On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom released a video claiming
that federal agents were investigating him and his family at the behest
of President Donald Trump. The investigation appears to be the latest
example of the Trump administration’s weaponization of the criminal
justice system against its political opponents.
In the video, posted on social media, Newsom declared:
In
recent days federal agents have knocked on the doors of family, friends
and former employees. Not because they found a crime, because they are
simply trying to find one. They are demanding records. They are abusing
the grand jury process, digging through years and years of random
documents.
The term-limited governor and likely 2028
Democratic presidential candidate claimed that Trump “isn’t coming after
me because of my mean tweets. He’s coming after me because I am
considering running for president. Because he hates that I have
consistently called him out, over and over again, for his lies and
deceit.”
*****
As of this writing, the Department of Justice and acting Attorney
General Todd Blanche have refused to comment on any investigations into
the Newsoms or release any charging documents. Newsom’s attorneys have
filed a Freedom of Information Act request for communications involving
top Justice Department officials, including Blanche, former Attorney
General Pam Bondi and former acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove.
In
his video address, Newsom noted that Trump personally called for him to
be investigated last year. Newsom’s office claims federal agents began
making inquiries to associates of the governor after Trump announced
that he planned to nominate Blanche as attorney general. Blanche
previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer.
Since Trump’s return to the White House, Blanche has been carrying out
Trump’s personal and political vendettas at the Department of Justice.
He has overseen the ongoing cover-up of the Epstein files, refusing to
release millions of documents still held by the department. He
spearheaded the attempted creation of a $1.8 billion slush fund for the
fascists who stormed the Capitol on January 6 and the agreement with the
Internal Revenue Service that granted Trump and his children immunity
from audits of past tax returns.
The New York Times reported, citing aides to Newsom, that
the federal investigation “appears to focus on his wife, Jennifer Siebel
Newsom.” The paper noted that those questioned by federal agents in
recent days include former employees of the governor and people
affiliated with his wife’s nonprofit groups. Newsom’s aides told the Times they believe banking records have been subpoenaed, although they said they had no written evidence of that.
The
newspaper quoted a person familiar with the matter who confirmed that
multiple federal investigations are active against Newsom, with at least
one focused on his wife. This unnamed source rejected Newsom’s claim
that the investigations were politically motivated and ordered by Trump,
asserting instead that the probes originated with federal officials in
California, not in Washington D.C.
Siebel Newsom is the mother of
the Newsoms’ four children. She is a filmmaker and owns a production
company, Girls Club Entertainment, which is listed as a contractor for
the Representation Project, a nonprofit founded by her. Tax records
reviewed by the Times indicate that the Representation Project paid Girls Club Entertainment $161,250 for film production services.
*****
Newsom’s denunciations of Trump underscore the hypocritical and
bankrupt character of the Democratic Party. He correctly accuses Trump
of using “the levers of government” to reward “cronies” and “try and
jail his opponents.” But Newsom himself has for years used the powers of
the state to defend the interests of the corporations, the wealthy and
the Democratic Party machine.
Most recently, Newsom and powerful
Democratic-aligned groups have moved to quash a proposed wealth tax on
California billionaires. Newsom’s team and allied organizations have
worked to isolate SEIU-UHW President Dave Regan, whose union has
championed the ballot measure. Construction unions, police unions,
teachers’ unions and major healthcare organizations have broken with
SEIU-UHW to oppose the initiative, while wealthy figures such as Google
co-founder Sergey Brin have reportedly moved assets or changed residency
arrangements in response to the proposal.
Faced with a modest proposal to impose a one-time tax on the state’s
billionaires, Newsom has mobilized the Democratic-aligned labor
bureaucracy, nonprofit groups and corporate interests to protect the
fortunes of the financial oligarchy.
Trump’s use of the Justice Department against Newsom marks a
dangerous escalation in the breakdown of American democracy. But the
Democrats have no progressive answer to it because they represent the
same financial oligarchy that controls the Republicans.
The
significance of this conflict lies not in the personal fate of Newsom
but in what it portends. The methods now being used in factional warfare
within the ruling class will be turned with far greater violence
against workers and youth who oppose the policies of the oligarchy: war,
austerity, deportations, police repression and the destruction of
democratic rights.
The G7 summit in Évian, France marks a further step in the collapse
of the postwar capitalist order and the slide now towards a Third World
War. Never before have tensions between the participants—the US, Japan,
Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Canada—been so acute. The heads of
state and government who traveled to the summit are sitting on an
explosive social powder keg in their own countries.
Trump’s
threats to seize Canada and Greenland, his trade tariffs against the
European Union and other so-called partners, his unilateral actions in
negotiations with Russia and in the recent war against Iran have
reinforced the view in European capitals that the US “can no longer be
relied upon” as an ally. The US is no longer seen as a partner but as a
threat.
The European powers are responding by pouring vast sums
into war and rearmament in order to pursue their imperialist interests
independently of—and, if necessary, against—the US. They are passing on
the costs to the population through cuts to social services, thereby
pushing social tensions, fueled by the war with Iran, inflation and the
economic slump, to the breaking point.
In the war in Ukraine,
Europe is pressing to have a seat at the table in the negotiations with
Russia, which have so far been led unilaterally by the US. Now that the
US has suspended its financial aid to Ukraine, the war is being financed
predominantly by Europe. Germany alone has spent more than €94 billion
on support for Ukraine since the start of the war, and the European
Union has recently released new loans totaling €90 billion to enable
Ukraine to continue the war.
The aim of the European powers and
Canada is to prevent any concessions to Russia. They insist on
escalating the war, thereby consciously accepting the risk of a nuclear
escalation. G7 host Emmanuel Macron invited Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky to the summit; Zelensky’s government has recently
been deliberately targeting energy facilities deep within Russia and
near the major cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, provoking sharp
Russian reactions.
*****
Tensions between the US and Europe have become so acute that it was
already regarded as a success that Trump attended the summit at all and
did not leave early, as he did at the last G7 summit in Canada. From the
outset, a joint final communique was not planned.
However, the
European powers’ military and economic dependence on the US remains so
considerable that they are seeking to prevent a complete break before
they have strengthened their military capabilities. Host Macron
therefore spared no effort to create an artificial façade of harmony and
to suppress any external disruption.
He treated Trump like a
stubborn child, who had to be kept happy with gifts. He postponed the
summit by a day so that Trump could take part in the military parade in
front of the White House to mark his 80th birthday, and he invited the
US president to an exclusive dinner amid the historic splendor and pomp
of the Palace of Versailles at the close of the summit on Wednesday
evening.
The official occasion was the 250th anniversary of the United States’
independence. It was at Versailles in 1783 that the peace treaty was
signed, officially ending the American War of Independence and sealing
the US’s independence from Great Britain.
Macron, however,
preferred not to remind Trump of another date closely linked to
Versailles—October 5 and 6, 1789, the “March of the Market Women to
Versailles.” On that date, the people of Paris forced King Louis XVI,
who lived a life of unspeakable luxury with his entourage, to move to
Paris, where he was later beheaded.
The spectre of revolution hung
over the Évian summit as well. The gulf between the mass of the
population and the super-rich, who dictate policy in all G7 nations, is
now giving rise to massive resistance, protests and strikes. The G7
leaders are so unpopular that they are on the verge of being toppled in a
party leadership election (Starmer), no longer have a parliamentary
majority (Macron) or, according to polls, would not be re-elected
(Merz). They are responding by beefing up the state apparatus and
trampling on democratic rights. Trump is merely the forerunner in this
regard.
*****
The Évian summit serves as a microcosm of the state of the world
today: a ruling elite entrenched in a high-security compound, planning
new wars and attacks on social programmes; growing opposition coming up
against the concentrated might of the state.
No government and no
party that defends capitalism will halt this slide towards war and
dictatorship. Only an independent movement of the international working
class, fighting for a socialist program, can do so. The struggle
against war, dictatorship and fascism is inextricably linked to the
expropriation of the oligarchs and the reorganization of society on a
socialist basis.
On the second day of the UAW Constitutional Convention in Detroit,
the administration of UAW President Shawn Fain stepped up its efforts to
bureaucratically stifle debate while ramming through a series of
amendments to the constitution aimed at strengthening the income and
salaries of the highly paid officials staffing the union apparatus.
In
between self-congratulatory and vacuous speeches by a series of
officials in Fain’s circle, the UAW apparatus used underhanded maneuvers
to force through amendments expanding the income and salaries of the
already lavishly compensated international officers and staff.
The
methods employed by the Fain apparatus to control the convention went
beyond even the strong-arm tactics used in the past, demonstrating the
fraud of the claim by Fain and corporate media that he heads a “reform”
administration.
In an attack on democratic rights and in
violation of normal parliamentary procedure, the UAW rammed through a
change in the rules to allow only one speaker in favor and one opposed
per region for resolutions. The apparatus appointed a resolution
committee to arbitrarily exclude all but five of the 74 resolutions
voted on and submitted by locals, but allowed all 35 resolutions
introduced by International officers.
After thus bureaucratically limiting debate, the UAW apparatus secured
passage of a constitutional amendment to raise the cap on the strike
fund that triggers an automatic dues reduction from the current $850
million to $1.3 billion. Under current language any time the strike fund
exceeds the cap, monthly dues must be decreased from 2½ hours pay to 2
hours.
This provocative move, aimed at keeping dues money flowing uninterrupted
to the apparatus, triggered significant opposition from the floor.
However, the UAW leadership quickly shut down debate and rammed through
passage. A counter-resolution calling for a lowering of the cap was
blocked from coming to the floor.
After this heist of members’ dues, the IEB secured passage of another
amendment raising the salaries of Shawn Fain and other top union
officers by around $30,000 each.
*****
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania and
socialist candidate for UAW president campaigning at the convention,
told the WSWS, “This is the most undemocratic gathering our union has
held in a generation. It is a convention of the bureaucracy, by the
bureaucracy, and for the bureaucracy.
“The defining action of the convention was the vote was for the
apparatus to reward itself a massive pay raise, while our brothers and
sisters cannot pay their bills. The character of the proceedings makes a
mockery of Fain’s claim about reforming the apparatus."
*****
Will Lehman said, “the conclusion the rank and file must draw from the
convention is the only conclusion these events permit. The decisions
that determine our lives have to be taken out of the hands of Solidarity
House and placed in the hands of the workers on the shop floor. That
requires the building of rank-and-file committees in every workplace,
independent of the bureaucracy and the political parties that defend it,
which is what the campaign is about.”
