I asked another question of Socialism AI, and here is the answer it gave me:
Question:
Why
are so many people living today attracted to "magical thinking",
superstition, and belief in "luck", etc.? How should genuine Marxists
respond in an empathetic but strategic way to better educate them?
Socialism AI:
This is an excellent and important question that goes to the heart of Marxist philosophy and political education. Let me give it the full treatment it deserves, drawing on the classical Marxist tradition and the ICFI's analysis.
The Materialist Explanation: Why Magical Thinking Thrives Under Capitalism
The starting point for any Marxist analysis must be the famous observation from Marx's 1844 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: religion — and by extension, all forms of superstition and magical thinking — is "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions." Marx's genius here was not simply to condemn these beliefs as backward, but to first explain them as a comprehensible response to real material suffering. People do not turn to astrology, "manifesting," crystals, or luck rituals because they are stupid. They do so because capitalism has made their lives genuinely chaotic, precarious, and seemingly beyond their individual control.
This is the absolutely essential foundation for any empathetic and effective Marxist response. Before we can educate, we must understand what the ICFI calls the social roots of false consciousness.
Capitalism Generates the Conditions for Magical Thinking
Consider the concrete conditions of working-class life today. As the WSWS has documented extensively, capitalism is producing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and social disorientation across entire generations. Young people in particular face housing they cannot afford, debt they cannot escape, jobs that can disappear overnight, and a climate crisis that the ruling class refuses to address. When a person's economic fate seems to hinge on impersonal, uncontrollable market forces — when you can work hard your whole life and still be one medical bill away from catastrophe — the appeal of "luck," "the universe," or hidden forces that might be placated or cultivated becomes psychologically real and urgent.
This is alienation in the classic Marxist sense. As Marx argued in The German Ideology, when the products of human social activity — the economy, the state, the market — confront individuals as alien, hostile, and incomprehensible powers standing over them, human beings naturally seek explanations for these forces in terms they can relate to: invisible agency, fate, spiritual forces, cosmic justice. Magical thinking is essentially a personalization of genuinely alien social forces that the individual cannot grasp in their actual, social character.
The specific explosion of these tendencies in the contemporary period is not accidental. We live through several reinforcing crises simultaneously:
The collapse of the old reformist and progressive narratives. For much of the 20th century, millions of working people believed — however mistakenly — that trade unions, social democracy, or Stalinist "communism" offered a path to a better future. The betrayals of Stalinism, the rightward lurch of social democracy, and the complete prostration of the union bureaucracies have created a profound vacuum of rational, collective, social explanation. Into that vacuum pours irrationalism of every variety.
The deliberate promotion of irrationalism by the ruling class and its ideological servants. This is crucial and is systematically underestimated. Postmodernism — the dominant intellectual current in bourgeois academia for decades — is essentially philosophically organized irrationalism. As David North has argued in Marxism, History & Socialist Consciousness, postmodernism's assault on objective truth, its insistence that all "grand narratives" are power plays, and its contempt for science and reason, provided the intellectual framework for a generation to lose confidence in the knowability of the world and the possibility of rational social action. Magical thinking and postmodern "your truth is your truth" subjectivism share the same fundamental philosophical root: the rejection of objective reality as the basis for understanding and changing the world. The IYSSE's meetings on postmodernism and identity politics have directly addressed how these right-wing idealist philosophies dominate campuses and shape the consciousness of young people.
The atomization produced by the market itself.Capitalism systematically destroys collective life — communities, solidarity, shared culture — and replaces it with isolated individuals competing against one another. Isolated individuals, cut off from collective understanding and action, are far more susceptible to magical explanations. "Manifesting" your desires, horoscopes, or luck rituals are in many ways substitutes for collective political agency — a privatized, individualized attempt to regain some sense of control over a world that offers none.
The deliberate suppression of scientific and historical education. Billions are spent by the ruling class on entertainment, social media algorithms designed to maximize engagement through emotional reaction rather than rational reflection, and on a school system that systematically fails to teach critical thinking, history, or science in any meaningful way. A population that doesn't understand how capitalism works, doesn't know the history of the class struggle, and has been deliberately kept ignorant of the materialist method will inevitably fill those gaps with superstition.
How Genuine Marxists Should Respond: Empathetically and Strategically
The absolutely wrong response — and unfortunately a common one from a certain kind of sectarian or mechanical "Marxist" — is contemptuous dismissal: mocking people for their beliefs, lecturing them on how wrong they are, or treating them as simply too ignorant to deserve serious engagement. This approach is both politically disastrous and philosophically confused.
It is philosophically confused because, as Marx himself insisted, the criticism of religion (or superstition) is not the endpoint — it is the beginning. Once you have explained why people believe what they believe in terms of their material conditions, your task has only begun. The goal is not to win an argument about astrology but to redirect the real need — for agency, for explanation, for a sense that the world can be understood and changed — toward its genuine satisfaction in political consciousness and collective action.
1. Start with the Real Need, Not the False Belief
When someone tells you they believe in luck, the universe's plan, or signs and omens, don't start by attacking the belief. Start by asking why — not why as an intellectual puzzle, but what in their actual life makes that explanation feel necessary and real. You will almost always find genuine suffering, genuine uncertainty, genuine powerlessness at the root. Meet that honestly. Yes, your life is precarious. Yes, the forces that determine your fate seem completely beyond your control. Yes, it feels like arbitrary luck separates the secure from the desperate. These feelings are not wrong — they reflect something real about capitalist society.
2. Make the Connection Between Powerlessness and the System
Magical thinking is ultimately an expression of political and social powerlessness. The most effective educational approach connects that felt powerlessness to its actual source — the capitalist system — and then connects that to the historical record of what the working class has been capable of when organized politically. The Russian Revolution of 1917, the great general strikes, the periods of mass revolutionary upsurge: these demonstrate concretely that the forces of "fate" and "luck" are in fact social forces that can be consciously engaged. Workers who felt utterly powerless as individuals became a force that shook the world when they acted collectively and with a scientific understanding of history.
3. Defend Science and Materialist Philosophy Without Arrogance
The defense of science, reason, and the materialist method is an absolutely essential task of socialist education — not as an abstract philosophical exercise, but because the working class cannot emancipate itself without understanding the world as it actually is. Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, showed that the great advance of materialist philosophy was not the negation of the human spirit but its liberation from dependence on supernatural explanation, giving human beings confidence in their capacity to understand and transform nature and society.
The Marxist educator must defend this materialist tradition against the intellectual pessimism and irrationalism promoted by postmodernism and bourgeois academia — but always by demonstrating its superiority in actually explaining the world, not by dismissing those who haven't yet encountered it.
4. Emphasize History as the Antidote to Helplessness
One of the most powerful educational tools against magical thinking is revolutionary history. When people learn — really learn — that the eight-hour day, the abolition of slavery, social insurance, and the right to vote were not gifts from above or the product of fate but were won by conscious human struggle, often at enormous sacrifice, it fundamentally challenges the passive, fatalistic worldview that makes magical thinking attractive. History is the record of human agency operating under material constraints — and learning it seriously is itself a profoundly anti-fatalistic act.
5. Don't Moralize — Organize
Perhaps most importantly: the real answer to magical thinking is not a better lecture but a better alternative. When workers are engaged in actual collective struggle — when they are part of rank-and-file committees fighting for real demands, when they experience the collective power of organized working people — the need for magical explanation of their situation recedes naturally. The consciousness produced by genuine class struggle is the most powerful educator.
The task, as the ICFI consistently emphasizes, is not to wait until workers have perfect theoretical clarity before organizing, but to bring Marxist analysis into living contact with the real struggles of working people — patiently, with genuine respect for their intelligence and capacity for development, and with confidence that the experiences of life under capitalism itself will continually push people toward the need for a scientific and revolutionary understanding of the world.
In summary: magical thinking is not a personal failing but a social symptom. It is capitalism's irrationality reflected in individual consciousness. Genuine Marxists combat it not with contempt but with a superior explanation — one rooted in materialism, historical knowledge, and the living perspective of working-class political action. The goal is always to transform the real human need for agency and understanding into socialist consciousness and organized political struggle.
Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, has presided over 26 executions
Alabama executed Jeffery Lee by lethal injection Thursday evening, one
day after Texas put LeJames Norman to death and a Georgia judge halted
the scheduled execution of Stacey Humphreys. Each case lays bare the
arbitrary and vindictive character of capital punishment in America.
