Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Socialist
Equality Party (Canada) holds founding congress—a major advance in the
building of the world party of socialist revolution
The following notes about this article was provided by Socialism AI:
Founding of the Socialist Equality Party (Canada) — Outline
The Congress
- Founding congress held August 22–24, 2026, in Montreal (with online participation), as the Canadian section of the ICFI.
- Adopted
three resolutions: the "Historical and International Foundations of the
SEP (Canada)," a "Statement of Principles," and a resolution for the
freedom of Bogdan Syrotiuk.
- Elected a
National Committee: Keith Jones (national secretary), Louis Girard
(assistant national secretary), Roger Jordan (WSWS national editor).
Context
- Held amid accelerating global capitalist crisis,
in what the ICFI defines as the "decade of socialist revolution," with a
third world war unfolding.
- Opened just
hours after US–Canada trade talks collapsed and PM Mark Carney declared
Ottawa "at war" — contrasting the party's internationalism with the
nationalism of all imperialist powers.
- Fraternal participation from SEP (US) leaders David North and Joseph Kishore, plus ICFI sections internationally.
Historical Background Reviewed at the Congress
Origins of North American Trotskyism (1928): James P. Cannon and Maurice Spector smuggled Trotsky's Critique of the Draft Program of the Comintern
out of the USSR, were expelled from their Stalinized Communist Parties,
and founded the Communist League of America — breaking the isolation of
Trotsky and the Left Opposition.
The first Canadian movement:
Persecuted by the Canadian state, Stalinists, CCF social-democrats, and
union bureaucrats; illegalized during WWII, yet emerged as a vibrant
force in the post-war strike wave.
Pabloite liquidation (1950s–60s):
The movement was destroyed not by persecution but by Pabloism — a
petty-bourgeois tendency that rejected the working class as
revolutionary subject and sought surrogates (Stalinists, national
bourgeoisie). Cannon's 1953 Open Letter founded the ICFI
against it. The Canadian section (Ross Dowson's LSA) joined the ICFI but
fatally underestimated the split, failed to review its entry into the
CCF, and by the early 1960s repudiated permanent revolution, hailed
Castro and the NDP, and broke with the ICFI in 1963 — later promoting
Canadian and Quebec nationalism.
Reconstitution (early 1970s onward): Young people attracted to the ICFI's record began rebuilding the movement; a five-decade struggle preceded the formal founding.
Split with the WRP (1982–86):
Led by the Workers League (US) and David North's critiques, the split
ended the post-war "civil war" in the ICFI, reasserted Trotskyist
principles, and enabled development of the program of world socialist
revolution. The Workers League of Canada's support was seminal —
including the fight against "left" Canadian and Quebec nationalism, the
1985 UAW split, the free-trade debates, and the 1995 Quebec referendum.
Perspective
- The SEP is built as the Canadian section of the world party, not a "Canadian party."
- Central
strategy: the socialist transformation of Canada requires unification
of the working class of Canada, the US, and Mexico in a joint struggle
for the Socialist United States of North America.
- The
party's task is to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership by
arming the working class with a revolutionary program, strategy, and
leadership.
2. Harris campaigns with El-Sayed in Detroit: Gaza genocide buried in the name of Democratic “unity”
The purpose of the September 22 event was to help [Abdul] El-Sayed win
support among African American voters in Detroit, home to nearly half a
million black residents, roughly 76 percent of the city’s population.
El-Sayed won the statewide primary by one percentage point, 48.5 to
47.5, but lost Wayne County, where he had served as county health
director from 2023 to 2025, by roughly 17,000 votes, and lost Detroit by
a wide margin. Nearly the entire Detroit political establishment, along
with 14 black members of Congress, backed Stevens.
The event was a
roundtable on black maternal health at the Birth Detroit’s Birth Center
clinic, presented as an expression of concern over a genuine crisis. In
Michigan, the maternal mortality rate among black women was 2.3 times
that of white women in 2019–2023, and the infant mortality rate among
black infants was 2.7 times that of white infants in 2022–2023.
Harris
told the roundtable, “I’m here to support Dr. El-Sayed because, on this
subject, I know he will be a champion.” She said the Senate must serve
as a “stopgap on the abuses” of the Trump administration and declared
that “an attack on DEI … is an attack by definition on maternal care.”
The
framing of the event, and Harris’s own words, treated the crisis as a
racial question detached from the class conditions that produce them,
including poverty, hospital closures, the gutting of public health and a
for-profit healthcare system that the Democratic Party defends no less
than the Republicans. This framing serves the Democrats’ relationship
with the black middle-class layers that run Detroit politics while
offering nothing to the workers, of every race, who live with the
consequences.
