008, when the government massively expanded spending and credit. Chief among these is the growth of debt.
A report by the Conference Board found that debt service payments are expected to account for 19.2 percent of the government’s budget this year, up from 12 percent in 2014.
“Debt servicing is becoming a material constraint on fiscal space at the local level,” Yuhan Zhang, principal economist at the Conference Board’s China Center told the Financial Times.
The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major right-wing think tank, noted that “spending on debt interest payments” rose by 341 percent between 2013 and 2025. This was “faster than any other major budget category.”
The Xi regime advances the notion that China can advance within the framework of the global capitalist economy and enjoy a “peaceful” rise, but it is running into all the contradictions produced by its developing breakdown.
10. Sri Lanka: More than 2,000 jobs threatened in Norwood Fashion liquidation
A Socialist Equality Party member addressed a workers’ protest, calling for the creation of action committees to fight against the destruction of jobs.
11. Chicago Democrats vie for mayoralty, pledging historic cuts
The campaign for the February 2027 election of the mayor of Chicago has been characterized by competition among the Democratic Party candidates over who will make the deepest budget cuts and enact the policies demanded by the banks and largest corporations. The savage austerity measures being prepared are setting the course for an explosive confrontation between the working class and the Democratic Party along with the financial and corporate oligarchy it defends.
Earlier this month, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and 15 other candidates filed nominating petitions to appear on the mayoral ballot in the municipal elections. Some of the other candidates include:
Illinois State Comptroller Susana Mendoza
Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias
US Representative for Illinois’s 5th District Mike Quigley
George Cardenas, a commissioner on the Cook County Board of Review
Matt Brewer, owner of The Wiener’s Circle novelty hot dog restaurant and a commissioner on the Chicago Housing Authority Board
Investment management executive Joel Holberg
John Kelly, a lobbyist and founder of Sentinel private security
Real estate developer Zoe Ma
Some of these candidates may be removed from the ballot through various challenges. Johnson’s nominating petitions will also be scrutinized by the Election Board in coming weeks after they were challenged by other candidates.
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Over the last three decades, Democratic mayors failed to make the necessary contributions to Chicago’s public retirement system. Instead, the city used the cash to fund operating expenses, taking tens of billions of dollars away from worker pensions that are now underfunded. Earlier this year, the Financial Times reported, “Chicago has also become a test case for how state and local governments may cope as cash-strapped public pension plans edge towards insolvency.”
The newly re-elected Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, who enjoys the support and mentorship of Barack Obama in his run for mayor, has the largest campaign war chest of close to $20 million. He is attempting to strike a more moderate tone, paying lip service to reducing the cost of living and raising taxes on the wealthy, while reassuring business and financial interests that he will make the necessary decisions when it comes to city services.
Mayor Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) staffer, has postured as an opponent of cuts, but has also proven his loyalties to the ruling class agenda. The CTU apparatus worked very closely with his administration last year to push through a sellout labor contract and block a teachers strike by concealing the scale of the budget crisis facing the school system. Weeks after it was ratified, Johnson announced new information about the financial crisis had come to light and cuts would be necessary. More than 1,700 Chicago Public Schools employees were laid off last summer.
Johnson unveiled a proposed 2027 city budget of $17.6 billion last week to address a deficit of around $883 million. As part of his re-election campaign, he has cynically renewed an earlier call for a $125-per-month corporate head tax on large businesses that would raise less than one-eighth of the revenue needed. The tax is highly unlikely to win the support needed in the city council to pass, and continues to be vocally opposed by Illinois’s billionaire Democratic governor, JB Pritzker.
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Inequality in the Chicago metro area has grown ever wider in recent years, in parallel with the US as a whole. Since 2021, food prices have risen 22 percent and rents have increased 31 percent, with the average rental cost estimated by Zillow to be over $2,100 per month.
In the wake of Trump’s deep cuts to federal food assistance, 36 percent of the city suffers from food insecurity, as reported by the Chicago Tribune. Of households with children, 47 percent face food insecurity, leaving adults to skip meals so kids can eat. Hunger is concentrated on the South and West sides of the city, where rates of food insecurity approach 50 percent, but some 20 to 27 percent of households living in the more affluent areas on the North Side are also food insecure, according to the same report.
