The greatest upheaval in modern times, the first stage in the world
revolution, calling into question the existence of the capitalist system
everywhere, shook American life as it did life in every corner of the
globe. No serious understanding of twentieth-century cultural life, its
greatest triumphs and greatest retreats, and our current challenges as
well, is possible without considering the impact of the socialist
movement and its decades-long struggle to raise the thinking and
activity of the working class, culminating in the 1917 Revolution. Of
course, the impact of the October Revolution was most direct and
inseparable for the Russian-Soviet artists themselves, Eisenstein,
Shostakovich, Gorky and others.
*****
... The writers and filmmakers discussed here had widely different histories
and aesthetic approaches, but they shared a commitment to realism, not
as an artistic school, but as a philosophy of life; a deep feeling for
the world “of three dimensions” as it is and a determination to bring
out its most essential characteristics. Stendhal’s comment, “Now, above
all, I want to be truthful,” served as the watchword for generations of
artists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact,
Dreiser echoed it quite directly: “The sum and substance of literary as
well as social morality may be expressed in three words—tell the truth,”
while Fitzgerald insisted that an author’s main purpose is “to make you
see.”
*****
... The White House lashes out nervously and insultingly against every
popular musician or actor who dares to criticize the would-be Führer.
The Israeli government has shown the way here, as it has in so many
areas, by liquidating poets, photographers, visual artists, scholars,
intellectuals, and journalists in Gaza by the hundreds, but the Trump
administration and the rest, each in its own way, have declared war on
progressive cultural life. The coming into existence of “The Donald J.
Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,”
whatever its ultimate fate, will forever be a monument to the present
perilous condition for intellectual creation, endangered by the
continued existence of the profit system.
*****
... “Pure art,” as Trotsky and André Breton suggested in the 1938 “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art,” too often “serves the extremely
impure ends of reaction.” They insisted that their “conception of the
role of art is too high to refuse it an influence on the fate of
society.”
That is the question. Art is not mere self-expression. Neither is the
artist an “empty machine” who exists for the sole or primary purpose of
creating form. Nor is it true that art lies beyond rational criticism or
influence because it speaks to the individual’s inner life, generated
by the “tragic nature of human life as such.” Art is not politics, and
an art work has to be judged in the first place by its own law, by the
law of art, but if artists are not troubling themselves with the most
insistent human problems, then, frankly, their undertakings will not
have much value. They will be mere scribblings or playthings for
personal diversion or that of the ruling classes.
*****
Art is, above all, concerned with investigating and reproducing men and
women’s lives, their relations with one another and with the world
around them from every possible point of view. The artist is a
specialist in this, obsessed with this. The artist and the reader or
spectator or viewer are living men and women capable of communicating
with and understanding one another because of a shared psychology
resulting from social and historical circumstances. Art is a function of
social humanity inextricably bound to its life and environment. It is a
form of social consciousness, one of the principal means by which
people gain their bearings in the world. How could art remain
indifferent to the social earthquakes we are living through? “The events
are prepared by people, they are made by people, they fall upon people
and change these people. Art, directly or indirectly, affects the lives
of the people who make or experience the events. This refers to all art,
to the grandest, as well as to the most intimate.” (Trotsky)
What Marxists have insisted upon since the 1917 Russian Revolution is
that however they might accomplish the task, the artists had to come at
least to general terms with the nature of their epoch, one of wars and
revolutions. This wasn’t a demand or an “ultimatum” placed on them by
the Marxists; it was simply a frank spelling out of what has defined the
important artists at every point in history, that they rise to the
fundamental challenges of the time if their work is to have a deep and
enduring and meaningful character.
At 2:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, only hours before tens of thousands of
workers were set to strike, members of Service Employees International
Union (SEIU) Local 99 received an email announcing a last-minute deal
with the Los Angeles Unified School District. The move abruptly shut
down the strike before it could begin.
