Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Perspective: US war against Iran enters new phase with strikes on oil tankers
The US-Iran war entered a new phase on Tuesday, with Washington and Tehran exchanging missile strikes that included attacks on shipping and threats of further escalation across the Middle East.
The US destroyed five Iranian oil tankers after Iran reportedly launched ballistic missiles at a US Navy warship. Iran responded with missile attacks on a US military installation in Jordan along with threats against American-linked shipping in the Persian Gulf.
The latest escalation demonstrates the collapse of every claim by the White House that the war is being wound up through limited military actions, economic sanctions or temporary ceasefires. The conflict is spreading geographically and increasingly targeting the infrastructure upon which the global economy depends.
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The US military’s action follows an increasingly explicit policy of reprisal against Iranian shipping. American officials have threatened to strike multiple Iranian vessels for every US ship attacked by Tehran. The policy amounts to a declaration that Washington will use military force to enforce its control over Iranian maritime trade, regardless of the consequences for global commercial shipping.
Iran has threatened to prevent vessels linked to the US and its allies from passing through the Strait of Hormuz. The IRGC urged crews to abandon tankers in waters near Kuwait and Bahrain and warned that additional ships could be attacked.
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Iran responded to the destruction of the tankers with a ballistic-missile barrage directed at Jordan, which hosts US military forces. The reported target was the Al-Azraq Air Base, where American aircraft and military personnel operate.
Iran claimed that its missiles struck facilities used for aircraft maintenance, deployment and shelter. US officials said the attack was ineffective and that all American personnel were accounted for. Jordanian authorities reported that 20 ballistic missiles were fired toward the country. Eighteen were intercepted by Jordanian air defenses, while two fell in unpopulated areas. No casualties were reported.
Iran also claimed that it had targeted American warships and other military assets in the region. The competing accounts of events could not be independently confirmed.
The attack nevertheless marks a significant expansion of the war. Jordan has attempted to avoid becoming a direct combatant, but its hosting of US forces makes it a potential target in any confrontation between Washington and Tehran. The same is true of US bases and military facilities across Iraq, the Gulf monarchies and the eastern Mediterranean.
The US military installation is generally identified as Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, located near Al-Azraq in eastern Jordan. The base is a major Jordanian air facility that hosts US military personnel and supports American air operations.
Iranian officials said their missiles targeted aircraft-maintenance and preparation facilities, deployment areas and hardened shelters associated with US F-35, F-16 and F-15 fighter aircraft. Some reports also referred to the nearby Prince Hassan Air Base as a target, but the precise facilities struck remain unclear.
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Speaking to reporters Wednesday before leaving for Dallas, President Donald Trump predicted that the war would end “immediately after” the US midterm elections in November. “I think war is going to end immediately after the election because they can’t hold out any longer,” Trump said.
The US President accused Tehran of being “desperate to try and affect the election,” while insisting that Iran was weakening under American economic pressure. Trump also indicated that Washington was not seeking to restart negotiations after the collapse of earlier ceasefires.
The timing of Trump’s prediction reveals some of the political calculations behind the war. The president is presenting the conflict simultaneously as a military campaign, an economic siege and an election issue. Claiming that Iran will soon capitulate, Trump offers no explanation for why a government supposedly on the verge of collapse has been able to continue missile attacks, threaten shipping and deny Washington its stated objectives after six months of bombing.
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The impact of the war is being felt by the working class internationally through higher gasoline, heating and transportation costs. The Independent cited an estimate from Brown University that the war had added $100 billion to US energy costs, or roughly $763 per household, with the total increasing by about $1 million every two minutes.
The price surge has created opportunities for energy corporations and financial speculators, including those with direct connections in the White House, to cash in on the market instability. Trump’s nine largest disclosed oil and gas holdings reportedly gained between $1.5 million and $4.4 million during the first six months of the war. His investment accounts continued buying and selling shares in companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips.
These disclosures show that the president is running a war that directly affects asset values held by him and his family. The White House denies that Trump or his relatives have any role in investment decisions, saying the holdings are managed independently through discretionary accounts and automated investment models.
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While the Trump administration claims that military pressure will force Tehran to surrender, the facts point in the opposite direction. After months of bombing and blockade, Iran has not capitulated, the Strait of Hormuz remains contested and American forces are increasingly exposed across the region.
The latest developments confirm the analysis of the World Socialist Web Site, which has described the war as part of a broader imperialist struggle for control of energy resources, strategic chokepoints and global economic power, particularly against China, which had been the principal buyer of Iranian oil.
The war will not be ended by Trump’s election timetable. Washington’s objective is not simply about shipping in the Strait of Hormuz but the strategic imperative that US imperialism must assert its domination over Iran and the entire Middle East.
Meanwhile, Tehran’s response is incapable of ending the conflict and reflects the dead end of bourgeois nationalism under conditions of an escalating imperialist military siege.
The alternative to this spiral toward a new world war is the independent mobilization of the working class in the United States, Iran and internationally against imperialist war and the capitalist system that produces it. The immediate demand must be the end of all US military operations, the withdrawal of American forces from the Middle East and the lifting of sanctions and the naval blockade.
The trade war between the United States and Canada escalated sharply this week. On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump announced import bans on several Canadian products, just hours after Canadian “retaliatory” tariffs on $20 billion in US goods came into effect.
Last month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared the country at “war” after trade talks collapsed and Trump unleashed a new volley of 50 percent tariffs on a wide array of Canadian exports.
Ottawa has accused Trump and his minions of demanding that Canada effectively surrender key attributes of an independent state. This included insisting, just hours before the midnight August 22 deadline for a new trade agreement, that Canada cede to Washington veto power over any future trade agreement with a third country, as well as privileged access to Canadian energy and other critical resources and an exclusive “right” to change tariff rates on key commodities at will.
After Carney announced the “retaliatory” tariffs that came into force this week, Trump went a step further, vowing late last month to double the current 25 percent tariff on auto imports to 50 percent next January 1.
The new bans and tariffs Trump announced this week and due to take effect September 29 impact a relatively modest $1 billion in Canadian imports. But they come after a barrage of trade actions, threats, and provocations, all meant to make good on the would-be US dictator’s threat to use “economic force” to crash Canada’s economy.
Trump mockingly referred to Canada’s Prime Minister as “Governor Carney” in a social media post. He has explicitly threatened Canadian oil producers with the fate of Venezuela, whose oil, in the manner of a US colony, has been placed under Washington’s control, following last January’s US invasion and the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro.
The breakdown of relations between what were only a few years ago arguably the two most closely aligned imperialist powers in the world goes far beyond sharp divergences over trade. For Trump, it is a question of establishing unhindered American imperialist dominance over the entire hemisphere, by subordinating Canada to the status of a vassal or even annexing it as the 51st state, seizing control of Greenland, bullying Mexico, and imposing “regime change” on Cuba. This agenda was elaborated in last year’s National Security Strategy and has been dubbed by the White House the “Donroe doctrine.”
Carney acknowledged this reality in a video speech posted online Tuesday, in which he declared that Washington was determined to “break us to own us” and make Canada “dependent.” He railed against 160 years of “American expansionism,” which he said Canada had resisted since Confederation in 1867, and stated that this was not the first time that the US had sought Canada’s “annexation.”
Trump’s expansionist designs are beyond dispute. His methods resemble those of Hitler’s Nazi regime in the 1930s as it prepared for World War II by consolidating control over its “near abroad”—first through the “Anschluss” (joining) of Austria to the German Reich, and then the dismemberment and takeover of Czechoslovakia.
The revival of such lawlessness in inter-state relations arises from the total breakdown of the post-war order, expressed most clearly in American imperialism’s precipitous economic decline, which Trump is desperately trying to offset with his fascist “America First” program of trade war and military conquest. The Donroe doctrine’s insistence on a US “right” to exclude all overseas rivals from the Americas and establish unbridled American imperialist control over the Western Hemisphere is a critical stepping stone towards great-power conflict, above all with China.
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Canadian imperialism is itself a protagonist in this struggle and is rapidly rearming. It opposes Trump—as Carney’s repeated pleas for a new Canada-US “partnership” make clear—only because Washington refuses to recognize its “sovereign” right to the lion’s share of the profits to be derived from exploiting the country’s workers and abundant resources, and grant it privileged access to the US market.
Carney’s Liberal government has embraced policies that Trump himself would applaud—procuring new fleets of fighter jets, warships and attack submarines, virtually abrogating the right to strike, handing refugees over to fascistic ICE agents, and public spending austerity.
Carney and several top ministers are holding a high-level “investment conference” in Toronto September 14 and 15 with the aim of attracting foreign capital to the country’s ports and airports, energy and critical minerals, and rapidly expanding military production sector. Among the world’s vultures descending on Canada’s financial capital, at Carney’s invitation, are top executives of BlackRock, Blackstone, Barclays PLC., and over 100 other investment firms and sovereign wealth funds. Carney will seek to entice them with pledges to make Canada the “best place for investment in the world” through a battery of measures aimed at intensifying worker-exploitation, from massive tax cuts, to privatization and deregulation.
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The working class in every country is paying the price for the imperialist powers’ mad escalation of world war and turn to trade war. In the US, Trump’s war against Iran, trade war with Canada, and push to erect a fascist dictatorship threaten millions of jobs, sharp increases to the already high cost of living for workers, and workers’ democratic and social rights. In Canada, Carney’s “retaliatory tariffs” will escalate already climbing inflation and risk jobs in manufacturing and other sectors dependent on cross-border trade, while his pitch for new foreign investors and a self-sufficient military supply chain demands a ratcheting up of worker exploitation.
