Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Marxism, AI and Der Spiegel’s fear of revolution
When Der Spiegel, one of Germany’s most influential news magazines, feels compelled to put Karl Marx on its cover, things cannot be going well for capitalism. The August 6 cover features a portrait of the revolutionary under the headline “Marx sensed it”—for a cover story on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the economy, society and democracy.
“Is the end of capitalism that Karl Marx prophesied approaching?” ask authors Simon Book and Nicola Abé right at the outset of their article. In doing so, they raise the burning question weighing on workers and young people worldwide, given their experience of an economic system that now has nothing left to offer them but world war, social inequality and fascist dictatorship.
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As early as 1848, Marx and Engels noted in the Communist Manifesto that capital converts “the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science” into its paid wage laborers. Today that process is reaching completion: as the promise that education secures a professional future collapses, so does a central mechanism of capitalist stability.
Accordingly, the protagonists of the article are laid-off tech workers and unemployed university graduates. Workers in car plants, warehouses, slaughterhouses, hospitals and delivery services, whose wages and working conditions have been under attack for decades and are also threatened by further automation, do not receive a mention anywhere in the lengthy piece. Yet capitalism objectively links the fate of both groups, as it now proletarianizes ever larger sections of the academically trained layers of society as well.
Objectively, millions of engineers, software developers and university graduates today face the same question as workers in the factories: capitalism has nothing left to offer them but poverty, war and dictatorship. But how can this be overcome? The answer requires a serious engagement with Marx.
That it is precisely this conclusion which unsettles the editors of Der Spiegel becomes clear from their own argument. The article quotes sociologist Mathias Albert: “But with AI, aimlessness is turning into hopelessness. We all know that it is not the parties of the centre that benefit from this, but the political extremes.” Their concern is directed, not least, at a growing interest in Marxism.
How acute the editors consider this danger to be is shown by the fact that editor-in-chief, Dirk Kurbjuweit, felt it necessary to supplement the cover story with a commentary headlined, “Marx or Musk? Neither,” in which he explicitly states: “The answer to this is not Marxism. In practice, it has created its own catastrophes.”
What is meant here is Stalinism. But equating Marxism with the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy is intended precisely to prevent Marx’s analysis from becoming the basis of a political program. The Stalinist bureaucracy was not the executor but the gravedigger of the October Revolution: it murdered an entire generation of revolutionaries and progressively restored capitalism—a process that culminated in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Marxism was defended and developed further by Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International, who led an implacable struggle against Stalinism.
The fact that Kurbjuweit, one of the most zealous journalistic advocates of German rearmament, feels compelled to draw this line at all is revealing. A Marx who merely “sensed” something remains harmless, but a Marx whose analysis becomes the basis of a political program poses a mortal danger to capitalism.
For what Marx analyzed more than 150 years ago is today becoming concretely tangible for every worker, above all through the development of AI. The productive forces have outgrown the social order within which they are confined.
A technology created out of the collective labor and knowledge of the whole of humanity, one that could ease everyone’s work and help solve the most pressing problems, is controlled by a tiny financial oligarchy and deployed to destroy millions of jobs, generate target lists for bombing raids and build up an apparatus of repression.
The decisive question is which class controls this tool and in whose interest it is deployed. The “end of capitalism” thus turns from an abstract question for passive readers into an active task for a consciously acting working class.
The social vantage point of the Spiegel article, however, is that of affluent upper middle class layers who have spent three decades profiting from precisely the development that ruined the working class. While real wages stagnated and the German government created a low-wage sector, this layer saw its share prices, property values and investment portfolios rise.
The article does not take the financial oligarchy to task for exploiting people, but because its greed threatens to destabilize the system itself. It cites a warning from economist David Autor: if in the future only a handful of people were to benefit from the system, “then that would not be stable. Democracy would be very difficult to sustain in a world in which most people had nothing left to give.”
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Marx never advocated a program to “save capitalism”; rather, he demonstrated that this system is destroyed by its own contradictions and that workers must take control of the means of production. Berggruen’s proposal leaves ownership of the means of production untouched: the corporations remain in private hands, tied to profit, while employees are handed shares in their own exploitation.
What exactly workers are supposed to have a stake in becomes clear from a glance at the balance sheets of the major AI companies, which are running up huge losses. The value of these firms often derives not from goods sold and profits realized, but from what investors were last willing to pay. The corporations mutually finance one another. The chipmaker takes a stake in the AI company, which uses that same money to buy the chipmaker’s chips. The AI company rents computing capacity from a cloud provider, which in turn orders processors from the chipmaker.
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Should the astronomical returns promised to investors by the AI firms ever be realized, they would ultimately have to be squeezed out of the working class. The article even explicitly invokes Marx’s analysis of living human labor as the sole source of the surplus value from which capitalist profit is derived:
Human labor, as Karl Marx already described, is a central element of our economic system: capitalists invest money. With it, they buy – alongside machines and means of production – human labor power. In the end, the commodity is worth more than the employees’ wages and the cost of the factories combined. That is how the capitalist makes a profit and grows ever somewhat richer.
Yet the article carefully avoids the consequences of this insight. For an individual company, replacing living labor with machines and AI can generate enormous extra profits: it cuts costs, raises productivity and gives it an advantage over its competitors. For capital as a whole, however, this process sharpens a fundamental contradiction. Only living labor creates new value; chips, data centers and power lines merely transfer the value that the labor of their production has invested in them.