Autoworker, socialist, and candidate for UAW president: Will Lehman
As delegates prepared to nominate candidates for international office on the third day of the 2026 UAW Constitutional Convention
in Detroit, Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker from Macungie,
Pennsylvania and rank-and-file socialist candidate for UAW president,
issued a statement charging that the proceedings had laid bare the gulf
between the union bureaucracy and the membership it claims to represent.
“The
events of the first two days of the 2026 UAW Constitutional Convention
have made clear why my nomination is necessary,” Lehman wrote in the
statement, posted on social media. “This is a convention of the
bureaucracy, by the bureaucracy and for the bureaucracy.”
The statement followed two days in which the administration of UAW
President Shawn Fain pushed through a series of constitutional
amendments while sharply restricting debate from the floor. Of the
roughly 100 resolutions submitted by local unions, the convention’s
resolution committee advanced only a handful, while allowing all 35
resolutions introduced by the International Executive Board. New rules
limited debate to one speaker for and one against per region.
The
convention raised the salaries of top officers, with increases Lehman
put at between $10,000 and $30,000 a year for each official. “While our
brothers and sisters cannot pay their bills, the bureaucracy voted
itself raises,” he wrote. “It is rewarding itself for the betrayals it
has carried out.”
*****
Lehman argued that the convention’s tightly managed character was
designed to head off opposition. “The whole event has been aimed at
suppressing opposition to the bureaucracy that controls the UAW,” he
wrote, contending that “there was not, in any meaningful sense, an
actual agenda apart from what Solidarity House wished to ratify.”
He pointed in particular to the presence of former UAW President Ray
Curry, whom Fain invited to the podium as a guest of honor. Curry was
the incumbent Fain defeated in 2022, when Fain denounced him as part of
an “old guard” that had “sold out members with tiers, concessions, and
plant closures.” Lehman noted that Curry “has been welcomed back with
open arms” and that “Curry’s people now sit on the slate alongside
Fain’s.” This reconciliation, he argued, amounted to “the unity of the
apparatus against the rank and file.”
*****
His campaign, Lehman said, “is about transferring power from the
bureaucracy to the rank and file” through “a network of rank-and-file
committees in every workplace.” He directed an appeal to delegates as
they prepared to vote on nominations: “When you go home, your members
will ask you what you did in Detroit. Will you say that you voted to
maintain full dues for workers making $15 an hour while authorizing pay
increases for the apparatus? Or will you say that you stood for building
a popular rank-and-file movement to take back this union?”
Lehman
said he had spoken with delegates “who are outraged by what has
transpired here,” and urged them to “nominate me, and nominate any
candidate who is willing to take a stand for the rank and file against
the apparatus.”
Nominations for international office are scheduled to proceed as the convention continues.
Most recently, on Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made a
provocative visit to Guantánamo Bay—the US naval base held indefinitely
on Cuban territory— where he made entirely unfounded claims that Havana
was looking “to procure or get access to the types of weapons that
could reach this base or the American homeland.”
Axios reported
last month, citing classified intelligence documents, that Cuba had been
acquiring hundreds of attack drones from Russia and Iran. Cuban
authorities have denied all such claims.
Military experts note
that the Cuban military is in a state of disrepair following years of
sanctions and the fuel blockade, making the claims of a threat to the
United States absurd on their face.
The Trump administration has also moved to construct a pseudo-legal
pretext for military action. Last month it indicted 94-year-old former
President Raúl Castro on four counts of murder in connection with the
1996 downing of two planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a
CIA-linked exile organization that conducted repeated hostile
overflights of Cuban territory. As the WSWS has explained, the
indictment directly mirrors the strategy used against Venezuelan
President Nicolás Maduro: fabricate criminal charges, then use them as
cover for abduction or military intervention.
The Pentagon has been preparing for military action. Politico
reported in late May that it “has spent months positioning the troops
and weapons needed for the U.S. to launch a military attack on Cuba—all
it needs is a final go-ahead from Donald Trump.” This includes the USS
Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group, which is operating in the
Caribbean near Cuba as a standing show of force.
*****
These military threats are unfolding against the backdrop of a
humanitarian catastrophe imposed deliberately by Washington. The energy
blockade established in January—when Trump issued an executive decree
threatening any oil suppliers with sanctions—remains in full force and
is tightening. After the Florida-based company Vanguard Energy announced
plans to ship approximately 250,000 barrels of fuel to Cuba, the State
Department denied any authorization had been granted, and Miami-Dade
County revoked the company’s right to operate.
Daily blackouts now exceed 20 hours and affect over 60 percent of the island. There is no relief in sight.
The
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, issued a stark
warning this week: “The fuel restrictions imposed since early 2026 and
recent tightening of extraterritorial sanctions, taken together, are
directly harming Cubans, especially the most vulnerable. Children are
dying because doctors lack access to essential medical supplies and
medicines. This is unacceptable. These sanctions must be lifted
immediately.”
*****
The Cuban government’s response to this siege has not been to appeal
to the international working class against this naked imperialist
aggression.
It has been to offer the Trump administration economic
concessions, seeking to demonstrate that the Castroite leadership can
oversee the island as a profitable source of cheap labor and natural
resources for US corporations.
Last Friday, President Miguel
Díaz-Canel announced a sweeping package of 20 liberalization measures
spanning tourism, foreign trade, foreign investment and the private
sector. He opened Cuba’s hotel sector to “new actors” and “new
modalities” to fill the vacuum.
State import intermediaries,
which had previously been required to participate in all foreign
commerce, are to be eliminated in favor of a more “dynamic” trading
environment. Agricultural producers are to be granted direct access to
inputs, the right to hold accounts with real cash backing and access to
foreign exchange markets. The government announced it will “incentivize”
foreign direct investment and extend the same conditions to Cubans
living abroad—including the exile community in Miami, long associated
with coup and terrorist operations against Cuba—as to residents on the
island.
More sectors of the economy are to be opened to non-state actors, and
the number of ministries is to be reduced from 27 to 20. Díaz-Canel
also returned to the long-standing government objective of “gradually
eliminating subsidies to products.” While claiming this is to direct
social support to “vulnerable groups.” This austerity measure will allow
for open-ended inflation and even deeper economic desperation.
These
changes are, in substance, a program of shock therapy and structural
adjustment—the same type of measures being implemented by Trump-aligned
far-right governments across the region, including Argentina’s Javier
Milei and Rodrigo Paz’s government in Bolivia.
Despite these massive concessions, the Trump administration has stated
openly that its objective is directly what has been imposed on
Venezuela, where income from oil sales and government finances are being
managed directly by the US Treasury Department, where US troops operate
freely, and where a puppet regime was installed through military force.
*****
The current prostration of the Castroite leadership—its receiving the CIA director in Havana, its appeals to Miami gusano
capitalists, its dismantling of social rights and nationalizations—is
not an accident. It is the logical conclusion of a nationalist and
capitalist program that was always hostile to the independent power of
the working class and was therefore always incapable of sustaining the
gains of the 1959 revolution against the pressure of imperialism.
As a recent WSWS statement on the balance sheet of Castroism stated, pointing to Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution:
The
Cuban revolution provides a strategic confirmation of the theory of
permanent revolution in the negative. Even the most radical
nationalizations carried out by a petty-bourgeois nationalist
government, under conditions of mass mobilization, could not resolve the
democratic task of emancipation from imperialism. Defenders of
Castroism could argue that it is precisely the isolation imposed by US
imperialism that led to their failure, but that argument only
underscores the point that the struggle for workers’ power as an
integral component of world socialist revolution is necessary.
The defense of Cuba against military attack and the genocidal blockade
requires the mobilization of the working class internationally—above all
in the United States. Its defense cannot be built on illusions in the
Cuban government’s ability to negotiate its way out of Washington’s
crosshairs, or in the regional bourgeois governments that have fallen
silent as the blockade tightens and the carrier strike group takes up
position in the Caribbean. It can only be built on the program of
socialist internationalism that unites workers across the Americas in a
common struggle to put an end to imperialist militarism and the
capitalist system that is its source.
On June 10, an Indonesian military court sentenced four personnel from
the armed forces’ Strategic Intelligence Agency (BAIS) to prison terms
for their roles in attacking a prominent human rights activist with acid
in March.
The
attack took place on March 12 in Jakarta against Andrie Yunus, a deputy
coordinator for the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of
Violence (KontraS). Andrie, who was known for his criticisms of the
military’s growing role in civilian life, was riding a motorbike shortly
before midnight. He had been recording an interview for a podcast with
the Indonesian Legal Aid Institute on the issue of remilitarization in
Indonesia since the end of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998.
Two
men on another motorbike coming from the opposite direction pulled up
next to him and doused him with acid. As a result of his injuries,
Andrie lost his sight in one eye and received acid burns on more than 20
percent of his body. The attack took place in full view of more than a
dozen CCTV cameras, clearly meant to be seen in order to intimidate
other government critics.
*****
The four soldiers were undoubtedly not acting on their own, but involved
authorization at higher levels of the military. The BAIS is the
intelligence body of the Indonesian military (TNI) and like other
intelligence and special forces organizations, played a key role in
suppressing opposition to the Suharto regime, which was in power from
1966 to 1998.
Andrie was one of a number of activists who protested a closed-door
meeting by members of the House of Representatives discussing revisions
to the TNI law in March 2025. Those changes expanded the number of
civilian positions that active-duty military personnel are legally
allowed to hold, including in the Attorney General’s office and the
Supreme Court.
These changes are part of a broader expansion of
the military in Indonesia. President Prabowo Subianto is reviving the
Suharto-era political policy of “dual-function” or dwifungsi in
which the military plays major roles in the government and public
sectors. In this way, the military was able to enmesh itself into
civilian life in order to suppress resistance to Suharto’s government.
Following the end of Suharto’s regime in 1998, the Indonesian bourgeoise claimed it was carrying out a period of reformasi,
supposedly ending the “dual-function” system among other democratic
reforms. In reality, the military continued to exert a great deal of
control and influence while figures like Prabowo, who were intimately
connected to the Suharto regime, were brought back into positions of
power. Under Prabowo, the repressive measures of the Suharto era are
returning in order to suppress working-class discontent amid a global
crisis of capitalism.
*****
The trial of Andrie’s attackers simply made them the scapegoats while
covering up any involvement of the military top brass. Andrie had
requested that the trial take place in a civilian court, rather than a
military court. He refused to appear in person during the trial, citing
his health and fears for his safety.
Mokhamad Zainal Abidin, one
of the judges in the trial, downplayed the seriousness of the attack,
stating, that the four men “only intended to teach (Andrie) a lesson”
for criticizing and “demeaning” the military. In other words, Andrie had
brought the attack on himself implying the same could happen to anyone
who criticizes the armed forces.