These conditions have already produced an upsurge in working-class opposition that must be unified across national borders to reject trade war and imperialist war. The strike by over 1,200 National Steel Car workers in Hamilton, Ontario, as well as the rejection of numerous contracts recommended by the United Auto Workers by autoworkers in the US demonstrate that a basis exists to unite American and Canadian workers in opposition to both governments and their agendas of war and austerity.
The main obstacle to this are the nationalist trade union bureaucracies. While the UAW lauds Trump’s trade war tariffs as a boon to US workers, the unions in Canada tell the working class to join hands in “Team Canada” with Carney, the country’s 89 billionaires, corporations, and all political parties from the social democratic NDP to the far-right Conservatives.
The urgent task is to revive the long traditions of joint struggle between American and Canadian workers, stretching back to the eight-hour-day movement in the 19th century and the building of the industrial unions in the 1930s, and infuse them with a new and higher socialist content. The only alternative to intensifying inter-imperialist antagonisms and world war is the fight for the socialist transformation of society. As David North emphasized in his opening report to the SEP (US) 9th Congress:
The world war now spreading across five continents raises to the highest level the historic struggle of this epoch: between global imperialist war and the world revolution, between imperialism’s drive to organize and subjugate the earth and the ever-more conscious effort of the international working class to overthrow the social order that produces the redivision by imperialism.
3. “The verdict against Bogdan is an indictment of the Ukrainian regime”
On September 6, the Socialist Equality Party (SGP-Germany), as part of its campaign for the Berlin state election, held a rally in front of the Brandenburg Gate under the slogans “Stop the Ukraine war! Freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk!” Katja Rippert's speech is published now.
4. US removes Syria from its “state sponsors of terrorism” list
The US has formally announced Syria’s removal from Washington’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list. This designation had defined US–Syria relations for nearly half a century, leading to sanctions and Syria’s diplomatic and economic isolation.
Removal from the terrorism list signals the incorporation of the new Syrian regime into a US- and Gulf-backed regional order. For the Syrian population, the opening to foreign capital is taking place alongside the consolidation of an authoritarian Islamist state and an economic program that shifts the costs of reconstruction onto workers, farmers and the wider population.
Ending sanctions on the Turkish-backed Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), lifting the $10 million bounty on President Ahmed al Sharaa, the HTS leader previously known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, and the repeal of the Caesar Act open the way for Syria’s reintegration into the global financial system.
A long period of economic isolation was compounded by the fourteen-year civil war in which the US, Gulf states and Türkiye backed different opposition forces, including Islamist and jihadist-linked militias, while Russia, Iran and Hezbollah intervened to preserve the Assad regime.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that the delisting was “in recognition of the positive actions taken and further commitments by the Syrian government under President Ahmed al Sharaa to fully distance Syria from acts of international terrorism.” These “positive actions” include renouncing links to jihadist networks, joining Washington’s coalition against ISIS and Iran-aligned groups, and cooperating with US counterterrorism agencies.
The reasons for rehabilitating the former jihadist were geostrategic in character: stabilizing the weak post-Assad and pro-US state in the face of growing unrest over social conditions, eliminating Russia’s influence by integrating Syria into its regional axis, weakening Iran, enabling Gulf investment in Syria and using Syria as an alternative, land-based energy corridor from the Gulf to the Mediterranean.
With the major US and European sanctions substantially lifted, US and European banks can resume operations with Syrian banks and Syria’s Central Bank can seek a sovereign credit rating, enabling access to global capital markets.
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Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution that overthrew one of Washington’s key regional allies, the Carter administration began to reorganize the Middle East, strengthening Israel’s role in the region. One element of this was the designation of Syria as a State Sponsor of Terrorism for its support of the Rejectionist Front, Palestinian militant organizations, and later Hezbollah, in their struggle against Israel during the civil war in Lebanon—in which some right-wing Christian parties were allied with Israel.
Syria was a linchpin in the Obama administration’s broader struggle to assert US hegemony over the resource-rich Middle East and Central Asia. Its close ties to Iran and Hezbollah made it particularly important to the US efforts to weaken what Washington viewed as the main obstacle to its domination of the region. This significantly increased Syria’s dependence on the Soviet Union and, following its collapse, Iran.
After seizing power in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s war on Hezbollah in Lebanon, al-Sharaa, the former jihadist leader, made clear his orientation towards the US, Türkiye, the European Union and the Gulf. This ensured his—and Syria’s—rapid integration into Washington’s orbit, with President Donald Trump declaring him to be a “young, attractive guy. Tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.” Trump invited him to the White House in November 2025 and met him again last July, when al-Sharaa was a guest of the NATO summit in Ankara.
This was proof that the $10 million bounty was never more than a public-relations cover while the CIA collaborated with jihadists, with a reported annual budget of nearly $1 billion, to topple the Assad regime. Al-Sharaa was now welcome in the US, Türkiye and Gulf-backed regional order, having joined the international coalition fighting ISIS, and Syria could be opened for business.
The unintended consequences of Syria’s new geopolitical realignment within a US-aligned regional order have been the expansion of Türkiye’s influence, which conflicts with Israel’s security requirements and brings with it increasing tensions between Ankara and Tel Aviv.
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Israel, however, is determined to keep the new Syrian state weak and fragmented and prevent it from developing military capabilities that could constrain its own freedom of action. It views the Kurds, who had established an autonomous region in the northeast, as its “natural allies”. The Turkish state for its part is attempting, through its negotiations with Abdullah Öcalan, the long-imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, to turn its 40-year-old enemy into an ally, thereby undermining Israel’s policy toward the Kurds.
Israel has seized territory in southern Syria close to the border, allied with some of the Druze leaders in Suwayda, and built permanent military infrastructure inside the country, both as a counterweight to al-Sharaa and as a bulwark against Turkish influence. It has repeatedly bombed Syrian airbases, most recently Abu al-Duhur in northern Syria in August, to warn Türkiye against using the base to expand its military influence.
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The fate of the Kurdish national militias—the Syrian Democratic forces (SDF) and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) that controlled the Kurdish region in the northeast of Syria with US support—illustrates both Washington’s broader geopolitical realignment and the class character of the nationalist forces fighting for regime change. In August, the SDF formally announced its dissolution under an agreement with the al-Sharaa government, ending Kurdish autonomy and placing Kurdish regions under HTS and Islamist units.
Throughout the war for regime change, the SDF/YPG had served as Washington’s principal proxy force, alongside the Sunni Islamist militias of HTS, in return for its backing for an autonomous Kurdish entity.
The World Socialist Web Site rejected the pseudo-left’s glorification of these forces as fighters of a “democratic revolution,” insisting that “What is unfolding in Syria is not a revolution but a reactionary, imperialist-led carve-up of the country.”
The SDF/YPG capitulation was dictated by Washington, not chosen by the Kurds. As SDF commander Mazloum Abdi has acknowledged, it was done in support of its ally, Ankara—opposed to any Kurdish autonomy.
The March 2025 agreement—signed after months of clashes between the SDF and Damascus, amid the massacre of nearly 1,000 Alawites—provided for the integration of SDF forces and the autonomous administration into the Damascus regime. In August 2025, Syria signed an agreement with Türkiye to train and equip its armed forces, signalling a move against the SDF.
The December 2025 agreement for three SDF divisions to remain affiliated with the Kurds within the military structure of the Syrian Army followed immediately on the US Congress vote to lift sanctions on Syria. After Washington “green-lighted” the HTS military offensive, with support from Ankara, against the Kurds that cost the SDF up to 80 percent of its territory, it was forced to sign the January 2026 agreement returning the region to Damascus’ control. US envoy Tom Barrack stated that “the original purpose of the SDF as the primary anti-ISIS force... has largely expired”. The US alliance with the Kurds was over once it no longer served Washington’s drive against Iran.
The SDF leadership never broke from imperialism. Its strategy of maneuvering between Washington, Ankara and even Israel, which it had accepted as a “natural ally”, left it isolated and defenseless. SDF leader Abdi was still backing Trump’s plan to “make Syria great again” and offering to work with the US against Iran as late as December 2025.
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Shortly after toppling the Assad regime, al-Sharaa consolidated his political position by imposing a new constitutional framework that instituted a political dictatorship. It gives the president the sole power to declare a state of emergency and appoint one third of the “people’s assembly” that would draft legislation but have no power to impeach the president.
The new constitution entrenches Sunni Islamist dominance, making Islamic law the primary legislative source and empowering an all-Sunni Fatwa Council with no minority representation to vet legislation. It codifies discrimination against Alawites, Christians, Druze, and Ismailis who together constituted nearly 20 percent of Syria’s population in 2025.
The new regime dismantled civil and land registries, undermining legal identity rights and disproportionately harming minorities. UN reports have documented ongoing arbitrary detentions, kidnappings, torture, and sexual violence against minorities.
Al-Sharaa has used the military as well as the new constitutional arrangements, to consolidate his grip on power. While formally dissolving the HTS, he has rewarded his followers and restructured the Syrian army around HTS fighters, with thousands of veteran jihadis incorporated into the new security forces.
His new military apparatus has carried out a wave of sectarian violence against minorities. A months-long Reuters investigation established that 1,479 Alawites were killed between March 7 and 9, 2025 in more than 40 settlements along Syria’s Mediterranean coast. The chain of command ran up to leading figures of the new regime in Damascus. UN reports have documented abductions, rape, arbitrary detention, and sectarian slurs against Alawite women and girls by armed personnel, including foreign fighters integrated into state forces.