*****
Since
winning the [Michigan Democratic Party Senate election] primary,
El-Sayed has quickly shed much of his anti-war rhetoric. On NBC’s Meet the Press
on August 9, he defended US military aid to Ukraine in the US-NATO war
against Russia, describing the conflict as one involving “a leader of a
neighboring sovereign country, who clearly violated international law.”
In this he follows other “progressive” Democrats, including
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
El-Sayed’s embrace of
Harris is not unique. It expresses the primary role of the so-called
“progressive” elements in and around the Democratic Party, to whitewash
the crimes of the party and the ruling class and channel socialist and
anti-war sentiment back into the graveyard of electoral politics.
The
same week that El-Sayed campaigned with Harris, Zohran Mamdani, the
Democratic Socialists of America member elected mayor of New York,
hosted Trump at Gracie Mansion, and his police arrested demonstrators,
including DSA members, protesting Netanyahu’s appearance at the United
Nations.
That El-Sayed, who presents himself as an opponent of
genocide, can stand beside one of its facilitators demonstrates where
his politics lie, not with the working class but with the ruling class
whose party he seeks to join in the Senate. To stop the wars, halt the
assault by ICE and win healthcare as a social right, workers must break
with the Democratic Party and build an independent, international
socialist movement.
3. The eviction of Maricarmen in Spain and the global housing crisis
On September 23, police in Madrid evicted 87-year-old María del Carmen
Abascal, known as Maricarmen, from her flat in the city’s Retiro district where she had lived since 1956. Riot police cleared hundreds of
supporters from the building, and medics carried her out on a stretcher
while the crowd chanted, “You are not alone!”
*****
From her hospital bed, Maricarmen issued a defiant video. “I did not
manage to defend my home, but I did fight so that others would learn to
fight for theirs,” she said. Calling on those listening to “please
fight,” she added, “What I want is that this problem that we have with
all the vulture funds be done away with once and for all.”
In
response, on September 26, tens of thousands marched in Madrid under the
slogan “Not one more Maricarmen,” with protests in Barcelona, Seville,
Valencia, Málaga and other cities. Tenants then set up camp in the
Puerta del Sol, the square occupied in 2011 by the mass movement against
austerity. The protests follow two years of demonstrations by hundreds
of thousands across Spain against soaring rents.
*****
The response is an indication of the enormous social tensions
building up in Spain and beyond. Over the past decade, rents on new
leases in Spain have risen faster than wages. Social rental housing
accounts for less than 2 percent of Spain’s housing stock, compared with
an EU average of about 8 percent. According to the national statistics
office, 44.3 percent of Spaniards aged 26 to 34 lived with their parents
in 2025. Some 272,000 evictions have been carried out since Pedro
Sánchez became prime minister in June 2018 or roughly 90 every day.
House
prices across the European Union rose by more than 60 percent between
2010 and 2025. In Portugal, where prices rose 16.5 percent in the year
to June, protesters marched in 16 cities in March after the government
approved measures to speed up evictions. In Ireland, child homelessness
has risen sevenfold since 2014.
French police carried out a record
24,556 evictions in 2024, a year in which 912 homeless people died. In
England, more than 177,000 children are living in temporary
accommodation, also a record.
In the United States, 22.7 million
renter households, a record and nearly half of all renters, spent more
than 30 percent of their income on housing in 2024. More than 12 million
spent over half. The government’s count found more than 745,000 people
homeless in January 2025. In Ontario, Canada, landlords’ applications to
evict tenants so that they or their relatives could move in rose 85
percent between 2020 and 2023.
The US private equity firm
Blackstone began buying Spanish flats in 2013 and by 2019 was the
country’s largest private landlord. Banks such as JP Morgan, Bank of
America and Deutsche Bank supplied 80 percent of the money at about 3
percent interest, while drawing their own funds from the European
Central Bank and the Federal Reserve at zero, the news site Infobae
reported in May. A government study found that in 2023 only about 39
percent of Spain’s rented homes belonged to individual landlords who
rent out a single home.
For the funds, security of tenancy is
simply a cost to be eliminated. Maricarmen’s case follows the pattern: A
rent-controlled flat passes into corporate hands, and the new owner
uses the courts and the police to remove a tenant paying below-market
rent.
*****
The mass response to Maricarmen’s eviction expresses deep opposition
in the working class to this entire political setup. “Either the rentier
system or the government will fall,” renters’ union spokeswoman Valeria
Racu declared on television. Yet the union’s central demand is that the
same government that presided over the crisis issue a more ambitious
housing decree.