The strike would have
involved the entire workforce of 77,000 classified workers, teachers and
administrators for the first time in the district’s history. Los
Angeles Mayor Karen Bass intervened directly in the talks late Monday
night, showing the Democratic Party was determined to prevent it.
The shutdown followed the Sunday betrayals
by United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and the Associated Administrators
of Los Angeles (AALA). Workers were deliberately split apart in order
to prevent a district-wide confrontation with LAUSD and the Democratic
Party establishment.
Workers responded angrily to the sellout. An
LAUSD school bus driver told a WSWS reporter that as of Tuesday morning
he had not seen the contract details. But, he said, “With everything
that’s going on—the war, price of gas, ICE raids, cost of living—there’s
so much affecting all of us right now. And the classified workers are
the lowest paid in LAUSD. We can’t afford to live like this. I think if
we had gone on strike, it would have inspired everybody else facing the
same things.”
A teacher said, “I think this is an unprecedented
opportunity for UTLA and they are capitulating too soon. All three
unions should be capitalizing on our solidarity and force the district
to give us what we all deserve. These circumstances aren’t going to
arise again anytime soon. Let’s not forget the over 5 billion dollar
reserve, a superintendent in legal jeopardy and a 22 million dollar
embezzlement scheme. I’m hearing the same sense of disappointment from
other teachers at my school site as well.”
Under the cover of darkness early Tuesday morning, the trade union
bureaucracy reached a last-minute deal to avert a strike in the Los
Angeles school district that was set to begin just hours later. It would
have been the first time that the entire workforce—an estimated 80,000
teachers, administrators and support staff—walked out simultaneously in
the second-largest school district in the United States.
The deal
is the culmination of a betrayal carried out before a strike even began.
At 4:00 a.m. Sunday, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) announced an
agreement covering teachers. The Associated Administrators of Los
Angeles (AALA) followed suit shortly thereafter. Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) Local 99 announced the final deal Tuesday,
following overnight talks involving Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
As
it always does, the union bureaucracy shouted that these were “huge
victories,” a miserable cover for the agreements’ actual wretchedness.
Teachers and administrators will receive an average of 11.65 percent in
wage increases over two years, with some teachers getting as little as 8
percent.
Workers in SEIU Local 99 will receive only 24 percent
over three years, half of which consists of retroactive back pay, since
workers have been kept on the job without a contract for two years. This
falls well short of the nearly 30 percent SEIU initially demanded and
leaves support staff in extreme poverty. Already, 99 percent of these
workers cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment.
The deals pave the
way for a wave of austerity measures that will dwarf whatever nominal
“gains” are contained in them. These cuts are already outlined in the
district’s “fiscal stabilization” plan, under which 3,200 workers have
already been given layoff notices this year.
*****
The World Socialist Web Site calls on workers to reject these
deals. The struggle must be continued, now organized under rank-and-file
control. We urge the formation of committees of trusted workers at all
schools to prepare the strike action for which workers have already
overwhelmingly voted. An appeal should be made to the broader working
class, along with preparations for a national movement in defense of
public education.
*****
The United States is on the cusp of colossal social struggles. The
year began with strikes by 46,000 nurses and healthcare workers on both
coasts and mass demonstrations against the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) occupation of Minneapolis, in which the call for a
general strike was widely raised. Over the course of the year,
opposition has deepened and become more radical, especially as the
consequences of the war with Iran have mounted. The campaign of murder
and threats to annihilate Iranian civilization has exposed the
government and the entire ruling class as criminal.
The economic
consequences of war are driving workers—already struggling with
inflation and mass layoffs—to the brink. School districts are being
eviscerated by deficits in the hundreds of millions, while hundreds of
billions more are funneled into the military and trillions into
speculative ventures on Wall Street. The crisis is being escalated by
Trump’s existential attack on public education and drive to convert
schools into centers of nationalist and religious indoctrination.