*****
Significant protests have taken place during Prabowo’s term,
including those that erupted last August over an allowance that greatly
increased legislatures’ pay amid rising inflation costs and layoffs. In
response, the Prabowo government deployed the police and military and
carried out hundreds of arrests.
Only a few weeks after that, in September 2025, the military took out a full-page advertisement in Kompas,
Indonesia’s largest circulation newspaper, extolling the expansion of
the armed forces into people’s lives. It claimed that the military had
been turned into “people’s defense based on prosperity and cross-sector
collaboration.”
As part of these efforts, the Prabowo government
is undertaking the largest expansion of the military this century. Since
late 2024, approximately 30 “territorial development brigades” and 155
“territorial development battalions” have been established. The
government intends to create another 150 battalions this year with the
goal of establishing one for each of Indonesia’s 514 regencies and
cities.
While supposedly to assist in disaster relief, community
projects, and to combat crime, these battalions are being deployed to
monitor and suppress social unrest while conditioning the public to the
presence of security forces in their daily lives.
Last year China recorded a trade surplus of more than $1 trillion,
the largest ever for any country and the data for the first half of this
year show the export surge is continuing.
Exports in May jumped
by 19.4 percent from a year earlier compared to a forecast of a 15
percent growth and a 14.1 percent increase for April. The growth was
concentrated in high-tech areas—long gone are the days when Chinese
exports largely comprised cheaper consumer goods, though these still
play a part.
*****
The situation in the domestic economy, however, stands in marked contrast to the tech-fuelled export boom.
Figures
released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) yesterday show that
retail sales declined by 0.6 percent in May. This was greater than
expectations and the worst result since the ending of COVID restrictions
as the disease swept through the country.
*****
Figures on loans and credit also point to a slowing of the domestic
economy. While aggregate financing increased by 2.03 trillion yuan
(around $300 billion) in May it was 11 percent lower than the previous
year. According to a Bloomberg report last week, the “weak underlying
credit showed little sign of rebounding despite efforts by the central
bank” to stimulate its flow.
China was able to insulate itself to
some extent from the impact of the war in Iran by using its large oil
reserves to cut oil imports. But it has not been able to completely
escape the effects of the war nor the impact of the Trump tariffs.
In April, the New York Times
reported on protests in southern China by thousands of workers who took
to the streets over the sudden close of several toy factories.
These
factories operate on very thin profit margins, and the closures were
the result of increases in the price of plastics, the production of
which is dependent on oil and natural gas.
The factories were based in Yulin City, a toy manufacturing hub. According to the Times:
“Workers draped banners across factory gates with slogans like, ‘Give
me back my blood and sweat money.’” It said “numerous short videos” of
the protests circulated online in China, apparently tolerated by
authorities who mostly censor such actions.
If the internal
economy continues to slow, amid declining consumer spending, sluggish
investment and the rising costs of production for many firms, then the
Xi regime could well be confronted with its worst nightmare—an upsurge
of working-class struggles.
It used to be said by leaders of the ruling Chinese Communist Party,
which functions as the chief mechanism of rule for China’s capitalist
oligarchy, that a growth rate of at least 8 percent was needed to
maintain “social stability.”
The official growth target for this year is between 4.5–5 percent and there are doubts that even this level will be reached.
*****
Not only is the domestic economy weakening but there are growing
tensions arising from the export boom. China is not only confronted by
the US but increasingly by Europe which takes 20 percent of its exports
and comprises 31 percent of its record trade surplus.
Earlier this
month Beijing cancelled diplomatic meetings with the European Union
without a reason being given. But the move was interpreted as expressing
dissatisfaction with the EU’s threats to impose protectionist measures.
Last month, as it threatened tariffs and restrictions on Chinese goods,
the European Commission said the rising trade deficit with China, now at
€1 billion a day, was “unsustainable”.
*****
The Global Times, which strikes a more nationalist tone, said: “The EU should not and cannot afford to fight a ‘trade war with China’.”
There
will be a summit meeting of the European Council later this week which
will discuss “competitiveness and global economic challenges.” China is
not mentioned by name, but it is clearly the target.
The doctrine
of the CCP, so-called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is that
it can somehow peacefully integrate itself into a “rules-based” global
capitalist order. But that order has been shattered, above all through
the actions of the Trump regime in the US, and global capitalism is
rapidly moving, not into a multipolar word, but one riven by a series of
conflicts which increasingly resemble those of the disastrous 1930s.
At the Teamsters’ 31st International Convention, held this week at
Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) helped
return Sean O’Brien and Fred Zuckerman to power unopposed.
The
O’Brien-Zuckerman Teamsters United slate was reelected by white ballot
Tuesday after no opposition candidate received enough delegate votes to
reach the membership ballot. TDU, which endorsed O’Brien for a second
term, has thus helped secure another five years for an ultra-right union
president whose record includes mass layoffs, blocked strikes and open
collaboration with Donald Trump and fascistic forces.
The election
decision was settled by convention delegates in Las Vegas, at a luxury
casino resort, while 1.3 million Teamsters were denied the right to vote
on the top offices.
Only five years ago, TDU and its pseudo-left
allies promoted O’Brien-Zuckerman as the beginning of a new era of
militancy, democracy and “rank-and-file” power. TDU said the campaign
offered “new leadership and a new direction.” Jacobin and Labor Notes hailed the coalition between TDU and O’Brien as proof that the “reform” wing of the bureaucracy had opened a new road forward.
None
of these promises came true for workers. The only “reform” that
materialized was the elevation of TDU members into higher positions
inside the apparatus.
O’Brien’s central pledge in 2021 was that he would lead a showdown
with UPS. Instead, the Teamsters apparatus, with TDU’s full support,
used the 2023 “strike ready” campaign as a bait-and-switch operation to
prevent a strike and push through a sellout contract.
The result
has been one of the largest corporate job-cutting campaigns in the
United States. UPS announced 12,000 layoffs in 2024. In 2025, the
company eliminated 48,000 jobs, launched driver buyouts and closed 93
facilities. It plans to eliminate up to 30,000 more positions in 2026.
These cuts have followed directly on the heels of the contract that
O’Brien and TDU sold to workers as a breakthrough.
O’Brien’s other
major “achievement” has been to steer the Teamsters into active support
for Trump and the far right. He became the first Teamsters general
president to speak at the Republican National Convention, where he
praised Trump and presented the union bureaucracy as a partner in the
nationalist politics of the Republican Party. He has cultivated
relations with figures such as Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson, promoted
“America First” trade-war policies and echoed the rhetoric of the Trump
administration against immigrant workers.
O’Brien’s politics express the orientation of the union bureaucracy as a
whole. The apparatus rests on nationalism, anti-communism and
corporatism. Under conditions of capitalist crisis, war and
dictatorship, it seeks a place for itself inside the state as a labor
police force, suppressing workers’ struggles in the name of “national
competitiveness” and “American jobs.”
*****
While the Teamsters convention is taking place in Las Vegas, the UAW
is holding its constitutional convention in Detroit, where the Fain
apparatus is seeking to prevent socialist autoworker Will Lehman from
being nominated as a candidate. Over the previous weekend, Labor Notes
held its conference in the Chicago area. These events form a balance
sheet for the entire milieu. Its “success stories” are now in office,
and their record consists of layoffs, betrayals, corruption allegations,
nationalist politics and suppression of rank-and-file opposition.
The
same social layer plays a similar role in electoral politics. The DSA,
Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani channel anger back into the
Democratic Party and the capitalist state, combining left phrases with
adaptation to the right, austerity and imperialism. Mamdani’s meetings
with Trump and his “Commission on Government Efficiency” in New York
City are only the latest expression of this politics.
Workers must
draw the necessary conclusions. The issue is not that TDU chose the
wrong bureaucrat or that workers need a better reform caucus. The entire
strategy of pressuring, capturing or reshuffling the apparatus has
failed.
*****
TDU’s “one member, one vote” campaign has ended with the membership
denied a vote. This fact sums up the whole reform perspective. The task
facing workers is not to refurbish the apparatus, but to abolish its
control and transfer power to the rank and file.
On June 10, the Hollywood Reporter posted an article
headlined “Why Hollywood’s Unions Didn’t Put Up a Fight With Studios
This Year.” It’s a superficial piece, which accepts as good coin the
explanations provided by the various parties involved.
In our
view, the most accurate and direct response to the article’s headline
would be: The Hollywood unions abjectly surrendered as they did in 2026
because they fully accept the existing economic conditions, including
the stranglehold of the conglomerates, and act as extensions of
management. They are incapable of developing a strategy independent of
the corporate oligarchy, and this has disastrous consequences for
industry workers.
*****
The Hollywood Reporter’s account of the 2026 contract cycle,
which notes the Directors Guild of America (DGA) as “the last union to
seal a deal,” paints a picture of a year remarkable mainly for its absence of
drama. “What a difference three years makes,” the article begins. 2023
was “spicy.” 2026 was “sleepy.” The Writers Guild (WGA) talks were “very
chill.” SAG-AFTRA’s negotiations were “pretty uneventful.” The DGA,
true to form, behaved like the responsible eldest child.
The HR
then proceeds to offer explanations for this supposed placidity: the
ongoing contraction of Hollywood employment, the unions’ need for health
plan funding, the “personalities at play” (a new AMPTP president, new
union presidents) and the general sense that in a “precarious industry
environment, unionized entertainment workers were in no position to risk
another strike.”
The logic here deserves thinking about. Times
are harsh, the employers are taking advantage by cutting jobs and
increasing pressure on workers. Therefore ... the unions argue, we must
run up the white flag!
What is to be said of organizations that capitulate without a fight in
the face of ruthless enemies and bitter conditions? Workers might be
able “tolerate” such unions in periods of relative peace and quiet, but
now that everything is being turned upside down, the well-heeled union
bureaucracies’ utter worthlessness from the point of view of struggle
has been revealed. The rank and file will need to take matters into
their own hands, or there will be nothing left.
*****
To the tens of thousands of writers, actors and crew members who have
watched their livelihoods collapse over the past four years, the HR
account will read as something between evasion and insult. As noted, it
describes the surface of events—who said what, which leader replaced
which, what percentage voted yes—while systematically obscuring the
forces that determined the outcome. The purpose of this reply is not to
polemicize against a trade publication but to speak directly to the
workers who have been betrayed and to explain what actually happened,
why it happened and what must be done.
*****
The HR’s article treats the union leadership as the natural and
permanent representative of entertainment workers. Sean Astin “struck a
diplomatic tone.” Danielle Sanchez-Witzel praised the AMPTP for coming
“ready to talk.” Greg Hessinger “helped reset the relationship.” The
entire narrative assumes that workers’ interests are advanced through
the personalities and negotiating styles of officials.
