On March 27, David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site,
delivered a lecture of exceptional political and historical
significance at Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) in Nuremberg,
Germany.
*****
The Nuremberg lecture capped a highly successful series of public meetings across Germany, following well-attended events in Leipzig and Berlin.
Trump's speech begins about nine minutes into this official White House video
There has never been an address like this given by an American
president. Whatever the crimes carried out by former administrations,
they were framed as the defense of democracy, self-determination and
liberation. Now the American president’s message to the population of an
entire country is: accept our demands, or die.
*****
A criminal underworld is in power. The war against Iran is the
product of decades of escalating violence—from the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq, through the destruction of Libya and Syria,
through the genocide in Gaza—each crime more brazen, each carried out
with greater impunity.
Under Trump, however, a qualitatively new
stage has been reached, with the abandonment of any even pretense of
legal restraint, the proclamation that there are, as they say, no “red
lines”—including the use of nuclear weapons—in the pursuit of
imperialist domination.
In oral arguments before the Supreme Court Wednesday and in an executive
order issued at the White House Tuesday afternoon, the Trump
administration pressed ahead with a frontal assault on the democratic
rights of the American people.
The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday morning on Trump v. Barbara,
the case triggered by Trump’s issuance in January 2025, upon taking
office, of an executive order purporting to do away with birthright
citizenship.
The order has been challenged repeatedly in court,
based on Trump’s open defiance of the plain language of the
14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which begins: “All persons born
or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they
reside.”
For 160 years, this clause has been understood to mean
all children born in US territory, except those of foreign diplomats,
are citizens. The application of this language to the children of
immigrants was upheld by the Supreme Court in its 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark,
which upheld Wong’s citizenship rights based on his birth in San
Francisco, even though his immigrant parents had been barred from
naturalization by the racist Chinese Exclusion Act.
Seeking to
overturn birthright citizenship is a major focus of Trump’s persecution
of immigrants. It would deprive a quarter-million newborns of
citizenship each year, and if applied retroactively would nullify the
citizenship of millions of people born in the US to immigrant parents.
Trump signaled the importance of the case by attending the first part of
oral arguments, when Solicitor General D. John Sauer presented the
administration’s case and answered questions from the Supreme Court
justices. It was the first time any president had attended oral
arguments, in what was clearly a heavy-handed effort to bully the court,
including the three members appointed by Trump during his first term.
*****
The brief filed by the ACLU on behalf of a group of immigrant parents
and their children makes a powerful case for the unconstitutionality of
Trump’s executive order.
It points to the historical roots of
the 14th Amendment in English common law, and the discussions in
Congress during its adoption, in which the language was drafted to put
birthright citizenship “beyond the reach of officials in any branch of
government who might seek to overturn or narrow it.” The brief declares:
“The government is asking for nothing less than a remaking of our
nation’s constitutional foundations.”
Only ultra-right Justice
Samuel Alito seemed to favor the arguments made by Sauer, while his
co-thinker Clarence Thomas asked one question to begin the hearing and
then remained silent for the remaining two hours. Echoing the fascistic
“Great Replacement Theory,” Alito remarked that there were billions of
people who were “one plane ride” away from producing a child who would
be an American citizen. This deliberately echoed the administration
brief’s fantasy of “birth tourism,” and Trump’s own social media ravings
about “Chinese billionaires” giving rise to tens of thousands of new
American citizens.
While Sauer praised Alito’s remark, saying that
the ease of global travel meant that it was a “new world” compared to
the era of the 14th Amendment, Chief Justice John Roberts rebuked the
notion, saying, “It’s a new world, it is the same Constitution.”
*****
Whatever the eventual court ruling, there is no reason to think that
the Trump administration will abide by it. Trump has demonstrated his
contempt for constitutional and legal restraints on executive power ever
since entering the White House. And the persecution of immigrants,
through mass detentions and deportations and outright state killings of
immigrant defenders—as in the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex
Pretti in Minneapolis, has been the main focus of his domestic policy.
This
was demonstrated by the executive order which Trump signed on Tuesday
afternoon, purporting to take control of mail-in voting for federal
elections. Titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in
Federal Elections,” the order directs the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) and the Social Security Administration to create jointly a
master list of all US citizens aged 18 and older and eligible to
register to vote. The creation of such a list is unprecedented, and the
databases to be used are riddled with errors.
The DHS would then
transmit to each state its portion of the master list, and state
officials who issued mail ballots to anyone not on the list—or allowed
such individuals to register to vote—would be subject to felony
prosecution.
The order goes on to direct the U.S. Postal Service
to establish uniform regulations for the form of mail ballots to be used
by the states, effectively making the USPS the overseer of mail-in
voting, rather than merely the conduit by which such ballots are sent
from individual voters to the state and local officials who tabulate
them.
Trump issued the executive order despite the complete lack of any
legal or constitutional authority to regulate the conduct of elections.
The Constitution reserves primary authority over elections to the
individual states, while allowing Congress to set national rules. The
executive branch is given no role to play.
Multiple states
immediately announced they would file suit against Trump’s executive
order. State opposition had already torpedoed an administration plan to
compel the states to hand over their voter rolls to the Department of
Justice, which would “vet” them against databases of felons and
undocumented immigrants—again, riddled with errors. So many states
refused to cooperate, including several under Republican control, that
the plan had to be abandoned.
Instead of relying on the states to
turn over voter data to the federal government, the new executive order
would have the federal government “push” voter data to the states and
require the states to use the federal lists. There is little prospect of
this procedure being put into effect in time for the 2026 elections,
even if it survives legal challenges.
But that is not really the
goal. Trump and his fascist aides are seeking to conjure up the specter
of fraudulent voting by masses of “illegal aliens” as a way to discredit
the 2026 elections, under conditions where opinion polls suggest a
debacle for the Republican Party, including loss of control of Congress
and governorships of key states.
The ultimate aim is to rig the elections, through a combination of
physical intimidation of voters using troops and armed federal agents,
like the ICE Gestapo, and to create systematic disruption of voting in
major urban areas, on college campuses and at other locations where
opposition to Trump and his policies is concentrated. Or, on the pretext
of war, terrorism or some combination of the two, cancel the elections
entirely, and entrench Trump as dictator-president without any legal
check on executive power.
Such an outcome cannot be prevented
through lawsuits or appeals to the congressional Democrats. The defense
of democratic rights, including the rights of immigrants and the right
to vote, depends on the independent political mobilization of the
working class against capitalism and the parties that are the political
instruments of the financial oligarchy, the Democrats as well as the
Republicans.
As the criminal US-Israeli war of aggression on Iran enters its fifth
week and the Trump administration is poised to dramatically escalate the
conflict, its global dimensions are coming into sharper relief. While
the immediate aim is the subordination of Iran and the Middle East to US
imperialist interests, the war is viewed in Washington as essential
preparation for conflict with China, regarded as the chief threat to US
global domination.
The war has already had a major impact on the Chinese economy, not only
through the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but also by undermining its
efforts to strengthen diplomatic and strategic ties with Iran and the
broader region over the past decade. As well as being a significant
source of oil and gas for China, Iran is strategically placed on the
crossroads between Europe and Asia and thus for Beijing’s key Belt and
Road Initiative, which aims to forge infrastructure links across the
Eurasian landmass.
Like many countries in Asia and internationally, China has been hit
by soaring global energy costs. By the end of 2025, China was importing
around 1.4 million barrels a day of oil from Iran, which represented
roughly 13 percent of its total imports. The hardest hit have been
China’s so-called “teapot” refineries—small private operations that
specialised in processing sanctioned oil at a discount—from Iran and
also Venezuela.
The Trump administration’s decision to attack
both Venezuela and Iran in rapid succession was not accidental. Both
countries were heavily dependent on China as a means of circumventing
the sanctions regime imposed, for the most part, unilaterally by US
imperialism. China accounted for between 80-90 percent of Iran’s oil
exports in recent years. Having secured control of Venezuelan oil in the
wake of the illegal kidnapping of the country’s president, the US aims
to do the same with Iranian oil.
*****
While Iran has been central to its moves in the Middle East, China
has sought to strengthen its ties more broadly throughout the region. In
March 2023, in a deal brokered by China, Iran and Saudi Arabia—bitter
rivals throughout the Middle East—agreed to re-establish diplomatic
relations ruptured in 2016 and ease mutual tensions. The agreement,
which effectively sidelined the US, set off alarm bells in Washington as
it signalled China’s growing influence in the region.
The easing
of tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia helped consolidate China’s
expansion of ties with Arab countries in the Middle East. Two-way trade
expanded rapidly from $36 billion in 2010 to $400 billion in 2024 and
diversified from a focus on oil and gas into technology related to AI
and 5G systems, as well as renewable energy. Chinese foreign direct
investment has also expanded, particularly related to BRI
infrastructure. In 2024, the Middle East was the largest recipient of
BRI investments, with projects and construction contracts totalling
around $39 billion, including $18.9 billion in Saudi Arabia, $9 billion
in Iraq and $3.1 billion in the UAE.
Beijing has forged
“comprehensive strategic partnerships” with Saudi Arabia and the UAE,
while deepening ties with Egypt and the Gulf States. China has also
begun selling arms to other Middle Eastern countries in addition to
Iran, including military drones to Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Iraq and
Jordan.
The all-out US-Israeli war on Iran has now ruptured relations between
Iran and its Arab neighbours, especially Saudi Arabia, and dealt a
significant blow to Chinese diplomacy in the Middle East. In the face of
the massive bombardment of its civilian and military infrastructure,
Iran has been driven to retaliate against the Gulf States where the US
military is based and from where it has launched strikes.
*****
Beijing’s response to the brazen, illegal US war on Iran has also
called into question the value to governments of its comprehensive
strategic partnerships, not only in the Middle East but more broadly.
These partnerships have never been formal military alliances committing
China to come to the aid of its partners in time of war. It has no
mutual defence treaty with Iran, no permanent bases inside the country,
and has not provided Iran with advanced weaponry.
The Chinese
government has criticized the attacks on Iran as a fundamental breach of
international law, but has taken few if any steps to provide Tehran
with political or material support. The Chinese foreign ministry
described the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei as “a grave
violation of Iran’s sovereignty and security,” and Foreign Minister Wang
Yi declared the attacks to be “unacceptable.” China and Russia convened
an emergency UN Security Council session in New York on February 28
citing the US and Israel’s “unprovoked and reckless act of military
aggression.”
At the same time, however, Russia and China abstained
on a blatantly biased UN Security Council resolution condemning “in the
strongest terms” Iran’s retaliatory strikes on the Gulf states, while
saying nothing about the ongoing American and Israeli aggression that
had provoked the Iranian retaliation. By abstaining rather than using
their veto powers, the two countries allowed the resolution to be
carried.
*****
The sole social force capable of halting this plunge into world war is
the international working class. What is necessary is the political
fight for a unified anti-war movement of workers in the Middle East and
around the world, including in China and the US, based on socialist
principles, aimed at abolishing capitalism and its outmoded nation-state
system that is the source of war.
General Motors has again idled its flagship electric vehicle plant in
Detroit, temporarily laying off the 1,300 workers on the last shift
left running at the factory. Factory Zero stopped production on March
16 and is not expected to restart until April 13, leaving the workers
without pay for a month.
The latest shutdown comes less than three
months after a mass permanent layoff and the elimination of an entire
shift. It is a devastating new blow to workers who have now endured a
relentless cycle of overwork, temporary shutdowns and permanent job cuts
stretching back years.
Last October, GM had announced it would
permanently eliminate more than 1,200 positions at Factory Zero and
slash operations to a single shift. The cuts cascaded immediately
through the supply chain: supplier Avancez laid off 143 workers in Hazel
Park, Michigan; Dana Thermal Products closed its Auburn Hills plant,
cutting 200 jobs; Autokinition eliminated 133 positions; and Yanfeng cut
another 192.
Hundreds of additional layoffs hit EV and battery
plants across the Midwest and South—550 indefinite layoffs and 850
temporary ones at the Ultium Cells plant in Lordstown, Ohio, and 710
temporary layoffs at the Spring Hill, Tennessee Ultium Cells facility.