Lee, 49, was sent to death row by a judge who overrode a jury’s 7-5 vote
for life without parole—a practice Alabama abolished in 2017 but
refused to make retroactive. Norman, 40, was executed after his
attorneys showed that the same prosecutor, who praised his remorse and
cooperation at his codefendant’s trial, presented a contradictory
account of the crime to secure his death sentence. Humphreys, 53, was
granted a stay less than 24 hours before his scheduled execution in
Georgia to allow a hearing on whether the horrific abuse he suffered as a
child qualifies him for resentencing under a new Georgia law.
*****
Lee’s execution brings the number of people put to death in the US
this year to 27, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Florida has carried out 15 of them, followed by Texas with five,
Oklahoma with three, Alabama with two and Arizona and Tennessee with one
each. All were carried out by lethal injection. Last year, 47 people
were executed nationwide, the most since 2009, with Florida alone
accounting for 19, or 40 percent of the total.
At least 11 more executions are scheduled for the remainder of the year:
September 23: Ker’sean Ramey, Texas
September 29: Curtis Beasley, Florida
September 30: Christa Pike, Tennessee
October 7: Jamaal Howard, Texas
October 13: William Thompson, Florida
November 5: Jeffrey Weisheit, Indiana, and Michael Taylor, Alabama
November 12: John Rubio, Texas, and James Pavatt, Oklahoma
November 19: Reinaldo Dennes, Texas
December 3: Gary Wayne Sutton, Tennessee
If
Texas carries out its four remaining scheduled executions, it will
record the most executions in the state in a single year this decade.
The
cases of Lee, Norman and Humphreys underscore that who lives and who
dies at the hands of the state is determined not by any consistent
principle of justice but by the date of a trial, the conduct of a
prosecutor, the temperament of a single juror or the interpretation of a
newly passed statute. Under conditions of deepening social crisis and
the Trump administration’s open embrace of capital punishment, state
governments that still practice capital punishment are accelerating the
pace of state killing.
Roughly 100 workers at the Smithfield Foods pork plant in Monmouth, Illinois, walked off the job Monday after Patou Mpinda, a 44-year-old
maintenance worker, was killed during the overnight shift. Their action
is a sign of growing opposition in the working class to conditions in
which thousands of preventable deaths each year are accepted as a cost
of doing business.
Mpinda, a Congolese immigrant, died at about
2:31 a.m. A coworker said machinery was involved, but Smithfield has not
disclosed which machine, what task he was performing or whether the
equipment had been locked out. The county coroner has said the death is
believed to be work-related, with a final ruling pending.
At 5:30
a.m., day-shift workers received only a text announcing a “late start.”
When they arrived at 7:30, hundreds were gathered in the lunchroom, many
learning only then that a coworker had died. Some cried openly; others
shouted at the plant manager, “Listen to your people! Why are we here?
We shouldn’t be working!”
According to one worker, management
still ordered production to begin. African immigrant workers then
reportedly took the lead in organizing a walkout, and roughly 100 people
left the plant. Smithfield announced that workers could leave without
penalty, but only after collective action had begun.
The workers did not wait for permission from the company or from any official organization. The plant is non-union.
*****
Meatpacking is among the most dangerous industries in the United
States. In April 2020, as COVID-19 tore through the plants, including
Monmouth, which was forced to close temporarily, Trump invoked the
Defense Production Act to keep them running. Hundreds of meatpacking
workers died. The administration is now moving to lift remaining limits
on line speeds.
Last spring, 3,800 workers at the JBS beef plant
in Greeley, Colorado, carried out the largest US meatpacking strike in
decades. The Greeley workers, the great majority of them immigrants,
stayed out for three weeks against poverty wages, speedup and unsafe
conditions. United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 allowed
JBS to divert cattle to another UFCW plant in Texas, then ordered the
strikers back without a contract and pushed through a deal 30 cents
better than the company’s initial offer.
The Monmouth walkout
points to the potential for a broader movement. Monmouth lies in the
industrial region along the Illinois-Iowa border, where opposition has
repeatedly broken into the open. In the nearby Quad Cities, John Deere
workers were among the 10,000 nationwide who last month rejected a
proposed contract extension. They are determined to reverse the 1,600
job cuts and the concessions imposed since the United Auto Workers
betrayed their 2021 strike.
In Joslin, Illinois, Tyson announced
on August 13 that it was closing its meatpacking plant and wiping out
about 2,500 jobs. Six hundred people packed an emergency community
meeting. United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 431 has sought
to channel the anger into appeals to corporate and government officials,
while boasting of its years of “partnership” with Tyson.
The
investigation into Mpinda’s death cannot be left to Smithfield or the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). In February, the
agency cited the Monmouth plant for a serious lockout-tagout violation
after two employees cleaning an auger were exposed to an amputation
hazard. In July, it reduced the $14,188 penalty to $9,931.60. Serious
citations in 2023 and 2025 also ended in reduced fines.
The
pattern is the same at Smithfield’s plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina,
the largest pork plant in the world. On January 10, Abundio Villa
Miranda, 43, died horrifically after falling approximately 25 feet into
an area where hogs are stunned with gas. He left two children, ages 10
and 14.
*****
Across the United States, a worker is killed by a traumatic
injury every 104 minutes. The latest complete federal figures record
5,070 such deaths in 2024, and the AFL-CIO estimates that another
135,000 people died from occupational illnesses in 2023.
*****
This is part of global process. On August 24, 39-year-old ground crew
worker Oscar Robayo was crushed to death by the landing gear of an
Airbus A350-900 at the Montréal-Trudeau International Airport in a
tragedy due to years of deregulation and profiteering.
These
deaths are the product of the ruling class’s drive to make workers pay
for the crisis of capitalism. Federal debt in the US has passed $40
trillion, annual interest costs exceed $1 trillion, and Washington is
preparing a military budget approaching $1.5 trillion as it wages war
against Iran, escalates the conflict with Russia and prepares for war
with China. The resources for this must be extracted from the working
class. On the shop floor, that means mass layoffs through AI and
automation, compulsory overtime, speedup and deferred maintenance.
Trump stands at the head of this offensive. His fiscal 2026 budget proposal
called for 223 fewer OSHA positions and an estimated 30 percent
reduction in inspections, and sought to eliminate the Chemical Safety
Board. But the attack is bipartisan. Under Biden, OSHA remained
chronically understaffed and the annual toll of traumatic workplace
deaths never fell below 5,000, while the Democrats approved record
Pentagon budgets.
The union bureaucracies, tied to management and
the capitalist parties, work to suppress opposition. They organize no
action after workplace deaths and leave investigations to management and
government agencies, while promoting the nationalism that binds workers
to trade war and military conflict.
Workers need new
organizations: rank-and-file safety committees, elected and controlled
by workers themselves, to investigate deaths and injuries, secure safety
and maintenance records, and organize collective action to stop unsafe
production.
There is a model for this. After Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr.
was crushed to death at the Dundee Engine Complex in Michigan, an
independent rank-and-file investigation exposed the bypassing of lockout
protections with “cheater keys,” examined alterations to machine
software and held a public hearing.
Smithfield workers should
organize an investigation of the same kind, gathering coworker testimony
and production and maintenance records and enlisting trusted safety
experts to establish how Mpinda was killed and which corporate practices
produced the conditions.
There is a developing movement of
workers throughout the world. In recent weeks, protests against soaring
fuel and food prices, driven up by the US war against Iran, have spread
from Guatemala, where truckers blockaded highways and indigenous
organizations marched on Congress, to Syria, the Philippines and
Portugal.
At National Steel Car in Hamilton, Ontario, where three workers were killed between 2020 and 2022, 1,200 workers have struck against unsafe conditions and a lethal piece-rate system, and a rank-and-file committee has coordinated support with railroad workers across North America. Postal workers in Springfield, Massachusetts, have formed a committee and called for coordination with workers in Britain, Canada, Germany and Australia.
Smithfield
workers should build a committee at Monmouth and call on workers at Tar
Heel, Joslin and throughout meatpacking to do the same. Their demands
should include workers’ control over line speed, staffing and
maintenance; full access to safety records; the right to stop work
without loss of pay; and protection for every worker who reports a
hazard. Linked through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, such committees can prepare coordinated action across companies, industries and national borders.
