Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: August 24-30
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
United States and Philippines sign Mutual Defense Treaty
100 years ago:
Presidential decrees seek to stabilize Piłsudski’s Bonapartist regime in Poland
2. Donate to the campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Johannes Stern: Today,
I want to ask you to do something very concrete: Please make a generous
donation to support the international campaign to free 27-year-old
Ukrainian socialist and opponent of war Bogdan Syrotiuk.
The New York Times reported Sunday that House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries and Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump and one of his closest advisers, held a private meeting in recent weeks. It took place, according to the Times, in “a private space in New York City, offered up by a mutual friend of the two men.”
The Times account, which amounts to an orchestrated “leak” on behalf of Jeffries, Kushner or both, claimed that domestic issues like housing, immigration and the cost of living were “potential areas of common ground.” But it is more than likely that the discussion was focused on foreign policy.
But whatever the agenda, Jeffries was meeting the man who, as the Times noted, “has been deeply involved in the president’s efforts to resolve the war with Iran that Mr. Trump began, to enforce a cease-fire in Gaza and to bring an end to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.” Kushner meets with Netanyahu, Hamas, the Saudi Crown Prince and the Iranians. Jeffries has now been added to the list.
The Jeffries-Kushner meeting confirms the underlying class unity of the two corporate parties. The real differences between the Democratic Party leadership and Trump have always related to foreign policy priorities, particularly the war in Ukraine, which Trump has downplayed, and the war in Iran, which the Democrats criticize as mistaken or poorly executed, although they support the goal of US domination of the region and destruction of the regime in Tehran.
The Times portrayed the meeting as an indication “that those around Mr. Trump were well aware of the likelihood of a Democratic-led House, and trying to foster as much of a working relationship as possible before any change. Mr. Jeffries is in line to be the speaker, were Democrats to win the majority.”
As always with Trump, however, he is keeping his options open. While he dispatches his son-in-law to sound out the Democrats on post-election collaboration, he is preparing to rig the elections by conducting them at gunpoint, with National Guard troops and immigration agents at polling places, or to stage a provocation that would be the pretext for declaring a national emergency and putting off the election entirely. Earlier this month, appearing on the radio program of fascist Wayne Allyn Root, Trump was asked about his “right to declare a national security emergency” to unilaterally enforce new voting restrictions. “Stranger things have happened,” he responded.
Senator Adam Schiff (Democrat-Calif) told the Los Angeles Times that he is “most concerned” about a scenario in which unrest is provoked in major cities to “give the president a pretext, Reichstag fire-like, to call out the military or invoke the Insurrection Act or call out ICE or Border Patrol.” This was a reference to the provocation staged by Hitler a month after taking office as chancellor, which became the pretext for suspending civil liberties and outlawing the Communist Party, the first step toward the Nazi dictatorship.
For all their anti-Trump rhetoric, and even the alarm bells about possible suspension of the vote, the Democrats are preparing to do business with this fascist administration after the election, should they regain control of the House, or even of Congress as a whole.
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The Jeffries-Kushner meeting demonstrates the completely phony character of the claims by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) that the Democratic Party can be pushed to the left or even “taken over.” The DSA is seeking to provide a left cover for a corporate-controlled capitalist party, irrevocably committed to the defense of Wall Street and American imperialism.
This is further demonstrated by the ongoing recruitment of Democratic congressional candidates from the US national-security apparatus. When the World Socialist Web Site first exposed the rise of what we called the “CIA Democrats” in 2018, they accounted for 30 of the Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives, 11 of whom won seats. Similar numbers ran as Democrats in the next three elections.
But in 2026 that figure has doubled to at least 60 Democratic congressional nominees whose political campaigns are based on careers in the military-intelligence field. This includes two admirals, two generals, military intelligence operatives and special forces soldiers, paratroopers, military police, electronic warfare specialists and combat veterans of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
They also include former members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, State Department, National Security Council, Defense Intelligence Agency and FBI. These are not short-term enlistees—At least half have careers of 20 years or longer, and many have served in top positions in the global military operations of American imperialism.
In the event of a “wave” election in which the Democrats take many Republican House seats, the contingent of military-intelligence Democrats could rise from the present 10 to 20 or even 30, dwarfing the relative handful of supposed “democratic socialists” promoted by the DSA.
The DSA is not an obstacle to this orientation but a component of it. DSA-backed candidates provide a “left” image to attract radicalizing workers and youth and deliver them to a party that is placing admirals, generals and intelligence agents on its ballot line to wage war and suppress that radicalization.
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The Jeffries-Kushner meeting is a warning. Whatever the result in November, the working class will confront a government committed to war abroad and austerity at home, administered by Trump and the Republicans with tacit Democratic support, as at present, or by an open coalition of the two capitalist parties against the working class.
Workers and young people moving into struggle need organizations of their own: rank-and-file committees in the workplaces, linked internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) and a party fighting for socialism, the Socialist Equality Party, US section of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The oligarchy has two parties. The working class must build its own.
4. US and Canada “at war” over trade
Carney said the Canadian side had recognised that America had changed and that “sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”
“We cannot accept what they offered and we will not give what they asked. We were not prepared to compromise Canada’s sovereignty or undermine our key industries.”
He said the US had “miscalculated” on Canada’s resolve and it would respond, “dollar for dollar” against the US and, draping himself in the flag, said it would retaliate “to protect our workers and businesses.”