There
is extreme sensitivity and fear within ruling circles of the potential
growth of the class struggle, under conditions where the entire
political establishment is discredited and hated. The Democrats refuse
to fight Trump because they are a capitalist party committed to the same
basic policies of war and austerity, taking issue only with Trump’s
methods in carrying them out.
The union bureaucracy, bound by a
thousand threads to the political establishment, primarily through the
Democrats, functions as the corporate oligarchy’s industrial police
force. The bureaucracy’s role in war is to discipline workers on the
“home front,” summed up in 2024 when then-President Biden called the
AFL-CIO his “domestic NATO.” As the war against Iran escalates, the
union officials are seeking to prevent any expression of working class
struggle.
*****
But regardless of partisan allegiance, the bureaucracy as a whole
plays the same class role. This recalls the words of Leon Trotsky, who,
writing in 1940, said:
The labor bureaucrats do their
level best in words and deeds to demonstrate to the “democratic” state
how reliable and indispensable they are in peace-time and especially in
time of war. By transforming the trade unions into organs of the state,
fascism invents nothing new; it merely draws to their ultimate
conclusion the tendencies inherent in imperialism.
“Our mission is to unite postal workers worldwide to build collective
power, protect our rights, and improve wages, benefits and working
conditions through solidarity, transparency and democratic action to
actively counter the efforts of the 1 percent.”
Far
from representing a break with the corrupt, pro-corporate apparatus,
the slate is a merger of the same bureaucratic factions that have spent
decades collaborating with management to impose concessions.
The
struggle against the hospital’s strike-breaking and refusal to address
staffing issues requires a fight against management and the Teamsters
union bureaucracy, which has isolated and diverted the fight into the
dead end of appeals to the NLRB and the Democratic Party in Lansing.
Another
official inquiry makes no mention of Labor’s Universities Accord, which
is driving the further corporate transformation of Australia’s public
universities.
Roughly 34,000 porters, doorkeepers and maintenance workers, members of
Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, who work in
residential apartment buildings in New York City, will vote on whether
to strike today. The current four-year contract with the Realty Advisory
Board on Labor Relations (RAB) expires on April 20. Without a deal
before midnight the next day, workers will strike across 3,600
residential buildings with about 600,000 units and 1.6 million
residents. Workers have told the World Socialist Web Site that a vote for the strike is likely to pass overwhelmingly.
*****
The RAB claims that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign
promise of a four-year rent freeze on 1 million rent-regulated
apartments is creating an “existential crisis” for landlords. Howard
Rothschild, president of the RAB, stated that the “likelihood of zero
percent rent increases... will significantly limit the industry’s
ability to support wage growth.”
While some landlords own
rent-regulated buildings with both regulated and unregulated units,
these are generally older structures that do not command the highest
market rents. The RAB’s claim of an existential crisis is spurious.
But
whatever the RAB claims about Mamdani’s rent-freeze policy, 32BJ
officials have long tied workers to the Democratic Party by presenting
capitalist politicians as allies against the landlords. In the 2025
mayoral race, they promoted Mamdani in exactly these terms. Mamdani
spoke at the 32BJ union hall in November, before his election, and
former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander campaigned for him as a
surrogate in October 2025. Before the mayoral election, 32BJ bureaucrats
told workers that an “ally” like Mamdani would help them take on the
billionaire landlords.
Mamdani has said that he supports
“building workers’ quest for a fair contract that honors their
contributions to our neighborhoods and our city,” and a building worker
spoke from the podium at the Mamdani-Sanders rally on Sunday.
This
is all hot air. Mamdani has signaled both before and after his election
that he is no threat to the ruling class and will actively work in its
interests. He has met with some of the richest New Yorkers, including
real estate magnates, as well as with one of the most dangerous
representatives of the oligarchy, Donald Trump.