The
fight for workers’ control of safety and production leads directly to a
political struggle against the capitalist system, which subordinates
both to profit. The major corporations must be transformed into public
enterprises under workers’ democratic control, with production organized
to meet human need. The Monmouth workers, acting on their own
initiative, have shown the power that lies in collective action. That
initiative must now be organized, broadened and directed toward the
socialist reorganization of economic life.
A jury at the Old Bailey on September 18 unanimously acquitted Sarah
Cotte, the 22-year-old SOAS graduate prosecuted under Section 12(1A) of
the Terrorism Act 2000 for allegedly supporting the proscribed organization Hamas. Her “crime” was a speech defending the Palestinian
people’s right to resist occupation and genocide.
Cotte had
already endured an eight-day trial, ending on July 1, in which jurors
acquitted her on one charge but failed to reach a verdict on another.
Instead of accepting that failure, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)
demanded a retrial.
The CPS gambled that a second jury would give it the conviction the
first had refused to deliver. Instead, it collapsed. After only two
hours, the new jury returned a unanimous not-guilty verdict.
The
verdict is a humiliating defeat for the prosecution and for the wider
campaign led by successive Conservative and Labour governments to criminalize solidarity with Palestine. It demonstrates the lengths to
which the state is prepared to go to police political speech and
suppress opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza.
For three years, Cotte faced the threat of 14 years in prison for
expressing solidarity with an oppressed people. Now, 12 jurors have
rejected the state’s case. They did not need to share Cotte’s politics,
or her background, to recognise a frame-up when they saw one.
*****
The police raid on Cotte’s home on January 31, 2024—nearly four
months after her speech—exposed the emptiness of the prosecution’s case.
They found nothing linking her to Hamas: no books or pamphlets, no
financial records showing donations, no evidence she had met its
leaders, members or supporters.
The prosecution’s entire case
rested on an extraordinary supposition: that a young woman supposedly
supporting Hamas had left no trace of that support. No documents,
messages, transactions, associations—not even the words of the speech
itself—established the allegation.
*****
Cotte’s acquittal is a victory—but the struggle from which it emerged
is far from over. The state is fast-tracking new legislation to criminalize ever broader forms of political opposition. Its defeat in
this case will not end its campaign to criminalize solidarity with
Palestine. It will intensify its efforts, as it has done following every
previous acquittal.
The defense of democratic rights requires the
building of an independent political movement of the working class,
internationally united against war, genocide and capitalism. The
acquittal of Sarah Cotte demonstrates what is possible when people
refuse to be intimidated and take a principled stand.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka held its Fourth
National Congress in Colombo from September 11 to 13 amid a worsening
crisis of global capitalism, the escalation of imperialist war and
growing resistance by workers and the rural masses to the austerity
measures of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)/National People’s Power
(NPP) government.
The congress adopted the main resolution, “The
strategy and program of the SEP in the fight against the JVP government
and capitalism.” General Secretary Deepal Jayasekera introduced the
resolution, while Lasitha Lakmal, Rohantha De Silva and Saman Gunadasa
presented supplementary reports on the JVP’s evolution, Sri Lanka’s
racialist war and the lessons of the 2022 mass uprising.
Jayasekara stressed that the Congress was taking place under conditions
in which the threat of world war had become an immediate reality. “The
Third World War is no longer a threat that is expected in the future,”
he stated. “It is a reality unfolding before our eyes.”
*****
Workers need to realize that “the revolutionary struggle is
international, not an extension of the existing nationalist bourgeois
framework,” Gunadasa stressed. “Socialist consciousness does not arise
spontaneously. It requires conscious revolutionary leadership. That is
the challenge before this congress,” he concluded.
The Congress unanimously adopted a resolution on the campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk.
The
congress elected a new Central Committee (CC). The members of incoming
CC reelected Deepal Jayasekara as general secretary and reelected Saman
Gunadasa as assistant national secretary; Lasitha Lakmal as national
editor and Pani Wijesiriwardane as assistant national editor.
The
congress established that the SEP’s work in Sri Lanka—amid escalating
war, social inequality and attacks on democratic rights—was an integral
part of the international struggle to build the world party of socialist
revolution.
Its reports, resolutions and contributions will be published on the World Socialist Web Site to politically arm workers and young people for the struggles ahead.
The
wide-ranging interview focused on the political persecution of
Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk and the international campaign for
his freedom. It also discussed the return of German militarism, the rise
of the far-right AfD and the deepening social and political crisis in
Germany.
Thousands of immigrant workers, branded as visa overstayers, will face
raids on their homes and workplaces, imprisonment and deportation under
the Albanese Labor government’s anti-immigrant measures, unveiled by
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke this week.
Under the government’s plan, 100 additional Border Force “compliance
officers” will be recruited, boosting the total to about 300, to hunt
down supposed visa “overstayers.” About 250 extra detention beds will be
opened immediately near airports and the government will repurpose a
mothballed 1,000-capacity COVID quarantine facility in Melbourne to
provide for mass detentions and deportations.
The most immediate
target will be almost 80,000 people, mostly workers and students, who
have allegedly overstayed their temporary visas. That alone will involve
a massive deportation program, but that is just the start.
The
dragnet will inevitably widen to as many as half a million temporary
visa holders as the government also moves to stop them from
“visa-hopping,” that is, applying for alternative visas. This will
create a police-state atmosphere of raids and arrests in working-class
areas.
Those most vulnerable include the 432,000 people who were
on bridging visas as of March this year, which allow people to remain in
Australia lawfully while their visa applications or appeals against
decisions are heard, and the 93,000 asylum seekers refused visas and
still living in the community as of February.
Burke’s speech at
the National Press Club on Thursday underscores the reality that when it
comes to blaming immigrant workers and students for the worsening
cost-of-living, fuel and housing crisis there are no real differences
between the Labor Party and the far-right anti-immigrant One Nation or
the Liberal-National Coalition, all of which are vying to outdo each
other in slashing immigration.
Labor is intent on spearheading this offensive despite the widespread revulsion to immigration police raids, as seen in the mass opposition
to the dawn raid and imprisonment of a Sri Lankan family in the rural
town of Biloela in 2018, and in the reaction to the Trump
administration’s brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids,
incarcerations and deportations.
*****
These measures are an attack on the working class as a
whole. Stripping work rights away from workers or students will push
them into the black economy of especially unsafe, precarious and
exploitative employment, undercutting the conditions of all workers.
As
refugee and human rights organisations have protested, studies have
shown that undocumented workers face the worst forms of exploitation and
are least likely to speak up about it, for fear of detection and
deportation. Employers often take control of their workers’ visa status,
rendering them undocumented in order to continue their exploitation.
This
offensive marks a sharp turn by the Labor government to make immigrants
scapegoats for the deteriorating social conditions confronting
working-class households, intensified by the renewed global inflationary
impact of the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran, which the Albanese
government has backed from day one.
*****
From the US to Europe, governments of all political stripes are
pursuing anti-immigrant witch hunting to channel mounting working-class
anger over soaring social inequality, falling housing unaffordability,
cuts to social programs and the funneling of billions into military
spending, toward the most vulnerable members of society.
This aims
to divide the working class—which in Australia is truly international,
with nearly half the population having a parent born overseas and
figures reaching two-thirds in major working-class areas—along national
and ethnic lines under conditions of an unfolding world war and Labor’s
growing integration of Australia into US plans for war against China.
On September 11, hundreds of prisoners in Ukraine, the UK, Turkey,
Russia, Austria, and other countries have joined a hunger strike
protesting against torture and inhumane conditions in the Ukrainian
prison system. According to the website anti-imperialism.by, 408
political prisoners from 18 different countries participated in the
hunger strike, up from 362 prisoners who joined the August 5 hunger strike.
Both
hunger strikes were organized by the Association for the Rights of
Political Prisoners and Human Rights and the Platform for International
Solidarity with Political Prisoners. The Association for the Rights of
Political Prisoners and Human Rights was founded by the Kononovich
brothers, the leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Youth movement which is
affiliated with the Stalinist Communist Party of Ukraine. Since 2022,
the Kononovich brothers have been subjected to violent persecution by the fascist-infested Ukrainian secret service (SBU). They are still placed under house arrest.