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The eruption of this conflict goes beyond the issue of Canadian trade. It has global implications.
The tariffs were invoked under Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Act. This provision, which has never before been invoked by any US president, provides that he can impose tariffs on countries that discriminate against the “commerce of the United States directly or indirectly.”
In April 2025, Trump initiated a trade war against the rest of the world with his so-called “reciprocal tariffs.” But after being collected, these tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year, resulting in the Treasury having to repay around $160 billion to US corporations—exposing the lie of the administration that they were paid for by foreign governments and corporations.
Since then, the administration has been casting about for other means of imposing tariffs, notably under the 1974 Trade Act. But this is a cumbersome and somewhat lengthy procedure, and the administration would like to be able to rapidly impose tariffs at will as Trump sought to do.
The use of Section 338, as was noted when it was invoked, may well be a trial run for its wider application as the administration deepens its economic warfare against the rest of the world.
5. Murky Australian “foreign interference” arrest used to promote war against Russia
With much media fanfare, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) announced last Thursday that a 27-year-old Australian-Russian dual citizen had been arrested on charges of attempting to engage in intentional foreign interference, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years’ imprisonment.
The next day, Vladimir Teslov was remanded in custody by a Brisbane magistrate on accusations that he tried to collect and communicate information relating to Ukrainian military personnel, locations and operations to people “he believed” were connected to Russian intelligence services.
Lawyers for the young man, who did not appear in court, made no application for bail. Teslov could remain in prison until his case is next heard on October 2. To further promote media attention, the AFP yesterday posted a video of his arrest.
Every aspect of this case remains murky. But from what is known, it shows how far Australia’s foreign interference laws can go to criminalize any political activity accused of being for the benefit of a foreign government or organization.
A joint AFP media release with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the domestic spy and surveillance agency, alleged that Teslov traveled to Russia in October, 2024 and undertook military-style training.
No details were provided of this training, which must have been brief: “After returning to Australia in December, 2024, it is alleged he maintained contact with individuals he believed were connected to Russian intelligence services.”
The AFP and ASIO allege that Teslov traveled to Ukraine in May 2025, “where he joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces and gained access to information relating to their military personnel, units and locations” and later “provided, or attempted to provide,” information to such unnamed individuals.
When first introduced in 2018 by the previous Liberal-National Coalition government with Labor’s backing, the foreign interference laws were justified by the political and media establishment as needed to protect Australians and “national security” from interference by foreign powers.
Teslov’s arrest confirms that the laws have an even wider scope to outlaw any association with an overseas government or organization, regardless of any supposed “interference” in Australia itself.
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As the World Socialist Web Site has documented, AFP and ASIO entrapment has been the basis for multiple terrorism cases in Australia, including some where the prosecutions failed after the entrapment was exposed. Entrapment has become endemic in Australia and internationally, creating sensational scare campaigns that are used to justify an increasing assault on basic legal and democratic rights.
The WSWS has also warned that the foreign interference offenses, now in section 92.2 of the federal Criminal Code, outlaw any allegedly covert conduct “on behalf of, or in collaboration with, a foreign principal.”
“Collaboration” is undefined. It could cover consultation, information-sharing, coordination, or even online communication. “Foreign principal” is defined to cover not just governments and government agencies, but also “foreign political organizations” and “foreign political parties.”
Thus, campaigning against Australian supply of arms or involvement in Ukraine, Gaza or other US-backed military interventions could be criminalized if any contact were made, even by widely-used encrypted text or email platforms, with any overseas organization.
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Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, quickly welcomed the news of Teslov’s arrest. He declared that it was not surprising because Russian President Vladimir Putin had criticized the AUKUS alliance—a military pact for war against China—and was therefore identifying Australia as an enemy of Russia in the Indo-Pacific.
The Russian embassy in Canberra said it had learned of Teslov’s case as a result of media reports and had received no notifications of the allegations by Australian authorities. Yet the accusations have been splashed all over the media, amounting to war propaganda.
By contrast, the major media outlets in Australia, as in the United States and Europe, have maintained a deliberate blackout of coverage of a Ukrainian court’s August 10 imposition of a 15-year prison term on Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist, despite growing international calls for his release.
Bogdan was convicted of high treason for writing six WSWS articles urging Russian and Ukrainian workers to make common cause against the war, opposing both Putin’s invasion and Washington’s proxy war, and denouncing the Zelensky regime’s official glorification of World War II Ukrainian Nazi collaborators.
We urge our readers to sign the petition demanding Bogdan’s release at wsws.org/freebogdan. Send letters to the Pervomaisk City District Court (inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua) and the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal (inbox@mka.court.gov.ua), copied to freebogdan@wsws.org, calling on them to vacate the 15-year sentence and free Bogdan.
6. Mamdani goes to court to block $10,000 bonus for NYC paraprofessional school aides
[New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani’s lawsuit foreshadows a massive conflict between his supposedly “democratic socialist” administration and the powerful New York City working class, which includes hundreds of thousands of public school educators. Last month, UFT President Michael Mulgrew said an attempt by the mayor to block the bonus would mean “all out war.”The last thing Mulgrew intends is war against the mayor and Wall Street. He has imposed one sellout contract after another, and, with an annual compensation of $388,994, he pulls in nearly seven times the salary of the highest paid paraprofessionals. But he is well aware of the explosive anger building up in the rank and file and fears an eruption that he will not be able to control.