Enormous cuts to Medicaid health care access have impacted hundreds of thousands in the state, a significant proportion of whom live in the metro area. Pritzker and the Illinois General Assembly—where the Democrats hold a supermajority in both houses—eliminated the Health Benefits for Immigrant Adults (HBIA) program, ending state-funded healthcare coverage for low-income undocumented and noncitizen adults aged 42 to 64. More than 660,000 people have been removed from state health insurance in recent years.
The Trump administration’s attacks on immigrant families—including “Operation Midway Blitz” in the Chicago area, in which 4,000 were arrested and 2,700 detained or deported—have devastated households, neighborhoods and small businesses over the last year. Families have lost breadwinners, and the city courts have since become a center of the deportation machine. Recently, immigrants are summoned to court and arrested on arrival. These kidnappings and deportations continue at a rate of 80 per month.
The Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago placed the economic cost to the region of the mass arrests and deportations over just the last year at $1.26 billion total, including $107 million in local sales tax revenue, with the most significant losses accruing to small businesses in the neighborhoods that were hit hardest by the Gestapo-style raids and kidnappings.
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The incumbent Brandon Johnson’s record in office has been an object lesson in the Democratic Party’s reliance on its pseudo-left-backed “progressive wing” to lend it enough legitimacy to carry out its class policies.
Johnson’s claims to be a fighter for the working class were quickly exposed as a fraud. His tenure has been marked above all by attacks on the most vulnerable. His first hundred days were defined by a promotion of the Chicago Police Department: disavowing earlier calls to “defund” the police, pledging not to cut the CPD budget “by one penny,” and appointing as police superintendent Larry Snelling, a veteran of gang and tactical units who had testified as an expert witness in trials of officers involved in the 2014 police murder of Laquan McDonald.
In 2023, Johnson initiated plans to build a “winterized” migrant camp, explaining in nakedly xenophobic terms that the immigrants bussed into Chicago by Texas Governor Greg Abbott needed to be kept away from the city population. The plan was quashed after public protest, fueled by the fact that the land requisitioned for the camp was contaminated with industrial pollutants. After warehousing immigrant families in makeshift shelters under the control of private security, he imposed a 60-day limit on shelter stays, and in June 2024 his administration began evicting them, including those with school-age children, driving many into homelessness.
In May 2024, the Johnson administration deployed Chicago police SWAT teams to the Art Institute of Chicago, where peaceful student protests in defense of Gaza were taking place, arresting and charging 68 people in total. In an attempt to send a clear message to students who might try to establish encampments in the wealthy downtown area, the administration had police move in aggressively, shoving protesters violently to the ground, zip-tying their hands behind their backs, and carrying them off. Later that year, the Inspector General issued a report revealing the Johnson administration’s refusal to remove members of fascist gangs and groups within the Chicago Police Department from the force, including confirmed Proud Boys and Three Percenters.
For all the rhetoric against the oligarchy and claims to be for working people, Johnson, like Bernie Sanders, AOC and Zohran Mamdani—who has gone so far as to claim the fascist in the White House is an ally of New Yorkers—is fully committed to an anti-working class agenda.
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The protests and general strikes sweeping France, Italy, Spain and other countries in Europe and Latin America, will soon be arriving on American shores, including in Chicago, the third largest city in America.
Next year, a large number of union contracts for city and county workers expire. Most city agreements end on June 30, 2027, while many county agreements expire on November 30, 2027.
These include:
City of Chicago Historical Unit and Window Washers (SEIU Local 73)
Chicago Firefighters
Cook County departments, including CCHHS Healthcare Professionals and Hospital Technicians
In Chicago Public Schools, the contract for Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 73, whose members include custodians and special education assistants, expires on June 30, 2027. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) agreement covering more than 20,000 educators is set to expire on June 30, 2028.
Recent experiences, including the isolation of the nearly seven-month lockout of 800 BP Whiting workers by the United Steelworkers, and UNITE HERE’s blocking of a unified strike by 7,000 Chicago hotel workers, demonstrate why the coming struggles must be conducted independently of and in opposition to the trade union apparatus. This means building rank-and-file committees in advance of contract expirations that will advance demands and fight for what workers need, not what the ruling class claims it can afford.