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How immediate the question of ownership and class is when it comes to AI is shown most starkly in its use for conducting war and state repression. It is precisely here that the Spiegel article leaves out a central question. In nearly 40 minutes of reading time meant to supposedly make readers aware of the dangers of AI, its use in warfare and in suppressing political opposition is practically absent. Drones in war zones appear only in a list extolling the technology’s capabilities, sandwiched between phone translation and X-ray imaging—without a word of criticism.
Yet this use is already a reality. AI systems belonging to the US corporation Palantir generated more than 1,000 targets within the first 24 hours of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, in violation of international law, and assisted in the abduction of Venezuelan President Maduro. Similar systems are being used in the genocide in Gaza. In the United States, the same corporation is equipping ICE immigration agents in hunting migrants, and against students and workers who have protested the Gaza genocide.
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Anyone who explains the dangers of AI while passing over its current use for war and dictatorship is not doing so by accident. The social standpoint that Der Spiegel represents is inseparably bound up with the policy of war and the state apparatus that suppresses the growing opposition to it.
What the article finally presents as “the counter-movement” amounts to nothing more than neo-Luddite machine-breaking and abstention from technology. It ends with a call for passive waiting: “Who consumes? Who rebels? Who rules? The questions are quickly asked. The answers will take time.”
This false alternative—adaptation to AI controlled by the oligarchy, or rejection of the technology—leaves the decisive question untouched: who controls the technology, and in whose interest is it deployed?
The answer lies in the working-class taking control of the technology and deploying it to improve living and working conditions, instead of for war and profit.
2. US government officially designates Palestine Action as a terrorist organization
The U.S. State Department and Treasury have designated three Europe-based groups as terrorist organizations and imposed economic sanctions on them. The action is part of a campaign to criminalize opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the wider US-Israeli aggression throughout the Middle East.
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According to the State Department:
As a result of today’s actions, all property and interests of those designated that are subject to U.S. jurisdiction are blocked, and all U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in any transactions with them. … Engaging in certain transactions involving the designated entities may also risk the imposition of secondary sanctions on participating foreign financial institutions. Violations of U.S. sanctions may result in the imposition of civil or criminal penalties on U.S. and foreign persons.
Both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent cited the 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy document that focuses on supposed “violent far-left terrorist groups” and ignores the fascist and far-right militia groups, which act as allies of the Trump administration and its preparation for dictatorship.
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Any US or foreign person who contributes financially to the three organizations can be subject to civil and criminal penalties. The Treasury notice reads: “The prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any designated or blocked person, or the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person. Non-U.S. persons are also prohibited from causing or conspiring to cause U.S. persons to wittingly or unwittingly violate U.S. sanctions, as well as engaging in conduct that evades U.S. sanctions.”
The Treasury is offering bounties to anyone providing information that leads to successful prosecutions that result in monetary penalties of $1 million or more.
3. UK-Russia conflict escalates after Burnham’s provocations in Ukraine
The UK prime minister was the sole leader of the “Coalition of the Willing” to visit Ukraine for a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday. France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Friedrich Merz took part virtually.
The event coincided with the anniversary of Ukraine’s 1991 breakaway from the Soviet Union—part of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s nationalist carve-up of its territory between what became obscenely rich capitalist oligarchies.
Burnham used the occasion to compare Ukraine’s war effort with the fight against the Nazi armies in the Second World War. “My nation kept the flame of European freedom alive in the 20th century, you hold that flame in the 21st,” he told Zelensky.
Given that Zelensky’s dictatorial government has honored the leading figures of Ukrainian fascist organizations which fought with the Nazis, helping to kill millions of Soviet citizens, this was not just a lie but a provocation. It rubbed salt in the wound of Burnham announcing more British aid to fuel the Russia-Ukraine bloodbath.
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Providing Ukraine with missiles is vital to sustaining its war effort. The country is currently seriously outmatched by Russia in this area, offensively and defensively.
Since the beginning of the year, Russian forces have launched at least 130 missiles a month, peaking in February (288) and July (376). An increasing proportion of these are finding their targets, as Ukraine runs low on interceptors.
According to Zelensky, Ukraine received 675 such missiles in 2023 compared to 364 in 2025, with 264 planned for 2026. He said 300-360 were needed for the winter. Global supply is around 600, with the war in Iran having heavily drained stocks.
Though Ukraine has recently been able to regularly hit Russian targets with drones, of which it expects to produce some 10 million this year, its missile strikes have been limited. The British-French plans are part of an effort to change that.
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The “situation” the UK is working to maintain is a war chewing through tens of thousands of casualties a month. The primary myth of NATO’s support for Kyiv is that it is provided for Ukraine’s defense, rather than for Russia’s defeat and the collapse of its government—at whatever cost to the Ukrainian working class.
Downing Street hopes leveling the playing field in the air will put more pressure on the Kremlin, as the death toll mounts on both sides. Burnham’s refrain—inherited from Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak, and Boris Johnson before him—that Britain will back Ukraine for “as long as it takes” means “as long as it takes” to achieve these imperialist ends.
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This is the second key myth of NATO’s war in Ukraine: that the alliance can continue to place pressure on the Russian government without the conflict escalating, becoming ever more likely to spark a catastrophe.