The lessons of the 2011 protests in Spain must be
learned. The occupation of the Puerta del Sol that year expressed mass
opposition to the austerity of the PSOE government of José Luis
Rodríguez Zapatero. Its problem was not a lack of militancy. The forces
that dominated it proclaimed the movement “non-political” and
“leaderless,” leaving the field to those who channeled the opposition
into Podemos and, ultimately, into government.
The same questions
are posed today, in Spain and internationally. Housing cannot be
guaranteed as long as it remains a source of profit for Blackstone and
its counterparts. Decent housing for all requires placing the real
estate funds and the banks under public ownership and democratic
control, and turning the resources now spent on war to social needs.
Workers
cannot wage that struggle through appeals to the PSOE, Sumar or
Podemos. American workers can no more rely on the Democrats than on
Trump. The struggle requires the independent organization of the working
class, in rank-and-file committees in workplaces and neighborhoods,
linked across borders through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). Above all, it requires building a
Marxist-internationalist, that is, Trotskyist leadership—the
International Committee of the Fourth International—in Spain and around
the world.
4. Mass arrests of 150 Palestine Action protesters at UK Labour Party conference, as total nears 4,000
Repression of anti-Gaza genocide protests took another leap at the
Labour Party conference in Liverpool on Sunday, confirming that Prime
Minister Andy Burnham’s government is continuing the pro-Zionist and
pro-war agenda of his predecessor, Keir Starmer.
Merseyside
Police arrested more than 150 people, the vast majority of those
peacefully protesting. This brings the total arrests since the
undemocratic proscription last year of Palestine Action under
anti-terror legislation to almost 4,000.
Those detained were arrested for carrying signs reading, “I support
Palestine Action” and “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action,”
under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which makes it a crime to
support a proscribed organization. Escalated charges under Sections 11
and 12, covering membership and inviting support, carry sentences of up
to 14 years.
The protest, organized by Defend Our Juries (DOJ) as
part of its Lift the Ban campaign, assembled within sight of the ACC
Liverpool conference centre where Labour was opening its first
conference with Burnham as Labour leader. Defend Our Juries said 195
people took part.
More than a dozen protesters were arrested two
hours into the demonstration. By 8:02 p.m., Merseyside Police stated
that “more than 50 people” had been arrested. Defend our Juries reported
that police were still making arrests at midnight, with protesters
being “held in a police kettle for 13 hrs.”
On Monday, DOJ issued a
statement that as of “5am this morning, after over 150 arrests on
terrorism charges and a stand off that lasted over 16 hours,
MerseyPolice left a group of people outside the Labour Party Conference
still displaying their ‘terrorist’ signs.” Their accompanying photos
showed just eight people holding five signs.
Those seized were
overwhelmingly elderly. Among them was Margaret Owen OBE, 94, a human
rights barrister. Medics, clergy and disabled people using mobility aids
sat among the pensioners.
*****
Palestine Action was proscribed by the Starmer government after
activists entered the Royal Air Force (RAF) Brize Norton base and
damaged two Voyager aircraft in protest at British complicity in the
Gaza genocide. The High Court ruled the proscription unlawful in
February 2026, but the Court of Appeal overturned that ruling in June,
and police immediately resumed mass arrests.
In July, the Supreme
Court granted Ammori limited permission for a further appeal, listed
for November 4 and 5. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, kept in the post
by Burnham, said the government will “robustly defend this appeal.”
The
Burnham government is backing the genocide in Gaza and criminalising
opposition to it at home every bit as brutally as Starmer, despite
Burnham’s crocodile tears.
On July 9, shortly before taking
office, he posted a video declaring, “Labour’s initial response to the
treatment of Gaza caused huge hurt. We got it wrong and I am sorry for
that.” He has never described Israel’s mass murder of the Palestinians
as genocide, saying only that there is “increasing evidence that war
crimes appear to have been committed” but any determination is a matter
for international courts.
Meanwhile Burnham is escalating Britain’s military role in the Middle East region as well as in Europe against Russia.
*****
Stepped-up war demands state repression. In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week, Burnham announced a new National Centre for Information Defence.
This would bring together intelligence agencies, law enforcement and
social media companies with a remit to “detect, attribute and disrupt”
hostile information attacks, warning of “an insidious campaign that
reaches into people’s homes… stoking division and sowing despair.”