Effective opposition to the Democratic Party’s agenda of slashing services and worker pensions to pay for wars and boost private profits cannot be achieved through the ballot box. A struggle for the social and democratic rights of workers requires a complete break from the Democratic Party and the building of a mass, socialist movement committed to workers power and the expropriation of the oligarchy.
12. After midterm debacle, Trump moves to cut 6.3 million people off food stamps
One week after voters delivered the sharpest repudiation of a sitting president’s party in half a century, the Trump administration has answered with a new attack on working people’s social rights. On Tuesday, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a proposed rule that, by its own estimate, would strip food assistance from 6.3 million people in 3.2 million households—nearly one in five recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.
The rule would abolish “broad-based categorical eligibility” (BBCE), under which 46 states enroll households in SNAP if they receive services funded by the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, such as childcare help or job training. Using this provision, 37 states have lifted the gross income cutoff above the federal limit of 130 percent of the poverty line, and 41 have waived the federal asset test. The USDA would restrict automatic eligibility to households receiving TANF cash aid. Trump first proposed the measure in 2019, and it was withdrawn under Biden in 2021. Its revival was called for in the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
USDA projects a cut of $44.65 billion in federal SNAP spending over fiscal years 2027–2031. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) puts these cuts at roughly $15 billion a year once phased in, more than 15 percent of the program.
This is the first major assault on social programs since the November 3 election, which registered mass opposition to the war against Iran, the persecution of immigrants and the destruction of social programs. As the Democrats plead “bipartisan common ground,” Trump and the financial oligarchy he represents intend to press ahead with war abroad and class war at home.
13. Death toll in HABAŞ steel plant blast in Türkiye rises to 19, one still missing
Relatives of the HABAŞ victims describe workers trapped in deadly jobs by debt and low wages. Meanwhile, the government has imposed a publication ban, and the Türk Metal union has done nothing.
14. How the German government manipulated the trial of Adolf Eichmann
The fact that the AfD and its supporters can once again spread far-right ideologies and ethno-nationalist ideas unhindered today shows that there has never been a “zero hour” in Germany—nor a thorough eradication of National Socialism and an exposure of its roots in the capitalist system.
Following is a list of principal persons named, and an outline of this article (made with the assistance of Socialism AI):
Adolf Eichmann — SS officer and head of Department IV B 4 ("Final Solution to the Jewish Question") in the Reich Security Main Office. The chief organizer of the Holocaust, responsible for the logistics of deporting European Jews to the extermination camps and minute-taker at the Wannsee Conference. Captured by Mossad in Argentina, tried in Jerusalem in 1961, and executed on May 31, 1962.
Hans Globke — Adenauer's State Secretary in the Federal Chancellery and "gray eminence." A Catholic who was never a Nazi Party member but co-drafted the Nuremberg Race Laws and their authoritative commentary with Wilhelm Stuckart, and authored the 1938 Name Change Ordinance. After the war he controlled personnel policy across the West German state apparatus, ensuring former Nazis filled key posts, and oversaw the BND and Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Konrad Adenauer — First Chancellor of the Federal Republic (CDU). Halted denazification, pushed amnesty laws, and stood by Globke until 1963. His government worked to keep Eichmann's testimony from exposing former Nazis in the West German state.
Fritz Bauer — Hessian Attorney General, Jewish Social Democrat and concentration camp survivor. The man most responsible for Eichmann being brought to trial, after German and U.S. authorities refused to act on his information. Also drove the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–65) and pursued Globke, only to have his investigation quashed.
Dieter Wechtenbruch — Assistant to Eichmann's defense attorney Robert Servatius, and secretly BND Agent V-7461 ("Laqueur"). Reported on the prisoner to Bonn and briefed journalists—including Hannah Arendt—with the government's official line. Maintained silence until his death in April 2025.
Rolf Vogel — Half-Jewish journalist accredited to the Deutsche Zeitung, in reality a BND agent loyal to Globke. Sent by Adenauer to Jerusalem to supply Israeli prosecutors with exculpatory material on Globke and to steal incriminating documents from an East German lawyer.