It is becoming harder to keep this fact suppressed, however. Multiple newspapers carried headlines on Wednesday announcing government plans to warn the population to stockpile food and water in preparation for state attacks or environmental crises.
According to the original article in the Financial Times, “a social media campaign is being prepared to tell households how to prepare for severe disruption, whether caused by hostile state action, extreme weather or cyber attacks.”
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That these are serious risks was confirmed by CIA director John Ratcliffe’s unplanned visit to Moscow on Tuesday. According to sources, Ratcliffe traveled to warn the Russian government against attacks on NATO states, focused on the Baltics. Media reports prompted by the visit also cited the danger of a response to the UK and Germany.
Triggering the alliance’s Article 5 collective defense clause would start a war between the world’s largest nuclear powers.
4. Oppose the arrest of Independent Miners Union leaders in Türkiye!
Gökay Çakır, chairman of the Independent Miners Union (Bağımsız Maden-İş), and Başaran Aksu, the union’s organizing specialist, were arrested and sent to prison on the evening of Wednesday, August 26, by a court in Ankara.
Çakır was detained the previous day at the union’s headquarters in Soma, where 301 coal miners were killed in a disaster in 2014, and Aksu the same day in Ankara, on the 16th day of the miners’ protest outside the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources. According to the union, this was the seventh time Aksu had been detained during this protest alone; Çakır stated that he had been taken into custody six times.
The charge brought against them is “publicly inciting the population to hatred and hostility,” and the “evidence” presented consists of posts from their social media accounts. The arrest ruling cited the suspects’ “trade union positions” and their “capacity to direct and command masses” as grounds. What the court has admitted is clear: what is being treated as a crime is the very capacity to organize and mobilize workers.
In his statement to the court, Aksu explained that one of the posts he is being prosecuted for drew the connection between the impoverishment of the population and the resources transferred to the holding corporations and said that if speaking on the side of the workers is a crime, he would go on committing it.
“The yellow unions that say nothing about a minimum monthly wage of 28,000 Turkish lira (US$585), nothing about pensions [23,500 lira at minimum], are applauded and entertained on yachts and in penthouses, while those who sit down with workers and labourers are punished,” he said. “I am proud to be part of something like that.”
Çakır, a retired miner who worked underground for 22 years, pointed out that his own pension amounts to 23,700 lira and that he and his fellow miners founded this independent union so that his workmates would not share that fate.
“My brothers working underground are being wronged,” he said. “What am I supposed to defend, if not this [their fight]? If I am the chairman of this union, I was obliged to defend these workmates. My social media posts are there to defend workers’ rights. I am seeing workers who cannot pay their electricity bills and live in poverty.”
The union’s lawyers underlined that the pair have committed no crime according to the Turkish Penal Code, and that the real subject of the investigation is the struggle being waged by miners in Ankara.
The arrests came on the same day it was announced that, on the 17th day of the miners’ protest, agreement had been reached with the employer on the bulk of the principal claims. Talks between the union delegation and the holding company, which began on the evening of August 25, ended in the early hours of the following morning.
As the miners came closer to securing their demands, those who had led the struggle were thrown into prison. This is not a “legal process” but an operation to persecute workers’ leaders, and to intimidate the entire working class. In every mine, factory and workplace, workers must respond by taking action independently of the union bureaucracies—which will merely stand by as Aksu and Çakır are arrested—and by defending them.
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These arrests are not isolated incidents; they aim to suppress an emerging independent workers’ movement. In March, independent textile union BİRTEK-SEN leader Mehmet Türkmen was jailed for supporting Sırma Halı workers’ wildcat struggle in Gaziantep. Esra Işık, a peasant leader who defends the Akbelen forest, was jailed for exercising her right to protest. In April, Aksu was arrested over a social media post defending Işık.
In June, miners at Özşen Madencilik in Uzunköprü, Edirne, came under armed attack in front of the security forces. That attack, in which it was only by chance that no one was injured, was a violent warning aimed at the Özşen miners and the entire working class. The same week, construction workers demanding unpaid wages at the site of the new Palace of Justice in Ankara were attacked with knives by thugs employed by a subcontractor. The company owners who refuse to pay workers’ legal entitlements and the thugs who physically attack workers act with the same confidence: the state is no neutral arbiter; it is their state.
This wave of attacks and the elimination of democratic rights cannot be separated from the ever-closer integration of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government into the imperialist war that the United States and NATO are escalating across the region, against Russia and Iran. Ahead of the NATO summit held in Ankara at the beginning of July, a de facto state of emergency was declared in the capital, hundreds were detained and more than 200 arrested.
In a politically directed judicial operation that is still under way, more than 30 elected mayors of the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) have been jailed and the party’s elected chairman removed from office. This led to a split within the CHP.
The mounting political repression is part of the imposition of a savage austerity program on the working class in one of the most unequal countries in Europe. Türkiye has increased its military spending by 94 percent over the past decade, and the bill is being met through cuts to wages, pensions and social spending.
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi–Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party–Fourth International), the Turkish section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), demands the immediate release of Çakır and Aksu and all working-class prisoners, and the payment of what is owed to the miners and all workers in the same position.
5. Nepal suffers devastating flooding
The catastrophic flash floods that struck northern Nepal and China’s Tibet region on Wednesday have created a massive human disaster. At least 270 people have been confirmed dead in Nepal, but with hundreds still missing, this figure will likely climb considerably. In Nepal, more than 900 are missing, including tourists and other travelers. China reported three deaths and 558 missing.