In
Ukraine, 58 political prisoners joined the hunger strike, including at
pre-trial detention centers in Lukyyanov and Lvov as well as in
Nikolaev, where the 27-year old Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk has
been held for over two years. On August 10, he was sentenced to 15
years for “high treason”, because he had called for the unity of the
Russian and Ukrainian working class in opposition to the war.
The
hunger strike focused, in particular, on the situation in the Vinnitsiya
Penal Colony No. 86, where prisoners have reported severe torture,
forced labor and other inhumane and degrading conditions. One of them,
Alexander Mel’nik, who leaked his reports about conditions in the prison
to the press and was one of the leaders of previous protests, has been
held in solitary confinement for over two months. The strikers demanded
an immediate end to the torture and inhumane conditions at the facility,
calling it a “concentration camp”, and demanded that Mel’nik be
released from his solitary confinement.
*****
The World Socialist Web Site expresses its full solidarity
with the hunger strikes, demands an end to torture and inhumane
conditions in Ukrainian prisons and calls for the immediate release of
all political prisoners!
As the previous hunger strike and the
persecution of political opposition in Ukraine more broadly, the
September 11 strike has been completely ignored by the Western media.
There is nothing coincidental about this. There is a conspiracy of
silence regarding the systematic and violent suppression of political
dissent by the Zelensky regime which has been built up and funded by
NATO to wage war against Russia. As this war continues to rage, with
hundreds of thousands killed and many more maimed, more and more youth
and workers are being imprisoned and silenced.
The administration is concealing the number of American dead in an
illegal war of aggression that it began, together with Israel, in open
defiance of international law. The US-Israeli war had killed at least
3,527 people in Iran by August 28, according to a count Al Jazeera compiled from health ministries and other official bodies.
The
majority of the US population opposes the war. A Reuters/Ipsos poll
taken September 11-14, seven weeks before the November 3 midterm
elections, found that 59 percent of respondents disapprove of the US
military strikes on Iran.
US President Donald Trump said in the
Oval Office on September 4: “I call it a military conflict because it’s
small potatoes for us.” He added that “we lost 18 people.”
*****
The Pentagon’s database on Friday listed 832 US troops wounded in
action, 414 of them under “Overseas Operations.” The Associated Press
reported August 6 that most of the wounded had suffered traumatic brain
injuries.
A report by the Pentagon’s inspector general found that
Iranian strikes “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and other
structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab
Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan,” the Associated Press
reported September 14. “Dozens of American aircraft and drones also were
destroyed or damaged,” the AP wrote.
The Wall Street Journal
reported June 25, citing US officials, that Iranian forces had struck
at least 20 US military and diplomatic sites across the Middle East with
missiles and drones. The damage, the Journal wrote, “has the U.S. re-evaluating its entire footprint in the region.”
The Journal
examined satellite images of Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the
headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which lies within 150 miles of
the Iranian coast. The Journal found that Iranian forces,
striking from late February to June, badly damaged the command
headquarters, at least 12 other buildings and two satellite
communications terminals. The Pentagon, the Journal wrote in June, had not publicly acknowledged the damage.
The Fifth Fleet headquarters building “is no longer usable,” the Journal reported, citing a US official. The Journal
put the cost of constructing such a building today at $200 million and
of constructing all the buildings damaged at the base at about $400
million. The United States evacuated most of its staff from the base and
kept a small number there, the Journal reported.
Iranian
forces also destroyed E-3 Sentry radar planes belonging to the Air
Force at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia and did “significant
structural damage” to Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates and
Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, the Journal reported.
*****
Iranian forces destroyed a Navy logistics base in Bahrain on February 28, the day the war began, the New York Times
reported September 2. The region’s other ports that can take a supply
ship or an aircraft carrier lie within range of Iran’s missiles and
drones, the Times wrote, “making them inaccessible.”
Navy supply ships must now sail to Diego Garcia, 2,200 miles away in the Indian Ocean, or to Singapore, 3,700 miles away, the Times reported. It wrote that the warships’ deployments are open-ended and that “this is not sustainable.”
The Washington Post
reported August 30 that the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force
warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a classified August 14
document, that prolonging the war at its present scale is
“unsustainable.” Admiral Daryl Caudle, the Navy’s top officer, told
Hegseth that “barely one-fourth” of its destroyers are ready to deploy,
the Post reported.
CNN reported August 4 that almost 80
percent of the military’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense
interceptors had been used up.
The war on Iran is one front of an
escalating global war whose death toll will be far greater than the one
the Pentagon is now concealing.
*****
On Wednesday, 58 House Democrats joined Republicans in handing Trump new
powers over war and trade, including the authority to tax goods from
China and India, which buy Russian oil, at rates up to 100 percent. The
bill, which also keeps the US sanctions on Iran’s energy and arms
industries in force until 2031, passed the Senate 86 to 11 on August 7,
with 36 of the 45 Democrats voting yes. Trump signed it into law Friday.
According to a report in Stuff last month, New Zealand’s major
power companies raked in more than a billion dollars in profit over the
year while household power bills surged and many people spent the winter
freezing in their homes.
The “big four” generation retailers, commonly known as
“gentailers”—Contact, Mercury, Meridian and Genesis—that dominate the
market posted combined profits of $NZ959 million. The state-owned
Transpower, which owns and operates the national grid, also announced an
annual profit of $176 million, a 64 percent increase on the previous
year’s $107 million.
The profits accumulated by the four companies
was more than 1,800 percent higher than the previous year’s result of
$49 million, though short of the $1.5 billion record set in 2022. The Spinoff observed
that in terms of operating earnings, it was “comfortably the most
lucrative year the companies had ever seen,” bringing in a combined
$3.65 billion.
Meanwhile, figures from Powerswitch show 14 percent
of people cannot afford to heat their homes properly, 24 percent have
missed a power bill payment and 19 percent have been forced to borrow
from family or friends to keep the lights on.
The soaring price of electricity is a major component of the escalating cost
of living. Over the two years between the June 2024 and June 2026
quarters, salary and wage rates increased by a total of just 4.4
percent, according to Stats NZ’s Labour Cost Index.
Over the same
period local authority rates and payments rose 22 percent, electricity
21.4 percent and petrol 17.2 percent. Health insurance increased 39.4
percent, while dwelling insurance rose 9.2 percent. Supermarket prices
skyrocketed, ranging from a 28.2 percent increase in beef mince, to 26
percent for milk, 42 percent for butter and 67.6 percent for bread.
Lower-income
households are hardest hit with essential expenses commanding more of
their budgets. Cold, damp homes are contributing to the spike in winter
illnesses.
*****
The “big four” power companies are now collectively valued at $38
billion. They have been far more focused on paying dividends to their
shareholders than reinvesting in necessary infrastructure. In the last
decade they have paid out $10.8 billion in dividends, with only $4.5
billion going to new power projects.
According to Consumer NZ,
residential electricity prices are, when adjusted for inflation, 65
percent higher than they were when the retail market was created in
1999.
Privatisation has served to redistribute wealth from the
mass of the population to a small financial elite, which has been
enriched at the expense of working class households.
According to
the Electricity Authority, about 700 households per month are having
their electricity disconnected for non-payment. Last year 46,895
requests for post-paid electricity connections were declined due to low
credit ratings, forcing families onto pre-paid connections.
Essential
services like water and electricity are necessities of life that must
be provided to everyone. These utilities must be placed in full public
ownership—not under the control of the capitalist state, which is an
instrument of the financial elite, but under the democratic control of
the working class. This requires nothing less than the abolition of
capitalism and the socialist reorganization of society.
The Left Party bears central responsibility for the victory of the
far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the recent Saxony-Anhalt
state election. Outrage over social cutbacks, war and the establishment
parties found an outlet on the right because the Left Party and the
trade unions blocked every avenue on the left.
The ruling class is
responding to the deep crisis of capitalism by boosting militarism,
stepping up the repressive powers of the state and imposing social cuts.
The Left Party goes along with this and provides a left cover. It
supports the federal government’s great-power policies, voted in
the upper house of parliament for €1 trillion in war credits and
persecutes opponents of the Gaza genocide within its own ranks. In the
federal states, where it is or has been in government, it has left a
trail of social devastation.