Mamdani’s meetings with financiers, landlords and Trump are not just
photo opportunities. They express his real role: containing social
opposition and helping shut down workers’ struggles before they can
threaten the profit interests of the ruling class. Mamdani called on
striking nurses at four major New York City hospitals this winter to
settle their contract and return to work. His mistitled Deputy Mayor for
Economic Justice, Julie Su, played a central role in shutting down the
nurses’ strike and forcing them back to work with none of their major
demands, especially safe patient-staffing ratios, met. When Su was Joe
Biden’s deputy secretary of labor in 2022, she was instrumental in
formulating strikebreaking legislation that outlawed a rail workers’
strike.
*****
Building workers will have to break free of the Mamdani
administration and the 32BJ bureaucracy if they are to defeat the RAB’s
conspiracy to slash wages, benefits and working conditions. They must
form a rank-and-file strike committee to lead the strike and prepare to
expand it. Workers in thousands of buildings are deeply connected to
other sections of the working class across the city through critical
industrial and service supply chains.
Porters, for example, are
the first to handle garbage and recycling, which are then removed by New
York City Department of Sanitation workers and private sanitation
workers. Building maintenance workers occupy a key position in the chain
of labor connected to water, gas and electrical systems.
Porters
and maintenance workers also work with thousands of, usually small,
companies involved in wallpapering, flooring, tile cutting, window
installation and cleaning, and boiler maintenance. They interact with
plumbers, sewage and drain cleaners, heat pump and water system
specialists, and Con Edison workers who supply buildings with gas and
electricity. They also work alongside fire alarm technicians, elevator
mechanics, inspectors, repair workers and cleaners. All of these workers
have a common interest in fighting alongside building workers.
Doorkeepers,
finally, are the last link in logistics, shipping and handling. They
are, in effect, “last-meter” delivery workers, an extension of the
“last-mile” delivery phenomenon that has grown over the past two
decades, especially with the rise of Amazon and the gig economy.
According to the New York City Comptroller’s Office, there are about
45,000 last-mile delivery workers in New York City.
Doorkeepers
have seen an enormous increase in daily package volume. Package rooms
have become cramped warehouses, and in new buildings with 500, 1,000 or
more apartments, they are often so large that dedicated “package-room
doormen” are assigned to them full time. Sorting and organizing
deliveries from UPS, the Postal Service, DHL and FedEx has itself become
a full-time job.
All of these are workers whom a Building
Workers Strike Committee must mobilize to defeat the real estate titans.
Local 32BJ will seek to isolate the strike and shut it down. But a mass
struggle uniting these sections of the New York City working class,
based not only on the needs of building workers but of all workers, will
be an unstoppable force.
... The function of organizations like the DSA, and figures like Sanders and
Mamdani, is to police opposition from the left, ensuring that hostility
to war and dictatorship never develops into an independent movement of
the working class.
That political function was on display throughout Sunday’s event.
In
his remarks, Mamdani, who has twice traveled to the White House seeking
an alliance with Trump as the administration wages mass deportations at
home and illegal war abroad, never once said the words “Trump,” “war,”
“Iran,” “militarism,” “fascism,” “capitalism” or “strike.” Instead, he
praised the assembled union bureaucrats, Sanders and his “deputy mayor
for economic justice,” Julie Su, falsely describing Su as a “lifelong
champion for workers.”
This is a lie.
As labor secretary under Gavin Newsom and later as Biden’s deputy and
acting labor secretary, Su repeatedly worked with corporations and the
union bureaucracy to suppress workers’ struggles. She was involved in
efforts to block or contain strikes and job actions by refinery workers,
railroad workers, West Coast longshore workers, autoworkers and Boeing
workers. She also helped slow-walk autoworker Will Lehman’s lawsuit over
the 2022 UAW election, in which only 9 percent of the membership voted,
shielding the bureaucracy from a serious challenge by rank-and-file
workers.
*****
Weingarten followed the same script. Like Mamdani, she invoked “union
density” while saying nothing about the illegal war against Iran, the
genocide in Gaza or Israel’s ongoing military assault on Lebanon.