Now, with the April shutdown, those who survived the first wave of cuts
find themselves once again pushed into economic limbo.
GM
spokesman Kevin Kelly offered corporate speak in response to press
inquiries, saying that “Factory Zero will temporarily adjust production
to align EV production with market demand” and that “impacted employees
will be placed on a temporary layoff and may be eligible for subpay and
benefits in accordance with the GM-UAW national contract.”
United
Auto Workers Local 22 President James Cotton told reporters he was
“disappointed that the EV market has failed to take off as expected” and
blamed the Trump administration’s elimination of the $7,500 EV tax
credit and rollback of tailpipe pollution rules. “I never feel great
about any layoffs,” Cotton said, “but sometimes market demand may impede
production.” That anodyne response stands in sharp contrast to the fury
and anxiety among workers on the shopfloor.
“Workers
at Factory Zero are not responsible for the economic crisis being
exacerbated by Trump’s criminal war against Iran, nor for the
shortsighted decisions of management, which are primarily concerned with
enriching stockholders and corporate executives,” Lehman said.
He
said workers at Factory Zero and other plants should build
rank-and-file committees that would enforce a zero-layoff policy and the
return of all laid-off workers to their jobs. “When production is
slowed, workers’ hours should be cut with no loss of pay. Automation,
artificial intelligence, and other technologies should be used to lessen
the burden of work and sharply increase workers’ living standards—not
throw them into the streets.”
Lehman placed the crisis squarely in
the context of capitalist production for profit. “GM is spending
billions on executive salaries, stock buybacks and its new headquarters
in downtown Detroit while workers are thrown out of their jobs,” he
said. “The company had adjusted profits of $12.7 billion for 2025,
following record profits of $14.9 billion in 2024. GM stock has risen
approximately 55 percent over the past year, and the company spent $6
billion on stock buybacks for their wealthy investors. Workers produced
that wealth. They should not be sacrificed to further enrich
shareholders.”
Lehman was scathing in his denunciation of UAW
President Shawn Fain and the broader union bureaucracy for their silence
in the face of layoffs at Factory Zero and at GM and Ford electric
battery plants across Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. “The UAW
apparatus has not called a single membership meeting, organized a single
protest, or issued a single concrete demand to stop these layoffs,”
Lehman said. “The bureaucracy’s silence is not passivity—it is
complicity.”
He reserved particular condemnation for Fain’s embrace of Trump’s
nationalist economic agenda. “The chauvinist nationalism of Fain and the
UAW apparatus aligns them directly with Trump,” Lehman said. “By
blaming ‘unfair trade’ and pitting American workers against their
brothers and sisters in Canada, Mexico and around the world, the UAW
bureaucracy functions as a tool of the very corporations that are
destroying workers’ livelihoods.”
“The fight of Mexican workers
against the transnational auto corporations is our fight. The
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees is building
the unity of American, Canadian and Mexican workers against these
corporations, and that is the only program that can actually defend
jobs.”
Lehman stressed that his campaign for UAW president is
aimed not at a changing of the guard within the current bureaucratic
apparatus but at transferring genuine power to workers on the shop
floor. “This campaign is about waging a relentless fight against
capitalism, which subordinates every decision—what to produce, how to
produce it, who works and who doesn’t—to the needs of corporate owners.
That has to end. The transformation of the auto industry, including the
shift to electric vehicles and the use of automation and AI, must be
placed under democratic workers’ control and reorganized to meet social
needs, not the further enrichment of wealthy shareholders. The
squandering of trillions on war and destruction must end and society’s
resources used to raise the material and cultural conditions of all
working people.”
*****
The crisis at Factory Zero is unfolding within the broader context of an
accelerating collapse of manufacturing employment across the United
States in 2026. More than 100,000 American manufacturing workers have
lost their jobs since Trump entered office, driven by a combination of
AI-driven restructuring, tariff-related economic uncertainty and
corporate decisions to offshore production.
*****
Automation is being weaponized to lay off workers across entire
sectors, as workers are being made to pay for a looming economic crisis.
Companies like Ford—converting an EV battery plant into a data center
facility—exemplify the instability of the supply chain that the UAW once
celebrated as the foundation of a “just transition to EVs.”
Factory
Zero was inaugurated with fanfare in 2021 after GM invested $2.2
billion retooling the former Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant. President
Biden visited for a test drive of the electric Hummer. UAW leaders
proclaimed a bright future. Less than four years later, the plant has
been cut to a single shift, laid off repeatedly, and now sits idle
again. The UAW, which pledged to defend jobs in the transition to
electric vehicles, has offered workers nothing but platitudes and
silence.
The Teamsters and global logistics giant DHL announced a tentative
agreement Monday, blocking a strike of 6,000 workers across 16 states.
Workers had voted earlier in March to authorize strike action by 96
percent if they did not get a new deal before the old one expired on
March 31.
In a statement announcing the deal the union claimed the
agreement “includes a 20 percent wage increase, higher health and
welfare contributions, and critical job protections” as well as
“safeguards against AI-driven routing systems” and “autonomous
vehicles.”
The 20 percent over four years will barely keep pace
with inflation, worsened by economic shocks from the US war on Iran. A
recent report from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and
Development (OECD) anticipates an inflation rate of 4.2 percent for
2026.
Full details of the Teamsters’ deal with DHL have not been
made available and the union has not stated when a contract vote will
occur, only that it will take place “in the coming weeks,” meaning that
workers will continue to work without a contract for weeks before a vote
occurs.
Moreover, wages for DHL workers are largely set by their
local supplemental contracts, so it is not clear what this 20 percent
figure represents. For locals across much of California and Nevada the
advertised wage increases would raise top pay for drivers from nearly
$40 an hour to $48 an hour in 2030 in some of the country’s most
expensive areas, barely behind the top rate of $49 an hour which UPS
drivers will have reached by 2027.
*****
There is every reason to believe that the claims about job security
are a lie. For weeks, the Teamsters bureaucrats loudly claimed they were
preparing to strike DHL, not to prepare workers for a struggle but to
market the contract as the product of a “credible strike threat.” This
bait-and-switch maneuver was used notoriously in 2023 to push through a
contract at UPS.
As soon as the contract was ratified, UPS began
laying off tens of thousands as part of its automation-led “Network of
the Future” restructuring. There were no protections against job losses
due to automation, only requiring that management give the union advance
notice.
For nearly three years, Teamsters officials have barely
even acknowledged one of the largest layoffs in the company’s history.
The Teamsters are even allowing UPS to deploy AI driver-facing cameras
despite claiming they had prohibited such devices in the contract.
*****
DHL is part of the same corporate entity as Deutsche Post, the German
post office, which was privatized in the 1990s. In 2025, Deutsche Post
announced 8,000 new layoffs.
At the US Postal Service, years into
its own restructuring project, the independent agency could run out of
money as soon as next February, setting the stage for the deepest cuts
in its history.
For years, DHL has been building partnerships with robotics companies
like Boston Dynamics and Robust.AI to design warehouses around
automated processes. DHL global head of digital transformation, Tim
Tetzlaff, told CNBC that the company had increased automation projects
from 240 in 2020 to 10,000 in 2026. These systems include fully
automated forklifts and product picking robots guided by artificial
intelligence technologies.
In 2023, DHL announced plans to build
four new automated warehouses in addition to the nine it already built,
four of which are in the US. It also announced interest in building five
more in the future.
Automation is also targeting truck and delivery drivers. In 2024, Supply Chain Dive
reported that DHL was partnering with Volvo VNL Autonomous to launch
two autonomous trucking routes in Texas, between Dallas and Houston, and
Fort Worth and El Paso. On DHL’s website the company also highlights
“outdoor autonomous vehicles” as a subject of interest for the
deployment of AI driven delivery vehicles. While they note that the
technology is several years away from widespread deployment, the company
is clearly keen to adopt new technologies that will displace thousands
of its highest-paid workers.
*****
The automation technology being deployed in the logistics industry
has the potential to greatly reduce the physical burden on workers,
increase efficiency, reduce working hours and improve safety. But it can
only be used for this purpose under the control of the working class
itself.
The fight against layoffs and workers’ control over new
technology requires the building of rank-and-file committees, in
opposition to the union bureaucracy. The Teamsters apparatus, headed by
the right-wing Sean O’Brien, cannot be reformed, because its interests
are intertwined with management and the corporate political
establishment. Instead, workers must organize to take back power in the
union by abolishing the bureaucracy and replacing it with genuinely
democratic organs made up of workers themselves.
With 90 percent of the oil which passes through the Strait of Hormuz
and 83 percent of the liquefied natural gas destined for Asia, the
region is at the center of the growing economic and financial crisis
precipitated by the US war on Iran. So much so that the closure of the
Strait is increasingly being described as an “Asian crisis.”
As
the war enters its second month, the price of Brent crude, the global
benchmark, has risen by 63 percent from its pre-war level, eclipsing the
previous record monthly rise of 46 percent following Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait in 1990, amid warnings that there are more rises to come.
The economies of Southeast Asia, as well as those of India, Japan and Korea, are taking a double hit.
First,
there is the rise in the dollar-price of oil, and then there is the
additional hike resulting from the fall in their currencies in relation
to the dollar.
There is an interaction between the oil price hikes
and the hit to stock markets which is manifested in currency values.
The Indian stock market has experienced a major downturn with the two
major indexes, the Sensex and the Nifty 50, falling by 10.8 percent and
9.5 percent respectively so far this year.
This had led to an
outflow of foreign investor money, which in turn has pushed down the
value of the rupee. It has fallen 4.4 percent in the March quarter and
has hit a record low of 95 rupees to the dollar.
The Reserve Bank
of India has been intervening to try to maintain the value of the rupee
by demanding that Indian banks limit their dollar holdings. It has
insisted that they hold no more than $100 million at the end of each
business day. So far, the effect appears to have been minimal. On
Monday, after the restrictions were ordered, the rupee rose by 1.4
percent but then lost most of its gains by the end of the day.
One of the worst affected stock markets is that of South Korea. Earlier
this week, the Kospi index experienced another significant fall, taking
its total loss since it reached a record high in late February to 20
percent, passing the threshold which is considered the entry to bear
market territory.
Korean stocks have not only been hit by the oil price rises, the threat
of significant inflation and higher interest rates, but also by
developments in AI that can sharply reduce the amount of memory which is
needed to train AI large language models. Consequently, the shares of
the major chipmakers, Samsung and SK Hynix, have seen major falls.
*****
In the Philippines, higher oil prices and a fall in the peso have
delivered what has been called a “double whammy,” which is expected to
double the rate of inflation in coming months, if not weeks, hitting the
working class and the poorest sections of the population.
The
Marcos government, fearful of an upsurge in the working class—there has
already been a national transport workers’ strike—has declared a
national state of emergency. And it has, despite its vociferous
rhetoric, reached out to China to explore the possibility of joint
operations in the hotly-contested South China Sea to extract oil and
gas.
The currency turmoil has extended to Japan, with financial
officials raising the prospect of a major intervention in the market to
halt the slide of the yen.
*****
The Japanese finance minister, Satsuki Katayama, said she was watching developments with a high degree of urgency.
“It’s now reaching a point where it’s affecting the real economy and people’s daily lives,” she told a press conference.
These
remarks express the fear held by all governments in the region that
developments in the real economy—higher inflation combined with job
cuts—will provoke struggles by the working class.
The combined
effects of the oil price hikes and the deprecation of Asian currencies
has international ramifications, not least for the $30 trillion US
Treasury market.
Yesterday, the Financial Times reported
that “foreign central banks have slashed their holdings of Treasuries at
the New York Federal Reserve to their lowest level since 2012, as
countries sell US government bonds to prop up their economies and
currencies in the wake of the Iran war.”
*****
According to Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, oil importers, including Turkey, India and Thailand, were
among those selling Treasuries to obtain dollars to buy oil and mitigate
the slide in their currencies.
The selloff comes amid the fall in
bond prices in the US, sparked by inflation fears in the short term.