Mamdani’s intervention against the paraprofessionals is the latest in a series of austerity measures aimed at closing a budget deficit of $5.4 billion on the backs of the working class. In collaboration with Mulgrew and the New York State legislature, Mamdani intervened to delay for two years the implementation of a state-mandated reduction in school class sizes. This allowed the city to leave open some 5,000 teacher vacancies and save $508 million, the biggest single line item in its budget-balancing program.
Mamdani’s election reflected a broad political radicalization of workers, young people and sections of the middle class who have been hammered by inflation, social cuts and the impact of escalating war abroad. Repulsed by the genocide in Gaza, Trump’s savage attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, and the cowardice and complicity of the Democratic Party, these layers are increasingly looking for a socialist alternative to capitalism.
While the DSA and its candidates are the initial beneficiaries of this shift to the left, the DSA is not a socialist party. It is a faction of the Democratic Party, one of the two parties of the American financial oligarchy. As the trajectory of Mamdani’s administration has already revealed just seven months into his mayoralty, the DSA is not a vehicle for serious social reform, let alone socialism. It is an instrument for channeling the mass opposition to war, inequality, dictatorship and poverty behind the Democratic Party and blocking an independent movement of the working class for socialism.
7. Brazil: University of São Paulo students speak out in defense of Bogdan Syrotiuk
The Brazilian Socialist Equality Group (GSI) carried out distributions last week at several departments of the University of São Paulo (USP) of a leaflet demanding the immediate release of Bogdan Syrotiuk, the 27-year-old leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), sentenced in Ukraine to 15 years in prison for his opposition to the war.
The campaign reached USP students weeks after the conclusion of a 54-day strike—one of the largest movements in the history of Brazilian higher education—which was met with brutal police violence ordered by the far-right state government of Tarcísio de Freitas, and with punitive legislation and sordid acts of provocation by fascistic politicians.
The GSI team explained to USP students the facts and political significance of Bogdan’s case and campaigned for their support in the international fight for his release. Since his conviction by a Ukrainian court on August 10, more than 1,000 people in 58 countries and territories have signed the petition for Syrotiuk’s release, while social media content reporting on and opposing the case has drawn tens of thousands more views, likes and shares. This groundswell of public support stands against the calculated silence of the major press in the United States and Europe, which also prevails in the Brazilian media.
The campaign was met with a warm response from students. GSI members also spoke with representatives of the student unions at the faculties of Architecture, Geography and Social Sciences, who responded positively and said they would bring the case to their leaderships for discussion. At the head of these entities are organizations such as Juntos!—the youth wing of the Morenoite Socialist Left Movement (MES), an internal current of the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL)—and the Communist Youth Union (UJC)—the youth wing of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). Neither the PSOL, PCB, nor any other self-declared left-wing organization in Brazil, has reported Bogdan’s case or taken a stand in his defense. Their silence contrasts with the agreement and interest expressed by students at the rank-and-file.
8. Australian Industrial Workers Rank-and-File Committee demands freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk
“I call for the immediate release of Bogdan Syrotiuk. His only crime has been fighting for the unification of Ukrainian and Russian workers to oppose a war that comes at the expense of those workers through their pockets and blood.”
9. Amid budget crisis, French government prepares new attack on pensions
As France’s ruling elite prepares for the political return from summer recess and for the 2027 presidential campaign, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s government is preparing new social attacks on workers. Macron’s 2023 pension cuts provoked the rejection of an overwhelming majority of the French population and the largest wave of strikes in France since the May 1968 general strike. Nonetheless, the government is charging ahead, trampling democracy underfoot, toward a new confrontation with the working class.
According to sources close to Lecornu, the Finance Ministry proposes to break the indexation of pensions to inflation. This would allow the state to freeze pensions, whose purchasing power would collapse as inflation and prices rise. This opens the way to the mass impoverishment of pensioners: If inflation stood at 6 percent for a decade, for example, the value of frozen pensions would fall by more than 43 percent.
In 2027 alone, even a partial de-indexation of pensions would cut spending by between 6 and 12 billion euros, according to official estimates. “We will indeed need to have the debate on undifferentiated automatic indexation,” Minister of Public Accounts David Amiel told Sud Radio. Economy Minister Roland Lescure said: “We are going to look at this business of indexing to inflation, because, indeed, I think it’s an effective way, I would say, of making savings.”
Stopping the attacks aimed at the working class requires taking up a struggle directly against the capitalist oligarchy and against war. But waging such a fight requires drawing the lessons of the last great struggle against pension cuts. Workers cannot leave control of these struggles to the trade union apparatuses and the parties of the New Popular Front (NFP), which smothered the last struggle against pension cuts.
The catastrophic state of French public finances, to which the ruling elites are responding by slashing the social rights of the French population, is due in large part to the collapse of taxation on capitalist oligarchs and to the astronomical rise in military spending. Pensions, education and public hospitals—along with other basic social services—cannot be preserved without halting militarism and directly assaulting the wealth of the billionaires.
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... France and Europe are living through their greatest financial crisis since the world wars of the 20th century. Looking at the fiscal crisis of the French capitalist state, it is impossible not to compare it to that of the monarchy before the 1789 Revolution, when society was controlled by another parasitic and illegitimate aristocracy.
To defend social rights and halt militarization and war, workers will have to take up the road of revolution once again. But to do so, all the lessons of the fight against the 2023 pension reform must be drawn. The trade union leaderships and those of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s NFP initially supported the movement, in words, before retreating in the face of the eruption of the class struggle and the demonstrations against Macron’s imposition of his reform without a vote. They flatly put an end to the movement, smothering working-class opposition.