Instead, she celebrated a tentative agreement reached by United Teachers
Los Angeles as a victory, though its real purpose was to head off a
broader joint struggle by educators in Los Angeles.
Sanders, for
his part, delivered another version of his stale “Fighting Oligarchy”
speech. He spoke of the wealth of the top 1 percent and denounced “big
money” in politics, presenting the central problem as Citizens United
and campaign finance. This fiction has been the stock in trade of
Sanders for more than a decade. The problem is not one Supreme Court
decision, but the capitalist system itself, which subordinates every
aspect of social and political life to the interests of the financial
oligarchy.
Sanders made the real purpose of the event explicit when he declared,
“If the Democratic Party wants our support, it must become a party of
the working class, not corporate America.” This fraudulent formulation
sums up Sanders’ political role. The Democratic Party is not a neutral
vehicle that can be pressured into serving workers’ interests.
It
is a capitalist party, rooted in the defense of private property,
imperialist war and the state apparatus. It can no more be transformed
into a party of the working class than the Confederacy could have been
transformed into an egalitarian society. Its defense of capitalism binds
it to the financial oligarchy and the intelligence agencies Sanders
falsely postures against, while ensuring that every movement he leads
ends by subordinating workers and youth to their class enemies.
There is no genuine fight against the “oligarchy” that does not place at
its center the fight against imperialist war. Sanders’ appeal for the
Democratic Party to become a “party of the working class” is especially
obscene under conditions in which that party is being mobilized to
provide political legitimacy for the next phase of the war. What he
presents as a vehicle for reform is, in reality, one of the principal
instruments through which the American ruling class organizes
imperialist violence abroad and suppresses opposition at home.
*****
Workers and youth looking for a way forward must stay far away from
these bourgeois politicians. The fight against war, dictatorship and
inequality requires a clean break from the Democratic Party, the trade
union apparatus and the entire capitalist system they defend.
Over the Easter long weekend, the Australian pseudo-left organization Socialist Alternative (SAlt) held its annual “Marxism Conference,”
drawing an estimated 2,000 people.
Any of those attendees seeking
a socialist perspective to fight the massive US-led assault on Iran and
the broader threat of an imperialist world war left empty-handed. Over
four days, not a single one of the conference’s nearly 150 panels was
dedicated to the war on Iran.
That can hardly be ascribed to a pre-arranged schedule or an innocent
error. It was an entirely deliberate decision to suppress discussion of
the war, its vast global implications and what must be done to stop it.
A
core theme of the Civitas report is that war cannot be fought by armies
alone and is a “whole of society” effort: "This is the essence of the
distinction we need to make between 'our armed forces learning to fight
battles' and 'our country learning to fight war'", the authors declare.
Police have cracked down aggressively on Israel’s small
anti-Netanyahu government protests against the illegal US-Israeli war on
Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the ongoing repression in Gaza and the
West Bank and the imposition of the death penalty for Palestinians
charged with terrorism.
The police have said the right to protest
“is not absolute” and must be balanced with the “right to public
order”. The army has limited gatherings in public areas to 150 people
and refused protests in Tel Aviv, citing Iranian missile threats.
These authoritarian measures are the domestic requirement for
pursuing a Greater Israel policy, as part of US imperialism’s broader
political and military agenda to reorganize and control the
resource-rich Middle East in preparation for wider wars against China
and Russia. What are now often referred to as Israel’s own “forever
wars” demand the suspension of the democratic right to oppose and
protest.
Nevertheless, protests and rallies have continued around
the country. Last weekend saw the sixth consecutive week of protests by
groups opposed to the Iran war, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
corruption—his long-running trial has been delayed yet again for
“security and political” reasons—and his fascist government’s bid to
overhaul the judiciary and exempt ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students from
military service.
With hours to go before a potential strike by 80,000 Los Angeles
school workers, negotiations between SEIU Local 99 and the Los Angeles
Unified School District (LAUSD) are continuing under intense pressure
from city and political officials. As of this writing, this includes
Mayor Karen Bass, who was directly involved in talks Monday night.