Reinhard Gehlen — Head of the Gehlen Organization (from 1947) and the BND (1956–68), whose agency was riddled with former Nazi officers and ran informants against SPD, FDP, and independent CDU politicians.
David Ben-Gurion — Israeli Prime Minister, whose government cooperated in keeping Globke out of the trial in exchange for West German arms and financial aid.
I. The trial and the government's fear of exposure
- Eichmann tried in Israel 65 years ago; Adenauer's government and the BND feared his testimony would expose former Nazis in the state apparatus, above all Globke.
- The government dispatched numerous well-paid agents to the trial.
- The Süddeutsche Zeitung's recent report (Winkler) frames this as "betrayal" (breach of attorney-client privilege), but the government's actions went far beyond the legal realm.
II. The agent Wechtenbruch
- Assistant to defense attorney Servatius; BND Agent V-7461 "Laqueur" from summer 1960.
- Task: keep Globke and other Nazi collaborators out of the proceedings at all costs.
- His BND contract forbade disclosure of trial material; he kept silence until his 2025 death.
III. The "zero hour" myth
- The government sought to project a break with the Nazi past while refuting East Germany's (GDR) accusations against West German officials.
IV. Eichmann's crimes
- Head of the "Final Solution" department; responsibility for the murder of six million.
- Wannsee Conference minute-taker; reported to Heydrich.
- One of the few leading Nazis held accountable after Nuremberg, while the vast majority continued their careers in West Germany.
V. How Eichmann escaped- Adenauer halted denazification; amnesty laws of 1949 and 1954; "Section 131" restored "followers" to the civil service.
- Statute of limitations for murder (20 years) and the long fight over its repeal until 1979.
- Eichmann's flight via the Vatican "Rat Line" to Argentina in 1950, as "Ricardo Klement."
- The Gehlen Organization/BND and the government knew his whereabouts from the early 1950s and did nothing, preferring to exploit former Nazis as anti-communists.
VI. The role of Fritz Bauer
- Received tips on Eichmann's location; wanted him tried in Germany but was blocked at the highest levels.
- His Frankfurt Auschwitz trials; his remark about leaving office into a "hostile, foreign country."
- Informing Mossad, which abducted Eichmann from Argentina.
VII. The Adenauer government's reaction
- Adenauer's false claim of a "constitutional state" with no remaining National Socialist sentiment.
- The "Unpunished Nazi Justice" exhibition and the Heyde euthanasia scandal as evidence of continuity.
VIII. Globke's role in the Third Reich and the early Federal Republic
- Pre-Nazi racial legislation (1929 circular on name changes).
- Co-drafting the Nuremberg Race Laws and commentary; the 1938 Name Change Ordinance ("Sara"/"Israel").
- Accusations over the deportation of Greek Jews (Max Merten); Bauer's 1960 investigation quashed in 1961.
- His denazification exoneration via resistance-circle witnesses and Robert Kempner.
IX. Adenauer's "gray eminence"
- Globke's control of personnel, the BND, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, and CDU donations.
- Adenauer's "dirty water" remark; BND spying on Bauer and other Social Democrats.
X. "Denial of the past" as "reason of state"
- Substantiated allegations against Eichmann omitted; Globke kept out of the proceedings.
- Wechtenbruch briefing journalists, including Arendt.
- Henke's book and the "Jerusalem Operation," based on BND documents declassified only in 2026.
- Active, state-level "defense against the past," not unconscious repression.
XI. The agent Rolf Vogel
- His mission to Jerusalem; stealing incriminating documents from an East German lawyer.
- Cold War context (Berlin Wall, Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis).
- The aim of portraying Eichmann as a mere "henchman of Himmler's SS apparatus," not an agent of the German Reich.
XII. A secret committee
- The "Committee of State Secretaries for Matters of Secrecy" under Globke, including Lorenz Bessel-Lorck (who had covered for Heyde).
- Consideration of blaming the Jewish victims; the drunken, apologetic behavior of Bonn's observers.
- Eichmann's October 1960 statement that Globke "meant nothing to him"; his refusal to incriminate former Nazis; the Sassen tapes revealing his unrepentant fanaticism.