The trade unions, with which the Left
Party works closely, act as co-managers organizing the destruction of
jobs and social provisions and suppress all resistance to this. Just
three days before the Saxony-Anhalt election, for example, the union IG
Metall agreed to the destruction of a further 50,000 jobs at Volkswagen.
This
is why the AfD—a free-market party backed by billionaires such as
Henning Conle and Elon Musk—is able to channel social anger and outrage
into right-wing channels with its demagogy. The AfD contains numerous
fascists, but it is not a fascist mass party. Many voted for it out of
protest and opposition to the establishment parties, which offer them
nothing but war, unemployment and poverty.
*****
The claim that the Left Party can be forced, through pressure from
below, into a policy in the interests of the working class is not only
refuted by the entire experience of recent years but is also
historically false. Neither the Left Party nor its predecessor, the PDS,
was ever a workers’ party.
As the Berlin Wall fell and East
Germany’s Stalinist regime collapsed in 1989–90, the PDS emerged through
the renaming of the former party of state, the Socialist Unity Party of
Germany (SED), as the Party of Democratic Socialism. The SED was not a
socialist party but a Stalinist one. It represented the interests of a
privileged bureaucracy that leeched off the nationalized property and
suppressed every independent stirring of the working class.
When
the “Ulbricht Group,” the nucleus of the later SED, returned from exile
in Moscow at the end of the Second World War, among its first actions
was to dissolve the Arbeiterräte (workers’ councils) that had
sprung up spontaneously. In 1953, the Ulbricht regime then bloodily
crushed the workers’ uprising of June 17 in the German Democratic
Republic (GDR).
In the context of the Cold War, the SED found
itself compelled to expropriate large, landed estates, companies and
banks. This was a social advance upon which numerous social and cultural
achievements of the GDR rested. But it was not yet socialism. A
socialist society could no more be built within the narrow confines of
East Germany than within the borders of the far larger Soviet Union.
That required workers’ democracy and access to the world economy through
the international extension of the revolution. Stalinism rejected both.
As globalization increasingly put the GDR economy under pressure and
social tensions grew, the bureaucracy tried to save its privileges by
introducing capitalism. It liquidated state property and all the social
achievements bound up with it. That was the political content of the
transformation of the SED into the PDS.
Hans Modrow, the last
SED/PDS head of government in the GDR and later honorary chairman of the
PDS, states this bluntly in his memoirs of his time in office. “In my
view, the path to [German] unity was unavoidably necessary and had to be
pursued with determination,” he writes.
Modrow saw his most
important task as defending the state order against a wave of protests
and strikes by workers. He describes how strikes and social tensions
increased and insists: “What mattered to me was preserving the country’s
governability, preventing chaos.”
Modrow’s economics minister,
Christa Luft, also a PDS member, founded the Treuhand, the agency that privatized and wound down the GDR economy, destroying hundreds of
thousands of jobs in the process.
The PDS and the Left Party have
never since departed from the course set by Modrow and Luft, protecting
the state order and capitalist property. In the 1990s, working closely
with the trade unions, the PDS played a key role in keeping resistance
to the destruction of East German industry under control. In the 2000s,
as the SPD’s influence began to decline under Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder, the PDS/Left Party took on government responsibility in
several East German federal states.
*****
After more than three decades, the pseudo-left does not cling to the
Left Party because it still has illusions in this pro-capitalist party,
but because it rejects an independent movement of the working class. It
speaks for better-off middle-class layers who fear a genuine offensive
by the working class more than they fear the growth of the extreme
right.
The SGP and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), of which it is the German section, represent a
diametrically opposed policy. They are fighting to organize the working
class independently of the Left Party and the ossified trade union
apparatuses, to build rank-and-file action committees, and to construct
the Fourth International as the new revolutionary leadership of the
international working class.
The pseudo-left calls this
“unrealistic” and “sectarian.” In fact, it is the only realistic
perspective. It rests not on superficial impressions and false hopes,
but on an objective analysis of the crisis of world capitalism and on
the lessons of more than a hundred years of the Marxist workers’
movement.
*****
“The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct
interference of the masses in historical events,” writes Leon Trotsky in
the preface to his History of the Russian Revolution, the revolution he led to victory together with Lenin:
In
ordinary times the state, be it monarchical or democratic, elevates
itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line
of business—kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians,
journalists. But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no
longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding
them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional
representatives, and create by their own interference the initial
groundwork for a new régime.
This process is only
just beginning. It unfolds neither automatically nor spontaneously. It
requires a revolutionary leadership that understands and anticipates the
political tasks ahead. Mass consciousness lags far behind objective
conditions for a long time before it changes abruptly and erupts into
fierce political and social conflicts. If a revolutionary perspective
and leadership are then lacking, such struggles risk ending in bitter
defeats.
*****
The fight against the AfD requires a political break with the Left Party
and its pseudo-left satellites. An independent offensive by the
international working class, directed against war, fascism, social
inequality and their root cause, capitalism, will cut the ground from
under the AfD.
The effects of
a widely predicted “super” El Niño are intensifying dramatically in
midwinter, bringing unusually high temperatures. Peru’s National
Meteorology and Hydrol across Peruogy Service (SENAMHI) reported that
Lima reached 29°C this week, breaking a record that had stood since
1997. The reading is 9°C above the September average. Under normal
conditions, such temperatures would be expected only during the hottest
summer days, between January and March.
Because of the extreme
heat, the government has placed 21 regions under red alert, covering
virtually the entire country—the coast and the Andes— except the Amazon
lowland departments.
The anomaly is so destructive that, so far
this year, starvation has killed at least 9,570 sea lions, 2,144 guano
birds, 30 Humboldt penguins, and hundreds of pelicans, gulls and other
species. The Coastal El Niño, which pushes the cold, nutrient-rich
waters of the Humboldt Current away from Peru’s coast, taking the fish
with it—the main source of food for seabirds and marine mammals—is
forecast to reach its peak between November and January 2027. These
deaths were recorded in protected areas where the government collects
figures. The actual toll is likely far higher, since many coastal
habitats are not monitored and the worst of El Niño’s destructive force
is still to come.
Infobae reports estimated economic losses of $15
billion to $25 billion in Peru. More than 13,500 families in the
northern city of Lambayeque and thousands more in Piura face precarious
economic conditions and reduced availability of traditional fish species
such as silverside.
Conveagro, Peru’s National Agrarian
Convention, estimates agricultural losses exceeding $3 billion, with
sharp declines in olives, strawberries and corn. The Peruvian Institute
of Economics estimates El Niño will reduce GDP growth by a combined 0.8
percentage points in 2026–27.
The Coastal El Niño also affects
Ecuador, where 494,274 hectares of crops face high flood exposure and
606,584 hectares face high landslide exposure.
*****
Since pre-Inca times, Peru’s coastal peoples have depended heavily on
the ocean. El Niño affected civilizations including the Paracas, the
Moche and the Chimú. Researchers continue investigating whether
exceptionally strong events contributed to the decline of the Moche
civilization, which flourished on the north coast between roughly AD 100
and 800 — particularly the “mega-El Niño” events around AD 550 and 650.
Torrential rains and floods destroyed crops, irrigation systems and
adobe structures, followed by prolonged droughts and famine.
El
Niño is a natural phenomenon of enormous proportions that cannot be
controlled, and global warming is making these events more frequent and
stronger. Society, however, can anticipate its effects, protect food
supplies and reduce suffering among people and animals.
Even the
Inca state maintained vast storehouses, known as qollqas, containing
corn, quinoa, chuño, textiles and other goods. These surpluses were
produced through the labor and tribute obligations of local communities.
During poor harvests, droughts and other emergencies, authorities could
redistribute stored reserves to affected populations.
By
contrast, today the vulnerability of global food systems to climate
shocks is registered primarily through the volatility of commodity
prices. Financial markets allow speculators to take positions based on
expectations of good or poor harvests. When agricultural disasters
produce shortages, investors can profit from rising commodity prices.
Under capitalism, food production and distribution are subordinated to
markets and private profit rather than to preventing mass hunger and
starvation.
The solution to capitalism-induced global warming and
its effects, including massive disruptions of food supplies, requires
organizing production internationally according to human need rather
than private profit, through ownership and democratic control of the
means of production by the international working class.