The longer-term concern is that at some point the bond market is simply
not going to be able to absorb ever increasing US debt, now at $39
trillion and set to rise even further, as the Trump regime demands more
money for the military.
The numbers involved in the recent selloff
by central banks are not large at this stage. But the process does
illustrate the complex interconnectedness of the global economy and its
finances. It means that a crisis in one region, in this case centering
on the Asian economies and their currencies, can be rapidly transmitted
to the very heart of the international system.
Numbers of participants likened the rampage to the actions of US
President Donald Trump’s administration in Minneapolis, where
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have carried out a
reign of terror, including the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in
January.
As the World Socialist Web Site stated, the
coordinated rampage on February 9, and the entire Herzog visit, was a
turning point in Australian politics. By backing the police repression
of dissent, the Labor governments signalled their full support for
imperialist war and barbarism, not just in Palestine but globally, and
their readiness to tear up basic democratic rights.
Eleven
parties, including Kurdish nationalists and nominally “left-wing”
groups in Türkiye, issued a statement appealing to the Erdoğan
government for "peace" without addressing US imperialist aggression
against Iran and across the Middle East.
Eleven Kurdish nationalist, Stalinist and pseudo-left parties —
including the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), the Workers’
Party of Turkey (TİP) and the Labour Party (EMEP) — issued a joint
statement Monday, “Call for Urgent Concrete Steps for Peace and
Democracy.” [1]
Despite the word “peace” appearing in the title of
the statement issued by parties that describe themselves as
“democratic,” “left” or “socialist,” it says nothing concrete about the
US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon
or the genocide in Gaza.
What the 11 parties mean by “peace”
amounts to nothing more than advancing the ongoing negotiations between
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government and the Kurdistan Workers’
Party (PKK), led by imprisoned Abdullah Öcalan. By severing workers’
aspirations for peace and democracy from the international revolutionary
struggle against imperialism and confining them to negotiations with
the Erdoğan government, the statement prevents Turkish and Kurdish
workers and youth from confronting the real danger—the capitalist system
and the imperialist wars it generates—and politically disarms them.
The
statement promotes the illusion that “peace and democracy” can be
achieved by changing the policies of a bourgeois government. However,
since the beginning of the 20th century, Marxists have explained that
wars are inevitable in the epoch of imperialism and that the foundations
for lasting peace can only be laid through a world socialist
revolution. In 1915, amid World War I, Vladimir Lenin wrote:
Pacifism,
the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping
the working class. Under capitalism, particularly in its imperialist
stage, wars are inevitable. …
At the present time, the propaganda
of peace unaccompanied by a call for revolutionary mass action can only
sow illusions and demoralize the proletariat, for it makes the
proletariat believe that the bourgeoisie is humane, and turns it into a
plaything in the hands of the secret diplomacy of the belligerent
countries. In particular, the idea of a so-called democratic peace being
possible without a series of revolutions is profoundly erroneous.
In contrast to this approach, the statement puts forward a series of
concrete demands directed at the Erdoğan government: the withdrawal of
trustees appointed in place of elected mayors; the release of political
prisoners in accordance with rulings by the Turkish Constitutional Court
and the European Court of Human Rights; and an end to politically
motivated judicial operations targeting opposition parties.
These
are legitimate democratic demands that every worker and young person
should defend. However, a class and political gulf separates the
signatories of this statement from the perspective of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party –
Fourth International). Rather than calling for these demands to be won
through the independent political mobilization of the working class, the
signatories advance the bankrupt perspective that they can be achieved
by pressuring and appealing to pro-imperialist bourgeois parties in
government.
Ahmad Othman, an activist against the genocide of the Palestinians, has
successfully sued against the second dismissal issued against him. On 26
March, the presiding judge at the Dortmund Labour Court, Dr. Kirchner,
ruled that “the employment relationship of the parties is not dissolved
by the dismissal by the defending state of 11 July, 2025.” Ahmad Othman
remains an employee of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW).
Ahmad had been active in Palestine Solidarity Duisburg (PSDU), which
the North Rhine-Westphalian state Interior Ministry under Herbert Reul
(Christian Democratic Union, CDU) banned on 16 May 2024. The young IT
specialist was immediately suspended—in June 2024—by his employer, the
State Agency for Quality Assurance and Information Technology in Teacher
Training (Laquila).
In mid-November, he received his notice of
dismissal, effective 31 December 2024. He successfully sued against
this. In April 2025, the Dortmund court ruled in the first instance that
the dismissal was invalid. The state of NRW then issued a second
dismissal in July 2025. The state withdrew an appeal against the first
dismissal in October 2025.
While the first trial was primarily
concerned with the alleged danger posed by Ahmad due to his membership
in PSDU and his work as an IT employee, the real reason for the
repression against him became clearer last week: “You just carry on,” as
lawyer Christian Althaus of the Kümmerlein law firm put it.
What
he meant was: Ahmad continues to draw attention to the genocide in
Palestine by the Israeli government and continues to protest publicly
against it. “You don’t play by the rules,” the lawyer told the state
employee.
The lawyer went on to say that Ahmad “does not distance
himself from his political standpoints” and distributes “symbols of
terrorist organizations” (referring to the inverted red triangle as an
identifying mark of Hamas). He added that the slogan “From the river to
the sea” and Ahmad’s appearance at a Palestine conference in Vienna were
“subversive.”
In Vienna, Ahmad had reported that he and his family “originally came
from Haifa.” The state of NRW accused him in both dismissals of being a
liar because he was born in Syria. In fact, his grandparents had been
driven out of Haifa by the Israelis, and Ahmad has a right of return to
their home, the village of Balad al-Sheikh near Haifa, registered with
the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the
Near East (UNRWA).
*****
It is clear that the attempt to force Ahmad Othman out of his job is
an act of deliberate political repression. The court again saw no
grounds for a dismissal under employment law. The judge emphasized several times that she was not evaluating the ban on the PSDU or the
alleged criminal liability of individual slogans. She was solely
evaluating whether the plaintiff’s behavior justified a dismissal. Her
verdict was “no.”
In both hearings before the Dortmund Labour
Court, it became apparent that Ahmad had never given cause for complaint
in the performance of his duties at Laquila. On the contrary, the state
agency was highly satisfied with his work.
In court, his lawyer drew a parallel to the “Radicals Decree” (Radikalenerlass)
passed by the federal and state governments in 1972 under Chancellor
Willy Brandt (Social Democrat, SPD). At that time, teachers, railway
workers, postmen and many others were removed from employment in the
public sector or not hired because they had been politically active on
the left.
*****
The claim in the first proceeding that Ahmad posed a danger as an IT
specialist was also briefly discussed in the second trial. However, when
asked by the judge whether there was any evidence of this, the state’s
Human Relations representative was forced to answer with a monosyllabic
“no.” Ahmad emphasized once again that he had neither the technical
access nor the will or motive to hack Laquila, other state authorities
or even the Interior Ministry, as the state had insinuated.
*****
After his first court victory, Ahmad was deregistered with the agency
but not reinstated by the state. Thus, all payments to him were stopped
again and he lost his health insurance cover. It was not until the end
of June in 2025 that the employment agency admitted that Ahmad had been
wrongly sanctioned and deregistered. Nevertheless, it took another month
for his unemployment benefit to be paid out.
When the judgement
from the first trial became legally binding and Ahmad stopped receiving
money from the employment agency, the state delayed his salary payments
for over four months. When these finally arrived, Ahmad discovered that
he had been incorrectly placed in tax class VI. As a result, his back
payments shrank. He was even expected to pay back taxes.
Because
the small courtroom held only 18 spectators, Ahmad reported on the
verdict to about twice as many supporters waiting outside the court
building after the trial and thanked them. At the conclusion, when he
shouted the slogan “From Dortmund to Gaza–Yalla Intifada,” he was seized
by the police and dragged away, allegedly to establish his identity.
The authorities have tried, unsuccessfully, to wear Ahmad down and
break him. He is one of many who are targeted to be intimidated into
silence. Anyone who opposes Germany’s imperialist interests is criminalized and gagged.
The actions against Ahmad and other
opponents of the genocide in Palestine and the Israeli government are
aimed at suppressing all opposition to the redivision of the world among
the imperialist powers. Israel serves the US and Germany as a military
bridgehead in the resource-rich and geopolitically central Middle East.
The genocide against the Palestinians, the current war against Iran and
the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which has been going on for
years, are part of the same global war strategy.
Germany’s
economic and geopolitical interests, as well as the growing rejection of
the policies of the US, Israel and the German government by the
population, form the background to the harsh persecution of opponents of
the genocide in Gaza. This repression serves as a test run to crush
popular opposition to war and social devastation.
Stopping the genocide in Gaza and the wars in the Middle East and in
Ukraine requires the mobilization of the international working class in a
united struggle against capitalism—the root cause of war and
oppression. Against this background, Ahmad’s legal success against the
state of NRW is to be welcomed.
The agreement reached in Bad Breisig (Eifel region of the German
state of North Rhine-Westphalia) initially imposes a nine-month wage
freeze. Wages will not increase until January 2027, when they will rise
by 2.1%, followed by a 2.4% increase in January 2028. The old collective
bargaining agreement expired at the end of February; the new one has a
term of 27 months, running through May 2028.
Given the explosion
in energy prices and the rising inflation rate resulting from the war of
aggression against Iran, these modest nominal wage and salary increases
represent a significant decline in real wages. Currently, the official
inflation rate in Germany is still at 2.1%, but even the most optimistic
forecasts predict an increase of 2.5% to 2.6% in the coming year. If
rising energy prices also affect goods and services, the inflation rate
will be much higher.
The IGBCE, which has always been among the
most business-friendly unions, did not even put forward a concrete wage
demand in the negotiations due to the crisis threatening the profits of
industrial conglomerates. Led by Chairman Michael Vassiliadis, the union
leadership claimed it wanted to secure wages through an increase just
above inflation, but the final agreement exposes this as a fraud.
Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights is an astonishing
work of art. Its wild intensity has attracted many filmmakers, with
adaptations by directors as varied as William Wyler, Jacques Rivette and
Luis Buñuel.
It deals with two landowning families on the Yorkshire moors, the
Earnshaws at Wuthering Heights and the Lintons at Thrushcross Grange.
The destructive passions between them center on Heathcliff, the
Earnshaws’ fostered son. There is a fiery love between Heathcliff and
Catherine Earnshaw, but he is brutalized and alienated by her brother
Hindley.
Catherine loves Heathcliff but knows how low Hindley has
brought him, making him a servant. Catherine marries Edgar Linton, by
whom she has a daughter, Cathy Linton, dying soon after her child’s
birth. Having misunderstood Catherine’s feelings for him, an angry
Heathcliff exacts revenge on both families. He marries Edgar’s sister
Isabella and exploits Hindley’s gambling debts to take over Wuthering
Heights as mortgagee. After Hindley’s death, Heathcliff subjects
Hindley’s son Hareton to the treatment he had endured. Heathcliff also
tries to manipulate marriage between Cathy Linton and his own sickly and
vicious son Linton Heathcliff in an attempt to dominate the
landholding.
Wuthering Heights has what Charlotte Brontë
called a “storm-heated and electrical atmosphere.” Its force, its
genius, is an almost organic expression of this devastating personal
impact which has definite social roots in property relations. This is
not a novel of happy endings, although it is a novel of hope in the
possibility that they could exist.
*****
Heathcliff seems a force of nature, his love and passion twisted into
something vicious. Dark-complexioned and of mysterious origin, he is
presented as being alien to the world of the Earnshaws and Lintons.
Charlotte Brontë summarised the portrayal of this “unredeemed” figure,
saying that only occasional glimpses of human feeling prevented us from
saying “he was child neither of Lascar [a sailor or soldier from India]
nor gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by a demon life.”
The
passion between Heathcliff and Catherine is almost elemental. While much
of the book’s plot follows Catherine’s death, that passion dominates.