XIII. The complicity of the Israeli government
- Ben-Gurion's cooperation, tied to West German arms and financial aid.
- Strauß's demand that Israel spare Bonn's reputation; the suppression of Eichmann's 40-page paper on Globke.
XIV. Significance for today
- Files still withheld; the Federal Administrative Court's recent dismissal of a release lawsuit.
- The cover-ups' role in the resurgence of the far right and the AfD.
- The conclusion: there was never a "zero hour" in Germany, nor an eradication of National Socialism and its roots in the capitalist system.
15. Berlin names extreme warmonger as head of armed forces: The return of German militarism
Christian Freuding, the new head of the armed forces, stands for a generation of officers who no longer regard war as a state of exception, but as the defining purpose of the whole of society.
16. Australia: Melbourne council workers speak out against real wage cuts, Labor and war
Last week, more than 1,000 workers from eight Melbourne councils met to vote on the next steps in their long-running fight against further real wage cuts.
The employers have offered workers a nominal pay rise of just 2.75 percent, far below the current inflation rate of 4.3 percent. The meeting was a damning exposure of the Australian Services Union, which pressured workers to lower their own wage demand in the most anti-democratic fashion. Click here for full coverage of the meeting.
World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to workers outside the meeting.
17. Part Four: The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Canada)
The Socialist Equality Party’s founding congress, held in Montreal August 22-24, unanimously adopted a comprehensive document outlining the party’s historical and international foundations. Following is an abridged version which began with Part One (made with the assistance of Socialism AI):
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Following is an outline of Part Four, points 69–88:
The founding of the Revolutionary Workers Party and the Stalinist suppression of the post-war upsurge of the masses
69. The Trotskyists' opposition to the war — The Trotskyists were the only tendency to oppose Canadian imperialism in World War II. SWL supporter Frank Watson was the first person arrested under the Defence of Canada Regulations for an anti-war speech. Working in illegality, they opposed the Stalinists' and social democrats' subordination of the industrial union movement to corporatist labor-management committees and war support. The reconstitution of an independent organization—the Revolutionary Workers Party (1946)—required a struggle against left social-democrats and centrists who had turned tactical adaptation to state suppression into political accommodation to reformism.
70. The global post-war upsurge and Stalinism's role — The Canadian upsurge was part of a global movement that placed the survival of world capitalism in question. Across Europe the working class revolted, and anti-colonial movements swept Asia. The decisive role in suppressing the working class and rescuing capitalism was played by Stalinism, with social democracy's assistance: the mass Stalinist parties entered bourgeois governments, disarmed resistance fighters, and declared their task was to revive national bourgeois-democratic states, not fight for socialism.
71. US imperialism's reorganization of the world — The betrayals of Stalinism gave American imperialism, in a position of unprecedented dominance, the breathing space to revive the world capitalist economy. Under Bretton Woods (1944), the dollar became the cornerstone of the world financial system, and Washington created the IMF, World Bank, and GATT to manage crises and avert a return to the protectionism that had preceded World War II.
72. The "deformed workers' states" — Only in 1948, after the US launched the Cold War and the Marshall Plan, did the Kremlin expropriate large capitalist holdings in Eastern Europe—by bureaucratic fiat from above, not by working-class revolution. The Fourth International characterized these states as "deformed workers' states," stressing their historically unviable character: only a working-class political revolution to purge the bureaucracy could open a path to socialism.
73.The Chinese Revolution and its deformation — In 1949 a peasant uprising under the Stalinist CCP overthrew the Kuomintang. The CCP suppressed independent working-class action, violently repressed strikes, and ruthlessly cracked down on the Chinese Trotskyists. Forced further than intended by US pressure and popular ferment, it expropriated the landlords and nationalized industry, creating a Stalinist-model bureaucratic planning system. The Fourth International defined the Beijing regime as a deformed workers' state, and Mao's disastrous zigzags (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution) culminated in his 1971 rapprochement with Washington and the eventual full restoration of capitalism.