On September 11, the government of Bernardo Arévalo deployed the Guatemalan Army alongside the National Civil Police to break up roadblocks against soaring fuel prices, giving demonstrators 30 minutes to disperse.
Interior Minister Marco Antonio Villeda declared that the protests had “mutated from demonstrations into criminal acts.” Anyone blocking a road would “be arrested and placed at the disposal of the courts,” their vehicles confiscated.
Defense Minister Henry Sáenz went further. “We are not talking about demonstrations,” he said. “We are talking about coordinated activities with very dark interests.” Three army forces and 23 operational commands were mobilized.
At their height that day, 14 blockades were reported across 10 of Guatemala’s 22 departments. The Constitutional Court ordered the roads cleared within six hours, under threat of removing officials who failed to comply.
They closed the Periférico at Bethania in the capital, the Atlantic highway, CA-2 West at Cuyotenango and CA-9 North in Zacapa. Transmetro Line 18 was suspended, cutting a bus route workers depend on.
Nothing has been settled. A blockade was again reported on September 16 on CA-1 West near Huehuetenango.
The community council in La Bethania said on September 13 that residents could return to demonstrations or blockades.
The next day market traders association, transportation groups and indigenous organizations (28 Cantones and the Sololá Mayorship) launched an indefinite occupation of the Plaza de la Constitución. “This September 15 there is no independence,” said Julio Rivas of the Association of United Market Traders, “because they have us sunk in an economic and fuel crisis.”
*****
Between January 1 and July 20, diesel rose from Q24.92 to Q39.54 a
gallon—58.7 percent. By September 16 it had reached Q50.89 ($6.67), the
highest price in Guatemalan history. Regular gasoline hit Q44.09
($5.79).
Food prices have registered a major increase as a
result, with corn, the most important staple, increasing from Q550 per
quintal (100 pounds) to Q600 in just three weeks.
Set against
wages, the figures are devastating. The 2026 minimum wage is Q4,252
($557) a month; and the average monthly income is Q2,748, and 65.9
percent of those employed work informally, without contract or
protection. Current price hikes are resulting in major deprivation.
Guatemala
imports all its fuel, and the chief cause of the price increases lies
in the US-Israeli war against Iran and the collapse of traffic through
the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes in
peacetime.
*****
Guatemalan workers are being made to pay for a war waged half a world away over the control of oil. So are workers everywhere.
In
the same weeks, Mexican truck drivers blocked several of the country’s
eleven commercial border crossings after US Immigration and Customs
Enforcement revoked their B1 work visas.
The drivers are being
ruined by the same administration whose war on Iran is driving up
Guatemalan fuel costs. These are not separate grievances but a clear
demonstration of the potential for uniting the struggles across borders.
The
protests in Guatemala are not socially homogeneous, however. The
transport employer chambers demand tax exemptions and direct
subsidies—public money transferred to fuel importers and bus owners,
leaving the price mechanism intact.
The indigenous leaderships
that were demonstrating alongside these bodies demanded the opposite:
measures against fuel speculation, frozen transport fares, state action
on food prices and enforcement against hoarding. They explicitly
rejected subsidies.
Significant sections of the working class have
been mobilized through their neighborhood associations, and behind
market traders and some rural communities; however, the working class
has not intervened massively in the struggle yet. Significantly, the
trade union federations have issued no national call to action and no
appeal for a strike.
*****
Arévalo, who was elected running as a democratic, left-wing answer to
the far right advancing across the hemisphere, said on a televised
address on September 13, that a convergence of local politicians, drug
trafficking networks and gangs are behind the blockades: “The spurious
electoral interests of some and the criminal interests of others
converge.”
He alleged that in Río Hondo, Zacapa, politicians had
paid people to man the roadblocks and described similar arrangements in
Cuyotenango and Villa Nueva. He named no one and produced no evidence.
The
charge is not rhetorical excess. Guatemala has joined the Trump
administration’s “Shield of the Americas,” launched in March around a
commitment to “using lethal military force” against cartels.
To
brand a movement of bus drivers, truckers, market traders and village
councils as narco-financed is to place it inside that framework and to
justify its repression.
On May 19, Arévalo spoke by telephone with War Secretary Pete Hegseth. The New York Times
reported, citing three people familiar with the talks, that he agreed
to US airstrikes and other military action on Guatemalan soil. The
government denied it and insisted only the Guatemalan Congress may
authorize foreign troops. It confirmed, however, that Defense Minister
Henry Sáenz had requested US “cooperation.”
That is the same
minister who now calls workers blocking roads over the price of diesel
“coordinated activities with very dark interests.” In August, Hegseth
announced that the government of Guatemala, along with new far-right
regimes in Colombia and Honduras, had agreed to joint US operations on
their respective territories.
*****
In 1952, the civilian Jacobo Árbenz government expropriated
uncultivated estates. United Fruit, which held 550,000 acres of which 85
percent lay idle and whose annual profits were twice the revenue of the
Guatemalan state, lost more than 400,000 acres.
Under the
leadership of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director
Allen Dulles, who had both arranged deals for United Fruit, the Dwight D
Eisenhower administration authorized Operation PBSuccess in August 1953
to overthrow Árbenz. A CIA-orchestrated invasion in June of 1954
installed Col. Carlos Castillo Armas as the country’s US-backed
dictator.
What followed was 36 years of civil war and some 200,000
dead. The UN-backed truth commission attributed 93 percent of the
carnage to the state and found it committed acts of genocide against the
Maya.
The apparatus built to defend United Fruit’s interests was
turned, decade after decade, against strikes, land occupations and the
villages of the highlands. That is the historical function of the
“cooperation” his ministers have requested.
Arévalo’s biography
runs through this record. The son of President Juan José Arévalo
(1945-51), he served in Guatemala’s embassy in Israel from 1984 to 1988,
when Israel was a principal arms supplier to a military fresh from its
scorched-earth campaigns against the indigenous population.
His
party, Semilla, founded in 2017 out of a Washington-connected NGO
milieu, has its major constituency among the professional upper
middle-class. Arévalo entered the 2023 runoff with 15.51 percent of the
first-round vote—fewer than the 18.17 percent of ballots cast null—and
won with just a 44.98 percent turnout.
On taking office, he thanked Washington and the army for securing his inauguration.
Living
standards cannot be protected by pressuring the government that has
already deployed the military against the population, criminalizes its
protests and invites the Pentagon to collaborate.
The working
class requires independent organization—in Guatemala, Mexico, the United
States and internationally—against war and the capitalist system that
produces it.
In 2025, Sri Lankan writer-director Lalith Rathnayake’s Riverstone
won Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography prizes at the Shanghai
International Film Festival, as well as the Best Director award at the
Singapore International Film Festival. This year, it won a Golden Cyclo,
the top prize at the Vesoul International Festival of Asian Cinema in
France.
These awards are well deserved. Rathnayake’s two-hour
drama, his second feature, is a work of considerable artistic
intelligence, and its subject matter—the extrajudicial killing of a
prisoner by Sri Lankan state security forces—is a reality that has
afflicted the island for decades.
Thousands died in such killings
during the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna-led uprisings by rural youth in
1988–90 and during the 26-year communal war against the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which ended in 2009. More recently, over
100 police custodial deaths have been reported in so-called anti-crime
and anti-drug operations, with suspects allegedly killed while
“attempting to show a weapon cache” or “trying to escape.”
Set in
the aftermath of Colombo’s bloody war against the LTTE, the story
unfolds almost entirely within the confined space of a police vehicle
travelling through the central highlands to Riverstone, its destination
in the spectacular Knuckles mountain range.
The drama involves
three policemen—a senior officer, a sergeant and a junior constable—and
Nanditha (Randika Gunathilaka), the alleged criminal, who is being
transported to a pre-arranged execution.
While the film’s
protagonists are mainly confined to the police vehicle, long stretches
of winding mountain roads, enveloped in mist, rain and dense forest,
reinforce a mounting sense of entrapment. Director Rathnayake repeatedly
juxtaposes the serenity of the natural world with the casual brutality
of official power.
*****
The police violence depicted in Riverstone is not some relic
of the past. The same institution continues to suppress dissent, crush
strikes and enforce government austerity, helping to explain its strong
resonance with Sri Lankan audiences.