Presented
as a shield against Russian bots, such a body will be turned against
dissent at home. Opposition to war, to austerity, to the genocide in
Gaza can all be recast as a foreign-sponsored “narrative of decline.”
The
fight to lift the ban on Palestine Action, to secure the dropping of
all charges against those arrested and to oppose genocide and war
demands above all the independent political mobilization of the working
class against the Labour government and the capitalist system it
defends.
5. Frida: The Making of an Icon: Tate Modern’s erasure of Frida Kahlo’s politics
Cash tills at the Tate Modern
Tate Modern’s Frida: The Making of an Icon, sponsored by
Bank of America as “Lead Global Supporter,” brings together around 30
works by Frida Kahlo and hundreds of personal items. More than 200 other
artworks by other artists, from her contemporaries to those who have
appropriated her image since her death in 1954 are also on display.
The
exhibition has been a huge commercial success, shattering the gallery’s
record for advance ticket sales. More than 41,000 tickets sold before
it opened on June 25 with demand so high that queues stretched around
the building and the ticketing website briefly crashed. Full-price
tickets cost £25.
The show claims to interrogate the “Fridamania” surrounding Kahlo,
yet it operates as one of its engines—manufacturing, circulating and
profiting from the phenomenon it pretends to analyse. The gift shop is
piled high with limited-edition catalogues, prints, custom apparel and
tacky trinkets. Those who pay the steep entry price, endure the queues
and wade through the self-absorption of the contemporary artists on
display will learn little about Kahlo or the times she lived through.
That
is because the exhibition is an extended presentation of the
identity-politics curatorial class itself, engaged in repackaging Kahlo
as someone who “rejected the notion of a fixed identity” and projected a
“multivalent sense of self”: avant-garde artist, self-taught painter,
mestiza, political activist, devoted wife, bisexual woman, transgressor,
disabled artist. This supposed liberation dissolves all concrete
meaning, above all her politics.
*****
There is no mention of Kahlo’s political life, that she joined the
Mexican Communist Party in 1928, the year she met Diego Rivera, or that
she ceased party activity after Rivera’s expulsion in 1929 for refusing
to subordinate his art to Stalinist dictates. Rivera helped secure
asylum in Mexico for Leon Trotsky, co-leader of the October Revolution
and founder of the Red Army. In 1937 the exiled Bolshevik lived with his
wife Natalia Sedova in Kahlo’s family home, the Casa Azul. In 1938
Rivera collaborated with Trotsky and Surrealist leader André Breton on
the Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art.
The 1930s—when Kahlo and Rivera aligned with Trotsky and the struggle against Stalinism—were her most creative years.
My Dress Hangs There (1933), Kahlo’s only political work in the exhibition, exemplifies those years. Painted
during her stay in the United States, it is left unexplained by an
anodyne caption that merely depicts it as “Kahlo’s ambivalence towards
the United States.” But it is a ferocious satire of American capitalism:
a toilet perched on a classical column, a temple staircase rendered as a
sales graph, unemployed workers shuffling in breadlines. At the center hangs Kahlo’s empty Tehuana dress, evoking a Mexican identity in a
hostile landscape. Writing from the US, she declared: “I’ve learnt so
much here and I’m more and more convinced it’s only through communism
that we can become human.” Such a phrase clamors for investigation, but
the Tate has none of it.
The Tehuana costume was a deliberate political and aesthetic gesture.
Tehuana women, celebrated in post-revolutionary Mexico where women ran
markets and controlled commerce, and the dress expressed an
identification with indigenous and popular culture. But it belonged to
Mexicanidad, a nationalism that substituted ethnic identity for class
struggle, promoted by the ruling elite as “ideological cement” to paper
over unresolved social divisions. Suspended empty over the American
landscape, the dress becomes the emblem of a consciousness caught
between societies, unable to ground its critique of capitalism beyond
national belonging.
Yet the painting matters because, despite its weakness, it is
fundamentally about class—something entirely absent from both exhibition
and catalogue.
The Tate focuses on Kahlo’s self-portraits, but Self Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky
(1937), the single most politically significant painting she ever made,
is absent. This is not an oversight but a statement. Painted while
Trotsky and Sedova lived in the Casa Azul, it is a full-length
self-portrait of Kahlo holding a letter, framed by curtains like a
stage. The dedication to Trotsky is written in her own hand. Shown at
her first New York solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1938,
it was reproduced by Vogue, which removed the dedication. Trotsky’s name was too dangerous to print.