This is a
falsehood. The interests of entertainment workers cannot be advanced
through an apparatus that is structurally integrated into the industry
it claims to fight. This apparatus is not the workers’ representative,
but their enemy. The answer is to build independent rank-and-file
committees, democratically controlled organizations that operate outside
and against the union bureaucracy, capable of coordinating across
crafts, across unions and across industries.
The Hollywood writer facing AI replacement, the SAG-AFTRA performer
losing healthcare eligibility, the WGAW staffer stripped of coverage for
going on strike, the Detroit autoworker facing plant closure, the
University of California healthcare worker whose strike was canceled in
the middle of the night by AFSCME—They all face the same financial
oligarchy and the same apparatus of betrayal. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) has been built precisely to make this unity a reality.
After three consecutive interest rate hikes in February, March and
May, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) kept its cash rate on hold at
4.35 percent at yesterday’s Monetary Policy Board meeting.
But
the RBA board warned of possible further rate hikes, primarily to
suppress household spending, amid the ongoing global impact of the
US-Israeli war on Iran and a worsening cost-of-living crisis for
working-class families.
Statements issued by the RBA and its governor Michele Bullock
reiterated the central bank’s determination, acting on behalf of the
corporate ruling class, to keep increasing unemployment to achieve its
sub-3 percent inflation target—well below the current official rate of
4.2 percent—backed by the Albanese Labor government.
At her media
conference in Sydney, Bullock dismissed a reporter’s question about the
rising official jobless figure—now 4.5 percent—and how many more workers
had to lose their jobs before the bank’s inflation requirements would
be satisfied. She flatly stated that unemployment necessarily had to
“drift” up in order to slow demand.
Bullock was vehement that this offensive would continue even if the
Middle East war ended, and fuel and other price rises began to ease. “I
want to be very clear that inflation remains too high,” she stated. “We
already had an inflation problem before the Strait of Hormuz closure
supercharged things.”
In other words, the working class must
continue to bear the burden of job losses, as well as real wage cuts,
regardless of whether the Trump administration’s supposed ceasefire deal
survives.
Two more University of Michigan anti-war activists entered pleas of not
guilty on June 15 before the US District Court for the Eastern District
of Michigan. The federal conspiracy prosecution of the U-Mich Eight is a
Trump administration assault on First Amendment protections and a
pseudo-legal attempt to criminalize routine activities of political
organization.
The eight people being prosecuted are students, former students, or
student employees of the university who were involved in protests
demanding that U-Mich divest from Israel.
Ahmet Kerem Korkaya, 28,
and Alexander Matthew Sepulveda, 23, were arraigned on June 15 and
released on bail. Korkaya was a student at the Medical College of
Wisconsin and conducted research at U-Mich in 2023-24. Sepulveda was the
co-founder of the Jewish Voice for Peace chapter at U-Mich.
Their appearance follows the arraignment of four co-defendants on June 12:
Paige Feyock, 26; Zainab Hakim, 23; Colin Weger, 24; and Jonathan Zou,
22, all of whom also pleaded not guilty and were released on bond.
Miriam Odeh, 24, former president of Students Allied for Freedom and
Equality (SAFE), is scheduled for arraignment on July 1. The seven were arrested June 10 in coordinated FBI raids
across southeast Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin. An eighth defendant,
Amatullah Hakim, 21, the sister of Zainab Hakim, is currently in India
on a work-study program.
These prosecutions escalate the drive by
the Trump administration to construct a pseudo-legal framework for the
criminalization of left-wing political opposition. On September 22,
2025, Trump issued an executive order designating Antifa as a “domestic
terrorist organization.” Three days later, he issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7
(NSPM-7), a fascistic blueprint that names “anti-Americanism,
anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity” as “common threads animating”
domestic terrorism. In March of this year, nine North Texas activists
were convicted of “material support for terrorism” for their alleged
role in a July 4, 2025 protest at an ICE detention center, the first
large-scale application of that charge against left-wing protesters.
*****
Among the phrases the government presents as criminal are: “if you
aren’t losing sleep after funding mass murder and genocide, then WE WILL
WAKE YOU UP”; “we must escalate, mobilize, and organize to demand
divestment by any means necessary”; “our duty to Palestine is to damage,
disrupt, and destroy the colonizers’ operations by any means
necessary”; and “Do not forget … You sleep only because we let you.”
The
phrase “by any means necessary” has been used by the labor movement,
anti-war coalitions and civil rights campaigners for generations. The
government is effectively stripping the working class and students of
the right to employ urgent, aggressive or confrontational rhetoric
against the ruling elite. As Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR)-Michigan staff attorney Amy Doukoure noted: “None of that seems
like a threat when you’re talking about First Amendment law.”
*****
The same modus operandi of inflating minor infractions into federal
felonies applies to the Department of Justice’s prosecution of Chinese
researchers at U-Mich. Five Chinese researchers affiliated with the
university were charged with conspiracy and smuggling over routine
customs paperwork violations. They were arrested, jailed and either
deported or forced to return to China. The witch-hunt led to the suicide
in March of post-doctoral research scientist Danhao Wang.
Neither Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer nor Attorney General
Dana Nessel has made a public statement addressing the federal
indictments against the U-Mich Eight, but the FBI credited Nessel’s
office for providing logistical assistance in the investigation. Unable
to secure convictions in state court, Nessel colluded with the Trump
administration to finish the job.
The government attack on U-Mich
anti-genocide protesters has from the start been a bipartisan operation.
The Biden administration joined with Republicans to smear
pro-Palestinian protesters as antisemites and supported crackdowns on
peaceful demonstrators by campus and local police.
*****
These illegal and unconstitutional methods are being refined and
tested on students today so they can be deployed against striking
autoworkers, teachers and logistics workers tomorrow. The defense of the
targeted students cannot be left to the courts, nor can it rely on
appeals to the Democrats and Republicans carrying out the persecution.
The
Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for
Social Equality demand the immediate dropping of all charges against the
University of Michigan Eight and an end to the persecution of anti-war
protesters nationwide. The defense of democratic rights and the defeat
of the imperialist war machine require the independent political
mobilization of the international working class against the source of
war and dictatorship—the capitalist profit system.
Communists raise their fists as Nazi soldiers lead them to their execution
For
the first time, newly discovered photos of the Nazi massacre at
Kaisariani give a face to the 200 Greek resistance fighters, including
twelve Trotskyists, and reveal their courageous defiance.
*****
After the recent discovery of the photos, descendants of Krokos
published an open letter in which they “reverently, moved and proudly” honored the 200 executed men who “faced death with dignity, true to
their convictions to the end.” They demanded that the photos be handed
over to the Kaisariani Museum and that a National Resistance Museum be
established in Athens.
*****
Today’s Communist Party of Greece, which currently has 21 seats in
parliament, places itself in the tradition of the partisan movement and
attempts to politically co-opt the memory of the Kaisariani massacre. In
articles, at events and at a large concert at the memorial site, it has honored the executed KKE members as its heroes and communist patriots.
In 2016, it also opened a museum about the history of the EAM
resistance movement in Kaisariani.
But to this day, the leadership of the KKE pursues an openly Stalinist
programme, justifies the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, which claimed
the lives of countless loyal Bolsheviks, and covers up the
counterrevolutionary role that it itself played at decisive moments of
Greek history. In fact, it bears a substantial share of political
responsibility for the tragic fate of the heroic fighters and its own
members who were murdered by the Nazis in 1944.
*****
The pictures do not tell a story from afar but speak to a generation
that is once again facing the horrors of war and fascism and is
searching for paths of resistance. They show the upright posture of the
victims of Kaisariani. These people knew what was coming to them, and
yet they did not bow. It is precisely for this reason that the photos
raise questions that go beyond the massacre itself: Why were these
courageous people not saved, although an escape would have been
possible? Why was the powerful movement that they had helped to build
disarmed and betrayed after the war?
The reasons must be sought in
the devastating role of Stalinism in Greece. What these victims of
fascism did not have was a political leadership that fought for a
revolutionary conquest of power by the working class. When today’s KKE
claims the memory of the “Kaisariani 200” for itself, it conceals the
fact that it is continuing the same Stalinist policy that led tens of
thousands of courageous resistance fighters to defeat 80 years ago.
Britain’s Court of Appeal ruled Monday that the Labour government’s
proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization under the
Terrorism Act 2000 was “justified and proportionate”, marking a
dangerous escalation in the suppression of democratic rights.
Five
of the most senior judges in England and Wales—led by Lady Chief
Justice Baroness Sue Carr and including Master of the Rolls Sir Geoffrey
Vos, Lord Justice Edis, Lord Justice Lewis, and Lady Justice
Whipple—overturned a February High Court ruling that found the ban
unlawful and disproportionate.
The judgment has immediate consequences for more than 700 people
already charged under the Terrorism Act and for the around 3,400
arrested since the ban took effect in July 2025. The majority were
detained for holding placards reading “I oppose genocide. I support
Palestine Action”—an act that, under section 13 of the Terrorism Act,
carries a potential sentence of six months in prison.
Within hours
of the Court of Appeal ruling, the Metropolitan Police announced it had
arrested a further 117 people outside London’s Royal Courts of Justice
for “supporting a proscribed organization”. Many simply held up a
placard reading “Saving lives is not terrorism. I support Palestine
Action.”
Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori, who brought the original
judicial review challenge, described the latest ruling as “one of the
most extreme attacks on free speech and the right to protest in modern
British history.” She added, “We will seek permission to appeal to the
Supreme Court and, if need be, take this to the European Court of Human
Rights”.
*****
The real criminal is the Labour government, complicit in the genocide of
the Palestinians through arms supplies to Israel and hundreds of RAF
surveillance operations over Gaza on behalf of the fascistic Tel Aviv
regime. It has banned a group whose principal target was Elbit Systems, a
key supplier to the Israeli Defense Forces.
*****
The ruling came just three days after four Palestine Action activists
were sentenced as terrorists for a 2024 break-in at an Elbit Systems
factory in Filton, South Gloucestershire. With more than 700 individuals
already facing charges under the Terrorism Act—their cases suspended
pending the appeal—the floodgates have now opened for a wave of
prosecutions against people whose only offense was to peacefully
identify with opposition to genocide.
This is the spearhead for
worse. The fact that the ruling made specific reference to the war in
Ukraine, NATO and the Five Eyes surveillance alliance makes clear the
motivations behind the crackdown. As military tensions mount across the
globe, the British ruling class is preparing its state for war—against
its enemies abroad and the working class at home.