According to legend, when King Louis XVI asked his courtiers in 1789 whether France was experiencing a revolt, he was told, “No, Sire, it is a revolution.” Faced with an objectively revolutionary situation, Macron’s courtiers in the NFP said: “No, Sire, this is social dialogue.” Various petty-bourgeois organizations busied themselves sowing illusions about a democratization of the state apparatus and a strike “battle plan” through which union leaderships would supposedly bring Macron to his senses. Nothing of the sort happened.
It is impossible to save democracy and social rights under the capitalist system. The lessons of history must be faced squarely. In 1945, as workers across Europe rose up against fascist oppression and formed workers’ militias and strike committees, the Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois forces of the National Council of the Resistance (CNR) promised a new capitalist regime. Under this regime, guaranteed social rights would go hand in hand with “the eviction of the great economic and financial feudalities from the direction of the economy.”
That promise was false. Today, the economic feudalities dominate the economy, are plunging the world back into war and are impoverishing the working class. The alternative is the program defended by the Fourth International in the workers’ resistance struggles of the 1940s. Workers must once again organize from below and fight for power and an international socialist revolution, with the formation of the Socialist United States of Europe.
10. Hyundai autoworkers in South Korea continue strike action
The KMWU has refused to call out its membership in a sustained general strike or to link the struggle at Hyundai with other workers including at the automaker’s sister company, Kia.
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The media uses inflated wage figures to discredit autoworkers’ struggles and to accuse them of being “labor aristocrats.” These claims are frequently based on the union’s own overstated claims or the average of all Hyundai employees, including the well-paid upper management. At the same time, the company is tight-lipped about what workers actually receive.
The KMWU is one of the most influential unions within the so-called “militant” Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU). The KMWU routinely isolates workers at different companies where it has branches as does the KCTU more broadly. Both have a long history of selling out workers’ struggles.*****
Other struggles are looming in South Korea at major companies including POSCO, South Korea’s premier steel manufacturer, which has not had a full-scale strike since its founding in 1968. Workers voted 92.2 percent on July 9 to go on strike. The POSCO union, which belongs to the yellow Federation of Korean Trade Unions, has called for a 7.1 percent pay increase. It has still not called a strike despite negotiations being suspended on August 18.
According to the Chosun Ilbo’s affiliated paper ChosunBiz, a POSCO union official stated, “Unlike last year, there is significant pent-up anger on the shop floor this year over inadequate rewards for performance, safety issues, and management’s unilateral decision to directly hire subcontracted workers.”
Workers need to take matters into their own hands by forming rank-and-file committees independent of the trade unions in every factory and workplace and link their struggles in a general offensive for decent wages and conditions. Such a fight will inevitably bring them into conflict with not just the companies but the unions and government which defend the capitalist system that is responsible for deteriorating living conditions.
11. ICE terrorizes Haitians in Springfield, Ohio; imprisons 5-year-old boy in Texas
The Trump administration’s deportations and kidnappings of Haitian immigrants are continuing across the United States. The fate of the 161 people forcibly deported to Haiti last Thursday remains largely unknown.The US government has provided no public breakdown showing how many were formerly protected by Temporary Protected Status (TPS), how many were children, how long they had lived in the United States or whether they had pending asylum or other immigration cases.
The little that is known underscores the criminal character of the operation. The flight included women and children, former TPS holders and people admitted under humanitarian parole. Some of those deported were not born in Haiti. One man was born in the Dominican Republic, where his parents still live, but was sent to Haiti solely because he is of Haitian descent.
Some 350,000 Haitians who were previously protected by TPS are now at risk of being seized, imprisoned and sent to one of the poorest and most dangerous countries in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti’s social catastrophe is the product of more than a century of US invasions, occupations, coups and economic domination aimed at suppressing the Haitian working class and maintaining the country as a cheap labor platform.
Among those seized by the immigration Gestapo are Pastor Gilbert Joubert Adrien and Victor Yonel, whose arrests were reported Friday by the World Socialist Web Site. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents took the two men at about 8:30 a.m. Thursday from a Sunoco gas station on South Limestone Street in Springfield, Ohio. Two women who were in the vehicle, including Yonel’s wife, were released.
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At last report, Adrien did not have a lawyer and could not afford one. He was receiving advice and limited assistance from Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, but McClelland said the organization was swamped with other cases.
The secrecy is a standard feature of ICE’s criminal operations. Detainees are moved between county jails and for-profit concentration camps, frequently hundreds or thousands of miles from their families and attorneys. Relatives may receive no notice before a loved one is placed aboard a deportation flight.
Fear of retaliation also makes it difficult to document the scale of the assault. McClelland explained that Haitians were “very reluctant” to provide information that could draw ICE’s attention to themselves or their loved ones in Haiti.
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Springfield has a population of roughly 58,000, including more than 12,000 Haitian immigrants. They labored in factories and warehouses, operated restaurants and small businesses, raised families and attended local churches. The termination of TPS and the daily threat of abduction have driven much of this community underground.
Even Haitians with other visa or asylum applications pending “are afraid to step outside their own homes,” McClelland wrote.
“School started last week here; parents are afraid to let their children go, and children [are] afraid if they go to class, parents won’t be there when they get back,” he said. “They can no longer hold jobs or drive. There are frequent reports of Haitians going without food because they have no money and are afraid to go to groceries.”