The work is the clearest documentary evidence of Kahlo’s alignment with
the anti-Stalinist Left Opposition, not an exploration of identity but a
political commitment. Dated 1937 and written “with all my love,” the
dedication is a declaration of solidarity with a man Stalin had
condemned to death. Within three years Trotsky was murdered in a house
Kahlo helped him reach; within a decade she had rejoined the Stalinist
party.
Of course, the exhibition is about Kahlo, but the virtual absence of
Rivera, her lifelong partner and collaborator in art and politics, is
one of its most revealing gestures. What the identity-politics
curatorial class hates about Rivera is that he painted the class
struggle on public walls for the masses and refused to subordinate his
art to the ruling class; he is the living refutation of their entire
method. This petty-bourgeois milieu has sought over the decades to
destroy Rivera’s reputation, so much so that one couple, viewing a 1929
marriage photo of the tall, overweight Rivera beside a diminutive Kahlo,
felt no hesitation in exclaiming, “Oh, it’s so obvious he was a
predator.”
Trotsky, writing in 1938 at the height of Rivera’s sympathy with the
Fourth International, put it with characteristic force: “Do you wish to
see with your own eyes the hidden springs of the social revolution? Look
at the frescoes of Rivera. Do you wish to know what revolutionary art
is like? Look at the frescoes of Rivera… You have before you, not simply
a ‘painting’, an object of passive aesthetic contemplation, but a
living part of the class struggle. And it is at the same time a
masterpiece!”
Nor should Kahlo’s weaknesses be softened into the
revolutionary gloss sometimes given her. The truth is more complex, and
more instructive. Her politics, and Rivera’s, always had a radical
nationalist character, and their alignment with Trotskyism was tenuous
outside the artistic sphere. Rivera and Trotsky had parted ways before
the assassination, after Rivera backed a right-wing nationalist in the
1940 elections.
Both remained under the influence of Mexican nationalism and, chastened
and demoralized, both reconciled with Stalin and Stalinism.
After Trotsky’s murder Kahlo’s work took an increasingly mystical
turn. The symbol of a thought at the center of the forehead became
openly a “third eye”; she appealed more directly to religious symbols.
She rejoined the Communist Party in 1948, reportedly boasting she was “a
better Communist than he [Rivera] is or ever will be,” and in 1954,
painted Stalin and I, seated like a disciple beneath the
dictator’ portrait—a terrible political decline. This was the year of
her death and the year Rivera sought readmittance to the Mexican
Communist Party.
This is the version of Kahlo the exhibition
elevates, the late, mystical figure, drained of concrete political
content and repackaged as a fluid “multivalent self” and hollowed-out
icon, safe to sponsor and to sell.
6. Germany: Antisemitism campaign against the Berlin Left Party
The result of the Berlin state election had barely been announced when a
smear campaign erupted against the Left Party, the clear election
winner. The accusations range from antisemitism to support for criminal
clans and terrorist gangs.The opening shot came from Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right
Alternative for Germany (AfD), who on election night itself railed
against a “hard-left alliance calling for ‘shoot the rich,’ ‘capitalists
out,’ ‘expropriate’ and ‘rent caps.’” She was followed by the Springer
press, led by the tabloid Bild, and other media, and by representatives of all the Bundestag (federal parliamentary) parties, including the Left Party itself.
On
Wednesday, at the AfD’s request, a Bundestag debate took place in which
the AfD, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Social Democratic
Party (SPD) and the Greens ganged up on the Left Party. Gregor Gysi, who
spoke for the Left Party, contritely conceded that “some members are
clearly overdoing their criticism of Israel” and promised to do better.
This
nauseating spectacle was directed less against the Left Party and its
lead candidate Elif Eralp, who is seeking to form a Senate (state
executive) with the SPD and Greens, than against its voters.
The
Left Party has proven time and again that it is a reliable pillar of
capitalist interests. In Berlin, where it was part of the Senate for
some 16 years from 2002, it played a pioneering role in the destruction
of jobs and incomes and the privatization of public housing. It also
supports the federal government’s policy of war and rearmament. Eralp
had already fiercely attacked her own Neukölln district branch during the election campaign.
The
real target of the campaign is the broad popular rejection of the
genocide in Gaza and of the government’s war policy. According to
post-election surveys, 88 percent of Left Party voters and 60 percent of
all voters approved of the Left Party having spoken critically about
Israel.
*****
What is remarkable about this campaign is not only its vicious,
aggressive tone, but also the close cooperation of supposed democrats
with the AfD. Representatives of the establishment parties, far-right
extremists and influential figures in the capital’s press are vying to
howl the loudest. The campaign is preparing the ground for the AfD’s
inclusion in future governments.