To
represent this on screen, many adaptations have omitted the stories of
Cathy, Linton and Hareton. New generations respond enthusiastically to
the emotional maelstrom, finding in it an expression of something that
resonates with all human experience. The consuming fires of Heathcliff
and Catherine’s passion are always contemporary, so new generations
continue to seek themselves in Wuthering Heights.
The
stories of the younger family members, however, allowed Brontë to show
Heathcliff’s self-destructive vengeance in full flow. Adaptations
without those narratives, therefore, have to find other ways of
maintaining the depths of the central passion and its effects, most
often through dominating central performances.
Wyler’s Heathcliff,
for example, was Laurence Olivier at his best. Few actors have reached
Olivier’s ability to combine love, self-hatred, passion and cruelty. But
too often critics have complained that adaptations have been
overwrought rather than intense.
This is perhaps the nicest comment that could be made about Emerald Fennell’s dreadful film.
School support workers at Leicester SEND school, Ash Field Academy
have voted to strike in support of Unison rep Tom Barker who was
summarily suspended from his role as a teaching assistant in October
2025.
The suspension took place days after members had voted to take industrial action against job losses.
Ash Field is a specialist school for children aged four to 19 with
complex medical conditions, serious physical disabilities, leading to
Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties (PMLD) and/or Moderate
Learning Difficulties (MLD). Children come from Leicester,
Leicestershire and Rutland as well as out of the area.
*****
Its recent White Paper, “Every Child Achieving and Thriving”,
proposes an overhaul of the rights of children with SEND to access
education over the next decade. The measures will remove the statutory
right of hundreds of thousands of children to receive necessary support,
slash funding, and offload SEND provision onto cash-strapped schools
and exhausted teachers.
Educators must mobilize their collective
and independent strength against this offensive and in opposition to the
trade union bureaucracy who drive every dispute down a blind alley of
appeals to employers and the government.
The outrage expressed by
several unions to Barker’s suspension is hot air to cover their
complicity in imposing austerity and privatization of public services.
A
public meeting and rally was held on February 18 organized by the
Leicester and District Trades Union Council to call for Barker’s
reinstatement. Among the speakers in support was Zarah Sultana, MP for
Coventry South and a leading light within Your Party along with Jeremy
Corbyn. Sultana said that the decision to suspend Barker was an attack
on the right to protest, adding, “An attack on one is an attack on all.
Let’s fight back, let’s stand up together and let’s show that working
class people won’t be silenced, intimidated, or pushed aside.”
But
so far, the sentiment to “fight” has led only to 400 trade unionists,
plus new UNISON General Secretary Andrea Egan and 20 members of UNISON’s
National Executive Council, signing an open letter to demand Barker’s
reinstatement. Not a single union is mobilizing against cuts or the
anti-strike laws that block workers from mounting a struggle and the victimizations of their own members.
The suspension of Barker must be lifted and a unified campaign launched
to oppose the decimation of state education. The drive to privation,
cuts in education spending and the defense of the basic democratic
right to organize in the workplace can only be fought by the building of
independent rank and file committees.
On March 31, Italy’s far-right government, headed by fascist Prime
Minister Giorgia Meloni, denied the United States access to the
Sigonella airbase in Sicily during the March 2026 escalation against
Iran, in a move aimed at cultivating an image of “national autonomy.”
Defense
Minister Guido Crosetto confirmed that the refusal took place 'a few
nights ago' after it became clear that the required authorization had
not been granted in time for a parliamentary vote.
This decision,
widely reported as a sign of friction between Rome and Washington, has
been cynically presented as evidence of an independent Italian foreign
policy that rejects war. It is nothing of the sort. It is an expression
of the growing disintegration of NATO and the breakdown of the postwar
equilibrium long anchored in the uncontested hegemony of the United
States.
The refusal was not based on any principled opposition to
the imperialist war drive against Iran. It rested on two interrelated
factors: a narrow procedural dispute over authorization protocols, and,
far more significantly, the explosive growth of anti-war sentiment
within the Italian working class, which has begun to destabilize the
Meloni government itself.
While all parties hypocritically invoke
Article 11 of the Italian Constitution which rejects war as an
instrument of national policy, Italy remains deeply integrated into the
US-led war machine. Its territory hosts a dense network of bases,
logistical hubs and intelligence facilities central to operations across
the Mediterranean and Middle East.
Sigonella has long functioned
as a key node for surveillance drones, refueling and weapons transfers,
alongside installations such as Aviano Air Base, Camp Darby and naval
facilities in Naples and Taranto.
The Meloni government has not
curtailed this cooperation. On the contrary, it has expanded Italy’s
role in imperialist operations, providing logistical support, including
overflight permissions and intelligence-sharing. Italian bases and
airspace continue to be used routinely for military staging.
On
the same day that Meloni made the “reassuring” statements over Iran,
Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani joined his European counterparts in Kyiv
to reaffirm Italy’s support for Ukraine’s accession to the European
Union.
The denial of access to the US is selective and tactical,
not strategic. It reflects a widening divergence within NATO between the
global imperatives of US imperialism and the domestic and geopolitical
constraints confronting its European allies.
According to news reports, Oracle has begun a sweeping layoff
campaign that is impacting as many as 30,000 workers globally. The
reports say the tech corporation sent termination notices by email
starting at 6:00 a.m. on Tuesday.
Segments of the email have been
published by Business Insider and other websites, though the full
message has not been officially released by Oracle. The quoted text
says: “After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs,
we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader
organizational change. As a result, today is your last working day.”
The
portions published also say affected employees must provide a personal
email address for severance follow-up and that access to company systems
will be deactivated soon. Oracle has not issued a press statement or
provided official reasons for the job cuts.
Neither has the global
corporation—which has approximately 162,000 employees
worldwide—publicly disclosed an exact number of layoffs. Reporting
indicates the company is cutting thousands of jobs, with some accounts
placing the figure as high as 18 percent of the workforce, or even
20,000 to 30,000 positions.
Reuters has reported that Oracle is
laying off thousands of employees, while earlier reporting said the cuts
could begin in March and affect multiple departments as part of
restructuring tied to artificial intelligence (AI) data-center spending.
Reporting
from Business Insider and Reuters also says Oracle is trimming staff as
it pours money into the data centers, with some positions reportedly
targeted because the company believes they will be made redundant.
The
layoffs were communicated with no warning to the affected workers.
Employees in the United States, India, Canada, Mexico and Uruguay
reportedly received messages from “Oracle Leadership” in the morning,
with no prior notice from human resources or managers.
This method
of mass layoffs has followed the now-common corporate practice of using
abrupt digital communications to implement job cuts and avoiding any
meaningful confrontation with the workforce. The language in the email
reportedly reduced the destruction of livelihoods to a bland “broader
organizational change.”
Some workers have openly expressed their anger, especially on Reddit and
other social media accounts, as they described the layoff method as
“evil,” “disgusting” and “cowardly.” One widely circulated account
quoted a family member saying, “My dad has worked for Oracle for 20
years. … Not even a phone call. These companies are evil.”
*****
Wall Street responded enthusiastically to the announcement as
Oracle’s shares rose 4 percent to 6 percent on the layoff news. The
reports in the financial press framed the cuts as a sign of “AI
efficiencies” and a cost-saving move to help the company’s market
position in the context of the expensive data-center expansion.
Oracle’s announcement comes amid the continuing wave of tech layoffs in 2025 and 2026. Previously, the World Socialist Web Sitereported that tech giants led all industries in layoffs in 2025,
with more than 153,000 job cuts through November, and that AI and
automation were central to major reductions at Microsoft, Intel, Amazon,
Verizon and HP.
The World Socialist Web Site report also noted that the announcement
of layoffs at Block is especially revealing because it shows an
ideological shift in the tech industry. Block CEO Jack Dorsey bragged
that “the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with
smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working,” while
insisting the company was “ahead of the curve” and that “within the next
year” most companies would make similar structural changes.
In
other words, the corporate and financial elite are boasting that AI
implementation is being used as a mechanism for intensifying
exploitation, cutting labor costs and transferring the gains of
productivity to shareholders and executives.
Oracle is one of the central firms in enterprise computing, database
software, cloud services and business applications used by governments,
banks, hospitals, retailers and large corporations around the world. Its
software and cloud infrastructure sit deep inside the operations of
global capitalism, making the company strategically important far beyond
the tech sector itself.
*****
Oracle is a giant on Wall Street with market capitalization reported
at roughly $422.5 billion in late March 2026. Reuters and other
financial reporting noted that Oracle shares had suffered steep declines
in recent months even while the company attempted to reassure investors
through earnings and other AI-related announcements.
Larry
Ellison, Oracle’s cofounder and longtime chairman, has become one of the
defining tech billionaires of the Trump era. Ellison has a long history
of support for Trump, while he has been an advocate of Trump’s
interventions into business matters as president, such as the takeover
of TikTok by US corporations from China’s ByteDance conglomerate and
Stargate, the AI infrastructure venture unveiled at the White House.
Ellison’s
personal wealth is estimated in 2026 at between $225.8 billion and $393
billion, depending on the index and date. Both Forbes’ real-time wealth
list and Bloomberg place Ellison at sixth richest person in the world.
*****
AI is not being used to eliminate jobs only in the tech industry,
although the industry is leading all others in job cuts. Across business
generally, AI is being used in three interlocking ways: to justify
layoffs, to speed up restructuring and to extract more output from fewer
workers.
In customer service and support, AI is being deployed to
replace human agents with chatbots, automated ticketing systems and
AI-assisted “self-service” tools that eliminate the jobs of live
workers. While material from Salesforce claims AI is creating “new”
roles, firms are widely using AI to compress staffing, flatten teams and
make fewer workers do more work under constant monitoring.
In finance, the jobs elimination drive is similar: banks and
financial firms are using AI for data entry, reconciliation, fraud
detection, forecasting and trading analysis, which allows them to reduce
back-office labor and narrow the number of staff needed for clerical
and analytical work. CNBC reported that JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs
are already using AI to reduce their workforce, while executives across
business have warned that white-collar tasks could be fully automated,
making the threat to jobs systemic rather than temporary.
For
workers, the message from Oracle and its peers is unmistakable. AI is
being turned into a corporate bludgeon on livelihoods, while the
billionaires who control these firms and their Wall Street backers
celebrate “efficiency” and “transformation” with the expectation that
earnings, dividends and stock values will increase.
In a massive repudiation of the United Auto Workers bureaucracy,
Nexteer Automotive workers in Saginaw, Michigan rejected a
concessions-laden contract backed by the UAW in a near unanimous vote.
According to UAW Local 699, workers rejected the deal by 96.2 percent,
with 98 percent of production workers and 82.8 percent of skilled trades
workers voting down the UAW-backed deal.
The voting started Wednesday and concluded Thursday morning. Workers who spoke to the World Socialist Web Site
on Wednesday as the vote was underway delivered a devastating verdict
on the contract—denouncing its expansion of a two-tier wage system,
unaffordable healthcare costs, poverty-level pay for new hires, and the
role of the United Auto Workers bureaucracy in imposing it.
As the
WSWS reported last week, the tentative agreement creates a new layer of
“third-class employees” among new hires, who would start at $19.05 an
hour—compared to $22.50 for current workers and $24.75 for legacy
workers hired before May 2021. After four years, wages for new hires
would rise only to $20.89. The deal also sharply increases out-of-pocket
healthcare costs for workers hired after May 2021, with weekly
contributions for a married couple with children more than doubling from
$26.50 to $53.34. A workers’ leaflet was being circulated at the plant
entitled “Concessions our Leadership fails to tell you.”
Workers were blunt in their anger. A veteran Nexteer employee with
three decades on the job tied the contract’s failures to the broader
decay of living standards and the widening gulf between workers and the
corporate elite.
“Health care costs are already excessive for new
workers because they’re already paying $25 a week,” he said. “I have
been here for 29 years and we aren’t paying anything. They all have
families and cost of living is up for everybody. So, I think we all
ought to be equal and that’s what the UAW is for. This contract just
creates the separation and the gap between the new and older workers.”