The disaster was triggered by a major glacial collapse. A significant portion of a glacier’s lower end broke away at an elevation of around 5,200 meters (17,060 feet), dropping 1,200 meters (3,937 feet) onto the valley floor and accumulating rock and debris as it fell.
The resulting mudslide traveled at about 50 metres (164 feet) per second. The collapsing mass appears to have swept into the Lhende Khola, which feeds into the Bhote Koshi and then the Trishuli River, producing a destructive surge downstream across the Nepal–Tibet border.
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The extent of the tragedy indicates that there were very minimal, if any, proactive rescue preparations or specialized early warnings. Moreover, there are warnings that a second flood may occur.
Monsoon rains from June to September routinely cause fatal floods and landslides throughout South Asia, but the new Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) government in Nepal just ignored it despite its promises of “new governance.” Prime Minister Balendra Shah stated that the government mobilized security forces and promised food, clean water, medication and temporary shelter, adding that the “state is with you with all its means and resources.”
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Nepal is exceptionally exposed to natural hazards. It lies at the collision point of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates, contains steep and unstable mountain terrain, experiences intense monsoon rainfall and is home to glaciers rapidly affected by global warming. But this alone does not explain the scale of the tragedy.
Every year, floods and landslides devastate the region. Between 2015 and 2024, Nepal recorded 8,418 monsoon-related disaster incidents, affecting more than 56,000 families, damaging 36,479 houses and destroying 195 bridges. In 2024 alone, 495 people died in monsoon-related disasters. Landslides, the single deadliest category of monsoon disaster in Nepal, accounted for 1,296 of the 2,317 recorded monsoon deaths over the decade. This exposes a pattern, not an isolated tragedy.
Many families who survived earlier disasters never receive adequate compensation or permanent housing. Riverbanks are left unprotected, and settlements continue to be built in hazardous areas because poor people have nowhere else to live. More than a decade after the devastating 2015 earthquake, many survivors continue to live in inadequate housing or structures vulnerable to future earthquakes, landslides and floods.
The scale of the death and destruction cannot be explained by geology or weather alone. It is the product of climate change, decades of state neglect and the subordination of public safety to profit and the budgetary demands of capitalism.
Nature does not pay attention to the nation-state system created by capitalism. The tragedy, originating on the Chinese side but devastating Nepal downstream, highlights the irrationality of the nation-state system, which must be abolished to build an effective defense against such tragedies.
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Trillions of dollars are available for weapons, military bases and imperialist war, while poor and technically backward countries like Nepal lack robust bridges, secure communications, functioning warning systems and disaster management infrastructure. The flood victims of Nepal need immediate, unconditional relief. All missing people must be searched for; survivors must receive food, water, shelter and medical care; and displaced families must be guaranteed permanent, safe housing and compensation.
Recurrent flooding is just one example of the incapacity of the ruling classes to address even the most basic requirement of the working masses. It is a warning to workers everywhere. Climate disasters are becoming more frequent and destructive; the death toll is determined by social priorities. Under capitalism, the poor are left exposed while wealth is protected. The alternative is the international unification of the working class in a socialist struggle to reorganize society based on human need and scientific planning.
6. The Nepal-China flood, climate change and the fight for socialism
The social catastrophe that has resulted is the latest consequence of the inability of the world’s capitalist governments to halt climate change or prepare their populations for the inevitable deadly consequences.
More than 1,200 members of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 7135 have been on strike since August 12 at National Steel Car in Hamilton, Ontario after voting down the company’s proposed contract by a resounding 78 percent. Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site visited the picket line outside the railroad car production plant on Wednesday for a discussion with workers on the major issues in their struggle.
The strikers are now entering their third week with no pay. The USW withholds even its meagre $425-a-week strike pay for the first two weeks, a calculated attempt to soften up the rank and file for another sellout. This is the same modus operandi the union bureaucracy used during the six-week strike in 2023.
Workers enthusiastically took WSWS articles, including statements from the National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee (NSC-RFC). With the intimidating presence of USW bureaucrats, including officials from other locals, some workers were hesitant to speak at length, though many nodded their heads in agreement as reporters explained the NSC-RFC’s call for rank-and-file workers to take the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the apparatus. The committee has called for a broadening of the battle for improved wages and conditions to other sections of workers across North America in opposition to the Canadian and American ruling elites’ use of the trade war to attack workers on both sides of the border. It has also exposed the USW’s abandonment of the central issue for rank-and-file workers in the current strike: the ending of the piecework system.
Just minutes into the reporting team’s intervention, a USW bureaucrat approached and announced that our reporters were “riling up” the workers. He said he had come to “defuse” the situation, although discussions with workers had been entirely calm and respectful.
Within moments, a larger contingent of five to eight thuggish bureaucrats, led by Local 7135 Recording Secretary Shawn McMullin, surrounded the reporting team, swearing and shouting: “F*** off,” “Nobody wants you here,” “You’re just gonna twist their words.”
The shouting and expletives from the bureaucrats grew even louder when one WSWS reporter addressed the rank and file directly, asking them to demand that the USW executive explain its strategy for winning the strike. As in the last strike in 2023, the USW has advanced nothing but a strategy for defeat.