That Rathnayake has made such
an unflinching exposure of what the state does and what it makes of the
men who do its work is significant and testifies to the persistence of
artistic conscience in a country whose ruling elite has little use for
truth-telling of any kind.
In a global cinema landscape dominated
by trivia, cynicism and the industrial production of distraction, a work
of this honesty and seriousness deserves the widest possible
international distribution.
On Sunday, September 13, reporters from the World Socialist Web Site
visited the picket line at our Hamilton, Ontario plant to speak with
some of us. Within minutes, United Steelworkers Local 7135 President
Frank Crowder arrived, summoned by his associates, and launched into a
violent outburst, repeatedly calling the reporters “trash” and
physically blocking them from talking to strikers.
His aggressive behavior is just the latest example of the USW bureaucracy’s hostility
towards rank-and-file workers speaking out about the six-week-old
strike. Crowder already blocked WSWS reporters from discussing the
strike with rank-and-file workers on another occasion last month. He and
his colleagues in the USW apparatus have taken to referring to the
National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee, an organization built by
workers at our plant independently of the USW bureaucracy, as organized
by “rats.”
The thuggish behavior by Crowder and his associates
exemplifies the bitter hostility of the entire USW bureaucracy towards
rank-and-file strikers at National Steel Car. They know that our
overwhelming strike vote and anger over the dangerous working conditions
in the plant demonstrate that we are ready to wage a genuine struggle
against the exploitative piecework system, and for decent-paying, safe
jobs for all. But their primary concerns are protecting their relations
with NSC owner Greg Aziz and upholding the union’s alliance in “Team
Canada” with the federal Liberal and provincial Tory governments.
They
are therefore determined to suppress all independent rank-and-file
action in our strike for fear that we could break out of the
straitjacket in which the union leadership has confined our struggle,
and that we could start mobilizing broader layers of the working class
against corporate profiteering, unsafe working conditions, austerity and
war.
*****
The WSWS has a more than decade-long record of reporting on workers’
struggles at National Steel Car. It exposed the horrific conditions
behind the death of Quoc Le in June 2022, the third worker to die at our
plant in just 18 months. When we established the NSC-RFC during our
last strike in 2023, the WSWS provided a platform for the rank and
file’s demands and a perspective to guide our struggle. Our statements
warning about the pro-employer collective bargaining system and the
danger of expecting the capitalist courts to do anything about the
deaths of our colleagues were vindicated by the sellout of our last
strike after 41 days and the wrist-slap fine of $240,000 received by NSC for Le’s death.
*****
Workers on the line should take Crowder’s hysterical
outbursts against the NSC-RFC and the WSWS as a sign that the USW Local
7135 leadership is preparing to unveil another sellout agreement. We
know that Aziz has important orders whose deadlines are coming up. We
have been on strike for six weeks with no substantive communication from
the executive, let alone the elaboration of a strategy to challenge the
company and the political establishment that stands behind it.
We
know that a key element of the upcoming sellout tentative contract will
be the retention of the “incentive” system, i.e., piecework. Ending
this highly exploitative and frankly murderous system is a precondition
for establishing a safe workplace. Yet it was only weeks before the
contract deadline and under pressure from the rank and file, that the
USW bureaucracy announced it was launching a “fight” against piecework.
In
reality, this was a “fight” that was set up to fail. Showing more
concern for the multi-millionaire Aziz’s bottom-line than the members
who are living pay cheque to pay cheque, the union proposed a new a base
rate of $32 per hour that for many workers would mean a real-terms pay
cut. Then, after an arbitrator issued an undemocratic and flagrantly
anti-worker ruling that the USW has no right to bargain over the
existence of piecework (because it signed it away in a side letter years
ago), Crowder and Co. abandoned the fight to abolish piecework
altogether.
Now the USW bureaucrats are saying they want to be in
on setting the piecework rate, that is, on determining the rate at which
we should be incentivized to accept speed-up and dangerous working
conditions.
*****
A genuine working-class leadership would mobilize the whole
membership, encourage every worker to take an active role in the
struggle, and arm us with the information and organization needed to win
the strike. The USW does none of this, because an informed, active and
organized rank and file is the one thing its privileged officials fear
above all else.
Instead, Crowder and his associates spend their
time slandering the NSC-RFC and the WSWS. Crowder asserted that the WSWS
is on the line looking for handouts, that the NSC-RFC “divides” the
union, that the WSWS twists the words of workers, and that the committee
is collaborating with National Steel Car management.
We are not
looking for handouts. It is the USW bureaucrats who collect our dues
while angling for higher office, and the top union bosses rake in
six-figure salaries.
*****
The union sits on more than $2 billion in assets built up from our
dues money, but starves us on $420 a week in strike pay. In 2023, it
starved us out for 41 days on $260 per week in strike pay before pushing
through a sellout.
Nobody has divided the rank and file from our
allies throughout the working class better than the USW bureaucracy. It
has isolated our strike and refused to link it to the struggles of other
workers, including the 225,000 other USW members in this country and
850,000 across North America.
The WSWS does not twist the words of
workers. It publishes what workers actually say and gives the most
militant and class-conscious workers a voice by printing our committee’s
statements. It is the bureaucracy that does not communicate with its
members, bars them from talking to anyone, and won’t answer elementary
questions as to what we are fighting for and what is the strategy to win
the strike.
*****
The issues in our strike extend far beyond Local 7135. The USW’s
nationalism chains us to our own capitalist ruling class and divides us
from our brothers and sisters in the United States, Mexico and around
the world. Its alliance with corporate management prioritizes the
profits of the bosses over our needs and those of our families.
This
is not a failure of individual bureaucrats like Crowder, McMullin, or
even a higher-up like Marty Warren. It is the logic of the entire trade
union apparatus that has been integrated through corporatist ties with
the state and big business, and serves as an industrial police force by
suppressing our struggles on behalf of the ruling class.
The
answer is not to retreat before these threats. It is to build the
NSC-RFC as part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees in order to join our fight with the rapidly escalating
struggles of the working class across Canada and the US, and
internationally. The bureaucracy’s resort to smears and intimidation are
a measure of its weakness and isolation from the rank and file. It
attacks us and our supporters precisely because it cannot win the
argument in open debate.
There is a strong basis to win support
for our fight throughout the working class so we can go on the
offensive. Some 275,000 education workers across Ontario have been
working without a new contract for almost three weeks as the right-wing
Ford government seeks to escalate the onslaught on public education,
which millions of people in this province depend on. Anger is widespread
among workers in the United States towards Trump’s trade war with
Canada and “America First” agenda, while millions of workers on this
side of the border are being thrust onto a collision course with
Carney’s government as it sells off the country’s infrastructure and raw
materials to oligarchs and investment funds, and cuts public spending
to pay for war. We must appeal directly to these sentiments by making
our strike the spearhead of a broader counteroffensive that mobilizes
the industrial and political power of the working class to achieve
decent-paying, secure jobs, well-funded public services and an end to
imperialist war and the enrichment of the financial oligarchy.
The NSC-RFC declares:
• Build the NSC-RFC throughout the plant, department by department and shift by shift.
• Elect our own negotiating committee, answerable only to the rank and file.
• Demand rank-and-file control of the strike, of safety and of production.
• Abolish the incentive system, with base pay equal to the maximum wage
including the incentive rate. Full worker control over production line
speeds and safety.
• Broaden the struggle: send delegations to
Dofasco and Stelco, to the railroads and the factories and the
warehouses, and link our fight to the growing rebellion of workers
across the continent through the International Workers Alliance of
Rank-and-File Committees.
Contact the NSC-RFC at nscrfc@gmail.com or by filling out the form below.
This year’s Trades Union Congress (TUC) was presented by Britain’s
pseudo-left tendencies as an occasion that would demonstrate a changed
relationship between the trade unions and the Labour government under
Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Instead, it confirmed that the relationship
established under Keir Starmer remains one of mutual support for
austerity and war.
The pro-worker rhetoric of the assembled
bureaucracy during the four-day event in Brighton, September 13–16, rang
hollow. None of the resolutions adopted were based on mobilizing the
working class against mounting social inequality, attacks on democratic
rights, anti-migrant chauvinism and, most acutely, escalating war.
Instead,
the congress used the so-called “Burnham bounce”, a slight uptick in
support for Labour sans Starmer, to consolidate the bureaucracy’s
corporatist relations with the government and big business.