*****
While Koçak’s alleged links to clan crime are pure speculation, a
clan of a quite different kind was meeting in the nearby Springer
building. Springer CEO Matthias Döpfner presented the “Axel Springer
Award” there to Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and backer of Donald
Trump and JD Vance, to honour his contribution “to the resilience of
democracies.” Thiel’s company Palantir supplies intelligence agencies
and security forces around the world with surveillance software that
undermines every democratic right.
Thiel accused the German media
of having “degenerated into a kind of left-wing hate factory.” He
praised Döpfner, saying that without people like him the situation would
be “really very, very bad.” Döpfner and Thiel have long had close
business ties and invest together in armaments projects. Döpfner’s son
Moritz was chief of staff at the investment firm Thiel Capital.
Also
in the audience was CSU leader Markus Söder, who is positioning himself
as a possible successor to the beleaguered Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
The
episode shows how closely the interests of the financial oligarchy, the
attacks on democratic rights and the strengthening of the AfD are
intertwined. Confronted with a crisis to which it has no answer other
than war and dictatorship, the ruling class in all capitalist countries
is moving to the right.
The Left Party, although the target of the
latest smear campaign, does not resist this development. On the
contrary, it uses left-wing phrases to contain the growing opposition to
war and genocide while itself moving ever further to the right. Elif
Eralp’s role model, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is now working closely with the fascist US President Trump.
Only
an independent socialist movement of the international working class,
fighting against war and capitalism, can stop the attacks on democratic
rights.
7. “We’re not supposed to be living in terror”: Austin, Texas residents speak out after ICE shooting of Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez
About 160 people returned Sunday to the North Austin intersection
where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot
28-year-old Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez one week earlier. Garcés Pérez,
meanwhile, remains imprisoned at the South Texas ICE Processing Center
in Pearsall with a bullet still lodged near his spine and is scheduled
to appear at a federal hearing Wednesday.
The demonstration was
one of a series of protests across Central Texas since the shooting.
Protesters gathered Sunday outside the Pearsall detention center
demanding Garcés Pérez’s release and surgery to remove the bullet.
Students at Anderson High School walked out Friday, following walkouts
earlier in the week at schools in Austin, Pflugerville, Del Valle and
Hays County. About 400 students at Lamar Middle School left class
Wednesday to protest the shooting.
Texas authorities have also begun making arrests over the protests.
At least three people were arrested on trumped-up resisting-arrest and
riot-related charges during the September 20 demonstration that erupted
hours after the shooting. Six days later, Texas Department of Public
Safety officers arrested Misael Ramos, a candidate for Austin City
Council and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, while he was
walking his dog.
Garcés Pérez, a Venezuelan immigrant who came to
the United States in 2024, was working as a DoorDash driver on
September 20 when an unmarked SUV drove alongside his car and attempted
to hit him. He initially believed he was dealing with an aggressive
driver. After learning that the men were federal immigration agents, he
said he asked to pull over somewhere safely so that he could submit to
detention. Instead, he said, the vehicle struck his car again before an
agent fired into him.
The bullet struck Garcés Pérez from behind.
He was taken to Dell Seton Medical Center, while his whereabouts were
concealed from his wife and attorney. He was discharged after only about
four hours and transported roughly 135 miles to the Pearsall detention
center with the bullet still in his body. After reporting severe pain
and loss of movement on the left side of his body, he was returned to a
hospital and subsequently sent back into ICE detention.
His
attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, has said Garcés Pérez suffers “extreme
pain” and loss of movement and warned that he faced paralysis. A
specialist later recommended surgery to remove the projectile, which
fractured his collarbone and remains lodged in the upper part of his
back near his spine. His legal team said last week that without surgery
his mobility could be permanently affected. He remains detained ahead of
Wednesday’s federal hearing.
Among those at Sunday’s demonstration was Enrique, an Austin-area
resident who described the atmosphere produced by the immigration raids.
“Everywhere
I go, I have to carry passport, documentation,” he said. “I have never
... seen this before. I don’t feel safe going out without
documentation.”
Enrique brought his daughter to the protest. “I
think it’s wrong having to carry documentation, passport, all that,” he
said. “This is a free country, and we’re not supposed to be living in
terror.”
*****
Another young man interviewed at Sunday’s protest described the fear created by the use of masked agents and unmarked vehicles.
“The
fact that they can come in unmarked vehicles, cover up their faces, I
could never tell if it’s even a federal officer or a random person
kidnapping you,” he said.