Al-Sharaa’s forces carried out a brutal campaign against the Druze in southern Syria in July 2025, killing more than 1,000 in Suwayda province. Sectarian violence continued into 2026, with Druze communities facing intimidation and displacement. Nevertheless, Suwayda remains outside Damascus’ full control and has become a key mechanism for Israeli intervention in Syria.
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The World Bank has estimated the cost of reconstructing Syria’s infrastructure, residential, and non-residential buildings as about $216 billion, more than three times Syria’s pre‑war GDP and nearly 10 times the size of Syria’s 2024 economy. This poses the issue of how Syria will be rebuilt and, most significantly, who will benefit from the enormous flows of capital it will generate.
The new regime is using the opening created by sanctions removal to restructure the economy via foreign investment, privatization and trade liberalization—all based on nepotism and patronage—while consolidating its control over the institutions that will distribute the resulting wealth.
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It has introduced a new tax system, with the new top rate of corporation tax set at 15 percent, regardless of size, with big tax and duty concessions to investors. It has announced plans to cut the public sector workforce by one third and privatize state-owned enterprises and public services such as health and education.
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Once a middle-income country, GDP per capita already fell from $1,550 in 2011 to $670 in 2022, a more than 50 percent decline. Unemployment stands at a massive 60 percent, according to the Economy Minister’s estimate.
The new regime has pursued policies that have further impoverished the Syrian people. It has reduced the subsidies on bread, suspended fuel and oil subsidies, and hiked electricity prices. With fuel now denominated in US dollars—the dollar is now worth 122 Syrian pounds—farmers and small businesses face soaring prices that could force many to close. While some electricity supply has been restored, this has not benefited the peripheral and rural areas.
Syria is facing a massive food crisis, amid UN warnings of a collapse in the agricultural sector, which has been ravaged by 14 years of conflict, recurring drought, and a collapsing economy. The Food and Agriculture Organization reported that 14.5 million Syrians are suffering from acute food insecurity.
Syria faces a severe water shortage as a result of the destruction caused by the war that has damaged more than 60 percent of water infrastructure and low winter rainfall 60 percent below the annual average.
More than 90 percent of the population live below the poverty line. Many are reliant on remittances from family members living abroad, believed to total $4 billion in 2025, equal to 15 to 20 percent of GDP. But this too is in jeopardy as refugees are being forced by their host countries to return home. The return of one million refugees and 2.5 million IDPs has strained housing, water, electricity, and municipal services and led to new conflicts over property ownership as others have taken over their abandoned homes and land.
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There has been a growing wave of protests and strikes this year by workers, professionals, students, traders, farmers and residents of devastated areas, with 41 demonstrations in the first half of June alone. They demanded relief from deteriorating economic conditions, labour and professional rights and the release of detainees and the disappeared. There have been protests over land rights and the displacement of residents for investment in luxury projects and property rights in Homs and Damascus.
In May, protests broke out in wheat growing areas in the east of the country before spreading nationwide following the government’s setting the price it would buy wheat from farmers well below the cost of production, a situation aggravated by the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz driving up oil and fertilizer prices. While al-Sharaa issued a decree raising the price, this was still below what farmers were demanding.
These protests and strikes demonstrate that the Syrian masses were not “liberated” in December 2024 but handed from one repressive regime to another. The social catastrophe produced by 14 years of imperialist proxy war is now being felt by the population under its new beneficiaries.
Events in Syria confirms Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution: in regions of belated capitalist development like the Middle East, the national bourgeoisie cannot establish even formal democratic rights for minorities or pursue an anti-imperialist policy, because of its ties to imperialism and fear of the working class. Those tasks fall to the working class in the struggle for socialism.
Workers must build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Syria, Türkiye and across the region, capable of unifying workers of all nationalities and religions—Arab, Kurdish, Turkish, Persian, Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Christian and Jewish—around a socialist program for the reorganisation of society based upon social need not private profit. This must be fought for against all the imperialist powers and their proxies and based on the establishment of a United Socialist States of the Middle East.
5. Turkish preface to A Socialist Opponent of the NATO War in Ukraine: The Case of Bogdan Syrotiuk
The Turkish edition of this volume appears under conditions in which the International Committee of the Fourth International has intensified its campaign for Bogdan’s freedom globally following the verdict.
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The Bogdan Syrotiuk case, which involves both this war and basic democratic rights, is of direct concern to readers in Türkiye. Türkiye is a NATO member with the largest land army after the United States; it lies at the intersection of the Balkans, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Middle East; and it hosts critical infrastructure of the alliance, from the Incirlik Air Base in Adana to the Kürecik radar station in Malatya. As the country that controls entry to and exit from the Black Sea under the 1936 Montreux Convention on the Straits, it is also a maritime neighbor of both Ukraine and Russia.
In the first phase of the war, Ankara positioned itself as a “mediator” by closing the Straits to warships and hosting the Istanbul talks. In March 2022, the framework of an agreement between the two sides was on the table in Istanbul. Why this framework collapsed, and what the real aim of the war was, was stated publicly in April 2022 by the then foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu: “There are those within the NATO countries who want the war to continue. Their aim is for the war to go on, for Russia to be weakened further and perhaps for Putin to be replaced as well.”
These words belong to the foreign minister of a NATO member, and they make clear where the responsibility lies for the war now kept going for four and a half years. The hundreds of thousands of lives given by Ukrainian and Russian workers as the war has been prolonged are the price of a decision taken in Washington, London and Berlin, which direct a war in which the Ukrainian regime serves as a proxy.
Over the past four years, Ankara’s position has step by step been integrated into the escalation by NATO and Ukraine. This shift reached its high point at the NATO Summit held in Ankara on July 7-8, 2026. For the second time since the 2004 Istanbul summit, Türkiye hosted the leaders of the imperialist war alliance, who are at the same time the architects and backers of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.
Following the summit, which produced an increase in military spending and aggression, the war against Russia was escalated. And about a month after the summit, on August 10, the verdict against Bogdan Syrotiuk was announced. This is no coincidence. That Kiev found the audacity to sentence a socialist to 15 years for his writings is a direct product of its backing by NATO. As is clearly documented in the final article of this book, “Zelensky rules out elections, as Ukraine’s dictatorship jails opponents of the war,” Zelensky is ruling as a dictator against enormous popular opposition to both the war and the regime, and Bogdan has been targeted for giving this opposition to the war a socialist expression. While the Zelensky regime has banned a dozen parties by court order, above all left-wing parties, the Erdoğan regime has extended its political repression as far as the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the New Party that split from it, despite their pro-NATO orientation.
As NATO’s war against Russia escalates, the Black Sea too is becoming a theater of battle. With the intelligence and technology supplied by NATO, Ukraine is carrying the war ever further onto the international sea lanes and onto commercial shipping. While countless ships and their crews have been targeted in the Black Sea in recent months, on August 26, 2026, the Turkish-operated Lider Bordo Mavi was hit by a drone attack off Tuapse; the following day the Lider Kocatepe, sent to tow the vessel, was also targeted and a fire broke out on board. Ankara was finally compelled to summon the Ukrainian ambassador to the Foreign Ministry on August 29. The replacement of the line of “mediation” by one that adapts itself to NATO aggression has created a deadly danger for seafarers in the Black Sea.
At the same time, demands are being raised in various NATO circles for a “reassessment” of the Montreux Convention, that is, for the opening of the Black Sea to the navies of the alliance. Such a step would mean placing Türkiye on the front line of a direct military conflict with Russia.
All of this is being carried out against the will of the overwhelming majority of the population. US-led NATO is a hated organization in Türkiye, identified with military coups and with the repression of the workers’ movement and the left-wing opposition. Following the genocide in Gaza, social anger against the US and Israel has reached historic levels. This is accompanied by an ever-intensifying growth of class struggles.
Newly released federal records provide further evidence that, following the February 2023 Norfolk Southern derailment and toxic chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, the Environmental Protection Agency withheld vital information from area residents about the potential dangers they faced while repeatedly reassuring the population that their community was safe.
The records reveal that federal officials possessed models projecting severe and potentially fatal chemical exposures that were never shown to residents and internally characterized hazardous substances released in the disaster as an “imminent and substantial threat to public health and the environment.”
They also show that EPA intervened to narrow portions of Norfolk Southern’s environmental testing program while monitoring residents and independent investigators who challenged the government’s assurances.
Together with evidence established since the disaster, the documents reveal a pattern of withholding and minimizing information about potential dangers on behalf of the railroad industry.
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On February 3, 2023, 38 cars of Norfolk Southern train 32N derailed in East Palestine, 11 of them carrying hazardous materials.
Three days later, five tank cars containing more than one million pounds of vinyl chloride, a known human carcinogen, were deliberately breached and burned, producing a huge black chemical cloud over the Ohio-Pennsylvania border region.
On February 4, two days before the vent-and-burn, EPA requested plume projections from the federal Interagency Modeling and Atmospheric Assessment Center (IMAAC), which models where airborne chemicals may travel and at what concentrations.
Internal correspondence obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the Government Accountability Project (GAP) shows the models were distributed within the federal government but not shown to residents.
One early model projected that 17,972 people could potentially fall within an area where phosgene concentrations might cause severe injury, including 1,901 in a zone where death was possible. For hydrogen chloride, the corresponding projected populations were 312 and 185.
Phosgene, which can form when vinyl chloride burns, can cause severe lung injury and death at sufficiently high concentrations. Hydrogen chloride can seriously injure the eyes and respiratory tract.