The language that is used to describe peaceful direct action protest
against a genocide is chilling. The Court of Appeal endorses the Home
Secretary’s power to weigh the “operational benefits” of proscribing an organization against the action’s infringements of democratic rights.
The “key benefit” being “to prevent it from funding terrorism and to
degrade its covert infrastructure characterized by secret cells.”
Defending
democratic rights means organizing the working class to win the
ferocious confrontation which the ruling class is preparing. It was
popular struggles which won every social and democratic right now
threatened with destruction. The fight against the war, genocide and
dictatorship requires the building of a mass socialist movement in
Britain and internationally.
Musk, an ideological fascist and the biggest donor of the 2024 election,
who spent $277 million to elect Trump, headed the Department of
Government Efficiency early in Trump’s second term, using it to gut
federal agencies and close the US Agency for International Development.
According to a 2025 study in the Lancet, the closure of USAID could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, 4.5 million of them children under five.
The Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, and New Zealand’s
Christopher Luxon, met in Australia on June 6 for their annual leaders’
meeting.
The countries are crucial allies of Washington in the Indo-Pacific
and are deeply involved in US-led imperialist wars in every part of the
globe—from the Middle East to the US-NATO proxy war against Russia over
Ukraine, and war preparations against China. These are all fronts in a
developing third world war, which threatens a catastrophe far greater
than the two world wars of the last century.
Both ruling elites
face intractable economic and political crises at home. Australia’s
Labor government and NZ’s National Party-led coalition are profoundly
unpopular as the working classes confront attacks on living standards,
exacerbated by the Iran quagmire and the Trump administration’s tariffs.
Both governments are massively increasing military spending.
*****
The anti-China thrust of the meeting was highlighted by statements
condemning so-called “intensification of destabilizing activities” in
both the South China and East China Seas, including “the militarization of disputed features and instances of unsafe and unprofessional behavior.” Albanese and Luxon opposed “any unilateral action to change
the status quo” at the Taiwan Strait, purportedly “encouraging dialogue
rather than coercion or the use of force.”
The statements,
implicitly blaming China, turn reality on its head. They repeat the
propaganda deployed by Washington to demonize Beijing and reinforce US
imperialist positioning in the region. It is not China, but the Trump
administration that is engaged in a vast buildup and expansion of its
military activities in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
recently demanded that local allies increase their military budgets to
at least 3.5 percent of GDP, as part of US-led war preparations.
*****
Attempts by the ruling classes to whip up anti-China sentiment are,
however, beginning to fall flat. A survey released this month shows
that, for the first time in a decade, New Zealanders are more likely to
see China as a “friend” than the United States.
The “Perceptions
of Asia and Asian Peoples” survey, by the Asia New Zealand Foundation,
found that 43 percent of people viewed China as a friend, up from 38
percent last year. The percentage who regarded the US as a friend
dropped dramatically from 61 to 39 percent.
While this is
indicative of overwhelming public opposition to war, experience has
demonstrated that imperialist governments are impervious to protests
urging them to change course. The urgent task is to build a socialist,
anti-war movement to unite workers and young people across Australia,
NZ, Asia, the Pacific and internationally to put an end to capitalism,
which is the root cause of war, social inequality and dictatorship.
The
fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an
essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide,
dictatorship and fascism.
Whether the agreement actually holds remains uncertain. The actual
text has not been released. Iran has claimed that some $25 billion in
frozen Iranian assets have been unfrozen, which the US has disputed.
Trump has reiterated that “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon” and
warned that the United States “could attack Iran again if negotiations
fail.” Israel, not a party to the agreement, has rejected it and
continued strikes on Lebanon the same day.
Regardless, the outcome
represents an unqualified debacle for American imperialism. It is a
case of a schoolyard bully picking a fight and winding up with a black
eye. The Iranian government remains in power. Its nuclear program is
intact. The most concrete deliverable is the reopening of the Strait of
Hormuz, a reversion to the prewar status quo.
There is a
staggering chasm between the braggadocio with which the war was launched
and the reality of its outcome. Trump promised the war would end with
Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
declared on March 2 that the United States was waging “the most lethal
... air power campaign in history” with “no stupid rules of engagement.”
Days later he promised reporters “death and destruction from the sky,
all day long.”
*****
The political character of the American ruling class’s response is captured in the editorial published by the New York Times, speaking for the Democratic Party, under the headline “President Trump Lost This War.” The Times’ concern is not that the war was waged through mass murder and assassination, but that it failed.
*****
The editorial’s prescription boils down to the statement: “The
Pentagon will also need to modernize and prepare for the wars of the
future.”
The wars of the future. The Times takes for
granted the framework of permanent imperial confrontation, above all,
with China and Russia, for which the Pentagon must “modernize and
prepare.” What is in question is only the competence with which the
framework is administered.
*****
The end of this stage of the war does not mean the end of the war.
American imperialism will prepare new wars to recover its position. The
2015 JCPOA framework established under Obama was ended by Trump in 2018
and paved the way for the 2026 war. The 2026 ceasefire framework will
pave the way for the war that follows.
The most significant consequences of the debacle, however, will be the consequences within the United States.
The
war was launched, in part, in an attempt to stop the structural decline
of American capitalism. The European Central Bank reported this month
that gold has overtaken the euro to become the world’s second-largest
reserve asset, at 27 percent of global reserves, up from 20 percent a
year earlier. The federal debt crossed 100 percent of GDP in March for
the first time since 1946. The failure of the war has accelerated the
dollar’s decline and deepened the structural crisis the war was meant to
resolve.
*****
The Trump administration will respond to deepening social opposition
with the methods it has demonstrated: ICE raids, mass detention
infrastructure, the deployment of the National Guard against domestic
protest, the criminalization of political opposition and the
consolidation of authoritarian state power. The defeat in Iran will not
moderate this trajectory. It will intensify it. The American ruling
class, confronted with the failure of its imperialist offensive abroad,
will turn with renewed savagery against the working class at home.
The
task is the construction of an independent political movement of the
working class that is international in scope, socialist in program and
politically conscious in its objectives.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup opened last week across the United States,
Mexico and Canada with a spectacle designed to project an image of
continental unity and economic power. What the world actually witnessed
was something else entirely: a tournament seized at every
level—organizational, financial and political—by the American financial
oligarchy and its political leadership, the Trump administration.
From
the moment FIFA President Gianni Infantino awarded Donald Trump the
“FIFA Peace Prize” last December, prostrating the world governing body
of football before a would-be American Führer, the character of this
World Cup has been unmistakable. The most popular sporting event
worldwide has been taken hostage.
The inauguration of the event made this reality impossible to ignore.
In Mexico City, where the opening match was played on June 11, an
estimated 50,000 people took to the streets—teachers demanding an end to
the privatized pension system, collectives searching for Mexico’s tens
of thousands of disappeared, transportation workers, indigenous and
farming communities and youth who see in the tournament not a
celebration but a squandering of massive resources. Riot police met
demonstrators attempting to approach the Azteca Stadium with violence.
Inside
SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles a day later, the US team defeated Paraguay
4–1 before a crowd in which billionaires, celebrities and tech
moguls—including Bill Gates—occupied luxury suites that sold on the
secondary market for tens of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, around
2,000 food service and concessions workers had voted 96 percent to
authorize a strike over stalled contracts and fears that Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs would be deployed at the matches. The
Unite Here union, however, rammed through a last-minute settlement whose
details were not even revealed to the membership. Hospitality workers
in Seattle and Philadelphia also threatened to strike.
*****
The catalogue of humiliations by US authorities can only be partially listed:
US
immigration officers carried out body-searches of Senegalese and Uzbek
players on the airport tarmac as if they were terrorism suspects.
Somali
referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan—the first Somali ever appointed to a
World Cup—was detained for eleven hours at Miami airport despite holding
a valid visa and diplomatic passport, then expelled from the country.
When asked about it, Infantino told supporters to “chill.”
Swiss striker Breel Embolo, born in Cameroon, had his travel authorization revoked hours before his team’s flight.
Iraqi
player Aymen Hussein was interrogated for nearly seven hours at O’Hare;
the Iraqi team’s photographer was denied entry outright.
Fans from Senegal, Ivory Coast, Morocco and Iran also faced blanket visa denials.
Countless
African and Iranian journalists received single-entry US visas that
prevent them from following their teams across all three host countries.
The head of the Palestinian Football Association has been denied a visa entirely.
A
comparison to the 1936 Berlin Olympics—already invoked by critics of
the 1978 Argentina World Cup, where political prisoners in the military
junta’s torture chambers could hear the fans cheering in the stadium—is
not hyperbole or rhetorical. The Trump administration today wages an
active war of aggression against Iran, arms a genocide in Gaza, detains
immigrant workers in concentration camps and mass deports them, kills
peaceful protesters, and kidnaps foreign heads of state, all while
hosting what FIFA calls a celebration of “unity.”
With Trump himself a student of Hitler, the chauvinism today against
foreign players, referees, fans and journalists from predominantly black
nations today mirror the Nazi vilification of “inferior” races, even as
the tournament like the Berlin Olympics is staged behind militarized
policing approaching a state of “total war.”
The $11 billion in
expected revenue measures the extent to which the fusion of sport, state
violence, oligarchic plunder and the turn to fascism has reached its
logical endpoint under capitalism. Governing bodies like FIFA have
become, as the WSWS has written of the International Olympic Committee,
“little more than a direct tool of imperialism.”
The World Socialist Web Site
does not share the ruling class’s contempt for sport. Football, at its
most elemental, is a magnificent expression of collective human
creativity, skill, movement and dedication. The working class invented
the game in its modern form and has driven its culture for more than a
century.
As we wrote of the 2012 London Olympics, the apparently
superhuman character of athletic achievement is in reality proof of “the
tremendous potentialities of the human race.”
The hundreds of millions who want to enjoy that mastery deserve to do so
without it being turned into an instrument of nationalist poison and
oligarchic enrichment. From de Coubertin’s Olympics—designed in part to
better prepare French men to “fight and win wars”—to the Nazi Games of
1936 and the Cold War boycotts of 1980 and 1984, international sport has
always been refracted through nationalism and political reaction.
What is new is the ever more malevolent fusion of nationalism and
commercialism at an unprecedented scale, while the organizations of the
labor movement that once gave workers the collective means to resist and
find genuine means of international class solidarity have been
systematically destroyed or subordinated to capital.
The antidote
to nationalist poison is not indifference to sport, nor contempt for
fans—that posture belongs to the liberal intelligentsia, not the
socialist movement. The antidote is political class consciousness: the
recognition that a Mexican worker, an American worker, an Iranian worker
and a Haitian worker share common material interests that no
flag-waving can dissolve. Sport belongs to everyone.