His
frustration extended to the decades of stagnation in his own wages. “If
this contract passes, in four years I’ll be making the exact same
amount as I made 20 years ago. Our cost of living hasn’t gone down in 20
years. So how is it I’m making the same amount of money as pay rates 20
years ago when the CEO’s pay doesn’t go down that drastically? We
deserve an increase that equals the cost of living.”
The squeeze
of rising costs, exacerbated by Trump’s criminal war against Iran, was
immediate and personal. “I live 78 miles from here. So I’ve doubled my
gas cost every week to go back and forth to work. It happened overnight.
But my pay doesn’t change. Now I just have to budget what I can afford
to spend on food, groceries and bills.”
*****
A strike at Nexteer’s Saginaw facility would not be a local affair.
The plant is a critical supplier of steering systems to some of the most
profitable vehicles in North America. Production stoppages would
rapidly cascade across the industry.
Vehicles dependent on
Saginaw-produced steering systems include the Ford F-150 and F-150
Lightning EV, the Ford Mustang, Bronco and Escape; General Motors
Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra—the best-selling trucks in the
country—as well as the GMC Hummer EV, Cadillac Escalade, Cadillac XT6,
Chevrolet Traverse and Buick Enclave; and Stellantis’s Ram 1500, Dodge
Charger, Dodge Challenger, Jeep Grand Cherokee and Jeep Avenger.
International models including the BMW 1-Series, Fiat 500 and Linea,
BYD Song Pro/Plus, Chery Tiggo 8 PHEV and Zeekr 001 EV also depend on
components produced here.
This is precisely why the UAW
bureaucracy is working so hard to prevent a strike. The leverage that
Nexteer workers possess is immense—which makes the bureaucracy’s
determination to suppress it all the more deliberate and calculated.
At the same time, workers pointed out that Nexteer has moved many
operations to lower-wage countries, including Mexico and Poland. “If we
strike, they can just ship everything out. They’ve already pretty much
turned plants four and seven into ghost towns,” one worker said.
This
points to the need for building international solidarity. The veteran
worker recounted a formative conversation with a woman who had trained
workers in Mexico for Ford parts production. “She said they were happy
with what they got when they first got it. But then after they realized
what they had to do every day, and then what the company was making,
then they realized that they wanted to be unionized and start to get a
good daily wage.
*****
Last week, Will Lehman—a Mack Trucks worker running for UAW president—called on Nexteer workers to reject the contract and establish
rank-and-file committees to ensure vote integrity, prepare for strike
action under the direct control of workers, and extend solidarity to
auto parts workers striking in Findlay, Ohio, and throughout Mexico.
The
mass opposition among Nexteer workers to this contract reflects a
broader awakening. Workers are drawing connections—between their poverty
wages and the fortunes being accumulated at the top, between their
local struggle and the wars being fought on the other side of the world
in the name of “billionaires needing more money,” and between their own
fight and that of workers in Mexico and beyond. The task now is to
transform that opposition into organized, independent action under the
democratic control of the workers themselves.
The assassination plot against Palestinian-American activist Nerdeen
Kiswani is a warning to the entire working class. Last week, the FBI and
New York Police Department revealed that Alexander Heifler, a
26-year-old from Hoboken, New Jersey, planned to firebomb Kiswani’s home
with the aim of killing her.
Heifler is affiliated with the JDL
613 Brotherhood, a Zionist organization founded in 2024 that draws its
inspiration from the fascistic Jewish Defense League.
Revealed in
the plot is not simply the criminal conspiracy of one individual. It is
the product of a definite political environment, cultivated from above
by the ruling class, in which far-right Zionist organizations, sections
of the state and both capitalist parties have worked to criminalize
opposition to genocide, equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and incite
violence against those who speak out and organize in defense of the
Palestinian people.
Kiswani is a US citizen who has lived
virtually her entire life in the United States. She is the founder of
Within Our Lifetime, a New York-based organization that has played a
leading role in organizing protests against the genocide in Gaza and
against the Democratic and Republican politicians who support it.
Speaking to the World Socialist Web Site after Monday’s press
conference, Kiswani said the attack was aimed at silencing broader
opposition to war and repression. “I think they’re trying to suppress
anti-genocide, anti-war, pro-Palestinian, pro-freedom advocates,” she
said.
The plot followed months of threats, stalking, doxxing and
incitement directed at Kiswani by Zionist organizations. As Eric Lee,
one of Kiswani’s attorneys, explained at the press conference, the
attack was “the deliberate and intended product of a political strategy
by the Trump administration to cultivate extra-legal paramilitary
militia forces to murder its opponents and suppress dissent in the aim
of establishing a dictatorship in this country.”
*****
In February, Kiswani filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against
Betar and associated individuals under the Ku Klux Klan Enforcement Act
of 1871. The complaint invokes the statute’s private right of action
against non-state actors when “two or more persons… conspire… for the
purpose of depriving, either directly or indirectly, any person or class
of persons of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal privileges
and immunities under the laws.” The significance of the suit is not only
that it seeks relief for a campaign of threats and intimidation, but
that it identifies this campaign for what it is: an organized attempt to
terrorize political opponents and deprive them of basic rights.
The Ku Klux Klan Act was one of three Enforcement Acts passed by
Congress between 1870 and 1871 to uphold the democratic and
equal-protection guarantees embodied in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments adopted after the Civil War. These measures were a response
to vigilante violence by the KKK and other extra-legal terror
organizations aimed at violently violating the rights of newly
emancipated black Americans.
The actions of the KKK were connected
to the utilization of vigilante violence in the United States to
counter the emergence of working class struggle—from company gunmen and
deputized “posses” to private detective armies such as the Pinkertons
and strikebreaking mobs. That such methods are now being deployed
against opponents of genocide and imperialist war underscores the depth
of the crisis of the American ruling class and its accelerating break
with democratic norms.
*****
The plot against Kiswani occurs within the context of increasingly
violent and openly fascistic rhetoric from the highest levels of the
state and the Republican Party over the preceding months.
Florida
Representative Randy Fine, who has advocated dropping nuclear weapons on
Gaza, declared that if he had to choose “between dogs and Muslims” it
“would not be a difficult choice.” Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville
referred to Muslims as the “enemy… inside the gates” and called for a
ban on all “ISLAM immigrants.” Representative Mary Miller demanded,
“Deport them all. Now.” Earlier this month, Representative Andy Ogles
declared that “Muslims don’t belong in American society” and that
“Pluralism is a lie.”
The targeting of pro-Palestinian protesters
represents the importation into the United States of methods long
employed by the Israeli state. The JDL 613 Brotherhood is a newer
Zionist formation in the political lineage of the Jewish Defense League.
Its founder, Yisrael Yaacob Ben Avraham, has publicly glorified Meir
Kahane, the fascist founder of the JDL. Organizations such as Betar and
JDL 613 openly draw on this reactionary tradition, which has always
combined militant nationalism with the advocacy of political violence.
More
fundamentally, the attempt on Kiswani’s life arises out of the turn
toward dictatorship within the United States and the deliberate effort
of the Trump administration to criminalize opposition and encourage
political violence. In a March 22 post on social media, Trump issued a
thinly veiled threat, declaring: “Now with the death of Iran, the
greatest enemy America has is the Radical Left, Highly Incompetent,
Democrat Party!”
This is the language of a regime preparing to
treat political dissent as an enemy to be crushed. The deployment of
paramilitary ICE forces into American cities and airports, the drive to
abolish birthright citizenship and other basic democratic rights are
components of a systematic conspiracy to establish a presidential
dictatorship.
Today the target is a Palestinian-American opponent of genocide.
Tomorrow it is workers on strike, students protesting war, immigrants
resisting deportation, journalists exposing state crimes or anyone else
who comes into conflict with the drive toward dictatorship and war.
*****
The attack on Kiswani was fostered not only by the Republicans, but
by the Democratic Party as well. The political groundwork for the
criminalization of opposition to Zionism and the genocide in Gaza was
laid under the Biden administration. Mass student protests were met with
coordinated police repression, mass arrests, suspensions, expulsions
and an incessant campaign of slander equating opposition to Zionism with
antisemitism—aimed at isolating protesters and legitimizing state
violence against them.
The Democratic Party is absolutely opposed
to the development of a movement from below against Trump’s
dictatorship. As Trump wages war on the Constitution, the Democrats do
nothing. They have repeatedly funded the government, voted for massive
military and security budgets, and confined all “opposition” to
procedural complaints and empty rhetoric. In practice, they function as
accomplices: working to suppress mass resistance, channel opposition
back into electoral dead ends and ensure that the attacks on democratic
rights proceed uninterrupted.
The vast majority of the population opposes this. That opposition was
visible again at the press conference defending Kiswani, where Muslims
and Jews stood together, united in opposition to Zionist terror and in
defense of democratic rights. It has also been visible in the immense
protests that filled cities across the United States in the “No Kings”
demonstrations last weekend.
*****
The campaign to defend Kiswani is inseparable from the struggle against
genocide, imperialist war and the capitalist system that gives rise to
both. The democratic rights of all can be defended only through the
independent mobilization of the working class, in the United States and
internationally, on the basis of a socialist program directed against
war, fascism and capitalism.
Last week Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar, Saudia Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates (UAE) jointly condemned what they called Iran’s
“blatant” and “criminal” attacks on their energy infrastructure. They
declared their right to act in “self-defense” under Article 51 of the
United Nations Charter and “to take all necessary measures to safeguard
our sovereignty, security, and stability.”
The statement signals
their impending intervention as active belligerents in a criminal and
illegal war against Iran alongside the United States and Israel.
The Arab regimes have from day one focused solely on condemning
Iran’s retaliatory strikes on their territory, without even mentioning
the aggressors, Washington and Jerusalem, by name. The four weeks of
bombing have killed thousands of civilians, around 150 children on the
very first day of the war, assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei and dozens of senior officials, struck more than 8,000
military, infrastructure and civilian targets and destroyed 130 naval
vessels.
Iran had explicitly warned that any state permitting its
territory, airspace, or bases to be used in attacks against it would be
treated as a “legitimate target.” Despite public claims to the contrary,
the six Gulf Cooperation Council states—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar,
Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman—all allowed the United States and Israel to
use their airspace and military installations, just as they had during
the US-led war on Iraq in 2003.
While Gulf
officials insisted they had pressured Washington not to
strike Iran and had refused to authorize the use of their bases, the
US–Israeli operation relied on precisely those facilities. This includes
Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base, which hosted US refueling planes
and offensive actions, while the US has fired ballistic missiles
at Iran from Bahrain.
The conclusion is clear: these governments
were complicit in an illegal war that has already taken the lives of
thousands of Iranian civilians.
That complicity flows inexorably
from the dependence, which they describe as “regional security”, of all
these despotic regimes upon the US and its military power. Before the
war, unable to be seen publicly supporting the perpetrator of the Gaza
genocide and its principal backer, they wrapped themselves in the
language of “de-escalation”, “negotiations”, “regional security” and
“stability”. But the moment the confrontation widened, that façade was
dropped.
*****
Since the outbreak of the war on February 28, the Gulf states have faced
sustained Iranian missile and drone attacks targeting US military bases
and critical national infrastructure—energy production and refinery
sites, desalination plants, airports, and other economic facilities. At
least 27 people have been killed across the region. According to the
Saudi outlet Asharq Al-Awsat, 83 percent of Iran’s missiles and drones have been directed at the Gulf states, with only 17 percent aimed at Israel.
*****
Gulf economies are estimated to be losing more than $2.3 billion per
day, while oil exports have plunged by nearly 60 percent—from 25.1
million barrels per day to just 9.7 million. The attacks have undermined
the Gulf’s position as a global hub for aviation, business, and
tourism—key income sources for both citizens and migrant workers.
Saudi
Arabia’s financial position was already weakening before the war,
prompting cutbacks in megaprojects designed to reduce dependence on oil.
Riyadh had hoped to benefit from higher oil prices by exporting crude
through its Red Sea pipeline, but this is now threatened by the Yemeni
Houthis’ entry into the war and the effective closure of the Red Sea to
shipping. Vessels are being forced to bypass the Suez Canal and reroute
around the Cape of Good Hope.