These projections were not measurements of what residents actually breathed. Early models were based on limited information and included worst-case scenarios; later modeling produced substantially smaller danger areas.
Nevertheless, Ohio and Pennsylvania evacuated an approximately one-mile-by-two-mile area immediately before the February 6 burn. Residents outside that zone were never shown federal maps depicting potentially broader severe-injury and possible-death areas.
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The East Palestine catastrophe was not the product of one administration. It resulted from decades of railroad deregulation, corporate cost-cutting and the subordination of health and safety to profit under Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
Trump exploited East Palestine politically in 2023 after pursuing transportation and environmental deregulation during his first administration. Biden, meanwhile, had intervened only weeks before the derailment to impose a contract on 120,000 railroad workers and block a nationwide strike over staffing, scheduling, sick time and dangerous working conditions.
Norfolk Southern, meanwhile, has faced no criminal prosecution. Its $600 million class-action settlement contained no admission of wrongdoing.
The disaster was made possible by the profit motive. The railroad corporations operate to maximize returns to investors, while the government agencies charged with regulating them function within a political and economic system that treats corporate profitability and uninterrupted operations as overriding concerns. In East Palestine, the health and safety of railroad workers and residents were subordinated to those interests.
More than three and a half years later, residents still lack answers to basic questions: Who possessed the federal hazard models before the vent-and-burn, and why were residents not shown them? How reliable was the testing used to assure them the community was safe? What will be the long-term health consequences?
All government and corporate records must be released. Residents must receive lifelong medical monitoring and health care at no cost. An independent investigation must give residents, railroad workers and independent scientists full access to the evidence, free from control by Norfolk Southern or the agencies whose own conduct requires investigation.
7. Peru’s President Keiko Fujimori requests extraordinary powers to wage assault on workers’ rights
The demand for legislative powers represents the direct implementation of the program Fujimori announced on July 28 in her inauguration address. There she declared two “fronts of national emergency” and announced that she would resort to “extraordinary resources,” emergency decrees and extraordinary powers delegated by Congress. The real political core of that speech—as the World Socialist Web Site noted at the time—was the concentration of executive power outside all parliamentary control and the intensification of repression against the working class. The current request is the first concrete step in that concentration.
It forms part of a broader offensive by the Peruvian financial oligarchy and US imperialism to deepen the exploitation of the working class and transfer still more wealth to the economic power groups. Keiko Fujimori, direct representative of the interests of big capital and of the military apparatus that sustained her father Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship, seeks to consolidate a regime of labor precarity allowing companies to maximize profits at the expense of wages, working conditions and the democratic rights of workers.
In that same inauguration speech, Fujimori stated the terms of the operation openly: “We want better wages, but also sustainable companies and more formal jobs.”
Translated from the bourgeois idiom, this means: we want workers to accept crumbs while capital maintains its rate of profit. The increase in the monthly minimum wage to 1,300 soles ($388) that she announced falls far below the basic family basket of 1,848 soles ($551), while informal employment accounts for more than 72 percent of the Peruvian workforce, with average earnings in small enterprises of 858 soles ($256) a month.
The “flexibilization” of the 1990s, implemented under the original Fujimorismo with the backing of the IMF and the World Bank, destroyed millions of stable jobs and plunged the Peruvian working class into informality and misery. Its legal framework—the 1993 Constitution, imposed by the dictatorship and never substantially modified by any subsequent government—remains in force. The new offensive seeks to complete that work, eliminating the few labor rights that survive.
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In order to wage a genuine struggle against Fujimori, Peruvian workers need to create rank-and-file committees in the workplaces, democratically elected and recallable at any moment. These committees must organize the fight against precarity, layoffs and wage attacks, breaking with the discipline imposed by the trade union bureaucracy and coordinate nationally and across sectors—mining, industry, transport, education, health—around clear demands: a minimum wage indexed to the real cost of the family basket, an effective eight-hour day, the prohibition of temporary contracts and the right to organize without reprisals.
This struggle cannot halt at national borders. The same mining and financial conglomerates that exploit Peruvian workers exploit workers in Chile, Brazil, Mexico and the United States, and the Chancay megaport has turned Peru into a battlefield of the rivalry between US imperialism and China. That is why the rank-and-file committees must link up with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), founded by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), to unify the struggles of workers on a world scale.
The fight against the Fujimori government’s offensive cannot be confined to defending labor rights within capitalism. The only way out is the expropriation of the Peruvian financial oligarchy—the 17 family clans that have accumulated US$35 billion—and of the multinational corporations that exploit the country’s resources, the socialist planning of the economy and the redistribution of wealth under workers’ control. This requires an internationalist perspective: the Peruvian working class is part of the global struggle against capitalism and imperialism, and its emancipation is bound to the victory of socialism on a world scale.
Above all, the Peruvian working class needs its own revolutionary party, independent of the bourgeoisie and of every variant of petty-bourgeois nationalism: a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
The World Socialist Web Site calls on Peruvian workers to break with the trade union bureaucracy and the capitalist parties, to build independent rank-and-file committees and to orient themselves toward a revolutionary socialist program. Only in this way will they defeat Keiko Fujimori’s offensive and open the road to a society without exploitation or oppression.
On August 16, the Workers Party (PT) and the coalition of pseudo-left and bourgeois parties of its “broad front” launched the candidacy of incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for reelection. The event was held at the Vila Euclides Stadium in São Bernardo do Campo, in the heart of the ABC industrial region of São Paulo—“the place where it all began,” in Lula’s words.
The choice was not accidental. It was at Vila Euclides that tens of thousands of metalworkers gathered in mass assemblies during the strikes of 1978-1980—struggles that shook the military dictatorship (1964-1985) and whose militancy was diverted into the creation of the PT in 1980 and the CUT union federation in 1983. At the time, Lula was president of the ABC Metalworkers Union.
The staging of a return to the PT’s origins is a cynical maneuver. Lula and the PT came back to Vila Euclides to simulate a relationship with a working-class base the party long ago discarded. The stadium of nearly 50 years ago was mobilized to conceal the attacks waged against workers over the PT’s 17 years in power since 2002—when Lula was elected with a textile magnate as his running mate and calmed the financial markets with his “Letter to the Brazilian People.”
Once again, Lula and the PT are building a new “broad front” for October’s election. In the document “Building the Future: PT Manifesto to Continue Transforming the Country,” the PT claims to want to “consolidate a broad process of social concertation” bringing together “the productive sector and business committed to the nation, the working class, trade unionism and the popular movements in a coalition that transcends the institutional defense of democracy.”
The PT’s electoral coalition is the largest in this presidential election. Among the seven parties on the ticket are the pseudo-left PSOL, the Maoist PCdoB and the bourgeois parties PDT and PSB. The vice president and candidate for reelection is Geraldo Alckmin (PSB), the former reactionary governor of São Paulo, responsible for decades of attacks on education and social services in the country's richest state, who is being recycled once again as a “democrat” on the PT ticket.
But the PT wants to expand its alliances even further. In recent weeks, the party’s president, Edinho Silva, has been engaged in intense behind-the-scenes negotiations to ensure that parties in the so-called “centrão”—such as the Republicans and the Progressives, which were part of the government of former fascist President Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022)—remain neutral in this election. Arguing that “there are democratic forces within all parties,” Silva is now pressing these parties to support Lula in the first round.
While the government maintains austerity and is incapable of improving the living conditions of the population, the PT’s backroom negotiations are rehabilitating hated political forces, further discrediting Lula and opening the way for the far right. Since March, Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the fascist former president Jair Bolsonaro, has been technically tied with Lula in the polls.
The electoral process is unfolding amid the ever-deepening crisis of global capitalism. US imperialism is seeking to reverse its economic decline by escalating conflicts that are rapidly converging into a third world war, with China and Russia as its principal targets.
Latin America has become a battlefield in this imperialist redivision: Washington demonstrated with the invasion of Venezuela in January and interventions to promote fascistic candidates aligned with Trump in a series of regional elections that it is prepared to use direct military force to reorganize the continent and push back Chinese presence. Brazil is in the line of fire. Recent US punitive tariffs and diplomatic provocations have the declared aim of weakening Lula and boosting Flávio’s candidacy.
Faced with this situation, the PT’s response is to strengthen its “national unity” with sectors of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, advancing a combination of austerity in the economy, nationalism in politics and militarism in defense of the bourgeois state. This is the real content behind the nostalgia of Vila Euclides—and it is what the electoral program registered with the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) on August 7 reveals with clarity.
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The program’s title—“Guidelines for the Program to Transform Brazil: a sovereign, democratic, developed, sustainable and creative country”—already announces the tone that runs through its 84 pages: vague, self-congratulatory and systematically deceptive. The document presents a triumphalist balance sheet of Lula’s third government (2023-2026), claiming it was a period of “reconstruction” after the “destruction” caused by the Bolsonaro government. A new term would supposedly complete this work, transforming Brazil on the basis of “sovereignty” and “national development.”
What the program omits is the real character of this “reconstruction.” Lula’s third government did not rebuild rights; it deepened austerity. It did not reverse Bolsonaro’s legacy or the pro-market reforms of the Temer government (2016-2018)—in decisive respects, it continued them. And the result was not the defeat of fascism. On the contrary: Lula’s austerity measures are creating the conditions for the resurgence of the far right.
It is decisive to examine the terms in which the program criticizes the Bolsonaro government, for it is there that its class orientation is revealed. The document does not condemn Bolsonaro for deepening the exploitation of the working class, for arming the repressive apparatus against the poor or for demolishing social services. What it censures is something else: the former president left “a legacy of significant liabilities, far from a heritage of fiscal responsibility.” The accusation is that Bolsonaro governed badly for the capitalists.