Stalinism and the restabilization of post-war Canadian capitalism
74. The defence of the Stalinist CPC — More than three decades after the USSR's dissolution, pseudo-left and academic forces still defend the Stalinist CPC's record. In reality, the CPC played a decisive role in politically smothering the working class and restabilizing Canadian capitalism, exploiting the banner of October to imbue the most class-conscious workers with nationalism and opportunism, and celebrating the Moscow Trials and Trotsky's assassination.
75. The CPC's war zigzags — The CPC welcomed Canada's entry into the war, then shifted on Moscow's orders after the Stalin-Hitler Pact to denounce "imperialist war," then became the most vociferous pro-war party after June 1941. It became a de facto partner of the Mackenzie King government, enforced the "no strike pledge," connived in the internment of Japanese Canadians, and hailed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
76. The Stalinists and the post-war strike wave — On the eve of the massive post-war strike wave, the Stalinists intensified efforts to tie the working class to Canadian capital, promoting "Labor-Management-Government Cooperation" and a "Liberal-Labor coalition." They formed an electoral alliance with the Liberals in 1945 and played a crucial role in entrenching the collective bargaining system. They were then targeted by the Cold War witch hunt, which succeeded partly because the Stalinists had alienated rank-and-file workers.
77. The Stalinists and Canadian nationalism — The Stalinists' class collaboration was bound up with their championing of Canadian nationalism, contributing even more than the social democrats to fashioning "left" Canadian nationalism. The CPC agitated for a Canadian flag and O Canada, and its 1952 program called for a "people's coalition" against "US domination" that would include "Canadians who believe in private enterprise" and "sections of the capitalists."
78. The roots of Stalinism in Canada — The nationalist class-collaborationist politics of the CPC did not arise simply from Moscow's diktats. As the Workers League explained in 1978, Stalinism "hooked itself into the milieu of the trade union bureaucracy and middle-class radicalism," finding a hospitable climate in the traditions of pragmatism and populism. The struggle against these traditions and the nationalist-opportunist legacy of Stalinism is a critical task of the SEP.
The emergence of Pabloite opportunism
79. The rise of Pabloism — Adapting to post-war restabilization and Stalinism's authority, a liquidationist current emerged within the Fourth International seeking to overthrow the Trotskyist program. Beginning in 1949, Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel gave it theoretical expression and leadership, exploiting their positions in the International Secretariat to impose their perspective through administrative fiat. They claimed the Stalinist bureaucracy would be compelled onto the road of revolution, projecting an impending third world war resulting in a Stalinist-led world revolution and "centuries of deformed workers' states."
80. Pabloism's pessimism and liquidationism — Despite declaiming on the imminence of revolution, the Pabloites' perspective was shot through with pessimism about the working class, its material basis lying in the growing petty bourgeoisie. For Pablo, "objective social reality consists essentially of the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world"—the working class ceased to be the subject of history. They promoted the supposed progressive potential of social democracy, the trade union bureaucracy, and the national bourgeoisie, advocating "entrism sui generis"—the liquidation of the Fourth International's sections into whatever parties dominated the "mass movement."
The liquidation of the Revolutionary Workers Party
81. The RWP's vulnerability — The Canadian Trotskyists' ability to withstand political pressures was undermined by their scant involvement in the political-theoretical struggles of the Fourth International, their focus fixed on trade union tactics. "Union militants" who had collaborated with them now swung right and embedded themselves in the bureaucracy.
82. The dissolution into the CCF — Applying the Pabloite injunction, the RWP voted at its July 1951 Second Congress to dissolve and enter the CCF—a shift in class axis, not just tempo. Dowson, who five years earlier had insisted there was no inevitable reformist stage, now asserted "The CCF under the next upsurge will embrace the class." The decision was based explicitly on Pablo-Mandel International Secretariat documents, including the 1951 "Theses on Orientation and Perspectives."
83. The liquidation carried out — The stipulation that the entry be politically prepared was soon junked. The BC wing negotiated its entry outside party control and publicly announced the RWP's dissolution. In April 1952 the RWP issued a terse statement announcing its demise. Dowson wrote that "we are not going to fight... we don't want to get involved in anything that brings us into conflict with anyone—left, right or center."