G92 and other local organizations are providing transportation, legal assistance, food and rent money, “but the problem is far bigger than we are,” McClelland said. The Haitian Support Center is among the organizations collecting donations and assisting residents.
An unknown number of Haitians have fled Springfield. Those who remain are desperately waiting for asylum applications that can take months to resolve while ICE hunts them with virtually no legal restraint.
“Depression is widespread among the community, and we have reports of suicides,” McClelland wrote. He added that “people would rather die than return to Haiti.”
The attack extends far beyond Haitian immigrants. ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CPB) are targeting children and using their imprisonment to terrorize entire families.
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A Brookings Institution analysis estimated that approximately 205,000 children experienced the detention of a parent between January 20, 2025 and April 9, 2026. More than 145,000 were US citizens, and approximately 22,000 lost all their co-resident parents to detention.
Separately, a Factchequeado analysis of ICE records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act found that the Trump administration forcibly deported at least 13,816 children and adolescents between January 20, 2025 and March 10, 2026. Nearly one in five was sent to a country other than that listed as the child’s nationality. More than 99 percent had neither a criminal conviction nor pending criminal charges.
Conditions inside Dilley are horrendous. In the first year after Trump reopened the facility in March 2025, approximately 3,000 children were imprisoned there. Children and parents have reported rotting food, undrinkable water, vermin and the denial of medical care.
The El Gamal family, including four minor children, endured nearly 10 months of hell at Dilley despite none of the six family members being charged with a crime. Hayam El Gamal was taken to an emergency room after requests for medical care were ignored. Her 16-year-old son developed acute appendicitis after detention staff provided nothing beyond Tylenol. Her children wrote that their imprisonment was “slowly killing us on the inside.”
Dilley exposes the bipartisan foundations of the mass deportation apparatus. The 2,400-bed concentration camp was built at the request of the Obama administration and opened in December 2014 as the largest immigrant family detention center in the United States. It is operated by the Corrections Corporation of America, now CoreCivic, which continues to profit from imprisoning parents, children and infants.
12. UAW sends Bronx Defenders legal aid employees back to work following tentative agreement
The United Auto Workers (UAW) sent employees of the Bronx Defenders back to work after reaching an agreement with the nonprofit organization, which provides legal services to low-income and indigent New Yorkers. The agreement ended the workers’ 11-day strike for reasonable workloads, increased pay and other demands on August 7. The 300 employees include attorneys, social workers, investigators, advocates and support staff.
These workers, who began their strike on July 27, were the third group of legal aid employees in New York to walkout this summer. They followed more than 500 of their colleagues at Brooklyn Defender Services, who struck from July 16 to July 21, and more than 140 workers at Harlem’s Neighborhood Defender Service, who struck from July 24 to August 3. Eighty public defenders in Detroit also struck for seven days before the UAW called off the strike on August 4. All four of these groups of workers are members of UAW Local 2325.
The tentative agreement with the Bronx Defenders, like the others, provide certain concessions related to salary and benefits but fail to address the decisive issues. Ratification of the agreement would increase the starting salary for support and administrative workers to $70,555, which is less than a living wage in New York, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator. The starting salary for social workers would increase to $91,000, and that for attorneys would increase to $95,000. This is inadequate particularly for workers with children.
The agreement also provides a 3 percent cost-of-living raise each year. But as of July, the 12-month rate of inflation was 3.4 percent for the United States and 4.6 percent for New York City. Therefore, workers would continue to fall behind as the costs of food, rent, transportation and other expenses increase.
In exchange for the raises, the UAW made what it admitted were two major concessions. First, it gave up a popular benefit that allowed workers to access free education classes. More significantly, it severed the link between attorney salaries and social worker salaries, which means that raises for one group of workers will no longer automatically mean raises for the others.
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Most importantly, no publicly available information suggests that any of the three agreements addresses the fundamental demand that all New York’s legal aid workers have raised: the reduction of unmanageable caseloads. “We have incredibly high caseloads,” Tori, a family court attorney in her second year at the Bronx Defenders, recently told the World Socialist Web Site. “And we work really hard, oftentimes more than our contract hours.”
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These outrageous caseloads have contributed to a high level of attrition among the legal aid workers, which exacerbates the problem of overwork. In addition, a 2019 discovery reform law established new requirements for prosecutors to turn over evidence to defense attorneys in a timely manner. Although the reform has created more work for both sides, the city and state have only provided additional resources to prosecutors, not to defense attorneys. The organizations providing legal services to low-income New York workers are thus woefully understaffed and underresourced, making it impossible for them to provide the adequate representation that the US Constitution guarantees.
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Inhuman caseloads have not persisted because of mistakes or the lack of resources in the city with the highest number of billionaires on the planet. They reflect a deliberate, bipartisan policy of depriving the most vulnerable workers of adequate legal defense. Today, this policy is part of President Donald Trump’s broader campaign to establish a presidential dictatorship and suppress opposition to inequality and war. In New York, this attack on workers’ legal rights is being overseen by the Democratic Party and its mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The most immediate opponent that New York’s legal aid workers face, however, is the apparatus of the UAW bureaucracy itself. Though the nearly 950 workers in New York and Michigan all belong to Local 2325, the UAW leadership prevented them from waging a united struggle, even across the city. By bringing each of the local’s chapters on strike separately, the apparatus weakened its members’ leverage and aided management, as well as the city and state governments that fund these contracts.