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Overall, the PT’s program paints a country that does not exist. The Brazilian reality under Lula is not one of shared prosperity, but of rising inequality, falling consumption, record indebtedness and precarious work and education for tens of millions.
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The PT’s program recognizes the gravity of the international crisis but draws from it conclusions that serve the interests of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, not the working class. References to the world situation run throughout the 84 pages: “The contemporary world is witnessing the resurgence of unilateralism, protectionism and conflicts unprecedented since the Second World War.”
For the PT, this situation is not the result of the irreversible crisis of global capitalism, but of supposedly wrong choices in how to manage it. The party’s principal target is “neoliberalism” and the consequent subordination of countries to the “foreign interests” of the great powers and international bodies. In this way, the PT presents itself as an alternative within capitalism—as if the problem were not the system, but the mode of management.
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The “sovereignty” the PT defends is not that of the nation—that is, of the Brazilian working population—but that of the national capitalists and their accords with imperialism. It is the Brazilian bourgeoisie trying to balance between China and the United States, respectively Brazil’s first and second trading partners, in order to negotiate better conditions amid the deepening global crisis.
This can be seen in the friendly relationship Lula has established with US President Donald Trump—whom Lula has referred to as a “friend.” Since Trump returned to power in the US, the PT and the Lula government have capitulated before Washington’s offensive, whether by minimizing the risks of this external pressure and relativizing Trump’s authoritarian threat, or by seeking accommodation with the other imperialist powers.
The construction of a “multipolar order,” in which all countries would benefit if the international bodies were reformed, is a reactionary utopia. These bodies are not neutral arbiters susceptible to “democratization”—they are instruments forged by US imperialism at the end of the Second World War to impose its hegemony over the planet. In proposing their reform, the PT evokes the post-war period, when capitalist expansion under US hegemony allowed for social and political concessions for “national development”—a period that cannot be repeated.
Nor is the BRICS an anti-imperialist bloc: it is an alliance of capitalist states, among them China and Russia—which are not imperialist powers but large capitalist states resisting US domination—seeking to assert their own bourgeois interests in the global rivalry. Far from containing US militarism, this rivalry is driving the planet toward war.
The real objective of this foreign policy becomes clear when its economic dimension is examined. The PT’s program wants to diversify Brazil’s productive chain, seek new markets and reposition the country in global trade. The comparison several government members make with the period at the end of the Second World War is revealing. Aloizio Mercadante, president of the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES), declared last year: “To enter the Second World War, we negotiated the [steel company] CSN and mining, and we took an industrializing leap.” Today, he says, “we can attract investments and deal intelligently with this tension” between the US and China.
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Ultimately, what the PT presents as “neoindustrialization” for “national development” is, in reality, the integration of Brazil—its resources, its territory, its workforce—into the production chains fueling the developing world war. This becomes particularly clear when one considers the importance the Lula government attributes to the defense industry as a “vector” of “neoindustrialization.” In recent years, Brazilian defense industry exports have jumped from US$600 million in 2022 to US$3.4 billion in 2025—and four of the five largest buyers are NATO members.
Indeed, the defense industry occupies a central place in the PT’s program, appearing for the first time as a programmatic priority. The document states: “National defense requires well-equipped Armed Forces and a solid defense industry, capable of protecting Brazilian territory and its natural resources against external threats.” The party that emerged from the workers’ strikes against the military dictatorship now inscribes the Armed Forces as the axis of its national project.
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The PT’s program is the finished expression of what the party has become. This is not a “betrayal” of origins that were authentically socialist. The PT was the instrument built by the trade union bureaucracy and renegades from Trotskyism to prevent the militancy of the ABC struggles from being converted into the political independence of the working class. What it did at the end of the military dictatorship—and what it repeats today—was to channel the combativity of the Brazilian working class into the safe channels of bourgeois politics. The current program—austerity, “broad front,” “national sovereignty” and militarism—is the logical result of this trajectory.
Virtually all of Brazil’s pseudo-left organizations were directly implicated in this operation, including those today in the Morenoite Unified Socialist Workers Party (PSTU), the Morenoite and Pabloite groups within the PSOL and the Lambertist Workers Cause Party (PCO). All of them elevated Lula and the trade union bureaucracy to the status of the political leadership of the working class—and, with their pseudo-radical rhetoric, provided a “left” cover that helped block the construction of a revolutionary alternative. This orientation was formulated by the PT’s intellectual patron, Mário Pedrosa—a former leader of the International Left Opposition and later a deserter from the Fourth International—who proclaimed at the party’s founding conference that “a mass party has no vanguard, no theories, no sacred book”—the direct negation of Lenin and Trotsky.
It is from this perspective that the PT’s return to its origins staged at the Vila Euclides Stadium must be understood. Lula’s trajectory condenses this degeneration: from a trade union leader who emerged from the ABC strikes against the dictatorship to a president who, on the margins of the G-7 summit last June, assured the IMF’s managing director that “I was never a leftist.”
The PT was never a workers party that later degenerated. But it did have, in its early years, a real working-class base, which its leadership set about liquidating. As the party grew electorally, integrated itself into the state and imposed austerity, this base was actively discarded—a process accelerated by the suppression of working-class struggles by the unions controlled by the PT and the pseudo-left around it. What has changed since 1980 is not the party’s class character, but the frankness with which it displays it: the rhetoric of “democratic socialism” and “political independence”—ideological cover for its founding in 1980, which resonated among workers at the time—has fallen away, the working-class base has collapsed, and the bourgeois party that it has always been now appears without any pretense.
The Brazilian working class and youth cannot reform the PT, nor “push it to the left,” nor use it as a “lesser evil” against the Bolsonaros and the far right. It is necessary to break with the PT, with the pseudo-left that surrounds it and with the unions that sustain it. The struggle against austerity, militarism and war demands the political independence of the working class.
The Socialist Equality Group (GSI), in solidarity with the International Committee of the Fourth International, is fighting to build the Brazilian section of the world Trotskyist movement and a revolutionary party of the working class, armed with a socialist and internationalist program. Against the PT’s “broad front” with the bourgeoisie, the united front of the exploited of all countries. Against the austerity that bleeds the public services, the expropriation of the big banks and monopolies and the socialist reorganization of the economy under the democratic control of the workers.
9. Germany: VW Osnabrück: Making weapons for genocide and war instead of convertibles
On Monday, the Volkswagen Group agreed to sell its plant in Osnabrück to Israeli investment firm Aurelius Capital and the state of Lower Saxony. Instead of convertibles, the Israeli-Lower Saxony state-owned company will now produce weapons for genocide and war.
Production of the T-Roc convertible at Osnabrück will end in the summer of 2027. The site is to be converted into a “center of excellence for security and defense solutions”—a euphemism for the switch to war production.
The state of Lower Saxony is expected to take a 20 percent stake in the joint enterprise, with the venture capital fund Aurelius Capital holding the majority. Former executives from the Israeli and US security sectors were involved in founding the fund; leading figures come from the Israeli military and intelligence apparatus. In the deal, Aurelius Capital is working hand in hand with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, a state-owned arms manufacturer that builds, among other things, the “Iron Dome” missile defense system. Rafael reports directly to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and thus to the Netanyahu government.
The VW Group Works Council under Daniela Cavallo has hailed the collaboration with Israel’s genocidal regime, describing the deal as “strong news for the site.” Israel’s largest arms manufacturer will produce, among other things, heavy-duty missile transport vehicles, launch systems, generators and engines in Osnabrück.
The state’s Social Democratic Party (SPD)-Green coalition government under State Premier Olaf Lies (SPD), the group works council and IG Metall union have actively driven forward the conversion of a car plant into an arms factory and are celebrating it as a “milestone.” Volkswagen, meanwhile, is withdrawing completely from Osnabrück.
At its peak in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the historic Karmann brand built convertibles there, the plant employed up to 10,000 workers. After Karmann went bankrupt in 2009, Volkswagen took over the site, by which time the workforce had already shrunk considerably. Since then, employee numbers have fallen to 1,800.
The works council and IG Metall have agreed that only two-thirds of these jobs will continue at the new arms plant: 400 jobs will be cut immediately, with a further 200 to go “in the near future.” Employment protection for the remaining 1,200 workers runs only until the end of 2029.
Nevertheless, the union bureaucrats are delighted. Cavallo speaks of an “important milestone for our colleagues in Osnabrück,” with 1,200 people gaining “a future at their site.” For Jürgen Placke, works council chairman in Osnabrück, the “takeover of our plant by Aurelius and the state of Lower Saxony is a first major success.” And IG Metall chair Christiane Benner fantasizes about a “new industrial future for Osnabrück and the region,” which would mean “above all security for employees and their families.”
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It is the SPD that has made possible the entry of Israel’s state arms industry into Germany, both in the federal government and in the Lower Saxony state government.
Since the summer, the state has been examining whether to take a stake in the plant; according to media reports, the state was considering an investment of at least €200 million. The SPD-Green state government pushed forward the conversion from car to arms production and is now backing it with its own stake.
The deal deliberately outmaneuvers Qatar, which holds 17 percent of Volkswagen’s voting rights through its Qatar Investment Authority sovereign wealth fund, and which had until now opposed Rafael’s entry on VW’s supervisory board. Exactly one year ago, on 9 September 2025, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) carried out a targeted airstrike on a residential building housing the Hamas leadership in Doha, Qatar, killing and injuring several people. Among the hundreds of civilians deliberately killed in Gaza are numerous journalists from the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera, including Hamza al-Dahdouh, Ismail al-Ghoul, Rami al-Rifi, Anas al-Sharif and Ibrahim Zaher.