“I’m brown. They could just say I’m
illegal one day, you know, and I’d have to prove it in court, lose my
job in the process,” he continued. “Yes, I’m a citizen, but I still
would live in fear. I don’t trust these people at all.”
He
connected immigration to the economic and political conditions produced
internationally, arguing that US policies abroad contribute to the
conditions that force people to migrate. He then returned to the social
power of workers themselves.
“At the end of the day, if the
working class unite, then the power truly is in our hand,” he said.
“Without our labor, without our brain and muscle, there’d be no ...
corporations’ power. There would be no imperialism. There’d be none of
this oppression.”
8. Supreme Court allows expanded Homeland Security database to purge voter rolls ahead of midterm elections
On Friday, September 25, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Trump
administration can utilize an expanded Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) database of citizens and noncitizens alike, to carry out a March
2025 Trump executive order aimed at purging state voter rolls.
*****
In the name of blocking non-citizens from voting—a virtually
non-existent phenomenon—Trump ordered a massive expansion of a
40-year-old database known as Systematic Alien Verification for
Entitlements (SAVE). The data system has been used by state governments
to check the eligibility of residents for certain social benefits.
Trump’s 2025 order expanded SAVE to include natural-born citizens’
records, access Social Security Administration information, and allow
state and local officials to conduct bulk searches, rather than only
individual checks.
The additional data contained in Social
Security files includes personal information about hundreds of millions
of Americans: full names, Social Security numbers, dates and places of
birth, citizenship indicators and death records, according to a notice
in the Federal Register.
Under the executive order, state and
local officials can request that DHS run lists of potential voters
through the expanded SAVE system and flag names that are not listed as
citizens. Social Security records are notoriously inaccurate when it
comes to updating the status of naturalized citizens.
As a result,
just five weeks before the November 3 midterm elections, with early
voting having already begun in many states, the Supreme Court ruling
could enable Republican officials to run multiple checks of voters in
Democratic precincts, flagging hundreds of thousands and perhaps
millions of suspected “illegal” voters and preventing many of them from
casting ballots.
This is not a remote threat. The Trump
administration is widely hated, its poll numbers are at record lows, the
Iran war is massively unpopular, and soaring prices for gas, rents,
mortgages, healthcare and consumer goods all point to a political
debacle for the Republican Party in November. Trump is openly working
either to rig the elections, block them altogether or overturn the
results.
The Democrats, far more fearful of an eruption of mass
opposition by the working class than the prospect of a presidential
dictatorship, are doing nothing more than wringing their hands and
filing court suits. They are completely opposed to any popular
mobilization to defend the right to vote.
9. New Zealand election: Labour’s phony “principled” foreign policy
On September 23, New Zealand’s opposition Labour Party presented a
foreign policy approach described as “independent, principled and
unafraid.”
The speeches by leader Chris Hipkins and foreign affairs spokesperson
Vanushi Walters had an air of unreality. They largely consisted of
bland phrases about the need for more “diplomacy” and “the peaceful
resolution of conflicts and disputes.”
On the same day, US President Donald Trump told
the United Nations General Assembly that he was deciding whether to
“annihilate the Islamic Republic” of Iran and “drive them into hell with
no chance of survival.”
Hipkins and Walters did not mention, let
alone condemn, Trump’s genocidal threats and the criminal war against
Iran, part of an expanding global war in which New Zealand’s ruling
class is complicit as an ally of US imperialism.
With an election
looming on November 7, Labour is highly conscious of anti-war sentiment.
The war against Iran, which has led to soaring prices, is opposed by
nearly nine in ten people in New Zealand. Protests continue against the
US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the US is viewed as a greater threat
than China, according to one survey.
Labour is attempting to
rhetorically distance itself from Washington, while remaining fully
committed to the military-intelligence alliance with US imperialism. The
2017–2023 Labour-Greens government supported the military build-up
against China in the Indo-Pacific region and the US-NATO war against
Russia over Ukraine.
*****
The working class must be warned: another Labour government will
continue and escalate New Zealand’s involvement in the widening world
war. It will rapidly increase military spending and recruitment, which will be funded by cutting social programs and workers’ living standards. The Greens and the union bureaucracy will work with Labour to enforce this agenda.
To
stop the plunge into world war and barbarism, workers and young people
must break from all the capitalist parties and build a new movement,
based on the program of socialist internationalism, to put an end to the
capitalist system which is the source of war.
10. France: Mobilize the working class against war and austerity!
The public sector strike in France is part of an international
resurgence of social struggles against the backdrop of war and the rise
of the far right. Mobilizations are following one another: against high
rents in Spain, against conscription in Germany, the “No Kings”
protesters against Trump in the United States, wildcat strikes in
Turkey. What is developing is not a series of national trade union
struggles demanding negotiations with one capitalist government or
other.