The shutdown of the strike in Detroit has left workers vulnerable to an attack by the courts. Little more than a week after the union announced a deal with NDS, Wayne County Third Circuit Judge Darnella Williams-Claybourne moved to hold public defenders Megan Gokey and Daniel Eichinger in contempt of court because they were absent due to the strike. The two lawyers face up to 93 days in jail, a $7,500 fine or both if found guilty of criminal contempt.
UAW Region 9A in New York is overseen by Director Brandon Mancilla, a member of the DSA. Earlier this year, Mancilla refused to authorize a strike of Columbia University student workers and threatened the local with receivership if they did not drop their political demands, which included protection from ICE, an end to surveillance and divestment from military contractors.
Mancilla is running for re-election this year on the slate led by UAW President Shawn Fain. Four years ago, Fain presented himself as a reformer and became president following an election marked by systematic voter suppression. Since then, Fain has been a reliable enforcer of the corporations’ demands. During the 2023 “stand up strike” at the Big Three automakers, Fain ensured that most workers stayed on the job, thus minimizing the impact of the strike.
Fain has repeatedly invoked the World War II “arsenal of democracy,” which included a no-strike pledge that allowed US imperialism to wage war. He also has supported Trump’s tariffs and economic nationalism. Fain is now the subject of several investigations by the court-appointed federal Monitor and the Department of Justice that have exposed a pattern of corruption, abuse of power, retaliation and obstruction.
Will Lehman, a socialist autoworker from Pennsylvania, is running for UAW president on a program of abolishing the bureaucracy and restoring power to the shop floor. Lehman rejects class collaboration, nationalism and war and calls for workers to unite across national borders. On July 27, Lehman issued a statement to striking legal aid workers, which read in part:
The alternative the officials offer, particularly in New York, is to appeal to the Mamdani administration to open the city’s checkbook on your behalf. But a budget written under the supervision of Wall Street can be rewritten by Wall Street the moment workers’ demands collide with its interests, and workers taught to wait on a friendly politician will find they have surrendered the only real power they had. That power lies neither in city hall nor in any official’s negotiating skill, but in the independent organization of the working class itself—our capacity to unite across workplaces, industries and borders through organizations answerable to nobody but ourselves. That is what rank-and-file committees are for, and building them is the task in front of you now.
To every NDS and Bronx Defenders worker: Establish a rank-and-file committee at every office, elected by the workers themselves. Insist that every proposal and every bargaining session be reported to the membership in full and in real time, so that no agreement can be handed to you as a finished fact.
Where votes on tentative agreements are still taking place, legal aid workers should reject the sellout deals, form rank-and-file committees and develop a fighting strategy. Only through these committees will workers be able to break out of their union-imposed isolation and win the resources and conditions that will allow them to defend their clients. These committees should fight for the mobilization of the entire working class to abolish capitalism: the source of austerity, dictatorship and war.
On Monday 17 August, inside a classroom at the Rayen Mapu Lyceum in Quellón, on the southern island of Chiloé, Carabinero officers ordered two secondary students to strip. One was made to remove his sweatshirt and shoes and have his shirt lifted before his classmates. The second was ordered to remove his trousers, sweatshirt, shirt and shoes, and then to perform squats in his underwear, in front of his classmates, school staff and the police themselves. The procedure was triggered by the reported theft of a mobile phone.
The methods belong to Chile’s former dictatorship. The forced stripping of the defenseless, the degradation staged as public spectacle, the message sent through the body of the victim to everyone watching. These methods have now been employed by agents of the state against two schoolchildren as a deliberate probe by the Carabineros amid the Kast government’s sweeping expansion of the powers of the repressive forces.
The student council at the school issued a communiqué which read in part:
We are particularly concerned that a situation that began with the loss of a cell phone ended with students being physically exposed in front of their classmates. No student should feel humiliated or defenseless within the institution that is supposed to protect them.
As the Student Council, we request that this situation be taken with the seriousness it deserves and that an investigation be conducted not only into what occurred during the police procedure but also into the decisions that led to these students being singled out and exposed as suspects.
It is significant that in the week since this gross abuse of authority, President José Antonio Kast has said not a word. Nor has any government minister issued a single statement condemning the actions. His government rammed through Congress the “Protected Schools” bill, which became law on August 13, four days before the incident.
Kast is the son of a former Nazi Wehrmacht officer. His family collaborated in the Pinochet dictatorship’s repression. He has never hidden his admiration for the junta. His government is staffed with Pinochetistas. The silence is not an oversight, but a signal that Carabineros may act with the impunity that the Chilean state has granted for the duration of the civilian restoration with one difference: The current occupant of La Moneda Palace will not pretend to eschew such methods.
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The national corporate media, so closely aligned to the right and historically complicit with the dictatorship, took four days to report on the incident and then buried it. The message they are transmitting is that nothing of importance has occurred here and it is an acceptable price for the security emergency they helped create. For at least seven years, not a day passed without these same outlets saturating the airwaves with manufactured panic over crime and delinquency, deliberately cultivating within politically disoriented social sectors the demand for a strong hand against an enemy carefully constructed as internal. The entire political atmosphere created by the “Protected Schools” campaign was aided by months of saturation media coverage presenting schools as war zones and the government insisting that “criminals” had infiltrated the student population.