Under the current arrangement, Qatar is being bypassed: VW is withdrawing completely from the plant and selling the factory along with its land and buildings—rather than acting as a partner in the arms business, as originally planned. The new owners, Aurelius Capital and the state of Lower Saxony, are concluding the arms contracts with Rafael independently, removing the legal basis for a Qatari veto.
While Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, together with SPD leader and Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil, are making Germany “fit for war,” pouring billions into rearmament and squeezing the money out of the population through massive social cuts, their fellow party member Lies has played a decisive role in Lower Saxony in driving forward the plant’s sale and repurposing.
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In converting Germany into a nation geared for war, the SPD can rely on the IG Metall union. Many trade unionists and workers have pointed with outrage to the union’s own constitution, under which IG Metall commits itself to “peace, disarmament and international understanding” and aims for the “democratization of the economy while keeping neo-fascist, militarist and reactionary elements at bay.”
The IG Metall and works council apparatus has openly aligned itself with the government’s massive rearmament programme. For Jürgen Kerner, IG Metall’s deputy chairman, the question is not whether the union agrees to the conversion to war production, but “how it can best support it.”
The sale of the VW plant in Osnabrück marks a turning point: for the first time, an entire car plant is being converted into an arms factory. Investment funds already see Osnabrück as a test case for the conversion of further VW plants.
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The conversion of VW into a part of a war economy by the Porsche/Piëch families and the state follows historical precedent. Volkswagen was founded by the Nazis in 1937, after the destruction of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the SPD and the trade unions, as the “Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH” (Company for the Preparation of the German Volkswagen, Ltd). With the outbreak of war in 1939, the company switched entirely to arms production, manufacturing Kübelwagen (a light, open-topped military utility vehicle) and Schwimmwagen (an amphibious variant), both built on the Volkswagen chassis, as well as aircraft parts and the V-1 rocket.
The company’s development was financed with funds seized from the banned trade unions and with huge profits from wartime arms production and forced labor. This is the basis of the two families’ present-day fortune of around €40 billion.
Today, it is the SPD that is playing the decisive role in gearing up Germany for war. The trade unions, generally led by Social Democrats, support this drive. As early as February 2024, IG Metall had concluded a formal “rearmament pact” with the SPD and the arms industry: “Germany’s own defense capabilities on land, in the air and at sea must be further developed and, where necessary, newly built up, in order to secure the industry’s capacity,” the document states, which was signed by IG Metall, the Federal Association of the German Security and Defense Industry (BDSV) and the SPD’s Economic Forum.
The attack on jobs, working conditions and wages is part of an escalating class war that is inseparably bound up with the return to war and militarism. Hundreds of billions of euros are being invested in rearmament. According to its own figures, the federal government has transferred more than €43.3 billion to Ukraine since February 2022 and provided or committed military support worth around €57.6 billion.
Berlin supports the Netanyahu government with billions of euros’ worth of arms in its genocide of the Palestinians and its war against Iran. In the first half of 2026 alone, approved arms exports to Israel came to just under €800 million—compared with around €650 million over the preceding three years.
The conversion to arms production must be rejected. The defence of jobs cannot be left to the trade unions, which act as the paid agents of the corporations. Instead, independent rank-and-file action committees must be built to coordinate struggles across industries and countries, as part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
The nationalist policy of the trade unions, which plays off one plant against another and supports the government’s war policy, must be countered with the international unity of the working class—regardless of nationality, origin or skin color.
The fight for jobs and against war requires a socialist strategy: the needs of the working population must take precedence over corporate profits; the dictatorship of the corporations must be broken and their enterprises transferred into public ownership.
The strike at National Steel Car in Hamilton, Ontario, now in its fourth week, has brought to the surface a question that goes to the heart of the wage system under capitalism: the plant’s “incentive” pay scheme, a piecework system in all but name.
The National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee has made abolition of this system a central demand: incentive pay must go, hourly wages must be based on the maximum day rate including the current incentive rate.
This is not merely a call for a raise but a demand to get rid of a payment mechanism whose logic is lethal. Between 2020 and 2022, the incentive system was behind the deaths of three workers: Fraser Cowan, Collin Grayley and Quoc Le. NSC owner Greg Aziz paid a combined $650,000 in fines, roughly one day’s revenue for him.
The piecework scheme at NSC is simple: a worker gets a base wage plus a “bonus,” paid only if quotas are met—converting full wages from a guaranteed payment into something dependent on meeting a pace set by company.
As a rank-and-file worker explained, the company “steals from you, or attempts to steal from you, 25 percent of your wages ... unless you hop and skip and jump and dance to his tune, put your life on the line, wreck your body and potentially kill yourself.” This quota cannot be met at a regular pace, only by cutting corners, skipping safety checks and driving the body to its limit; a worker who stops the line to address a hazard, or rests when exhausted, forfeits a significant part of their pay.
The essential analysis of this brutal system was provided by the founder of scientific socialism, Karl Marx, more than 150 years ago in his monumental work Capital. Under capitalism, workers sell their labor power for a wage, which is the “price” of the commodities needed to sustain a worker and replace him after his body is worn out. The new value created by the labor of workers not only covers the cost of labour power but produces a “surplus value,” which is pocketed by capitalists like Greg Aziz as profit.
The piece-rate is just a mathematical trick derived from time-wages. Management decides how many units an average worker should produce in a day and sets the price per piece to match the standard daily wage. The underlying dynamic remains the same. A fraction of the worker’s workday covers their wages, and every piece after that point is unpaid labor captured as profit.
Piecework is far more aggressive than time-wages because it weaponizes the worker’s own drive for survival. Management brands it an “incentive” because every extra piece means a few more dollars, driving workers to exhaustion. As Marx noted, the piece-rate itself becomes the overseer. It also enables wage-cutting: whenever workers mastered a technique and raised output, management historically slashed the rate, trapping them in an escalating cycle of speed just to maintain baseline pay.
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Piecework declined after World War II in heavy industry, not out of benevolence but because the assembly line and later “lean” monitoring made the piece rate technically redundant. At the same time, globalization simply relocated piecework to Bangladesh’s garment sweatshops, where workers die in factory fires, to the maquiladoras of the US-Mexico border, and to US warehouses, delivery fleets and “gig workers.”
The USW is not fighting to abolish this brutal system; it is an accomplice in its continued existence. USW officials negotiated the letter of understanding at NSC that makes piecework rates non-grievable and non-arbitrable—disarming workers in advance, then pointing to its own handiwork as the reason “nothing can be done.” During the 2023 strike, the USW apparatus starved workers on $260 a week and pushed through a contract that left piecework intact.
In the current strike, it has abandoned the demand for abolition, proposing instead to administer the incentive program. As a rank-and-file worker put it, the USW gets “involved in the process of how this company makes profit,” co-opted to “do the dirty work of management.”
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The National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee is fighting to put shop floor workers in charge of our own struggle. We urge workers to put together our own non-negotiable demands, including the complete abolition of the piecework system and an increase in hourly wages equivalent to the maximum day rate and current incentive pay. At the same time, we must defeat the bureaucracy’s effort to isolate us and starve us into submission with poverty strike benefits.
The only viable path forward is to broaden the strike across Hamilton, Canada and North America by linking with steel, railroad, auto and logistics workers through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
The nationalist “Team Canada” rhetoric pushed by the union bureaucracy is a trap that chains Canadian workers to Bay Street’s profit interests and divides the working class along national lines when corporate supply chains span the globe.
We have appealed to North American rail workers to set aside NSCX cars, cutting off Aziz’s revenue, and reviving a weapon of the 1894 Pullman Strike, when Eugene Debs’ American Railway Union refused to handle Pullman cars and shut down much of the nation’s rail transport during their battle to defeat piecework and wage cuts.
We welcome the statement of the Railroad Workers Rank-and-File Committee in the US endorsing our call to boycott NSCX cars. We could not agree more with their statement and its call to place at the center of our fight the mobilization of workers across North America: “The corporations organize production and profits across borders. Workers cannot defend jobs, wages or safety by allowing ourselves to be divided at those same borders.”
11. SAG-AFTRA bureaucracy backs Trump’s protectionist Hollywood agenda
Last month, the Trump administration proposed the Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act, which would establish a 20 percent federal production tax credit combinable with existing state incentives. The proposal provides credits for qualifying domestic production and labor costs and requires productions to meet specified domestic workforce thresholds. Its most ardent supporters are Hollywood’s union bureaucracies.
The federal incentive would supplement programs already operating in states, including Georgia, California, New York and Texas. The administration has presented the measure as a response to the growth of subsidized production in countries, including Canada, Britain and Australia, claiming that these incentives have contributed to roughly 45 percent of US scripted projects being produced overseas.
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It is this corporate-welfare scheme that has produced a remarkable political spectacle: an instant alliance between Trump and some of his ostensible opponents. SAG-AFTRA, IATSE and the Motion Picture Association have all endorsed the proposal, alongside Democratic politicians like Senator Adam Schiff and Governor Gavin Newsom, who previously sought billions in federal film credits themselves. Politicians who otherwise posture as advocates of taxing the rich are joining studio executives in seeking special tax advantages for one industry.
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SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin, a longtime Democrat and outspoken Trump critic, has likewise praised the administration’s push for federal production incentives. In a joint statement with National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, Astin said it was essential to ensure that “the United States remains a global leader in film and television production” and argued that a federal incentive would “bring more productions and thousands of jobs back to the United States.” SAG-AFTRA, he added, was prepared to work with the administration, Congress and industry representatives.