The USW apparatus is hostile to any discussion of the major issues in the strike because this would inevitably lead to the conclusion that workers must push aside the bureaucracy, assert democratic control over the struggle and advance a diametrically different strategy if they are to prevail.
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The opposition of many of the NSC workers to trade war and economic nationalism stands in stark contrast to the USW’s bureaucracy’s “Team Canada” and support for retaliatory tariffs in response to Trump’s trade war measures.
Ontario NDP leader Marit Stiles visited the picket line to call on Premier Doug Ford to “buy Ontario steel.” This is the same program advanced by Mark Carney, pitting workers on each side of the border against one another while the bosses use the trade war to demand concessions.
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The NSC-RFC’s program advances its own demands for striking workers: a 25 percent wage increase, abolition of piecework without a pay cut, worker control over safety, doubled strike pay, and the broadening of the struggle across Hamilton and beyond.
These demands speak to the objective needs of every worker on the picket line. The task now is to build the committee, department by department and shift by shift, and to transform this strike from an isolated walkout the bureaucracy is working to smother into the starting point of a counter-offensive by workers across North America.
8. Trump sends second deportation flight to Haiti as ICE kidnaps nearly 50,000 in July
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement charter landed in Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city, rather than the capital of Port-au-Prince. Federal Aviation Administration restrictions prohibit most US civil aviation operations below 10,000 feet around the capital because armed groups have repeatedly fired on aircraft. At least three aircraft have been attacked with small-arms fire in the restricted area since September 2025.
The youngest person aboard was a 1-year-old born in the United States and therefore a US citizen. The child was among several US-born children effectively expelled from their own country alongside parents targeted by the immigration Gestapo.
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Newly released federal data obtained by the Deportation Data Project confirm that ICE kidnapped 49,571 people in July, the highest monthly total of Trump’s second term and a 15 percent increase over June. A majority of those arrested, 51 percent, had neither a criminal conviction nor a pending charge. Only about 4 percent had previously been convicted of a violent crime.
The same data show that nearly 34,000 people were deported during July, an average of approximately 1,100 every day. Rather than retreating after the mass opposition provoked by its murderous occupation of Minneapolis, the administration has shifted toward less visible arrests at traffic stops, immigration appointments, airports and workplaces. Local police increasingly carry out these kidnappings through the rapidly expanding 287(g) program.
An analysis of the data by the New York Times found that kidnappings increased in virtually every state, with the highest numbers recorded in Texas and Florida. ICE kidnapped more than 380 people in Texas and more than 230 in Florida every day.
August also appears likely to record tens of thousands of arrests. While nationwide figures have not been released, Fox News reported Monday, citing ICE officials, that the agency kidnapped 1,328 immigrants in the Washington D.C. suburbs over a two-week period from August 1 through August 14. The arrests were carried out in Virginia and Maryland. More than 900 of those taken had neither a criminal conviction nor pending charges.
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The state violence concealed behind these figures has already produced a mounting death toll. Two of the states with the highest numbers of ICE arrests were also the sites of recent immigration-related killings by federal officials.
On July 7, an as-yet unidentified ICE thug murdered father and construction worker Lorenzo Salgado Araujo as he was traveling to work in Houston, Texas. One week later in Florida, Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán, a Mexican father and husband who had legally entered the United States on a valid tourist visa, was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer while fleeing an ICE operation in St. Augustine.
As of this writing, the agent who killed Salgado Araujo has not been identified, much less charged with a crime. This is the “absolute immunity” Vice President JD Vance claimed for federal immigration agents after the January 7 murder of Rene Good in Minneapolis. Just over two weeks later, Customs and Border Protection agents murdered Alex Pretti in the same city.
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That Trump’s immigration Gestapo continues to operate so freely is entirely the responsibility of the Democratic Party and trade union apparatus. Democratic officials, including Walz in Minnesota, have collaborated with the federal government, deploying local police and National Guard forces to protect federal agents and facilities.
At the same time, the trade union bureaucracies, especially in Minnesota, have intervened to prevent strike action. They have warned workers who participate in militant action against ICE that the unions will not defend them because of the sanctity of “no-strike” clauses. These clauses were negotiated and accepted by the bureaucracies themselves, which now use them as a legal pretext to posture as opponents of Trump and the corporations while suppressing any action that would advance the interests of workers.
The fight against the mass deportation operation and the emerging presidential dictatorship cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party, the courts or the union apparatus. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class through rank-and-file committees and the preparation of nationwide strike action to halt the raids, free those imprisoned in immigration concentration camps and abolish ICE and Customs and Border Protection.
More than two weeks since his sentencing and just 13 days before his appeal deadline, global support has continued to grow for Bogdan Syrotiuk, the young Ukrainian socialist imprisoned for opposing the US-NATO proxy war against Russia. Since Saturday, a group of some 200 California academics has written to the Ukrainian courts demanding his release, socialist organizations in Russia and Turkey have issued statements, and left-wing publications in Germany, France and Turkey have taken up his case, along with a Mexican group.
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Despite the growing support for Bogdan, the media blackout continues. Seventeen days after the sentencing, neither the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC nor any other mainstream US or European newspaper or wire service has printed a word on the case.
The World Socialist Web Site urges its readers to add their names to the petition for Bogdan’s freedom. Write to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua and the Nikolaev Court of Appeal at inbox@mka.court.gov.ua, with a copy to freebogdan@wsws.org, demanding that the sentence be thrown out and Bogdan be freed at once.