The smaller Gulf states are even more exposed to the shock.
The
collapse of the Gulf economies reverberates far beyond the peninsula,
threatening to ignite a new wave of mass unrest across the Arab world—a
second “Arab Spring” directed against the authoritarian regimes that
dominate the region. As a recent Al Jazeera headline noted, “The Arab Spring hasn’t ended, and Arab regimes know it.”
*****
Nowhere is the destabilizing impact of the war more acute than in
Egypt, whose repressive regime under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has survived
only through continuous Gulf bailouts.
With 116 million
people—twice the population of all six Gulf states combined—Egypt is the
political and demographic center of the Arab world. Its economy is
among the region’s most fragile, a reality underscored by Morgan
Stanley’s recent downgrade. As the Gulf’s financial lifeline frays, the
foundations of Sisi’s rule are beginning to crack.
Suez Canal
revenues are again under threat as Gulf oil and gas shipments slow and
major shipping companies avoid the Red Sea due to potential Houthi
attacks. This strikes at one of Egypt’s few reliable sources of hard
currency.
*****
For Egypt’s workers and rural poor, the consequences are devastating.
Poverty has risen steadily since 2020; by 2023, more than 35 percent of
Egyptians lived below the national poverty line. Inflation continues to
erode wages and savings.
*****
In Iraq, which is unable to export oil via the Strait of Hormuz,
production from its main southern oilfields has fallen from 4.3 million
barrels a day to just 1.3 million. The government relies on oil sales
for nearly all public spending and more than 90 percent of its income.
Jordan’s
government is haemorrhaging an estimated $3.5 million a day as energy
prices soar and natural gas supplies collapse. Israel’s shutdown of its
gas platforms—Jordan’s primary source—has choked the country’s energy
system, with knock-on effects in Syria where electricity shortages are
worsening.
Rising energy costs will deepen an already severe
unemployment crisis: joblessness has climbed steadily in recent years,
reaching 21 percent in 2025, while youth unemployment has surged past 40
percent. This has forced nearly 10 percent of Jordanians to seek work
abroad, mainly in the Gulf. These jobs and remittances look increasingly
precarious.
*****
In the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is at the
point of collapse. Israel’s withholding of the tax revenues collected on
its behalf has forced the PA to put its staff on short hours and delay
wage payments. PA staff now face the loss of their jobs. The
unemployment rate is already 40 percent.
The greatest danger
facing the Arab regimes is an eruption of popular opposition. They are
all widely despised for their rampant corruption, inequality, and
alignment with Washington and Tel Aviv’s wars. Known for sweeping
attacks on democratic rights, tight media control, stage-managed
elections, and constitutional manipulation, these regimes have
intensified repression since the war began.
*****
The alignment of the Arab states with Israel and US imperialism marks
the terminal political degeneration of the regimes created by the
post–World War I imperialist carve-up of the Middle East.
The
struggle against the criminal war on Iran and its perpetrators and
collaborators demands the independent political mobilization of the
working class to overthrow their own rulers. The lesson to be drawn from
recent experiences is unambiguous: imperialism cannot be negotiated
with; it must be overthrown.
Workers across the region must be armed with a genuinely socialist,
internationalist perspective to oppose the war on Iran, the broader
escalation of war against Russia in Ukraine, and advanced plans to
target China. To defeat the reactionary US–Israel–Arab alliance, the
working class must rally all the oppressed behind it in revolutionary
opposition to capitalism—the root cause of war.
In a globalized economy, the path to ending war, genocide, national
oppression, and social exploitation lies not along national lines but
along international and socialist lines. It requires the working class
to take power and establish a United Socialist States of the Middle
East, as part of the fight for world socialist revolution.
This
begins with a determined effort to unify workers—Arab, Iranian, Jewish,
Kurdish and all others—across national, ethnic, and religious divisions.
It demands the building of a new revolutionary leadership: the
International Committee of the Fourth International.
The Financial Times revealed late Monday that Pete Hegseth,
the Trump administration’s Secretary of War, is implicated in an insider
trading operation involving his personal broker at Morgan Stanley and
extensive investments in major US defense firms, including Lockheed
Martin and Northrop Grumman, in the weeks leading up to the opening of
the war against Iran.
The FT report details evidence indicating
that Hegseth’s broker traded based on advanced intelligence—information
known only to senior Pentagon and National Security Council
officials—allowing the secretary to position himself for massive
financial gains as the war unfolded.
According to the FT report,
which cites multiple sources “with direct knowledge of internal Morgan
Stanley communications,” large-scale buy orders were placed for defense
sector exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and targeted equities two to three
weeks before the first waves of US airstrikes on Iranian infrastructure
in late February.
Those trades, executed through accounts
nominally administered by Hegseth’s long-time financial advisor, James
Halvorsen, were timed to take advantage of a predictable surge in
defense stocks once the war began.
*****
While the Financial Times concluded that there was “no
direct proof that Hegseth personally directed or discussed these
trades,” it cited three sources “close to the Secretary’s personal
office” who confirmed that he was in “near-daily contact” with Halvorsen
throughout the period in question, including during restricted
interagency war briefings.
“Everything about the timing, the
content of the messages, and the nature of the investments strongly
suggests insider knowledge of forthcoming war plans,” said one former
senior compliance official quoted by the newspaper. “This wasn’t smart
guessing. These were guided trades.”
*****
Within hours of publication, the Pentagon issued an indignant statement denouncing the Financial Times
exposé as “categorically false, malicious, and defamatory.” A press
release from Department of Defense spokesman Sean Parnell claimed that
Hegseth “has had no involvement whatsoever with personal investments or
trading decisions since assuming office” and accused the British
newspaper of “a politically motivated attempt to smear a decorated
veteran and patriot.”
The statement went further, demanding a full
retraction and threatening “legal consequences” if the allegations were
not withdrawn. However, Parnell notably refused to address any of the
factual claims laid out in the FT story—the dates of the trades, the
identification of specific defense sector instruments, the known
communications between Halvorsen and Hegseth’s office, or the percentage
gains upon declaration of hostilities.
Instead, Parnell attempted to discredit the source material, alleging a
“foreign disinformation agenda” without providing any evidence
whatsoever. That the Pentagon responded not with documentation or
transparency but with rage and evasion speaks for itself. If the
allegations were baseless, they could be easily refuted through the
release of brokerage records or ethics compliance disclosures.
*****
The revelations regarding insider profiteering through war-related
equities intersect directly with recent reports about the manipulation
of both oil futures and “prediction markets” tied to the unfolding
conflict with Iran. In February, investigative journalists uncovered a
pattern of suspiciously timed transactions on commodities and
derivatives exchanges, where traders made stunningly accurate bets on
the start dates, suspension announcements, and so-called ceasefire
“openings” in the war’s early phases.
Significant spikes in
short-term volatility options—precisely calibrated to White House and
Pentagon press conference timings—pointed to advance knowledge of when
the administration would signal either escalation or détente. In several
instances, speculative position-holders reaped profits within hours of
official statements, implying not mere coincidence but a flow of
restricted information from national security officials to private
actors operating within the global financial system.
The picture
that now emerges is one of a ruling class that is not only waging
imperialist war abroad but monetizing every phase of its own military
aggression. Decisions of war and peace, involving the lives of millions,
are being exploited as opportunities for personal enrichment by the
very people ordering the bombings. For the fascist Trump regime, the
blood-soaked machinery of imperialism now doubles as an investment
boondoggle.
These exposures further confirm that the decadence and corruption at the
highest levels of the American state have reached a terminal stage. A
government that treats war openly as a business venture—where cabinet
officials position themselves to profit from the destruction of entire
nations—has lost all vestiges of political legitimacy.
*****
Tens of billions have already been squandered in the bombs dropped
over Tehran and Isfahan, which have killed thousands of people, while
the White House war criminals demand another $200 billion to continue
the death and destruction that is rapidly escalating into a ground
invasion of Iran.
For the financial elite, all of this translates
into more dividends to be disbursed by Wall Street. The criminal
marriage of finance capital and militarism is being openly flaunted.
Grotesque figures such as Trump and Hegseth are not aberrations but the
product of the decline of American capitalism and its takeover by the
criminal underworld. Those who are personally cashing in on imperialist
war and barbarism are capable of anything, including nuclear warfare.
That these revelations center on Hegseth is entirely fitting. A
product of Fox News, white Christian nationalism, and the post-9/11
permanent war state, Hegseth has long embodied the fusion of fascist
politics and ultra-nationalist militarism. As a commentator, he defended
notorious war criminals, excusing the massacres of civilians in Iraq
and Afghanistan. As the top US military commander, he is linked to
extrajudicial killings of Venezuelan fishermen during US naval
operations in the Caribbean, a crime whitewashed by both the media and
Congress.
Hegseth has repeatedly invoked biblical scripture to
justify the bombings of Iranian cities, describing the campaign as a
“divine reckoning” and a “cleansing of evil.” Now, even as he sermonizes
about piety and patriotism, he stands exposed for enriching himself
through the carnage he commands—a fusion of religious zealotry,
capitalist greed and contempt for human life.
In past imperialist wars—going back to the Iran-Contra affair of the
1980s and through the first Gulf War in the early 1990s and then the
invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya after 9/11—profiteering was
often conducted by semi-anonymous contractors and executives hidden
behind shell corporations. Today, the corruption occurs right out in the
open and is carried out by those who plan and direct the wars
themselves.
The revolving door that once separated the Pentagon,
Wall Street, and the media has been effectively erased; the same
individuals are occupying all three spheres simultaneously. Hegseth,
like others in the Trump administration, moves between cable studios,
corporate boardrooms, and military war rooms without objection within
ruling circles.
It is no coincidence that same political and
financial figures implicated in protecting and covering up for the
sexual crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and his global network of collaborators
are now seen in the circles surrounding Hegseth and Trump. The same
culture of impunity and degeneracy pervades every level of the American
oligarchy.
The United States has begun bombing Iran with B-52 bombers, setting the
stage for a massive increase in the saturation bombing of the country of
90 million as the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran
intensifies. “We’ve successfully started to conduct the first overland
B-52 missions,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine
announced Tuesday at a Pentagon briefing.
The B-52 is capable of carrying 70,000 pounds of gravity bombs and
nuclear weapons. It is the aircraft at the center of a US bombing
campaign that dropped more tonnage on Indochina than was used by all
sides in World War II combined, that carpet-bombed Cambodia in a secret
campaign that killed an estimated 100,000 civilians, and that leveled
entire cities in North Vietnam—where US bombing destroyed 85 percent of
all buildings and killed roughly 20 percent of the population.
The
United States, having failed to achieve its war aims through a month of
airstrikes, is massively escalating the war. The administration is now
turning to the methods it used in Gaza: mass murder and the deliberate
destruction of civilian infrastructure.
*****
One month of war has produced a catastrophe. The human rights group
Hengaw reported at least 6,900 killed in Iran through Day 29, including
720 civilians and 150 children. Iran’s Red Crescent reported more than
85,000 civilian structures damaged, including 64,000 homes and 600
schools.
Between 3.2 and 4 million Iranians have been internally
displaced. In Lebanon, according to the Health Ministry, more than 1,247
have been killed and 3,600 wounded since Israel launched its assault on
March 2. The Pentagon reports that 15 American service members have
been killed and more than 300 wounded.
Among the first victims of the Iran war is international law, as it was
developed after the Second World War. Almost all legal experts agree
that there is no basis in international law for the war being waged by
the US and Israel against the country of 90 million inhabitants. It is
an illegal war of aggression, a “crime against peace,” as one of the
main charges against the Nazi criminals in the Nuremberg trials read.
It is not the first time that the US and its allies have flouted
international law. The wars against Yugoslavia (1999), Iraq (2003) and
Libya (2011) clearly violated international law. But back then, the
attackers still tried to keep up appearances and legitimize their wars
with far-fetched arguments.
This is no longer the case today.
President Donald Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of
State Marco Rubio have all publicly announced that they no longer care
about international law.