The United Auto Workers 39th Constitutional Convention opened in
Detroit Monday with the usual vacuous and self-congratulatory speeches
by top union officials and Democratic Party politicians, including UAW
President Shawn Fain, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Detroit
Democratic Mayor Mary Sheffield.
Shuler called for a mass
mobilization by the UAW, not to fight for the interests of workers but
to elect Democrats in the midterm elections. She called for the
mobilization of 50,000 trained campaign workers. The convention hall,
top heavy with well-paid union officials, provided a cheering section
for this bankrupt perspective.
UAW officials are shamelessly seeking to use the workers at American
Axle in Three Rivers, Michigan as PR props as part of the re-election
campaign of UAW President Shawn Fain. On the eve of the convention, the UAW rammed through a sellout deal
that raised top pay to $30 an hour by 2030, far less than workers made
in real terms prior to the 50 percent pay cut imposed in the 2008
concessions contract. They absurdly presented the new deal as a “record
contract.”
The convention was held under conditions of the drive to establish a
fascistic dictatorship in the United States by the Trump administration
and the expanding global war, including the war on Iran, which has
triggered a surge in the cost of food, fuel and other basic necessities.
There was not even a fleeting reference from the convention
podium to the shredding of the Constitution by the Trump administration,
war or the mass arrests and deportations of immigrants, including UAW
members.
Fain in his President’s Report made liberal use of militant-sounding rhetoric supplied by his advisers in groups like Labor Notes
and the Democratic Socialists of America, but he made no mention of
Trump by name or the critical issues facing the working class. This is
not surprising, since Fain is in a de facto alliance with Trump over his
tariffs, the spearhead of his fascistic America First policy directed
at the overseas rivals of US capitalism, in the first place China.
Fain referenced vast wealth inequality, epitomized by Elon Musk
becoming the world’s first trillionaire. But he used this to promote the
“Stand Up Strike” and the supposedly historic 2023 Big Three contract,
which he defended with outright lies about the supposed gains the UAW
achieved for workers.
*****
In contrast to Fain’s absurd picture of a thankful membership, the
UAW apparatus is facing a rebellion by auto parts workers, who have
decisively voted down sellout contracts that the union apparatus tried
ram down their throats. At Nexteer in Saginaw, Michigan, the 1,700
workers have rejected three contracts that would leave them making
poverty wages. A majority of workers at Dana factories have voted down
sellout deals in the last week, including at the Warren, Michigan
facility and the Dana Driveline factory in Toledo, where workers turned
in a 95 percent “no.”
A delegate from Local 9025 at the Dana plant in Paris, Tennessee told the World Socialist Web Site
that workers at his factory voted by 288-1 to reject a UAW-backed offer
by management that would have only raised top wages to a starvation
level $24.50, while leaving starting pay at $19 an hour. Noting that
Elon Musk just became a trillionaire, he said, “Something has got to
give for the working class. $19 an hour is not going to make it. I have
been in there 32 years working for nickels. We can’t make it on that. We
are in there breaking out backs.”
*****
In the face of discontent, the convention expressed a further
tightening of the bureaucratic control by the corporatist UAW apparatus.
This was expressed in the fact that no agenda for the convention was
presented to delegates, and business proceedings were completing closed
to the media, unlike in 2022 when a livestream feed was available. As it
has for the past two decades, the UAW denied the WSWS press credentials
and barred its reporter from the official press room.
The Lehman campaign posted a video on social media [above] of statements from workers and retirees from Stellantis, General
Motors, Nexteer and the academic sector calling on delegates to nominate
him.
In his campaign statements Lehman has called for the
abolition of the UAW apparatus and the restoration of power to workers
on the shop floor, through the construction of a network of
rank-and-file committees. The committees would become bases of
rank-and-file power in the workplace, fighting for workers’ control over
line speed, safety, hiring and production and the power to halt
production if necessary to save lives. Lehman has also issued statements
opposing Trump’s criminal war against Iran and Fain’s support for
Trump’s tariffs and calling for the international unity of the working
class.
Late Sunday, union officials reported that striking workers at
American Axle & Manufacturing in Three Rivers, Michigan had ratified
the tentative contract agreement, which they had less than 48 hours to
study and discuss. The vote brought an end to the strike by the 1,000
parts workers that began on June 1, and they returned to work on Monday
morning.
In the face of a campaign by the UAW apparatus to falsely
promote the contract as a major victory—combined with threats that
workers would lose their jobs if they rejected it—union officials
claimed the deal passed by 80 to 20 percent, with 704 workers voting to
ratify it and 173 workers voting no. Given the campaign of intimidation,
lies, and the rushed vote, the fact that one-fifth of the workers still
opposed it is significant.
UAW President Shawn Fain claimed the
union was “winning back a big chunk” of what had been taken away from
American Axle workers in a series of union betrayals over the past 18
years. Since the tentative contract was announced, Fain has celebrated
the “$30 by 2030” as a significant breakthrough on wages. However, the
center of this narrative is a fraud. In 2008, American Axle workers were
making $29 an hour (the equivalent of $46.04 in today’s dollars) before
the UAW agreed to cut their pay in half to supposedly save jobs.
The
UAW bureaucracy kept the strike isolated and cut off from critical
support building up among low-paid parts workers nationally. At Nexteer
Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan workers have rejected three sellout UAW
contracts—which top out at $27 an hour after four years, and forced a
strike authorization vote, which Solidarity House has ignored. At Dana
Incorporated, workers in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee
and other states have rejected UAW-backed deals by margins of 90 percent
and higher. Here too, the UAW International has prevented a strike at
the critical parts supplier.
A fool-proof way for workers to
determine in whose interests the ratified contract serves is the
official response of the management of American Axle, now known as Dauch
Corp. Chris Son, Dauch’s vice president of marketing and
communications, said in a statement to the Commercial-News Sunday night,
“We are pleased that UAW Local 2093 at our Three Rivers Manufacturing
Facility has ratified a new, four-year collective bargaining agreement.”
The
UAW bureaucracy’s primary concern in advance of the strike was making
sure that American Axle had enough parts in inventory to last for two
weeks so that the major automotive assembly plants, including the GM
Flint Assembly Plant, would not be disrupted by a shortage of parts.
Additionally, the timing of the strike made it clear that the Fain
leadership wanted it shut down just as the UAW convention was beginning
in Detroit on Monday morning, so they could declare it a major “victory”
in front of the assembled delegates.
In other words, for the UAW
apparatus, the strike was a stage-managed public relations operation
that avoided any disruption in the auto industry supply chain and then
repackaged it as union theater for the Fain bureaucracy’s own political
purposes.
The strike was also coordinated with the Michigan Democratic Party with
Governor Gretchen Whitmer and leading Democratic candidates posturing as
friends of the strikers on the picket line. This included US
Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who voted in November 2022 for legislation
requested by the Biden administration to block a nationwide railroad
strike and impose a contract that railway workers had previously
rejected.
*****
For workers who had expected the strike to lead to substantial
changes in wages and benefits, the strike resulted in a bitter outcome.
The anger American Axle workers feel connects them to the broader
opposition throughout the parts sector, including at Nexteer, Dana,
Bridgewater Interiors—where workers in Warren, Michigan also rejected a
UAW-backed contract.
This underscores the necessity for American
Axle workers to build rank-and-file committees, independent of the UAW
apparatus, to prepare a fight against the coming job cuts and oppose the
terms of the pro-company contract.
The campaign to form such
committees is central to the campaign of rank-and-file Mack Trucks
worker Will Lehman who is running for UAW president based on a program
of transferring power from the UAW apparatus to workers on the shop
floor. In a statement
on the opening of the UAW convention, Lehman pointed to the UAW
bureaucracy’s efforts to strangle the struggles of workers at American
Axle, Nexteer and Dana and urged delegates to take the side of the rank
and file and nominate him to run against Fain and the rest of the
apparatus.
The lesson from American Axle, Nexteer and Dana is
that the fight for decent wages, benefits and working conditions cannot
be won through the existing union apparatus, but only through a
rank-and-file rebellion against it.
The New York Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs Saturday night to win
their first National Basketball Association championship since 1973,
ending a 53-year drought. The victory, secured in Game 5 of the finals,
triggered mass celebrations across New York City, with crowds pouring
into the streets.
What is extraordinary, and troubling, is the manner in which this
sporting event has been presented by the corporate media, politicians of
both parties and a host of celebrities as a major political event of
national and international significance. Add to that the intensity of
the popular response.
Donald Trump attended game three along with
the Democratic mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani, a member of the
Democratic Socialists of America. “Progressive” Democrats such as
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spent the week posting online about the NBA finals, hailing a Knicks victory as a victory for all New Yorkers.
This, after all, was in the midst of a criminal war against Iran, an
ongoing assault on immigrants, an inflationary spiral that is
impoverishing tens of millions in the US, savage cuts in vital social
programs and Trump’s ongoing erection of a presidential dictatorship. It
follows strikes this year by New York nurses and Long Island Rail Road
workers. The speculative bubble centered in New York’s financial
district has minted the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk.
*****
The Knicks’ victory loomed large on the Sunday talk shows of the broadcast and cable networks.
The
official, and even the popular, response is clearly disproportionate to
the intrinsic significance of a basketball championship. There is
nothing wrong with fans cheering on their home teams, and sports have a
place in the social life of the people. There is, moreover, much to be
admired in the extraordinary skill and determination of professional
athletes and how they work as a team. Basketball is a beautiful game,
and millions of people legitimately admire the abilities of players such
as Jalen Brunson, who was named finals most valuable player after
leading the Knicks’ championship run.
But the Knicks hysteria is so over the top as to mark it as a
significant social phenomenon and raise the question: Why? What is
behind it?
The media presents the victory as proof that the city is united, that
the immense social gulf between billionaires and workers can be
overcome through shared sports enthusiasm. The wealthy celebrities in
courtside seats, costing thousands of dollars, the Wall Street
financiers in luxury suites, the politicians posting selfies in Knicks
gear and the youth crowded into the streets are all presented as part of
the same New York.
But the unity is fraudulent. New York is one
of the most unequal cities on earth. It is home to the headquarters of
finance capital alongside millions of workers living under conditions of
rent-gouging, depressed wages, insecure employment, homelessness,
police violence and collapsing social services. The same city that
produces billionaires and luxury towers forces immigrant workers,
delivery drivers, transit workers, teachers, nurses, food service
workers and students into poverty.
*****
Today, after decades of McCarthyism, red-baiting, deindustrialization
and the corporatist transformation of the trade unions into arms of the
employers and the state, there are no mass outlets for workers to
realize their desire for solidarity and unity in the fight for
democratic and social rights.