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The setting for this outrageous abuse of power is Quellón, which sits at the southern tip of the Chiloé Archipelago, some 1,270 kilometers from Santiago. The population of the region is predominantly Chilote—a mestizo people with deep Huilliche-Mapuche roots, shaped by centuries of Spanish colonialism and, more recently, by the violent extraction of the salmon industry, which has polluted the waters, depleted local fish stocks and confronted indigenous fishing communities with the same dispossession they faced under colonial rule.
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The targeting of indigenous and poor youth is part of a broader evisceration of the most basic rights of the whole working-class under “democratic governance.” For nearly five years, the southern macrozone has been treated as a laboratory for police-state measures—militarization of Mapuche territories under the state of emergency first decreed by Piñera, maintained and expanded by Boric, and now intensified under Kast.
This month, the fascistic president presented to Congress a bill that creates a fifth state of constitutional exception allowing the military to be deployed in working-class communes. We will be further analyzing the measure and the immense dangers it poses.
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Chile spends 2–3 percent of its health budget on mental health which is among the lowest in the OECD. The country has fewer psychiatrists per capita, fewer psychologists in the public system, and fewer child and adolescent mental health services than comparable nations.
The education system these students attend is the product of Pinochet’s free-market counterrevolution, preserved by every civilian government since. Between 2015 and 2023, 745 schools closed across Chile while only 193 new schools opened. The Ministry of Education reported an average of 43 daily incidents involving crimes, weapons, drugs or threats during 2025. Approximately 19,000 school-violence complaints were filed in 2024, with more than 133,000 over the preceding decade.
These are not problems of “school coexistence” that can be resolved by backpack searches and metal detectors. They are the symptoms of a society in which every social relation has been subordinated to the profit drive, in which the state has abdicated its most basic responsibilities to the young, in which decades of privatization, austerity and police violence have produced a generation subjected to levels of stress, insecurity and hopelessness without precedent.
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What happened in Quellón is a test run. Kast’s silence is a declaration of intent. The working class must prepare its answer—not in the corridors of Congress, where the pseudo-left begs for amendments, but in the streets, the workplaces and the communities, through the mobilization of its collective power. The crisis of Chilean capitalism is deepening. The task is to ensure that the working class emerges from this crisis not as the victim of the violence being prepared for it, but as the gravedigger of the system that has produced it.
14. Leading fighter for Julian Assange’s freedom calls for mobilisation behind Bogdan Syrotiuk
Maxine Walker:
The conviction and 15-year sentence of Bogdan Syrotiuk must be condemned by all socialists, anti-imperialists and those who fight the battle for truth and justice. We must fight for his release and mobilise support for him. He was convicted of High Treason for six articles he wrote for the World Socialist Web Site opposing the NATO-instigated war in Ukraine.
Bogdan’s case provides a rare glimpse behind the impenetrable wall of silence and propaganda that NATO nations have built around Ukraine’s corrupt, fascistic regime. This regime was put in place by the US and other Western nations in the 2014 coup against the elected government of Ukraine. The NATO powers have celebrated Ukraine as a gallant democracy. When Russia, after years of failed negotiations and many NATO provocations, began its military operation in 2022, the anti-Russian narrative was hysterically ramped up, and billions have been poured in to arm and support Ukraine. Currently, the drone and missile attacks deep into Russia with arms supplied by Britain and other NATO powers represent a dangerous escalation.
Bogdan and his young co-thinkers took a principled and courageous stand, opposing NATO imperialism, the Zelensky puppet regime, and Putin’s military assault, counterposing to war and nationalism the class unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers.
In my experience, the narrative surrounding the Ukraine war is the most successful propaganda exercise mounted by Western states in living memory. For four years a ruinous, ferocious war has been fought in Europe with vast casualties which have barely been allowed to register with the wider populations of Europe. The history is barely known. The violent coup which overthrew the elected Ukrainian government in 2014 was brought about after a long period of CIA planning and its organization of fascist forces and parties. The context was the planned encirclement of Russia up to its borders by heavily armed NATO states. Ukraine was a key state for NATO to acquire. With that in place, imperialism has endlessly armed Ukraine and waged an undeclared war on Russia.
While the Zionist genocide in Gaza broke the wall of silence and impunity and mobilized a large and varied movement of opposition, that is not the case for the Ukraine war. Yet the motives of the imperialist states are identical. They fight to force a redivision of the world to secure the future profits of the gangster financial oligarchy. Their enemies in this task are identified as Iran, Russia and China. They are taking their populations into a world war which threatens nuclear annihilation. None of the sons and daughters of the profit-hungry gangsters will fight in the existing and future armies. Dying or returning maimed and traumatized will be the job designated for the working class, as ever.
The much-vaunted “democracy” of Ukraine has not had an election since 2019; it has withdrawn from its obligations under Article 10 of the European convention on Human Rights covering freedom of expression; in 2019 it introduced a new national holiday for fascist Stepan Bandera who had led an organization whose members fought alongside the Nazis against the Soviet Red Army in the Second World War and were perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust, massacring tens of thousands of Jews and Poles; in 2022 it banned 11 opposition parties including the largest party and leftist organizations, and stripped many trade unions of rights.
That is the kind of democracy favored by the imperialists. The rulers of Western nations are now stepping up the attack on democratic rights against their own populations. We saw the warnings of what was to come when Julian Assange and WikiLeaks exposed US and other imperialist war crimes.