84. The "Labor Party" illusion — Even as they liquidated, the Dowson group conceded the CCF was a right-wing social-democratic party but claimed union affiliation had transformed it into a "Labor Party." In fact, the union–social-democrat alliance was consolidated through the Cold War witch hunt, and "labor political action" was the extension of trade unionism to the parliamentary arena—the antipode of independent class politics.
The Open Letter and the founding of the ICFI
85. Cannon's Open Letter — James P. Cannon's Open Letter (November 1953) proved decisive in rallying orthodox Trotskyist opposition to the Pabloite revisionists, demonstrating that Pabloism had repudiated the revolutionary program and was determined to "disrupt, split and break up" the cadres of Trotskyism and liquidate the Fourth International.
86. The programmatic foundations restated — The Open Letter, founding document of the ICFI, restated the programmatic foundations of Trotskyism in six points: the death agony of capitalism; the necessity of world socialist planned economy; the working class as the only revolutionary class facing a crisis of leadership; the Leninist combat party; Stalinism as the main obstacle; and the need to fight both imperialism and Stalinism without capitulating to either.
87. The Canadian section's rally to the IC — The majority of Canadian Trotskyists rallied to the IC, above all due to the SWP's leadership in defeating a pro-Pablo faction aggressively promoted by the IEC through dictatorial methods. The IEC removed Dowson as national secretary and suspended him. The Canadian leadership made no real independent contribution to the struggle; Dowson initially expressed shock at the Open Letter and declared "neutrality on the political issues."
88. The pro-Pablo walkout and collapse — In April 1954, days before the emergency convention, the pro-Pablo minority walked out and fused with the Committee for Socialist Regroupment renegades, and the Paris-based Pabloite leadership endorsed them as their "Canadian section." The group soon collapsed, but not before assisting the CCF leadership in fingering IC supporters for expulsion. Dowson wrote that the Canadian experience "confirms to the hilt the charge that Pabloism is attempting to liquidate the Fourth International."
This is the ninth and penultimate part of a 10-part series responding to British-based historian Hakim Adi’s recently republished book, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa, and the Diaspora, 1919–1939.
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Adi partly records the impact of Popular Frontism on the anti-colonial policies of the European Communist parties. But, overtly and by omission, he minimizes its political meaning.
The colonial peoples were told that their liberation had to be postponed because the imperialist powers ruling them, France, Spain, Portugal and Britain, were now “democratic,” while their fascist rivals were the real enemy. The result was the anti-colonial movement’s political disarming.
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Throughout the Stalinised Comintern, the unconditional defense of the colonial struggle and its revolutionary significance were denied. Its legitimacy depended on whether it strengthened or weakened the diplomatic position of the Soviet bureaucracy and of the imperialist powers with which Moscow sought an alliance.
Tunisia provided a devastating demonstration of Stalinism’s impact. The Popular Front victory in France initially generated considerable expectations among the Tunisian nationalists. Political prisoners were released, trade-union activity was allowed, and negotiations opened with the Neo-Destour, the nationalist party becoming the principal organised force demanding an end to French colonial rule. The PCF and the Tunisian Communist Party reacted by treating the nationalist movement as a danger to the security of France and the Soviet Union against Germany.
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The same counter-revolustionary policy was imposed in Madagascar. Paul Dussac, a veteran anti-colonial militant associated with Le Prolétariat malgache and the Communist movement in Madagascar, came under criticism from the colonial section of the PCF for positions considered excessively “nationalist”, that is, for pressing the question of Malagasy independence. Robert Deloche, one of the leading officials of the PCF’s colonial apparatus, instructed Dussac that “it would be absolutely ill-advised to demand independence from this government.” Deloche warned against “noisy and sterile agitation,” demanded the “greatest concern for respect for order and legality,” and insisted that the Communist Party must under no circumstances appear “anti-French.”
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Stalinism set itself against the anti-colonial and industrial struggles of the workers and oppressed masses. Between 1935 and 1939 African mineworkers struck on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt, cocoa farmers organized a mass boycott in the Gold Coast, railway and urban workers fought in Senegal and Sierra Leone, and anti-colonial demonstrations shook Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco. Adi himself notes that the ITUCNW’s dissolution coincided with the outbreak of major anti-colonial struggles in the Caribbean.