This is the corporatist-chauvinist program of the union bureaucracy. Workers are told that their jobs can be protected only by making the United States a more profitable location for capital than its competitors. The unions do not challenge the premise that corporations should receive public money to create jobs. They enforce it, acting as the industrial police of American capitalism: binding workers to nationalism, subordinating them to the demands of profit and enforcing the exploitation and divisions of the capitalist system.
Astin’s “global leader” is not the working class but American capital. His appeal aligns perfectly with Trump’s economic nationalism, the same protectionist logic by which the administration threatens tariffs on foreign films and pits American workers against their counterparts in Canada, Britain and Australia.
This comes shortly after the Directors Guild of America and IATSE have openly supported Trump’s ally David Ellison in his Paramount-Warner merger, a corporate move that comes at an exorbitant cost for workers.
The political danger is already visible. Once Washington controls the distribution of billions in production incentives, politicians—whether the fascistic Trump or the Democrats, should the pendulum swing in November—will attach conditions to the money. The unions, having enlisted in this scheme, will facilitate this.
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The bureaucracy is a distinct social layer whose material interests are bound up with the corporations and the Democratic Party. In February 2026, 115 staff members of the Writers Guild of America West struck their own union over wages and retaliation, while WGAW Executive Director Ellen Stutzman earned $761,624 in 2025 and a prior executive director took home over $1 million. The union that poses as the defender of writers against corporate exploitation was itself the target of its workers’ strike.
The same apparatus operates across every industry. The UAW, Unifor, the USW all enforce the competitive framework, suppress strikes and channel opposition back into the Democratic Party. Unifor is today promoting the trade war and Canadian militarism as it rams through a “pattern” agreement with General Motors ahead of the September 21 expiration, precisely to block rank-and-file opposition.
But the rank and file are increasingly opposing this. In the last two months alone: 10,000 John Deere workers rejected a sellout contract extension, defying a UAW apparatus that tried to smother the 2027 fight before it began. Some 1,200 workers at National Steel Car in Hamilton, Ontario, entered the third week of a strike against a USW bureaucracy that abandoned the fight against piecework. The Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee was formed to oppose UAW sabotage. Educators in Victoria, Australia formed a rank-and-file committee amid mass opposition to a sellout deal.
At the center of this revolt stands the campaign of Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist running for president of the UAW on a program of rank-and-file power and internationalism. Lehman’s campaign is a direct challenge to the nationalism that the union apparatuses—including SAG-AFTRA under Astin—now embrace.
When a UAW official issued a death threat against Lehman, workers in the United States, Mexico, Britain, New Zealand and Germany rose to his defense. GM workers in Silao, Mexico issued statements supporting Lehman and demanding the freedom of Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk.
The lesson is the same in Hollywood as in auto. The enemy is not the Georgia worker or the Canadian worker employed by a company receiving a tax incentive. It is the conglomerates that use workers’ divisions to demand ever larger concessions from governments. The fight must be taken out of the hands of the union bureaucracies and put into the hands of workers themselves, through independent rank-and-file committees united across crafts, industries and national borders.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) exists to make that unity a reality. Against the nationalism of Trump, Astin and the union officialdom, the only answer is the international unity of the working class against the capitalist system that pits worker against worker.
12. Thailand’s bogus amnesty law
The anti-democratic character of Thailand’s new “Peaceful Society Promotion Act” has been exposed within days of taking effect on August 24.
On August 28, the Criminal Court terminated proceedings against 15 defendants charged principally with sedition over the September 2020 protests demanding the resignation of the military-backed Prayut government, a new constitution and reform of the monarchy.
However, seven co-defendants remain on trial under Section 112, the draconian lèse-majesté law used to criminalize criticism of the monarchy. According to the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), between November 2020 and August 2026, 293 individuals have been charged under Section 112, including 20 children.
The protests were part of a mass youth-led movement that erupted in 2020 against the regime established by the 2014 military coup and its close association with the monarchy and its right-wing backers.
In the main, the legislation provides amnesty (or official pardons) to royalist and conservative forces while continuing the persecution of critics of the monarchy. The king has been the central pillar of the conservative Thai establishment that has resorted repeatedly to military coups to maintain its power.
The amnesty legislation was developed from a proposal of the military-aligned United Thai Nation Party (UTN). Parliament rejected the separate People’s Party (PP) and citizen-sponsored bills, which included coverage of Section 112 defendants, at their first reading in July 2025. The PP came to prominence after the 2020 demonstrations by calling for reform of the monarchy and an end to the military regime—proposals it has since abandoned.
The Act covers offenses arising from political assemblies or expression between January 1, 2005 and July 16, 2025. On the one hand, it includes rebellion under Section 113, sedition, terrorism and election offenses. On the other, it excludes Section 112, corruption, conduct causing death or serious injury and certain offenses against private individuals.
Therefore, conduct aimed at paralyzing elected governments can potentially be forgiven but not if it included criticism of the monarchy.
Among the clearest potential beneficiaries are figures from two royalist movements: the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), known as the Yellow Shirts, and the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC).
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The new law potentially clears away legal consequences for participants in these royalist campaigns. The Senate specifically added aviation-security offences to the amnesty schedule, widening its possible application to the airport occupations.
The protection extends beyond criminal cases. Airports of Thailand obtained a civil judgment of 522 million baht ($US15.9 million), plus interest, against 13 PAD leaders over the airport seizures. The airport company confirmed on August 26 that nothing had yet been paid. Section 9 potentially ends enforcement of such outstanding liabilities to state agencies where the underlying conduct qualifies for amnesty.
Further exposing the anti-democratic character of the bill is the fact that eligibility will be determined by a nine-member committee chaired by the prime minister or a designated deputy, with qualifying cases then processed through the courts. Political defendants are therefore dependent on the very state apparatus that has enforced the constitutional order established following the 2014 coup and repeatedly intervened against elected governments and opposition parties.
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The amnesty bill, rather than being a democratic resolution of two decades of repression as promoted by the PP and civil society advocates, has become a mechanism for rehabilitating royalist and conservative forces. The concessions to some political defendants cannot obscure that central purpose.
The fight for democratic rights must include the unconditional release of political prisoners, termination of Section 112 prosecutions and the case against the 44 former MPs, repeal of lèse-majesté and junta orders, and removal of constitutional immunity for coup leaders and officials responsible for repression.
The near unanimous support of the Thai political establishment for the anti-democratic “Peaceful Society Promotion Act” demonstrates that the defense of basic democratic rights can only go forward as part of the political struggle for socialism.
13. Trump administration doubles down on attack on mail ballots
Less than 8 weeks before the November 3 midterm elections, the Trump administration is escalating its drive to disenfranchise millions of working class and poor voters. The centerpiece of the White House’s assault on the right to vote is its attack on mail-in voting.
Even as states began sending out ballots this week, the US Postal Service (USPS) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) filed separate emergency applications with the US Supreme Court to lift lower court rulings blocking implementation of Trump executive orders designed to sharply curtail mail-in voting and purge voter rolls.
At the same time, DHS surged an operation nominally aimed at preventing noncitizens from voting in November. This is in line with Trump’s fabricated claims that hundreds of thousands of non-eligible immigrants are on state voting rolls and vote illegally in US elections—something for which there is no evidence.
The surge is being conducted by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), an arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the anti-immigrant Gestapo that has occupied and terrorized towns and cities across the country; kidnapped, detained and deported hundreds of thousands of immigrants; fatally shot immigrant workers Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero; and murdered protesters Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
The states targeted by the DHS/HSI surge include Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York and Connecticut.
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The administration recently forced out the independent members of the Election Assistance Commission, which oversees the certification of machines, and Trump has stacked the USPS Board of Governors with Republicans who parrot the lie that Biden’s 2020 election victory was the result of fraud. Heather Honey, who played a prominent role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is deputy assistant secretary for election integrity at DHS. She is a protégé of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who was on the January 2021 phone call in which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden's victory in that state.
On September 6, the US Postal Service asked the Supreme Court to stay an injunction issued the previous Friday by US District Judge Indira Talwani blocking implementation of an executive order signed by Trump last March restricting mail-in voting. That order directs the secretary of Homeland Security to compile lists in each state of US citizens eligible to vote and to send the lists to the states prior to any federal election. The states are then required to send lists of all registered voters to whom they are sending mail-in and absentee ballots to the USPS. The Postal Service is tasked with verifying these lists and withholding mail ballots from voters not on the lists of citizens compiled by federal agencies.
In addition, the Department of Justice is directed to investigate and prosecute state and local election officials who issue ballots to individuals deemed by the federal government to be ineligible to vote in federal elections. The order also directs the Postal Service to refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that do not comply with the new rules.
Last week, a report compiled by an anonymous whistleblower at USPS was made public. In it, the postal official warned that Trump’s executive order, giving the Postal Service immense powers to withhold mail ballots, “could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles, and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots.”
In her September 4 ruling, Judge Talwani wrote that the postal policy “threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail.”
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A coalition of voter service and civic groups, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in the lawsuit, wrote:
USPS has no authority in the Constitution or federal law over how states administer mail voting. And the president cannot order the Postal Service to create a disruptive new bureaucracy that will throw the election into chaos and disenfranchise untold numbers of voters.
However, opinion polls show the Republicans losing the midterm elections badly, and one of the aims of the White House’s full-court press against mail-in voting is precisely to foment the maximum level of chaos. Trump is preparing to exploit such conditions to either suspend the vote, mobilize ICE and federal troops to the polls to intimidate voters, or declare the outcome invalid and seek to overturn it.