Assange was relentlessly hunted down, illegally surveilled in the Ecuadorian Embassy where he had earlier sought refuge, persecuted and finally imprisoned in the hellish Belmarsh prison. He faced extradition to the USA and a possible 175-year sentence. His health was almost broken. The media narrative relentlessly slandered and mocked him.
We campaigned for Assange on the streets and found that the working class had a very clear understanding of his case and the injustices he faced. We repeatedly heard the sentiment that “He’s been fitted up”. The campaign warned that Assange was the canary in the coal mine, and that those who seriously oppose and damage imperialist interests would face similar lawless treatment. Assange finally won his liberty by hard campaigning and excellent lawyers. But that warning of deepening repression has rapidly come true.
Last month, 66 percent of Ukrainians told Gallup pollsters the country should seek a negotiated peace. So far, this sentiment has been largely politically silenced by the illegalization of opposition and fear of violent reprisals. As the war drags on, the voices of dissent will grow. Bogdan, as a rare and courageous socialist voice speaking out publicly, has borne the brunt of the regime’s insecurity and anger. He is a political prisoner, and a large campaign must be mobilized in his support. He has put his life on the line, and the goal must be his freedom. Nothing less will do.
The near-unanimous vote at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has torn aside the institution’s carefully cultivated image as a beacon of cultural enlightenment.
PCS union members at the V&A have voted by 95.4 percent on a turnout of 87 percent for strike action over poverty pay, unsafe conditions and the brutal impact of this summer’s heatwaves. The ballot, which closed August 20, covers all four V&A London sites—South Kensington, East Storehouse, East Museum and Young V&A. Prospect union members at the V&A also overwhelmingly voted for strike action in a separate ballot in July.
The call for strike action is the latest in a wave of industrial disputes sweeping Britain’s museums and galleries.
Workers at the National Galleries of Scotland struck during the Fringe Festival in early August; Royal Museums Greenwich staff walked out for two days the same month; the London Museum and Tate have both seen action in the past year; and a dispute at the National Coal Mining Museum ran from August 2025 to April 2026.
The V&A workers are demanding an acceptable pay offer, Real Living Wage accreditation, 1.5x pay on bank holidays, and heat mitigation measures—including access to drinking water, a policy of closing public-facing areas at 30 degrees, and additional protections for back-of-house staff. The demands are modest.
As the museum’s own annual reports confirm, the median salary among its employees rose from £28,500 in March 2021 to just £33,764 in March 2025, while the Retail Prices Index indicates it should have reached £38,190—meaning almost a 12 percent real-terms cut. Even on the government’s preferred Consumer Prices Index, which excludes homeowner housing costs and council tax, the cut is around 4 percent.
That workers are having to ballot for strike action to secure drinking water in a heatwave is itself an indictment of conditions at the institution.
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A 95 percent strike mandate on an 87 percent turnout is an overwhelming expression of workers’ willingness to fight. The union’s response is not to issue an ultimatum, not to call for solidarity action from workers at every other museum and gallery in dispute, but to plead with a director who will not even sit down with Acas.
Union officials are asking for “serious” negotiations with an employer that has spent decades imposing real-terms pay cuts and denied workers water in a heatwave.
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Cultural workers cannot afford to trust the PCS bureaucracy to wage a fight. Its record in the culture sector is instructive. The PCS leadership isolated the 100-day strike in 2015 at the National Gallery. Simultaneous strike action at the National Museum of Wales was voted for but suspended, and at National Museums Scotland was kept separate and restricted. The National Gallery dispute ended with a two-tier outsourced system.
At the British Library in 2025, the PCS funnelled workers into lobbying MPs, securing support from just 19 of 650. The strike, taking place over six months, was ended this February with a 4 percent pay deal. This was below workers’ demands and RPI inflation and came after a below-inflation deal the year before.
The strategy today is the same: each dispute kept in its own silo, with no perspective of escalating action across the sector, and no political challenge to the Labour government whose austerity has produced the crisis.
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What is required is the formation of rank-and-file committees in every institution to draw up lists of demands. These committees must be independent of and opposed to the union bureaucracy, and so capable of coordinating action across the sector and reaching out to workers in other industries.
Bus drivers in London, for example, have launched their own strikes against inadequate protections in extreme heat (suspended by Unite last week).
The cultural sector is the common property of all workers and should be defended by the entire working class against government and corporate cuts. V&A workers and all workers in the cultural sector should contact the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to begin building and organising this broad base of support.
16. Johannes Stern discusses the campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk on The Katie Halper Show
On Friday, Johannes Stern, editor of the German-language edition of the World Socialist Web Site, joined journalist Katie Halper on The Katie Halper Show to discuss the case of Bogdan Syrotiuk, the 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist sentenced on August 10 to 15 years in prison for his articles opposing the US-NATO war against Russia and the glorification of Nazi collaborators in Ukraine.
In the wide-ranging conversation, Stern reviews the frame-up of Syrotiuk by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), the court order for the destruction of his socialist books and documents, the complete media blackout of the case, and its connection to the rehabilitation of fascist forces in Ukraine and the revival of German militarism.
We urge our readers to watch and share this interview as widely as possible. Sign the petition demanding Bogdan’s freedom and make a donation to help support his legal defense at wsws.org/freebogdan. Send letters to the Pervomaisk City District Court (inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua) and the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal (inbox@mka.court.gov.ua), copied to freebogdan@wsws.org, calling on them to vacate the 15-year sentence and free Bogdan.
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