Six years later, the Stalinist bureaucracy declared the liquidation of the Comintern itself amid the Second World War. The politically significant even, on an organization he dedicates 405 pages to, is reduced to a few passages. In a footnote in the Introduction, Adi writes “Largely due to wartime conditions, the Comintern dissolved itself in 1943”. In the Epilogue, he then states, “The CI’s concern with the Negro Question did not end with the dissolution of the ITUCNW [...] but the growing danger of fascism and world war impelled the Comintern to make this its main focus until it too was dissolved, partly as a consequence of war-time conditions, in 1943.”
Once again, Adi’s account amounts to an apology for Stalinism. The dissolution of the Comintern was not simply a consequence of wartime conditions, but a deliberate political decision by the Stalinist bureaucracy. It was abolished in 1943 to facilitate the Soviet bureaucracy’s wartime alliance with the imperialist powers, above all Britain and the United States. Its dissolution sent an unmistakable political signal to the imperialist powers: the Soviet bureaucracy had no interest in world socialist revolution and would not allow the revolutionary aspirations of the international working class to interfere with its diplomatic agreements.
By subordinating the working class to Soviet diplomacy and alliances with “democratic” imperialism, Stalinism’s betrayal of the colonial struggles weakened the revolutionary internationalist opposition to imperialism and strengthened the appeal of bourgeois nationalism and Pan-Africanism. It helped direct a generation of anti-colonial militants to seek out national roads to liberation rather than a socialist alternative grounded in the international unity of the working class.
But the destruction of a revolutionary Marxist alternative to world imperialism was not accomplished by political betrayal alone. It was pursued by means of physical extermination. The Stalinist terror of the 1930s, which Adi dismisses, decapitated the cadres who would have carried the program of world socialist revolution into the post-war struggles of the colonial world.
To be continued.
19. Patrick Stewart (1940-2026): a classical actor animated by his socialist convictions
Grief at the recent death of actor Patrick Stewart, aged 86, was widespread. His great talent was rightly celebrated, but the personal respect he was afforded by millions internationally speaks to wider issues.
Proud of his working-class background, Stewart used his celebrity status to speak out against discrimination and domestic violence. His continued open identification of himself as an “absolute fundamental, emotional socialist” (he was a lifelong Labour Party supporter) made him appealing to a younger audience being radicalized by their own experience. He always came over as a fundamentally decent person and this quality infused his best-known roles.
A distinguished classical actor, Stewart became globally recognised in the high-profile Star Trek and X-Men franchises. It is significant that both the parts for which he is best known, Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Professor Charles Xavier, are authoritative but humane and moral leaders committed to equality and fighting injustice.
Their appeal to him is clear, and so too is their appeal to audiences. These figures embodied a striving for fairness, for something better in contrast to the official venality and corruption experienced by audiences the world over. Stewart responded with performances of seriousness and depth that made them more attractive. The abiding fan loyalty was a response to something honest.
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Interviewed by Time magazine in 2017, he was asked:
“Science fiction has a habit of portraying the world as bleak and hopeless. But the two major sci-fi characters you’ve played, Charles Xavier and Jean-Luc Picard, both believe in a better future for humanity, or mutants. Do you think we’re on the right path? Are you also optimistic about humanity’s future?”
He replied:
“I always have been. Always. Even at the most dismaying of times. I grew up in a quite poor working class home with working class parents. My grandparents were the same, my great-grandmother could not write her name, she simply made a cross on her wedding certificate. I’ve been a witness to unfairness in society all my life. To the conditions under which my mother worked all her life, working in an industrial weaving shed in the north of England. And it has been this feature of unfairness that has motivated me in all of my political thinking.”
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In a period when the quality of work on offer for fine classical actors was changing, Patrick Stewart brought his considerable talents to all his work. It is a mark of his qualities that the seriousness he brought to his every performance elevated every vehicle for his talents beyond their intrinsic merits.
20. Irish union leaders shut down public sector strike with below-inflation deal
Struck hours before around 50 European leaders arrived in Dublin, the deal ties pay rises of barely 4 percent a year to productivity, AI and “changed work practices.”
21. 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.