Trump declared in early January that he
needed “no international law,” and that only his “own morality” could
set limits for him. At the Munich Security Conference, Rubio announced
that in the future, one must no longer “place the so-called global order
above the interests of our populations and our nations.” And Hegseth
opened the Iran war with the announcement that the US was fighting
“without stupid rules of engagement” and “without politically correct
warfare.”
The German government immediately supported this. The
open breach of international law was obviously convenient for it.
Germany’s ruling elites, who were deeply implicated in the crimes of the
Nazis, have always perceived the Nuremberg verdicts as a disgrace to
which they only reluctantly submitted.
After the Nuremberg
Tribunal ceased its work, the West German judiciary continued the
prosecution of Nazi crimes only hesitantly. By 2005, in 36,400 criminal
proceedings, only 6,700 of a total of 172,000 accused had been
convicted. Many mass murderers, with the blood of hundreds and thousands
on their hands, were never indicted and continued their careers
unhindered. The control center of the government, the Chancellery, was
headed for ten years by a co-author of the Nazi race laws, Hans Globke.
Merz’s party colleague Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the EU
Commission, also supports the war and speaks out against international
law. On 9 March, she told EU ambassadors that the debate over whether
the war was “a war of choice or a war of necessity” missed the point.
Europe must simply “take reality into account.” It must “no longer be a
guardian of the old world order.” This, she said, was part of a world
“that belongs to the past and will not return.” The EU required “a more
interest-driven foreign policy.”
There are, however, also voices in German ruling circles that
consider the open rejection of international law to be a mistake. The
most prominent comes from Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who
at an anniversary event of the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin on 24
March declared: “This war is contrary to international law—there is
little doubt about that. ... Our foreign policy does not become more
convincing by our not calling a breach of international law a breach of
international law.”
This criticism of the Chancellor by the
Federal President, who is actually supposed to stay out of day-to-day
politics, is extraordinary. But Steinmeier and others who criticise
Merz’s stance are not concerned with international law per se, nor with
the democratic principles for relations between states anchored within
it. Rather, they fear that such an open breach with international law
will harm Germany’s foreign policy interests, undermine its support for
the Ukraine war, and weaken its economic relations with other states.
They have a tactical, not a principled, relationship to international
law.
*****
Kiev could become a collateral victim of the Iran war in several
respects: The already scarce air defence munitions and reconnaissance
and intelligence capacities of the US could be diverted to the Middle
East, and Moscow could gain additional leeway, thanks to rising oil
revenues, to continue its war with undiminished severity.
Above
all, however, the questioning of international law by the government
“removes the normative basis from the arguments on which Germany relies
internationally in its dealings with Russia: the rejection of military
force to change borders, as well as the condemnation of the targeted
destruction of civilian infrastructure and the demand for a just peace.”
In
other words, the Iran war and the open rejection of international law
expose the lies with which the government has so far justified its
support for the Ukraine war to the tune of tens of billions of euros.
With
the undermining of the rules-based order, according to the DGAP, Berlin
is accelerating “the erosion of its own foreign policy effectiveness.”
Its credibility and influence would be weakened “especially in the Arab
world and the Global South.”
This dispute over international law
is therefore not about right or wrong, war or peace, but about how the
interests of German imperialism—the continuation of the war against
Russia, the conquest of new markets and raw materials in the “Global
South,” greater independence from China and the US, and dominance in
Europe—can be most effectively pursued.
The danger of a third world war, threatened by the escalation of the
Iran war, will not be averted by a wing of the ruling class that commits
itself to international law in words, but only by an independent
movement of the international working class that fights against war, for
social equality, democracy and a socialist society.
That Huerta states she remained silent for decades “to protect the
farmworkers” is itself an indictment, not only of Chavez as an
individual, but of the political and organizational culture that
prevailed within the UFW. Her account underscores the degree to which
the apparatus subordinated the well-being of individuals, including its
own leading members, to the preservation of its public image and
institutional interests.
It is necessary, however, to reject the framework, already widely
promoted in the corporate media, that presents these revelations as the
tragic fall of a once-great civil rights figure. Chavez was not a
progressive leader whose legacy has only now been tarnished by scandal.
His political trajectory, methods and alliances placed him firmly within
the orbit of bourgeois politics and the labor bureaucracy. The emerging
evidence of abuse is entirely consistent with the authoritarian and
anti-working-class character of his leadership.
*****
From the outset, Chavez advanced a strategy based not on class
struggle but moral persuasion. Drawing on Catholic asceticism and
nonviolence, he sought to pressure agribusiness and the state for
reforms rather than mobilizing workers as an independent force. This
outlook was bound up with his virulent anti-communism, expressed through
purges of militants and the suppression of rank-and-file initiatives
that challenged his authority.
As the UFW developed, these
tendencies assumed increasingly authoritarian forms. Operations such as
the “Wet Line,” attacking undocumented workers, deepened divisions
within the working class, pitting workers against one another on the
basis of their legal status, instead of uniting them.
The death of Gino Paoli on March 24, 2026 at the age of 91 marks the
passing of one of the central figures of postwar Italian popular music. A
leading representative of the so-called “Genoese school” of
songwriters, Paoli helped reshape Italian music in the late 1950s and
’60s, composing works that have endured for decades, including “Il cielo in una stanza,” “Sapore di sale,” “Senza fine” and “La gatta.”
Paoli stands as a towering figure in Italian popular music for good
reason. He belongs to, and helped crystallize, the tradition of Italian
melodicism: a clarity of line, emotional immediacy and structural
economy that gives his songs their enduring power. His melodies, at once
simple and deeply expressive, exemplify a musical language capable of
conveying complex inner states with remarkable directness.
Many of
Paoli’s most enduring works—including “Sapore di sale,” “Il cielo in
una stanza” and “Che cosa c’è”—were arranged by another central figure
of Italian music, Ennio Morricone.
Before achieving international fame through his film scores, Morricone
was a prolific arranger at RCA Italiana, where his work played a
significant role in shaping the sound and musical identity of the
“Genoese school” of singer-songwriters.
To understand Paoli’s
significance requires more than considering his catalog of achievements.
His long career reflects the emergence of the cantautore
(singer-songwriter), the growing integration of music into commercial
mass culture and the political limits of a generation shaped by the
unresolved contradictions of postwar Italian capitalism.
*****
The cantautore has often been presented as the embodiment of
artistic authenticity. In reality, it was a broad and internally
differentiated phenomenon. While Paoli’s work centered on personal and
lyrical expression, other figures—among them De André, Tenco, Francesco
Guccini and Giorgio Gaber—pursued a more overtly social and critical
direction, addressing inequality, class and political life more
directly, with varied degrees of success.
This diversity reflected
a wider search for new forms of expression under changing historical
conditions. At the same time, the expansion of the recording industry
and mass media placed music within increasingly commercial frameworks,
shaping both its production and its reach.
Within this context, Paoli’s orientation toward the inner life became
a defining feature of his work. His songs, focused on love, memory and
subjective experience, achieved broad resonance precisely because of
their immediacy and emotional clarity. They became embedded in Italy’s
cultural life and continue to speak to universal aspects of human
experience.
That emphasis, however, also marked one of the principal tendencies within the cantautore
movement. Where others sought to confront social contradictions more
directly, Paoli remained largely within the sphere of personal
expression. This reflected not simply an individual choice, but a
particular artistic path shaped by the cultural and political limits of
the period.
Paoli’s personal life bore the imprint of these
pressures. In 1963, at the height of his early success, he attempted
suicide, shooting himself in the chest. He survived, but the bullet
remained lodged near his heart for the rest of his life.
While often treated as a purely personal episode, the event can be best
understood within a broader context. The postwar economic boom, far from
a period of unbroken progress, involved intense social dislocation and
psychological strain. For artists navigating fame and creative
expectations within an increasingly commercial cultural sphere, such
pressures could become acute.
*****
Paoli’s later turn to formal politics, serving as a parliamentary
deputy for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1987 to 1992, has
often been cited as evidence of his social engagement. More
fundamentally, it signaled an adaptation to the existing political
order.
By this point, the Stalinist Italian Communist Party had
long since abandoned even a nominal connection to socialism,
transforming itself into a pillar of the parliamentary order. Its policy
of the “historic compromise” and sustained collaboration with bourgeois
parties expressed a definite class orientation: the containment of
working class struggle within the framework of the capitalist state.
Paoli’s
association with the party reflected the broader evolution of layers of
intellectuals and artists who, as a result of the betrayals of the PCI
and trade union apparatus, gravitated toward official institutions. What
appeared as engagement took the form of participation in parliamentary
life, rather than alignment with independent class struggle.
*****
Paoli’s career spanned the transformation of Italy from postwar
reconstruction to the crises of the 21st century. Over this period,
music itself underwent profound changes, shaped by technological
developments, industry restructuring and globalization.
From vinyl
records and radio to digital streaming, the means of production and
distribution evolved, but his work retained continuity with the
traditions established in the early cantautore period.
Paoli’s
death is a bookmark in the history of Italian music. His passing
follows that of other major figures of his generation, marking the
gradual disappearance of those who shaped the cultural landscape of the
postwar period.
*****
Gino Paoli’s songs endure because they give clear expression to
fundamental human emotions, capturing moments of intimacy, longing and
reflection.
At the same time, the conditions that shaped this
artistic outlook have not disappeared. The tension between individual
expression and the need for a more consciously social art remains
unresolved.
Paoli’s death thus marks not only the loss of a major
artist, but the close of a chapter in which these questions first
emerged in modern Italian music and which remain, in essential respects,
unanswered.
The Liberal government of Prime Minister Mark Carney has appealed to
Canada’s Supreme Court to overturn lower court rulings that found
unlawful Ottawa’s February 2022 invocation of the Emergencies Act to
disperse the far-right “Freedom Convoy.” The Convoy menacingly occupied
downtown Ottawa for 23 days and blocked key border crossings with the
United States to press for the final elimination of all remaining
COVID-19 pandemic mitigation measures.
The Liberals are intent on
ensuring that they and future governments retain the broadest possible
latitude to invoke emergency powers in political and social crises, in
particular against the working class and a developing movement against
austerity and war.
*****
The Convoy protest, which never mobilized more than a few thousand
people, was promoted by Trump-aligned forces, sections of the
Conservative Party, and right-wing media outlets for the purpose of
destabilizing the Liberal government and pushing establishment politics
even more sharply to the right. Among its initiators and chief
organizers were proponents of far-right conspiracy theories and
advocates of the elected government’s replacement by an emergency
“junta.”
The Convoy’s ability to dominate political life for weeks
was due to the widespread support it enjoyed within the ruling class,
the media and the state. The Tory government of Ontario Premier Doug
Ford refused to take any action against the movement. Conservative
politicians courted the protest, including Pierre Poilievre, who met
with organizers and rose to leadership of the party in its aftermath by
touting his credentials as the Convoy’s most strident supporter.
In
striking contrast with their treatment of worker and left-wing
protests, the Ottawa police and RCMP allowed the occupation of the
capital to continue indefinitely, even as residents were subjected to
harassment, intimidation and increasingly intolerable living conditions.
Pro-Convoy elements in the police repeatedly leaked information to its
leaders.
Faced with mounting economic damage and a loss of control, the
Liberal government turned to the Emergencies Act to force a mobilization
of the police and cut off organizers’ funds. Its overriding concern was
restoring order in the capital and securing trade flows with the US.
The
Convoy was quickly dispersed. But in its immediate aftermath the
provincial governments, with Ottawa’s support, moved to dismantle
remaining pandemic measures, implementing a core demand of the protest.
The
trade unions and the New Democratic Party played a critical role in
legitimizing this authoritarian turn by backing the invocation of the
Act and voting to sustain it in parliament.
In contrast, the World Socialist Web Site
and Socialist Equality Party (Canada) opposed the so-called Freedom
Convoy while also opposing Trudeau government’s breaking of the taboo on
the Emergencies Act; since its use and the sweeping powers
exercised—freezing bank accounts, banning assemblies and forcing
financial institutions to hand over information without warrants—set a
far-reaching precedent in the assault on democratic rights.