The
annual event has long ceased to occupy a meaningful place in
working-class political life, and the TUC’s representation of 5.3
million workers is in the role of an industrial policemen and opponent
of class struggle.
The cynicism of the union bureaucracy was
summed up by TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak’s opening remarks. He paid
lip service to outsourced workers “feeding our patients, protecting our
public and cleaning our trains”, bounced from “one private company to
another” on insecure work and inferior terms before declaring, “Time to
end the outsourcing rip-off. Time for real public services, not private
profit.”
Nowak inhabits an entirely different world from the “colleagues” that
he spoke of meeting two months earlier at an NHS hospital. His
estimated remuneration of £167,000 plus expenses places him in the top
10 percent of income earners. He is the leading representative of the
privileged stratum of trade union bureaucrats who have facilitated the
explosion in private-sector contracts under Labour since it came to
power in 2024, with “soft facilities” contracts covering cleaning,
catering and security rising from £3.5 to £6.6 billion. And it is in
this capacity that he has taken up a position as non-executive director
of the Bank of England.
The bureaucracy peddled the lie that
Starmer’s pro-business and most right-wing Labour government in history
would fulfill its promise to “bring about the biggest wave of insourcing
of public services in a generation.” It is now attempting to revive this
discredited claim under Burnham and his fraudulent promise to end 40
years of “neoliberalism.”
Burnham’s “public ownership” policy is
in fact modeled on Tony Blair’s “Third Way” public-private
partnerships, which saddled National Health Service hospitals with
crippling debt and led to service cuts, and on his franchise model as
Mayor of Greater Manchester where public transport services were carved
up among private operators.
*****
The alignment of the bureaucracy and pseudo-left with Burnham is most
starkly exposed on the issue of war. Burnham became prime minister in a
palace coup supported by big business, who had concluded that Starmer
had proved himself incapable of simultaneously escalating war abroad and
attacking the working class at home through deeper austerity.
*****
A genuine fight against austerity and war is only possible through a
fundamental break from the bureaucratic apparatus of the TUC and its
member unions that acts as an extension of employers, government and the
state in suppressing the class struggle.
The next stage of
working-class resistance, whether inside or outside the existing unions,
must break the bureaucracy’s grip or face defeat. The fundamental task
posed is the building of rank-and-file committees, capable of mobilizing workers across workplaces and communities and uniting them in a
conscious fight against the capitalist system and for socialism.
The ruling class knows the mass social opposition its wars and
economic crises bring and is preparing police-state measures and
far-right political forces to meet it. Scores of young people have been
tried and branded terrorists for direct action protest against a
genocide. Major demonstrations have been hit with police restrictions
and mass arrests. Strikes have been served with court orders.
Reform
UK, like the French National Rally, Alternative for Germany and
countless other examples internationally, is being lined up to wage a
savage war against the working class begun with anti-migrant and benefit
claimant scapegoating.
*****
The insanity of capitalist war is matched only by that of
capitalism-driven climate change, which threatens the health, lives and
livelihoods of hundreds of millions around the world. The clock is being
run down on the time humanity has left to secure a livable planet for
future generations.
Europe has been battered by unprecedented
heatwaves and droughts, leading to tens of thousands of deaths and
billions in economic damage. What is likely to be the hottest year on
record in 2027 threatens more mass starvation and displacement,
concentrated in the poorest parts of the globe. International agencies
have already warned of an additional 50 million people forced into acute
hunger.
*****
Social inequality, the private ownership of production and the obscene
fortunes of a few are the source of this catastrophe. The world’s
richest 1 percent have the same combined carbon footprint as the poorest
two-thirds of humanity. To appeal to these forces to put a
stop to carbon emissions and other environmental catastrophes is like
discussing vegetarianism with a pack of hungry wolves.
*****
These experiences have generated a groundswell of popular protest and
struggle. Millions have taken to the streets to protest the Gaza
genocide. A wave of strikes was launched against the cost-of-living
crisis coming out of the pandemic. Before Covid, millions of young
people across the world were driving a protest movement against the
climate crisis.
The problem is not a lack of opposition, but of
political perspective. People are rejecting capitalism and turning
towards socialism in numbers unprecedented for generations. But they are
being led to defeat by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, Zack Polanski and
their international counterparts, who put themselves forward as the
answer.
*****
Corbyn has now consummated his ten years of betrayal of left-wing
sentiment with the debacle that is Your Party. Polanski’s double-talk on
NATO, bond markets and the Labour Party line him up to do the same.
Their role is best underscored by the experience in Venezuela, where the
“Bolivarian socialism” of Hugo Chavez has delivered the country’s
working class to American imperialism.
These movements failed
because they were based on national programmes aimed at reforming
capitalism. But a ruling class driven to war and dictatorship by fierce
competition and economic and social crisis cannot be pressured or
persuaded. It can only be defeated, and only by a world revolution that
topples capitalist states and expropriates the oligarchy.
Plenty
of organizations on campus will provide pseudo-socialist arguments for
lending semi-critical support to Your Party, the Greens, and even the
Labour Party, on the basis that they are the best there is. We reject
this perspective entirely.
The global crisis is preparing an
almighty movement in the international working class. This social force,
numbering in the billions, will mount increasingly determined fights
against right-wing governments and the major corporations. If these
struggles are to succeed, then they must acquire a revolutionary
socialist program and leadership based on the lessons of the twentieth
century.
Developing that leadership is the work of the IYSSE—the
youth section of the International Committee of the Fourth
International, the world Trotskyist movement. Trotskyism is the
continuation of Marxism in the 21st century, founded in the struggle to
defend the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the program of world
socialist revolution on which it was based against the nationalist
degeneration represented by Stalin.
Through meetings, lectures,
film screenings, classes and campaigns, we will create the conditions on
campus for students to learn this history, develop as revolutionaries,
and take their place in the fight for socialism. Sign up today!
Students and youth in London have spoken out against the persecution of
the 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk. On August 10, the
Pervomaisk City District Court sentenced Syrotiuk to 15 years in prison
for “high treason… under martial law” for his opposition to the war in
Ukraine and calls for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers.
Jennifer, a member of the recently established
International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) society at
Birkbeck University of London, said, “I think it’s absolutely ridiculous
that they arrested him and convicted him on high treason for simply
saying, ‘hey, wait a minute, we should look at this from another angle.’
He did not say Ukraine is in the wrong here, we should kowtow to
Russia’s demands. He didn’t do anything of that sort.
“He simply
said, ‘I think there may be other options here that may be worth
exploring.’ And that was enough to call him a traitor. It’s similar to
here in the UK, where people in balaclavas can shut down a port city [in a far-right protest] and have no arrests, but an 80-year-old woman holding a ‘stop genocide’ sign gets tried as a terrorist.”
*****
College student Hector said Putin and Zelensky are
“both right-wing. The difference is one is being funded by Europe. I’m
not really surprised [by Bogdan’s persecution], they do it with any
political activists.”
The war in Ukraine was not over democracy,
“It’s a fight of who gets more ownership of what, who gets more capital
at the end of the day. That’s what I think. If NATO was actually useful,
they’d help the Africans, they’d help the South Americans, they’d help
the Asians that were suffering against French and Spanish and English
imperialism.”
For those who speak out, “they kill people. That’s
the Western way to silence somebody, it’s just killing them. If not,
they’ll pay to assassinate them. If not, they’ll start a war. Like
Sudan, Libya, Syria, multiple African countries and Middle Eastern.”
To
fight for the freedom of Bogdan and an end to the war, “us being
peaceful won’t solve anything. Us being quiet won’t solve anything. We
need to speak out more. We need to socialise and… go against these huge
companies!”
On the use of propaganda by the ruling elite to
justify war, Hector said, “With the military they say ‘A true patriot
goes to fight for their country’ but truly, that’s the least patriotic
thing you can do, that’s the least Christian thing you can do. Because
at the end of the day, you’re oppressing a whole country, killing
multiple children, and you’re the reason why people starve in the
future.”
*****
The WSWS urges every reader to go to FreeBogdan.org and act:
Sign the petition, and add a statement of support in your own words.
Write to the court,
in your own language and in Ukrainian, using the letter-writing tool.
If you have written before, send your letter again with the Ukrainian
translation.
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