The trade unions, including the UAW, the Teamsters, UNITE HERE and the
AFL-CIO as a whole, function not as instruments of struggle, but as
mechanisms for containing it. They systematically subordinate the
working class to the parties of big business, mainly the Democrats. They
shut down strikes, isolate workers, enforce sellout contracts.
*****
In this vacuum, sports can become a substitute form of social cohesion.
Fans experience, in distorted and temporary form, a sense of belonging,
shared purpose and collective identity that capitalist society otherwise
denies them. The celebration of the Knicks becomes a surrogate for
solidarity. The championship becomes a symbolic victory in a social
order in which workers experience defeat after defeat at the hands of
employers, landlords, police, courts and politicians.
*****
This manipulation is reinforced by the proliferation of sports
gambling. Over the past several years, gambling has been integrated into
nearly every level of American sports. The major leagues, broadcasters
and betting platforms have fused into a single commercial apparatus.
Disney-owned ESPN has entered the gambling business through sportsbook
partnerships. CBS Sports’ betting page functions as a portal for betting
previews, “expert picks,” promo codes and promotions for FanDuel,
DraftKings, Bet365, Kalshi and other platforms.
The smartphone has
made this apparatus ever-present. A user can download a betting app,
upload a credit card or link a bank account, and begin wagering within
minutes. Push notifications, odds boosts, parlays, “no sweat” bets and
individualized promotions are used to draw users back into the app
throughout the day. The same behavioral technologies used by social
media companies to maximize engagement are deployed by gambling firms to
maximize losses.
The
Labor government’s far-reaching assault on the National Disability
Insurance Scheme has provoked an outpouring of anger from disabled
people, their families and advocacy organizations.
On
Sunday, June 14, in the Uzunköprü district of the northwestern city of
Edirne, miners who had been fighting for 26 days at the Özşen Mining pit
over unpaid wages and benefits and against layoffs came under armed
attack—carried out in full view of the security forces by assailants
reported to be acting at the behest of the mine’s owner, Bekir
Kiremitçi.
In a video statement issued together with the miners’
families after the attack, Başaran Aksu, organizing specialist of
Bağımsız Maden-İş (Independent Miners Union), declared that they would
not back down.
“Shots were fired three times from two separate weapons in a place
where there were children, women and workers. This attack is directed
not at the Özşen mine workers, their families and their children alone,
but at the entire working class,” he said, before adding: “Let those who
rob workers of their hard-earned wages and send guns and gangs against
families demanding their rights know this: this resistance will grow,
these workers will win, and all of Turkey will see it.”
Aksu had
previously been summoned to give a statement to the authorities over his
remark, “As the miners who do the producing, we will run this mine
ourselves.” One day before the armed attack, the miners occupied the pit
and began a hunger strike 1,200 meters underground.
The attack, in which by sheer luck no one was injured or killed, lays
bare the extent to which the class struggle has intensified. Just one
day earlier, construction workers and members of Dev Yapı-İş union
employed at the building site of the new Palace of Justice, under
construction in Ankara, were attacked with knives and clubs by thugs
from the subcontractor Gül Pa İnşaat because they had demanded their
unpaid wages.
These attacks, which are not isolated incidents and
are steadily mounting, can be countered only by building a politically
conscious and organized movement of the working class from below. The
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) was
founded to free workers and their struggles around the world from the
stranglehold of the trade union apparatus and to unite them on an
international scale. Building the IWA-RFC is also indispensable if
workers are to take measures to protect themselves collectively.
*****
As imperialist war escalates around the country’s borders, the
Turkish ruling class and the government of President Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan are steadily intensifying police-state repression at home. For
decades, with the assistance of the Türk-İş, Hak-İş and DİSK
confederations, the capitalist establishment has driven workers’
conditions backward, the class struggle has been suppressed, and social
anger has been kept within the bounds of the existing system. Not only
in Türkiye but across the world, class tensions can no longer be
contained by these methods, nor even within the limits of constitutional
norms.
According to a 2023 report by Credit Suisse, Türkiye leads
Europe in the inequality of wealth distribution. The top 1 percent of
the population controls 40 percent of wealth, and the wealthiest 10
percent controls 70 percent. While this trend has accelerated since
2023, Türkiye also ranks first in Europe in income inequality, according
to Eurostat.
According to the World Inequality Database, as of
2023 the share held by the poorest 50 percent—half the population—was
only 2.6 percent. That figure is 2.5 percent in the United States, where
Elon Musk recently became the world’s first trillionaire and President
Donald Trump is seeking to secure the wealth of the financial oligarchy
by building a fascistic police dictatorship.
This level of social
inequality is incompatible with democracy; suppressing a working class
movement that comes from below and is turning to ever more militant
struggles now requires state force and the deployment of corporate
thugs. The history of the class struggle in Türkiye—particularly from
the second half of the 1960s, amid the intensification of class
struggles on both the national and international scale—is filled with
such attacks by the hired thugs of the corporations and by fascists
seeking to break workers’ struggles. The corporations that set these
assailants in motion have always acted with the consciousness and
confidence that the state belongs to them.
On Sunday, June 14, in Edirne, in northwest Türkiye near the border
with Bulgaria, company thugs opened fire on workers and their families
at Özşen Mining who were fighting for unpaid wages and against layoffs.
This vicious attack was protested on Monday, June 15, in various
provinces across Türkiye. At the protest held in Izmir, the country’s
third-largest city, Can Denizli, a member of the Sosyalist Eşitlik
Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth
International) and a writer for the World Socialist Web Site, delivered the following speech.
Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi member speaks against the armed attack on miners in Türkiye. Translated captions available.
Our demands are clear:
Pay the miners all their unpaid wages immediately!
Reinstate those who were dismissed!
Prosecute and jail the perpetrators of the attack and those who instigated it!
From
miners to teachers, from construction workers to textile workers, we
must unite all sectors of the international working class that are
joining the struggle under a common programme of class struggle.
Build
a revolutionary workers’ movement that will fight against capitalist
exploitation, imperialist war and growing repression, and for socialism!
Africa’s four richest billionaires own $57.4 billion—more than the
combined wealth of half the continent’s 1.5 billion population.
Furthermore, according to Oxfam’s report Africa’s Inequality Crisis and the Rise of the Super-Rich,
the richest are getting richer. The top five billionaires have
increased their wealth by 88 percent over the last five years, compared
to a 22 percent rise for all Africa’s billionaires. Billionaire wealth
in Africa grew by 36.5 percentage over the previous year, more than
double the global average of 16 percent.
*****
Extreme inequality within Africa is replicated between Africa and the
rest of the world. Most of Africa’s wealth ends up outside the
continent, which possesses extraordinary resources—diamonds, gold,
platinum, cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, graphite, bauxite, and
major oil and gas reserves in Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Libya, Egypt,
Equatorial Guinea, and South Sudan.
*****
Africa produces about 7 percent of the world’s crude oil and 6
percent of its gas, mainly in Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Egypt and Libya,
but its oil and gas value chain is even more brutally skewed than its
minerals. It follows the same structural pattern: Africa exports crude
(low‑value) and imports refined products (high‑value), with the
overwhelming share of value captured outside the continent.
Africa’s
main role in the oil supply chain is the upstream extraction of crude
oil, but this is the lowest‑value segment of the chain, yielding just 10
to 15 percent of its final value. Highly capital intensive, it employs
relatively few workers and is dominated by the transnational oil
corporations, with some revenues going to the national oil companies and
states via royalties and taxes.
*****
Despite exporting crude oil, Africa imports more than 40 percent of its
refined products, as the continent has relatively little refining
capacity and utilization is often below 60 percent. Much of the
refining, which takes between 20 and 30 percent of the final value, the
biggest link in the chain, takes place outside Africa, with Europe,
Middle East, India, and increasingly China capturing this value. Even
with Dangote’s new refinery in Nigeria, Africa will remain a net
importer of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel for decades.
*****
In total, Africa captures just 11 to 18 percent of the final value,
while the advanced economies take 82 to 89 percent. This is because
Africa is dependent on imported refined products, losing the majority of
value to foreign refiners and traders.
*****
Nigeria is the clearest—and the most tragic—example of an African
petro‑state sitting atop vast hydrocarbon wealth while capturing almost
none of the value it generates. It is the archetype of political economy
built around the systematic externalization of every profitable segment
of the oil chain. Everything above extraction is offshored.
This
is the outcome of a long historical process: a colonial export structure
that the national bourgeoisie never dismantled after “independence”
from Britain in 1960; a post‑independence ruling class that ruled on
behalf of the industry’s foreign operators; and a global oil regime in
which the most profitable activities—refining, petrochemicals,
logistics, finance—are monopolized by advanced industrial economies.
Nigeria’s role is to supply crude oil and absorb the costs of its production, while importing the products made from it.
The numbers are stark. Nigeria captures 10–15 percent of the value of
its own oil at the wellhead. The remaining 80–90 percent—the value added
that turns crude into fuels, plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals,
and industrial feedstocks—is captured offshore. Europe, India, the Gulf,
and increasingly China refine Nigerian crude. Swiss and Singaporean
traders price it. London insurers underwrite it. Global petrochemical
complexes transform it. Nigeria exports the raw material and then buys
back the finished products at a premium. Despite being one of the
world’s largest crude exporters, Nigeria is one of the world’s largest
importers of gasoline.
*****
Africa’s billionaires function as a comprador layer, whose wealth
depends on smoothing the passage of foreign capital rather than building
domestic productive capacity. Their fortunes are rooted in their
position as intermediaries: securing concessions for oil majors and
mining corporations, guaranteeing regulatory stability for global
financiers, arbitraging import licenses, and policing the political
order required for uninterrupted extraction.
Africa’s billionaires
are enriched because they help maintain the structures that drain
wealth from the continent, in exchange for a minority stake, a board
seat, or a lucrative service contract. Unlike the classical bourgeoisie
of independent capitalist development described by Marx in
nineteenth-century Europe, African billionaires are a rentier layer
living off their intermediary position between the state and global
capital.
Leon Trotsky’s analysis of the colonial bourgeoisie in The Third International After Lenin
captures this dynamic with remarkable precision. Against Joseph Stalin
and Nikolai Bukharin—who claimed the colonial bourgeoisie could play a
“revolutionary” role because it was oppressed by imperialism—Trotsky
argued that its character is determined by structural subordination to
imperialism and by its fear of the working class. The bourgeoisie of an
oppressed nation, he wrote, is not more revolutionary than that of an
oppressor nation, but rather “if anything, viler and more reactionary.”
It may maneuver between imperialist powers, but it cannot lead a
genuine struggle against imperialism because doing so would require mobilizing the working class, which threatens its own class position.