The
WSWS warned that once normalized, such emergency powers would be
directed first and foremost against growing working class opposition,
including political strikes, and other left-wing movements.
The government’s subsequent efforts to reinterpret and conceal the legal
threshold for invoking emergency powers underscores how democratic
safeguards can be eroded behind closed doors. Against this, the WSWS
insists that the defense of democratic rights and the fight against the
far-right depends on the independent political mobilization of the
working class, not reliance on the courts, the pro-capitalist trade
unions, or any faction of the capitalist state, which all function to
contain opposition and preserve the existing social order.
*****
In the ensuing four years, governments across Canada have continued
to escalate the attack on the right to strike, pushed to restrict the
right to protest—smearing demonstrations against Israel’s imperialist
backed genocide in Gaza as “antisemitic”—and invoking extraordinary
measures, including the “notwithstanding clause,” to override
constitutional protections of democratic rights. Tens of billions of
dollars are being funneled into a massive military build up while public
sector jobs are being slashed and essential public services starved of
funds.
The Carney government’s appeal to the Supreme Court is a
warning that the Canadian ruling class, despite its internal divisions,
is determined to preserve and expand its capacity to deploy
authoritarian measures in the class battles that lie ahead. The
experience of 2022 demonstrated that the ruling class is prepared to
override legal limits and deploy authoritarian powers when confronted
with a crisis affecting the interests of Canadian capital.
The defense of democratic rights cannot be entrusted to any faction of
the ruling class or the courts. It requires the independent political
mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist and
internationalist program.
The UK’s 50,000 resident doctors will strike again for six days from April 7, their 15th walkout since March 2023.
The
strike was called by the Residential Doctors Committee (RDC) of the
British Medical Association (BMA) after it emerged doctors would be
awarded a measly 3.5 percent pay increase this year. Inflation is
already 3.6 percent by the RPI measure and will rise sharply with the
effects of the war on Iran.
This is not only an insult to resident doctors. It is an indictment of the course of action pursued by the RDC.
The
RDC entered closed-door talks with the Labour government in January,
having accepted Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s terms for doing so.
These were: abandoning any addition to the 5.4 percent pay uplift last
year, which left pay 21 percent behind real terms 2008 levels, and
discussing a paltry offer of 4,000 additional specialty training
places—which were repurposed jobs not new ones.
Some 50,000 resident doctors are estimated to be out of a job this year.
*****
Labour’s threats against the resident doctors are ultimately aimed
against all opposition to its agenda. It refuses to restore their pay at
a cost of just £1.7 billion because it is scraping for every penny to
fuel a planned increase in military spending to 2.5 percent of GDP by
2027, another £17.4 billion a year, and 5 percent of GDP after that.
Resident
doctors and all NHS staff, widely respected in the working class, can
give a lead to a movement demanding that the billions squandered on the
private profiteers and the war machine be invested in public services
savaged by years of austerity: including a fully funded public health
service.
This must be done in opposition to all sections of the
trade union bureaucracy, including the RDC, which seeks various
partnerships with the Starmer government. A new leadership must be built
among NHS workers. We appeal to those who agree to contact NHS FightBack today.
Ever since the end of January, the National Tertiary Education Union
(NTEU) has touted a vague “in-principle” agreement at Western Sydney
University (WSU) as a pace-setting “win” for its members nationally.
This
deal for a new 2026-2029 enterprise agreement (EA) was struck with
management behind closed doors while many members were still away on
summer leave. According to the NTEU, no details of the proposed EA would
be finalised for weeks. It had to first be signed off by the NTEU
national executive before NTEU members at WSU could be permitted to
examine, discuss and vote on it.
Two months on, no copy of an agreement has been provided to NTEU
members, let alone voted on. In the meantime, nevertheless, the WSU
management is implementing the EA, as a fait accompli, with the NTEU’s
assistance, including the imposition of job cuts and more onerous
workloads.
There is widespread anger and concern among WSU staff
members over severe under-staffing, including in student services,
unfilled vacancies and increased workloads for academics.
World Socialist Web Site video reporters spoke to protesters at the third round of “No
Kings” demonstrations on March 28, which drew millions of people into
the streets across the United States in what was the largest single-day
protest in American history.
Organizers estimated that roughly
eight million people participated in more than 3,300 events across the
50 states in every major city, along with hundreds of small towns.
Over recent days, the Australian Labor government led by Prime Minister
Anthony Albanese, has engaged in an utterly cynical attempt to distance
itself from the illegal US-Israeli war against Iran that it supports and
continues to actively participate in.
Labor has not voiced a word of criticism of the flagrantly illegal
character of the war, an unprovoked assault on a sovereign nation. Nor
has it so much as mentioned the many specific war crimes that form part
of this war of annihilation, from the assassination of top Iranian
leaders to the bombing of schools, hospitals and other vital civilian
infrastructure.
Instead, Labor’s line has been to suggest that the
purported “objectives” of the war may have been met, and to ponder
publicly as to whether it will soon end.
The transparent aim is to
deflect from the fact that Labor is an active party of the war. It is
carrying out this distancing operation under conditions where opinion
polls show overwhelming opposition to the war, and where its
consequences are being felt in soaring fuel prices and a broader spike
in inflation hitting the working class.
Speaking on the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation’s “7:30” program on Monday evening, Albanese
declared: “Quite clearly there is a need to see an end point. I think
that’s what people want to see,” adding that he was hoping for
“de-escalation” because of the “economic cost” of the war.
Albanese
timidly suggested that the fascistic US president Trump may be in a
position to claim that the “objectives” of the war had been met.
The most striking thing about what followed was that Albanese simply
repeated all of the lying pretexts that were used to justify the
continuing war and signaled his support for the bombardment.
About 150 workers at an auto parts plant in Findlay, Ohio launched a strike on March 24 for better wages and health benefits.
The
strike began at Freudenberg-NOK after talks with United Auto Workers
(UAW) Local 1327 broke down. Workers at the company produce seals,
O-rings, gaskets and other components critical for engines,
transmissions, drivetrains and hydraulic systems. In addition to
Findlay, Freudenberg-NOK has operations in Sandusky, Ohio, as well as in
Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Georgia. The company also
operates in Canada, Mexico and Brazil.
Neither the UAW nor the
company has made public statements about the content of the contract
negotiations. Workers say the strike centers on demands for higher
wages, more affordable healthcare and what they describe as a fair
overall contract. They have also emphasized the need for compensation
and benefits that keep pace with rising costs.
*****
While UAW members in Findlay are on strike, the union is seeking to push
through a sellout contract on 1,100 Nexteer workers in Saginaw,
Michigan. The new contract cuts wages for new hires, effectively
establishing a third tier. It also contains substantial givebacks on
out-of-pocket benefit costs.
For decades, the UAW has collaborated with the auto companies to cut
workers’ wages and benefits as corporations seek to boost profits. At
the same time, wages and living standards for workers in parts supply
have diverged sharply from those of assembly-line workers at major
automakers, reflecting the growth of a vast, lower-paid supplier
network.
This process was greatly accelerated following the 2009
bailout of the auto industry under the Obama administration. The terms
of the bailout included massive concessions, including wage freezes,
cuts to retiree healthcare and the introduction of second-tier wage
structures for new hires. The UAW played a critical role in suppressing
workers’ opposition and enforcing one concessionary contract after
another.
Economists note that inflation has further widened this
gap. According to research from the Economic Policy Institute, average
real hourly earnings for motor vehicle workers—including both Detroit
automakers and parts suppliers—have fallen significantly since the 2008
crisis, with wages failing to keep pace with rising prices for housing,
healthcare and other living expenses.
The UAW has supported
automakers’ reliance on outsourcing to suppliers in order to reduce
costs in the competitive global auto market. By shifting large portions
of production to independent parts manufacturers, automakers reduce
direct labor costs and transfer wage pressures onto subcontractors,
while eliminating tens of thousands of jobs.
On Saturday, March 28, 2026, the United Auto Workers (UAW)
bureaucracy shut down the strike of the Bath Marine Draftsmen’s
Association (BMDA, UAW Local 3999) at the General Dynamics naval
shipyard in Maine just days after it began. This lightning-fast
ratification of a four-year collective bargaining agreement at Bath Iron
Works (BIW) was not a “win” for the 620 designers, engineers and
technicians who walked out Monday, March 23, it was a strategic
intervention by the labor bureaucracy to enforce “labor peace” at a
critical bottleneck of the American war machine.
As the Trump
administration escalates its criminal military campaign against Iran,
the production of Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers has been
elevated to a supreme national priority, to which the material needs of
the working class must be subordinated. Neither the Trump
administration, General Dynamics management nor the union bureaucracy
could allow this strike to continue.
While the union apparatus
hailed the agreement as a “foundation for the future,” the ratification
was conducted under conditions of a deliberate information blackout. The
UAW moved to preempt a broader mobilization by forcing a vote before
the rank and file could fully digest the scale of the surrender.
However, leaked terms from the membership reveal the scale of the
capitulation: Annual wage increases of 10, 6, 5, and 5.5 percent, which
fail to keep pace with the real-world costs of a war economy, and the
regressive merging of sick and vacation time into a single paid time off
(PTO) pool.
To understand the content of Habermas’ work—and why the limitations
of his thought carry consequences that extend far beyond academic
philosophy—one must begin not with the man but the political environment
in which his life and career unfolded. Habermas was 15 when the Nazi
regime collapsed. West Germany after 1945 was a society haunted by its
fascist past, administered in many cases by men who had participated in
and accommodated themselves to the Nazi regime, and ideologically
committed to a ferocious anti-communism that not only precluded a
genuine democratic reckoning but also covered up and legitimized Nazi
crimes.
The young Federal Republic needed intellectuals who could
articulate a basis for political legitimacy that did not rest on the
discredited traditions of German nationalism. Habermas filled this role
with considerable skill. His concept of “constitutional patriotism” (Verfassungspatriotismus)—allegiance
not to the German nation as an ethnic or cultural entity but to the
universal principles embodied in the postwar Basic Law—provided the West
German intelligentsia with a vocabulary for political commitment that
did not require the rehabilitation of the national past. This was a
genuine service, and it explains why Habermas was, for decades,
something close to an unofficial philosopher of state for the Federal
Republic.
*****
Had Habermas studied Trotsky’s writings on the rise of German
fascism—developed in real time in the early 1930s, grounding the
catastrophe in the dynamics of class struggle and the criminal failures
of working class political leadership—he would have encountered an
analysis that drew precisely the opposite conclusion from the same
events. Trotsky argued that fascism triumphed not because the working
class was inherently incapable of revolutionary action, but because its
existing leaderships—the Social Democrats, who placed their faith in the
bourgeois state, and the Stalinists, whose ultra-left adventurism split
the workers’ movement—proved catastrophically unequal to the task. The
lesson of 1933, on this analysis, was not that revolution must be
abandoned but that the working class required a new, genuinely
revolutionary leadership. That Habermas never confronted this
analysis—that the entire Trotskyist tradition is virtually absent from
his work—is a silence of enormous political significance.
*****
The career of Jürgen Habermas illuminates, with exceptional clarity,
the fate of an entire current of postwar European thought and a
recurring pattern in the history of the German intelligentsia. The
thinker who begins by engaging with Marxism ends by placing his
intellectual powers in the service of the bourgeois state. The
vocabulary of constitutional patriotism and communicative reason is new,
but the political content is not. At every decisive moment, the
intellectual chooses the state over the independent movement of the
working class.
Habermas was not a hack or a mere propagandist. His
theoretical project represented a sustained attempt to provide
intellectual foundations for reformist politics after the catastrophes
of the 20th century. But having abandoned the critique of political
economy, the materialist conception of history and the revolutionary
role of the working class, Habermas was compelled by the logic of his
own position to seek an alternative basis for social critique in the
procedures of bourgeois democracy—in the idealised speech situation, in
constitutional patriotism, in the norms of rational discourse. When the
crises came—war, austerity, the disintegration of the liberal order he
had devoted his career to defending—he had no recourse but to rally
behind the state, lending the prestige of critical theory to the very
policies that critical theory had originally claimed to oppose.
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.