10. United States: Columbia University postdoctoral workers vote overwhelmingly to authorize strike
Some 1,000 postdoctoral researchers, associate research scientists and associate research scholars at Columbia University have voted by over 90 percent to authorize strike action, the Columbia Postdoctoral Workers-United Auto Workers (CPW-UAW) Local 4100 announced last weekend. Approximately 850 workers participated in the vote, a record turnout, which comes after six months of negotiations failed to produce a contract.
The postdocs are demanding an $80,000 salary minimum, year-long appointments to replace precarious three- and six-month posts, and increased university contributions to childcare costs. The vast majority of the bargaining unit is composed of international workers, for whom the stakes extend beyond wages to the question of whether they can remain in the country under the Trump administration’s purge of international students and political opponents.
One week after the strike vote, the union leadership has not announced a strike date. The UAW bureaucracy under President Shawn Fain and Region 9A Director Brandon Mancilla, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), have repeatedly defied the will of Columbia University members and sought to curtail their political demands, including opposition to Columbia University’s complicity with the Israeli state and the bipartisan suppression of anti-genocide protests.
A serious struggle for their demands requires that postdocs break from the stranglehold of the UAW union bureaucracy and build independent rank-and-file committees, part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), uniting postdocs with graduate and undergraduate student workers, faculty, staff and the working class more broadly.
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The postdocs’ determination is entirely justified. Columbia University sits atop a $13 billion endowment and billions more in New York City real estate. Its Board of Trustees is populated by hedge fund billionaires with deep ties to Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. Meanwhile, postdoctoral researchers in one of the most expensive cities in the world survive on salaries well below a decent standard of living.
A report by the Fund for the City of New York calculated that a household income of $100,000 is the minimum for an adequate existence; average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan approaches $4,000 per month. The university’s demand that highly skilled workers—who generate the research underpinning Columbia’s prestige and its hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants—accept poverty wages and three-month appointments that make it impossible to sign a lease or plan a life, expresses the contempt in which the ruling class holds all workers.
The postdocs’ struggle unfolds under the shadow of the Trump administration’s systematic assault on higher education—an American variant of the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung, the forced synchronization of cultural and intellectual life with the demands of the state.
Columbia has played a shameful role in this. In July 2025, the university agreed to a $220 million settlement with the Trump administration that included sweeping changes to admissions policies, curriculum reviews in Middle East-related fields, a ban on masks at protests, increased cooperation with the NYPD, and new requirements to provide the Department of Homeland Security with data on international students.
Columbia paved the way for this capitulation by suspending nearly 80 students for participating in a pro-Palestinian protest—the largest mass discipline in university history for a single action. The campus has become a police-controlled fortress. Over 300 disciplinary cases have been opened against anti-genocide students, with 122 suspended, over 50 evicted, and one expelled.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Gestapo agents roam the city streets attacking and detaining immigrants. Earlier this year, ICE agents arrested a Columbia senior after gaining access to her dorm room.
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Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania and the rank-and-file socialist candidate for president of the UAW in this October’s election, issued a statement in support of the postdocs Thursday night.
Lehman stated, “I support your fight without reservation and call on UAW members everywhere to back it.”
He continued:
The stakes go beyond your contract. The same government that has unleashed ICE across the country and sent troops into American cities is waging imperialist war all over the world, and this apparatus has lined up behind it. Shawn Fain has publicly backed Trump’s tariffs, telling autoworkers their enemy is workers abroad rather than the corporations that exploit them all, while promoting the UAW as the “arsenal of democracy.” That nationalism is what leaves your colleagues on visas defenseless. I am the only candidate in this election who opposes US imperialism, who fights for the international unity of the working class against the trade war, and who calls for the mobilization of workers to defend immigrants, abolish the ICE gestapo and stop the drive to dictatorship.
He concluded:
The only social force capable of breaking the grip of the financial oligarchy is the working class, organized independently of both parties and across every border. It alone can expropriate the wealth taken from us and reorganize economic life to meet human needs rather than to enrich billionaires and pay for world war. That is what I mean when I say I am a socialist.
The UAW bureaucracy has done nothing to defend its own members targeted by the Trump administration’s campaign of political repression. Mahmoud Khalil, a former UAW member who was a graduate student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs until graduating in December 2024, was seized by ICE agents from his Manhattan apartment building on March 8, 2025, and flown to the LaSalle immigration jail in Louisiana, where he was held in isolation for 104 days. A legal permanent resident married to a US citizen and father of an infant son, Khalil has never been charged with a crime—his sole “offense” was serving as a leading spokesperson for the campus protests against the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
A federal judge ruled his detention unconstitutional in June 2025, but the administration has pressed on, and in September a Louisiana immigration judge ordered him deported to Syria or Algeria—a transparent act of political retaliation that Khalil himself has described as a “kangaroo immigration court” ruling meant “to silence anyone who stands against genocide in Gaza.” Throughout this ordeal, the UAW apparatus has offered nothing but hollow statements, refusing to mobilize its hundreds of thousands of members and three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar strike fund in defense of a dues-paying worker—the same bureaucracy that now sits on an overwhelming strike authorization vote at Columbia rather than lead workers into struggle.