Everywhere, workers are entering into a political struggle
against the financial oligarchy. The demands of firefighters,
electricians, gas workers, education workers and transport workers in
France are just, both on wages and on resources in the workplace. But to
defend social conditions and prevent another union sellout of the
struggles, as happened in the fight against the pension reform in 2023, a
political movement must be built among workers against war,
dictatorship and the capitalist system that produces them.
Over
the past decade, Macron has doubled the military budget to more than €70
billion, gutted the taxation of the rich and created an immense debt of
more than €3 trillion. At the same time, the media are promoting the
National Rally (RN), which is leading in the 2027 presidential election
polls, even though it proposes annual austerity packages of €100
billion, or even €125 billion. The ruling class intends to trample
workers’ demands underfoot through fascistic dictatorship and war.
Macron’s televised interview Thursday evening confirmed the direct link between
austerity and neocolonial war. He proposed sending French troops to take
control of the Saudi oil port of Yanbu, which was hit by Houthi strikes
during Washington’s war of aggression against Iran. At the same time,
he called the current €54 billion austerity plan based on freezing
public sector wages “fair.”
Macron’s interview highlighted the
enormity of the capitalist crisis and the political tasks facing the
working class. He admitted that it is “factual” to say that the NATO war
in Ukraine is cutting off France’s energy supplies and driving up
inflation. He admitted that he could not rule out strikes in France in
retaliation by Moscow for attacks carried out by Ukraine with the help
of French military personnel, or an energy shortage if Trump cuts diesel
supplies in the context of his economic war against Europe.
In
plain terms, the capitalist oligarchy is rushing headlong toward world
war, financial bankruptcy and an economic and social collapse that would
be triggered by an energy shortage. Under these conditions, no lasting defense of workers’ social and democratic rights is possible without
wresting control of the economy and political life from the ruling
class.
*****
The course of events vindicated the Socialist Equality Party/Parti de l’égalité socialiste, which called for a struggle to bring down Macron
and to stop the war and the escalation of military spending. The PES
called for workers and youth to be mobilized in workplaces and schools
from below, to demand Macron’s removal and the withdrawal of his
illegitimate reform. Now, as the bourgeoisie seeks to exploit the
stifling of the class struggle to install a neo-fascist dictatorship, it
is precisely such an independent struggle that must be built.
Mélenchon
has nothing to offer to stop military escalation abroad. After Macron’s
interview on sending troops to Saudi Arabia, he posted on X not to
denounce this policy, but to call for a parliamentary vote that would
legitimize it. Since there is a risk of involving France in the war with
Iran, he wrote: “Therefore the Assembly must vote on the matter.
Article 35 of the Constitution.”
The task facing workers is to
stop neocolonialism and world war, not to have them legalized by a vote
of reactionary deputies. To do this, workers must organize independently
of the trade union bureaucracies that profit through works councils
from the militarization of industry and link their struggles with those
of their class brothers and sisters internationally.
Already in
2018, the “yellow vests” movement demonstrated that it is possible to
organize social struggles independently, through social media. For this
reason, calls for a return of the “yellow vests” are circulating and
attracting real interest. This corresponds to the need, felt
instinctively by masses of workers, to break through the dead weight
that the bureaucracies impose on the class struggle.
The political
lessons of the “yellow vests” mobilization are rich. On the one hand,
their mobilization confirmed the power of an independent social
struggle, holding Macron in check for many months. On the other hand,
the movement’s declared apoliticism and its rejection of a class
strategy cut it off from the possibility of a broader revolutionary
mobilization of workers internationally against austerity, war and
capitalism. Such a mobilization must urgently be built today.
The
construction of a politically independent movement in the French and
international working class is the decisive question today. The
development of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is the weapon of the workers to counteract the
sellout of struggles by the union leaderships and to unite unionized and
non-unionized workers across national borders.
11. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Canada:
Peterborough, Ontario paramedics vote to strike
Colombia:
Artists protest proposed budget cuts by right-wing government
Mexico:
Thousands demonstrate to mark 12 years since Ayotzinapa massacre
Paraguay:
Healthcare workers protest
United States:
Thousands of Chicago hotel workers authorize strike action
Cleveland Orchestra musicians end three-day strike, ratify agreement
Texas industrial workers strike against mandatory overtime
Confrontation at Cleveland Clinic Lutheran Hospital as workers launch strike