This is, after all, the same fascist who organized a mob of insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, to overthrow the 2020 election along with the Constitution, and retain power on the basis of dictatorial rule. He met with no resistance from the supposed opposition party, the Democrats, and was allowed by them to retake power four years later.
The Supreme Court said it would accept the USPS filing and arguments from its opponents by September 8 and rule sometime later, very possibly by the end of this week.
13. Support in Australia and NZ for the freedom of jailed Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk
The international campaign for the release of Bogdan Syrotiuk, the 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist sentenced to 15 years in prison for his political opposition to the NATO-Russia war, continues to win support across Australia, New Zealand and in South Korea.
14. Investigative report exposes vast US military basing in Australia
New data compiled by the Nautilus Institute and reported by the Guardian has underscored a vast expansion of American military basing across the Australian continent. Significantly, and rarely for a corporate publication, the Guardian notes that the build-up is bound up with US preparations for a war against China.
The data reveals US control over 17 defence facilities in Australia and access to another 75 Australian installations.
The Guardian notes: “In total, the US military and US defence corporations have control of or access to 110 facilities on Australian territory, well over half of all the military installations in Australia.”
Some of those facilities and access arrangements are longstanding, reflecting the protracted character of the US-Australian military alliance. However, there has been a major growth of US basing since the 2011 announcement of the US “pivot to Asia,” a massive military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific, explicitly directed against China.
That has accelerated further under the current Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whose keynote policy is completing Australia’s transformation into a staging ground for a catastrophic war in the Indo-Pacific.
The Guardian’s interactive report on the data features some of the most strategically significant US military facilities. For instance:
- “Amid the red dirt of Katherine, the runway at RAAF Base Tindal is being expanded to be able to better accommodate massive American B-52 bombers, the so-called ‘Stratofortresses.’ These aircraft are able to land on Australian soil carrying nuclear weapons. The US government won’t tell Australia if and when they are. The Australian government won’t ask.”
- “RAAF Base Amberley, about 50km south-west of Brisbane, is a vital staging point for US military operations across the region.” The facility, in such close proximity to a major Australian city, is already hosting US B-2 Spirit Stealth bombers, which the Guardian points out are also capable of carrying nuclear weapons.
- The Harold Holt naval communication facility in the north of Western Australia “provide[s] vital information to enable US submarine and space warfare. The naval communication station is designed to reach submerged submarines.”
- Pine Gap, the US war planning facility in central Australia, is also featured, with the Guardian noting that it is “regarded by some as the US military’s most valuable intelligence site outside the continental United States.” The facility, which processes data from satellites covering a vast swathe of the globe, “intercepts military communications and provides targeting information for US forces around the world.”
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The facilities in the north of the continent are openly being primed as a launching pad for US warplanes and bombers to conduct operations targeting China throughout the region. A contingent of US marines, based in Darwin, would serve as a spearhead of maritime deployments.
The Stirling submarine base in Western Australia is being “upgraded” by the Labor government, in preparation to permanently host the US fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, beginning next year. More than one thousand US military personnel will be stationed in Perth, along with as many as a thousand contractors. Stirling will become one of the key US bases adjacent to the Indian Ocean, with the US nuclear-powered submarines stationed there capable of carrying out missions throughout the waters of Asia, up to the Chinese coast.
But behind those platforms that could be used for direct warfare, a vast logistics network is being assembled. The Guardian reports: “Announced in June, Bandiana base in Wodonga will be the site of tens of millions of dollars worth of pre-positioned US weapons, munitions, fuel and vehicles, stationed for rapid deployment in the event of conflict in the Pacific.” Wodonga, in north-east Victoria, is some 324 kilometers north of the state capital Melbourne.
That is one of the striking aspects of a map in the Guardian report, showing all of the Australian military facilities, including those to which the US has access. A far higher number than most people would likely assume are located on the east coast of the country, including near the country’s largest cities.
In addition to prepositioning, there are training facilities, existing bases of the various branches of the armed forces, many of which the US has access to, and secretive intelligence facilities.
That involves the entire US military-intelligence complex, including the private arms manufacturers. The report states that “at least 42 Australian military facilities are accessed by US defense contractors,” who are engaged in the manufacture of advanced weapons systems and components on Australian soil, as well as their testing, and are increasingly integrated with the country’s own burgeoning military industry.
The data and the Guardian’s reportage of it is notable, not only for providing a picture of just how extensive the military build-up is, but because such information is generally not broadcast by the official media establishment.
Throughout the 15 years of the “pivot to Asia,” there has been a veritable conspiracy of silence on the build-up of both the US military presence in Australia and its purpose. To the extent that the prospect of war in the Indo-Pacific has even been openly canvassed in the corporate outlets, it has invariably been in an utterly fraudulent and inverted form, with China depicted as an irrational and aggressive power threatening US allies.
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The fact that the Guardian was inclined to publish such a report underscores the advanced character of the war preparations, which are undoubtedly the subject of continuous discussion in official circles. The military build-up in the Indo-Pacific, moreover, is not an isolated phenomenon, but is part of a developing global war, from the US-led war throughout the Middle East, including the utterly criminal assault on Iran, to a four-year conflict in Ukraine that has the character of a proxy war waged by the US and NATO against Russia.
The Guardian uncritically cites the political assessment of the Nautilus Institute, which is closely aligned with organizations that call for a more “independent” Australian foreign policy. These groups, such as the “Independent and Peaceful Australian Network,” particularly train their fire on AUKUS, the militarist pact between Australia, the US and the UK, under which Australia is to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.
Their opposition is essentially tactical and is utterly nationalist. That is reflected in the Guardian report, which leads with a declaration that “some analysts” describe the expansion of US military facilities in Australia as “‘saturation’–even a ‘colonization’–of the Australian continent.’”
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Australia is not being “colonized,” nor is its ruling elite being dragged unwillingly into the US war plans. Instead, it is aggressively advancing its own imperialist interests in conjunction with the US offensive. That has been expressed in a campaign by the current Labor government of political, economic and diplomatic pressure on the oppressed states of the Pacific Islands to align with the anti-China campaign, and to effectively cede their sovereignty to Canberra. The various “anti-AUKUS” groups, which present Australia as a victim of a dominant US, invariably have nothing to say about Australia’s own neo-colonial operations.
Above all, the nationalist line is a political trap for anti-war sentiment, which will only grow as the danger of war against China becomes more evident and as the global conflict of which those preparations are a part deepens.
For workers and young people, the alternative is not to align with sections of the ruling elite based on Australian nationalism, but to turn to the building of an international anti-war movement uniting the working class around the world on the basis of a socialist perspective directed at abolishing the root cause of war, the capitalist system.
15. Germany: After the AfD’s election victory: The Left Party is courting the CDU
The AfD’s election victory in Saxony-Anhalt has triggered the expected reaction from the Left Party. Following the rise of the extreme right, it is not breaking with the policies that paved the way for it. On the contrary, it is ingratiating itself even more openly with the CDU and the other establishment parties and offering to prop up CDU-led governments. This recipe will not weaken the AfD but strengthen it further.
The AfD is not an accident. Its rise is taking place within the framework of a rightward shift that has been driven from above for years. Under conditions of a deep crisis of capitalism, the ruling class is turning ever more openly to militarism, domestic rearmament and social cuts, and for this purpose it is strengthening authoritarian and far-right forces. A significant part of the AfD leadership comes from the state apparatus and the establishment parties. Its lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, was also a member of the CDU for five years before joining the AfD.
The Left Party knows very well that the AfD’s rise is a product of these policies. It itself accuses the federal government of preparing the ground for the AfD through rearmament, social cuts and the adoption of right-wing positions. Nevertheless, it declares the CDU, of all parties, to be its partner in the supposed “fight against the right.”
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The Left Party and the BSW are currently pursuing different tactical paths, but they defend the same capitalist order. Wagenknecht is openly turning to the AfD. The leadership of the Left Party binds workers and young people to the CDU, SPD and Greens and declares them the “democratic camp.” Both block an independent socialist movement of the working class.
The same applies to the pseudo-left groups inside and around the Left Party, which criticize its current orientation to the CDU but nevertheless insist that one must not break with the party. In this way, they prevent precisely the political reckoning and the building of an independent socialist workers’ party that is necessary to pull the ground from under the extreme right and stop the ruling class’s turn to fascism and militarism.
Despite its high election result, the AfD is not a fascist mass movement on the model of the NSDAP, the Nazi Party (also known as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party). Many of its voters are not convinced right-wing extremists. They voted for the AfD out of anger at the federal government, the decay of social infrastructure, job cuts and war policy, and from the experience that the supposedly left-wing parties implement the same policies as the traditionally right-wing parties. This anger is real, but the AfD channels it in a reactionary direction.
It must be directed at its real cause—the capitalist profit system. The ruling class is not turning to the right because individual politicians make wrong decisions. The capitalist crisis, the intensified struggle for markets and raw materials in a developing Third World War and growing social resistance are driving the ruling elites internationally toward militarism, authoritarianism and fascism.
That is why the struggle against the AfD cannot be waged in alliance with the bourgeois parties but only against the CDU, SPD, Greens and Left Party. Their policies have created the social and political ground on which the extreme right is growing.
The fight against fascism and militarism requires an independent offensive by the working class against social cuts, layoffs, rearmament and war, and against their common cause: capitalism. It requires a political break with the Left Party and all forces that bind the working class to it and to the profit system.
16. 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.