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The postdocs can win widespread support for their fight. Across New York City, the working class is in motion. Contracts for 40,000 transit workers have expired, raising the prospect of a strike that could paralyze the city. Workers at the Guggenheim Museum, public defenders, and legal services staff have all authorized or initiated strikes in recent months. The conditions driving postdocs to vote overwhelmingly to strike are the conditions confronting the entire working class.
The path forward requires a decisive break from the UAW’s strategy of defeat. Postdocs must not wait for the bureaucracy to set a strike date—they must organize to impose their own decision. This means forming rank-and-file committees that take control of the struggle out of the hands of the apparatus and place it directly in workers’ hands. These committees must reach out to graduate student workers at Columbia, whose own strike has been blocked by the UAW, and, as well, appeal for solidarity from transit workers, building workers, healthcare workers and autoworkers throughout the New York area and beyond.
As part of the international campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk, members of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and International Youth and Students for Socialist Equality (IYSSE) in Sri Lanka recently spoke with workers at the Katunayake Free Trade Zone (KFTZ) and Ratmalana Railway.
Bogdan, a 27-year-old Ukrainian Trotskyist and leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, was sentenced on August 10 to 15 years in prison on charges of “treason” for calling for unity between Ukrainian and Russian workers against the war.
The SEP/IYSSE campaigners distributed Sinhala-language copies of the WSWS article “Fascist Ukrainian court sentences Bogdan Syrotiuk, socialist opponent of war, to 15 years in prison,” and other literature. Their intervention drew significant support, with workers standing firmly behind the demand for Bogdan’s release and posing for photographs holding his picture.
The KFTZ is the country’s largest Export Processing Zone, employing over 30,000 workers. It is among several such zones, including Biyagama and Koggala, which make products for transnational corporations and global brands, such as Victoria’s Secret, Marks & Spencer, GAP, and H&M. Apparel workers are highly exploited, commonly earning around $US107–137 per month (Rs. 35,000–45,000).
12. The crisis of March 2020 is haunting the US financial system
With the announcement that the US national debt has passed the $40 trillion mark and is rising at what is widely acknowledged as an “unsustainable” rate, with no sign of abatement, attention is being directed as to how it is being funded.
The financing of the ever-growing debt mountain takes place through the $32 trillion US Treasury market where the government issues new debt by selling bonds and where bonds bought in the past are bought and sold by investors.
This market, which forms the basis of the US and the global financial system, has become transformed in recent years. Previously it was dominated by institutions such as banks, insurance companies and bond-trading firms which invested long term.
Today the market is increasingly impacted by hedge funds which trade rapidly in the search for quick, speculative profits, with their operations financed by large amounts of borrowing. This enables them to leverage their returns when their bets prove successful, but which can bring about major losses if they are not.
In a post on his Chartbook blog last week, the economic historian Adam Tooze directed attention to the growing financial dangers residing in the Treasury market and the real possibility of a repeat of the crisis of March 2020 when it froze—for days there were no buyers for US debt—and a crisis developed across the financial system.
While it was alleviated through the intervention by the US Federal Reserve, amounting to several trillions of dollars, the March 2020 crisis was in a number of respects even more serious than that of 2008.
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After the crisis had passed, following the massive intervention by the Fed, Neel Kashkari at an April meeting of the Fed noted that all the regulations introduced after the 2008 crisis, supposedly aimed at rendering banks and other financial institutions self-insuring, had failed.
And he said the crisis has raised “fundamental questions about the structure of our financial markets” pointing to the use of the Fed’s repo market which provides short run and overnight funding to banks and others.
“Is there any social value to allowing institutions—banks or nonbanks—to fund themselves overnight? The only social value that occurs to me is that they can maximize their profits in the short run, knowing that the Federal Reserve is going to be there in the long run when things get scary.”
In the six years since the March 2020 heart attack all the conditions that produced it have intensified. The repo market is integral to the massive speculation which operates in the Treasury market, especially in the so-called basis trade where speculators borrow large amounts of money to make a profit by exploiting the tiny difference in price of a bond in the futures market and its existing value in a process known as arbitrage.
Investigations into the March 2020 crisis have pointed to the role of hedge funds which set off the “dash for cash.”
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There are clear indications that a new crisis is developing which is being acknowledged in the Fed leadership.
In comments to journalists on the significance of the US debt passing $40 trillion Fed Richmond chair Tom Barkin said there was going to be a “reckoning” if US debt continued to rise “because at some point, people stop buying your debt and that’s the risk out there.”
Recent actions of Treasury secretary Scott Bessent point to the growing fragility of the US Treasury market and the entire global financial system.
First came the intervention by the US to try to stabilize the value of the Japanese yen.
The US move was not to “help out a friend” as it was presented but was to defend the US dollar and the Treasury market out of fear that if Japan started selling Treasury bonds to obtain dollars with which to buy yen and halt the slide this would have an adverse impact on the US financial system.
This fear was underscored in the way the intervention was carried out. The US organised to have Japan borrow money from the US rather than sell its dollar assets while its own intervention was financed by the selling of euros rather than using dollars.
This intervention, which has been characterized as “unusual,” “extraordinary” and even “desperation,” was followed by the announcement by Bessent that Treasury buybacks of 10 and 30-year bonds would be lifted from $2 billion to $4 billion in each operation starting early next month.