*****
The comprador character of the African bourgeoisie has decisive
political implications. It means that this class cannot lead a struggle
for genuine national independence or economic development. It is
structurally tied to imperialism. Its wealth depends on the continued
exploitation of Africa’s resources by foreign capital. It will suppress
strikes, enforce austerity, and collaborate with whichever imperialist
power offers the best terms.
This is why the Stalinist “two-stage
theory”, the conception that the national bourgeoisie will lead a
democratic revolution against imperialism and decades later the working
class will fight for socialism, was always a fraud. The historical
experience of Africa since the independence wave of the 1960s has been a
brutal confirmation of Trotsky’s analysis. Every Pan-Africanist regime,
every “African socialist” leader, every national liberation movement
that took power—from Nkrumah to Nyerere to Mugabe to the ANC—ultimately
imposed IMF structural adjustment programs, privatized state assets, and
acted as the local enforcer for imperialist capital.
The African working class cannot look to its own billionaires for
liberation. Its struggle is irreconcilably opposed to the comprador
bourgeoisie and can only be victorious through forging political and organizational unity with workers in the imperialist states and China,
with whom its fate is already objectively unified, in a struggle against
the entire capitalist system—imperialism and its local intermediaries
alike.
Teachers,
support workers and student teachers spoke out against the intolerable
conditions in public schools and the Australian Education Union’s
anti-democratic methods.
In April, the pro-Zionist Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights
Under Law filed charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
(EEOC) last April against the National Education Association (NEA),
claiming the teachers’ union created a “hostile environment” for Jewish
and Israeli members, particularly at a July 2025 Representative Assembly
in Portland, Oregon.
The charges are a politically motivated
attempt to equate opposition to the Israeli state and its ongoing
genocide in Gaza with antisemitism and to use federal
anti-discrimination law as a weapon against democratic rights.
The
Brandeis Center’s complaint rests on two interlocking lines of attack.
The first concerns the NEA’s existing DEI (Diversity, Equity and
Inclusion) infrastructure: its racially coded bylaws, constitutional
provisions and standing rules mandating proportional representation of
U.S. Census-defined “ethnic minorities” at every level of the union,
from delegate assemblies to staff hiring. The complaint argues that
because Jewish members are classified as “White (not Hispanic origin)”
under the Census rubric, they are structurally excluded from these
benefits and opportunities.
The second focuses on the conduct at
the assembly’s vote last July on New Business Item (NBI) 9, a resolution
calling for a boycott of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and NBI 6
and 7, which dealt with Palestinian history and the distinction between
anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
The NEA’s Representative Assembly
voted democratically to sever ties with the ADL because of its equation
of the Gaza genocide as “antisemitism” and calls for bans and
investigations against pro-Palestinian groups. Standing reality on its
head, the Brandeis Center charges treat the vote and the surrounding
debate as evidence of a “hostile environment.”
The filing arrives in a context where the both the Democrats and the
Trump administration have waged a systematic campaign to criminalize
opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Executive orders
have directed universities to function as extensions of immigration
enforcement, enabling the cancellation of student visas and deportations
of protesters on fabricated charges of “antisemitism.”
*****
The fact that the Democrats are full partners in this—and, under the
Biden administration, the leaders and initiators of it—exposes the union
bureaucracy’s alliance with this capitalist party. Under the Biden
administration, peaceful protesters, including Jewish anti-war
activists, were smeared as “antisemitic” to justify repression. In
spring 2024 alone, more than 2,500 anti-war protesters were arrested during campus crackdowns across at least 25 states.
When
Representative Ocasio-Cortez provided Zionist lobby groups a platform
in 2024 to smear opponents of the Gaza genocide, the pseudo-left played a
central role in legitimizing this narrative.
The Democratic Party itself has repeatedly codified this logic,
including through H.Res.183 in 2019 and the promotion of the
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of opposition
to the State of Israel or the Gaza genocide as “antisemitic.”
*****
The Brandeis Center is also using the reactionary logic of identity
politics as an opening to demand greater access to top positions for
Zionists, equating this with representation for Jewish people as “ethnic
minorities.” The NEA’s governing documents are saturated with
identity-based rules and proportional representation schemes that
divides teachers into separate racial categories rather than uniting
them on the basis of their common class interests.
The Brandeis Center’s complaint exploits the door the NEA has left open.
This is the logical extension of identity politics, a framework that
substitutes racial and ethnic representation for class struggle.
As
early as December 2025, IAV management announced its intention to
eliminate roughly 1,500 jobs this year. Over the course of seven rounds
of negotiations with management to date, union officials have, in their
own words, proven themselves “willing to compromise.”
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna-led (JVP) government is continuing to
stall on its election promise to hold Provincial Council elections,
which have been delayed by successive governments for years. Without
elected councils, the provincial administrations have been run
anti-democratically by governors appointed by the Colombo government.
The protracted delay has been driven by the Sinhala chauvinist
opposition to granting any concessions to the Tamil elites in the North
and East of the island, now compounded by the current government’s fears
of mounting opposition to its austerity program.
*****
The terms of all Provincial Councils ended at different times between
2017 and 2019. The Sri Lankan Constitution requires that elections be
held within four weeks of the end of a council’s term or its
dissolution. This constitutional requirement has been flagrantly
violated for nearly a decade by every government that has held office.
All
the opposition parties are pressing for the election so as to exploit
widespread popular hostility to the government’s IMF-driven austerity
agenda. In the North and East, Tamil bourgeois parties view the
provincial councils as the means to secure their own power and
privileges at the expense of Tamil workers and peasants.
The
provincial council system was not a product of a democratic development
but was imposed through the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord signed by Indian
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayawardene.
The Accord was a bid to end Sri Lanka’s civil war that erupted in 1983.
So-called Indian peacekeepers were sent to the north and east of Sri
Lanka to disarm the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)
in return for provincial councils to provide a limited power-sharing
arrangement for the Tamil bourgeoisie.
*****
The Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), opposed the Indo-Lanka Accord from the standpoint
of uniting the working class in the fight for socialism. It demanded the
withdrawal of both Indian and Sri Lankan troops from the North and
East, warning that the accord would neither end discrimination against
Tamils nor secure democratic rights. It called on Tamil, Sinhala, and
Muslim workers to unite in the struggle for a Socialist Republic of Sri
Lanka and Eelam as part of a socialist federation of South Asia. The RCL
paid a heavy price for this stand, with three prominent members
murdered by JVP-linked gunmen.
*****
Successive governments have delayed Provincial Council elections for
clear political reasons. Mahinda Rajapakse, despite holding the first
Northern Provincial Council election in 2013 under international
pressure, was unwilling to permit even limited devolution. The
Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration used the 2017 electoral amendment
to suspend elections across all provinces indefinitely, exposing the
gap between its phony democratic rhetoric and practice.
Gotabhaya
Rajapakse continued the postponement, citing the COVID pandemic,
economic crisis, and legal obstacles and refused to fulfill promises to
hold polls. While other factors were involved, the major reasons for not
holding Provincial Council elections was the dominant anti-Tamil
communalism of the Colombo political establishment.
The communal
agenda of the JVP-led government is certainly a major factor in
postponing the election in the North and East. But the decision is also
bound up with fears of losing mass support across the island. Mass
opposition is intensifying against the government as it implements IMF
austerity measures that attack the living standards of workers.
The
government is imposing the impact of the Iran war on working people,
increasing fuel prices by nearly 50 percent since March. The rupee has
been devalued by around 14 percent, leading to soaring prices for
essential goods and services. The government has reaffirmed its
commitment to cost-recovery pricing for electricity and fuel which means
further cuts to price subsidies. These measures are driving growing
poverty, hunger, and malnutrition.
*****
All of the opposition parties, including ITAK, are seeking to exploit
the mounting opposition to the JVP-led government for their own venal
purposes.
Workers cannot rely on any of the capitalist parties to
defend their democratic and rights. The struggle for democratic rights
is inseparable from the fight against IMF-imposed austerity and the
capitalist system lies at the root of the economic and social crisis.
The
only genuine alternative lies in the united mobilization of Tamil,
Sinhala, and Muslim workers on the basis of a socialist program. That
can only be achieved through a political struggle against all forms of
nationalism and communalism—both the Sinhala chauvinism of the JVP and
Colombo political establish, and the divisive Tamil nationalist politics
of ITAK and other Tamil bourgeois parties.
Royal Marines, two Royal Navy ships and multiple Royal Air Force
(RAF) aircraft took part in a six-hour mission to seize an oil tanker
sailing through the Channel under a Cameroonian flag, alleged to be part
of Russia’s “shadow fleet”. The Smyrtos, en route from Russia to India, was seized in the early hours of Sunday morning.
UK
Prime Minister Keir Starmer celebrated by posting a video of the
operation to TikTok, gloating in infantile terms, “Another bad day to be
Vladimir Putin.”
Although the Ministry of Defense claims the action was planned for
weeks, this is clearly Starmer’s attempt to mollify critics of his Defense Investment Plan. The military brass, and Starmer’s own Defense Secretary John Healey and armed forces minister Al Carns, all publicly
declared the funding came up short.
*****
The Trump administration is an ally in this war drive. US Under
Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby reposted Healey’s resignation
letter on X with the comment: “There is again a great need for more
British military strength in this critical time. We urge the UK to meet
that need with urgency, scale, and determination…
“Our purpose now
must be to… restore our home fronts that can, once again, supply
overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions.”
Starmer has responded to this pressure by repeatedly raising his
commitments and authorizing military actions to prove his readiness to
confront Russia. Prior to the broadsides from Healey and Carns, he had
already promised to hike defense spending to 2.68 percent of GDP by
2030. The Defence Investment Plan shaves 1 percent off the capital
budgets of multiple other government departments to free up an
additional £13.5 billion for the armed forces over the next four years.
Now more will be forthcoming. The seizure of the Smyrtos was
followed by new Defense Secretary (and former paratrooper) Dan Jarvis
promising to help “reprioritize” military funding. Culture Secretary
Lisa Nandy told the BBC discussions were “ongoing”.
*****
If Starmer does not succeed in meeting the demands of the warmongers,
then replacements are waiting in the wings to implement their agenda.
Prospective Labour leadership challenger Andy Burnham told the Times last
Friday he was “not squeamish about saying that the plan would be to
reduce the welfare bill”. The other main contender, former Health
Secretary Wes Streeting, said the same this April.
As
a matter of principle, no offer should be used to call off mandated
strike action before British Medical Association members have been given
time to scrutinise its contents and determine whether it meets their
demands.
The
fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an
essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide,
dictatorship and fascism.