Then came the announcement that the US was intending to impose sanctions against any country which had economic and financial dealings with Iran. Asked why a timeline had not been set, especially with regard to China which provides crucial support for Iran, Bessent replied: “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”
Questioned about Bessent’s bond market move last Friday, US president Trump made a revealing remark pointing to the interconnection between the growing financial crisis and ever-increasing US militarism.
Indicating his support for Bessent’s move, Trump said his Treasury secretary had a very good “touch” for bonds and interest. In a follow-up question, the reporter pointed out that yields had come back up since the announcement and asked if Trump had talked to him about another type of intervention.
“We have many types of intervention. That’s one,” Trump replied. “The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.”
No one can exactly know what the fevered brain of Trump meant by this, but the implication is clear: Buy our debt and support the crisis-ridden US financial system or we will bomb you.
13. Australian workers face deepening real wage cuts
The working class confronts a deepening cost-of-living crisis, as inflation continues to outpace wages. At the same time, banks, mining giants, supermarket chains and other major corporations have racked up record profits.
14. Australian Health Workers Rank-and-File Committee demands freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk
The Health Workers Rank-and-File Committee (HWRFC) recently convened an emergency meeting and passed a resolution unanimously condemning the conviction and sentencing of Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist, to 15 years’ imprisonment.
The HWRFC includes doctors, nurses, pathology and disability workers and allied health professionals from across Australia. The committee brings health workers together across the professional divides, and across the public and private sectors on the basis of a common class interest and independent of, and in opposition to, the trade-union bureaucracies and the corporate health employers they serve.
The resolution stated:
“We call for the immediate and unconditional release of Bogdan Syrotiuk, and for the annulment of the 10 August 2026 verdict, on the basis that his conviction rests on the criminalization of political expression and that Bogdan’s health and life are at risk in detention.
“No act of espionage, sabotage, or collaboration with any military force has been presented as evidence against him. The basis of the conviction was six articles written for the World Socialist Web Site. Bogdan is not being targeted for any genuine criminal act, but for expressing oppositional political views that the state has chosen to criminalize.
“In his articles, Bogdan explicitly opposes the Russian invasion and the Putin regime, as well as the Zelensky regime. His calls for the socialist unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against the capitalist oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine and against the US-NATO war being prosecuted on Ukrainian soil.
“Reports indicate that, since his arrest in April 2024, Bogdan has been denied urgently needed medical treatment, despite deteriorating health. In Ukraine's penitentiary system—where detainees are confined to cells for up to 23 hours a day, where overcrowding and inadequate food and water are routine, and where the United Nations has documented torture and a rising toll of deaths in custody—a 15-year sentence is a direct threat to his life.
“Health workers must understand the connection between the struggle they face every day and this political persecution. The persecution of individuals for their political views undermines democratic rights and the ability of workers everywhere to oppose war and injustice.
“His imprisonment is meant to terrorize all those who oppose imperialist war—in Ukraine, in Australia, and internationally. If the Zelensky regime can jail a socialist for his writings with the backing of Western governments, no opponent of war is safe.”
15. SEP (UK) Zoom Meeting: The Ukraine War and the Fight to Free Bogdan Syrotiuk
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We invite readers of the World Socialist Web Site to register to attend. Our speakers will include Chris Marsden and Tom Scripps, the national and assistant national secretaries of the SEP (UK), and Johannes Stern, the German language editor of the WSWS and leading member of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei.
27-year-old Bogdan was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment on August 10, 2026. He has been in pre-trial detention since his arrest in April 2024, charged with “high treason under martial law” based on six articles he wrote for the WSWS calling for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against the war.
Bogdan’s imprisonment explodes the lying NATO narrative presenting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a champion of “democracy”. Zelensky heads a martial law regime that has cancelled elections, banned opposition parties and criminalized left-wing and anti-war journalism and protest.
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We encourage you to attend the SEP’s meeting to discuss Bogdan’s sentencing, the escalating NATO-Russia war in Ukraine, the warmongering role of Andy Burnham’s Labour government and the campaign to secure Syrotiuk’s freedom.
Register here to attend this vital discussion!
If you have not already, add your name to the petition at wsws.org/freebogdan and write letters of opposition to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua and the Nikolaev Court of Appeal at inbox@mka.court.gov.ua, with a copy to freebogdan@wsws.org.
16. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Egypt:
Kenya:
Namibia:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Tunisia:
Belgium:
Bus workers in Wallonia strike over “ecocheque” agreement
France:
57-day strike by Paris humanitarian emergency service workers ends
Germany:
Technology workers in Thuringia strike against plant closure
Strike against racism by migrant-owned shops in Magdeburg
Norway:
Union calls off air traffic controllers’ strike
Serbia:
Electrical factory workers dismissed for striking over unpaid wages
Spain:
Indefinite strike over pay and conditions resumed at Airbus
United Kingdom:
Strike by air traffic control staff at Norwich Airport over pay and conditions
Strike by hospital staff in Northwest England over overtime payments
Hospital estate staff at London hospital trust walk out to demand pay parity
Holiday camp safety officers at Butlin’s in Bognor Regis set to strike over pay and safety concerns
Edinburgh’s National Galleries of Scotland staff in stoppage over cuts
Middle East
Iran:
Ongoing protest against dire economic conditions
Israel:
Wildcat walkout by portering staff at Ben Gurion airport over staff shortages
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
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.