The
last-minute negotiations follow the announcement Sunday of tentative
agreements by United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and the Associated
Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA), moves that have already served to
divide workers and weaken the prospect of unified strike action.
Taken
together, these developments constitute a coordinated effort to prevent
a joint walkout and impose a settlement before rank-and-file workers
can act. This would also isolate a separate potential strike by 200
teachers in the Little Lake City School District in Southeast Los
Angeles County, which is set to begin Thursday.
*****
What is taking place are not “negotiations” in the sense of two
adversarial parties. It is a conspiracy of the Democratic Party, through
the city government, LAUSD and the union bureaucracy to sabotage the
class struggle, which terrifies them above all. The union bureaucracy,
joined at the hip with management and the capitalist parties, is a full
partner in this effort because a genuine struggle by workers would
undermine these corrupt relations.
Similar betrayals have already taken place this year across America,
including among nurses in New York City and at Kaiser Permanente, San
Francisco teachers, the United Auto Workers’ blocking of a strike at
Nexteer, and the shutdown of a strike at Bath Iron Works, a major
defense contractor.
The intervention of Mayor Karen Bass recalls the role of San Francisco
Mayor Daniel Lurie and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in shutting
down a four-day strike by educators earlier this year. Also involved in
that intervention was American Federation of Teachers President Randi
Weingarten, who is also a top Democratic Party operative and former
member of the Democratic National Committee. Soon afterward, the San
Francisco school district announced layoffs as part of its “fiscal
recovery program.”
*****
The struggle must be taken out of the hands of the union bureaucracy,
which has sold out one struggle after another across the country.
Across
all unions, workers should form independent rank-and-file committees to
break the isolation, share information, organize from below and assert
their democratic will. These committees can provide the means to
overturn sellouts and ensure that decisions are made by workers
themselves.
Educators and school workers must appeal to the
broader working class, linking their struggle to a wider fight against
inequality and in defense of the rights of immigrants and all workers.
This requires the independent mobilization of the working class against
the corporate oligarchy.
An essential aspect of Trump’s contradictory messages throughout the
war—threatening to obliterate Iranian civilization one moment and
calling a ceasefire the next—is that he is disturbed by the lack of
success of the operation and the reaction of global markets to it. He is
fumbling for ideas as he buys time. The spot price for physical oil
cargoes has effectively doubled since the war began. US gasoline has
crossed $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022. Stock markets have
posted their worst quarter since 2022.
There is a panic in the
ruling class that this war will yield a win for Iran, prompting
Democrats, such as Pete Buttigieg on CNBC last Friday morning, to
suggest a further escalation of the war to achieve regime change.
Within the oil and gas industry, the prevailing view is that markets and
governments—worried as they may be—still do not understand the
dimensions of the crisis now unfolding. As Bloomberg reported
last week, after speaking with more than three dozen traders, executives
and shippers, “The world still hasn’t grasped the severity of the
situation.”
*****
Because oil tankers move slowly—around 10 to 15 knots, given their
size—the last shipments that made it out of the Gulf at the end of
February are only now arriving at their nearest destinations, primarily
in Asia. The actual crisis in the physical supply of oil, gas and the
other commodities that flow from the Gulf—fertilizer, petrochemicals,
sulfur, helium—is only just beginning to be felt. It may take until May
for its full force to arrive. Meanwhile, for every new day of a blocked
Strait, the crisis deepens.
*****
Geographically, 85 percent of the fossil fuels flowing out of the Gulf
are bound for Asia. It is there that the devastation will be most acute,
especially in poorer importing countries like the Philippines, Cambodia
and Thailand.
*****
Iran has discovered significant power in all of this.
A
country being bombed and strangled is simultaneously operating as the
gatekeeper of the world’s most important energy corridor. Trump,
meanwhile, appears to have few cards left to play except to make good on
his Hitlerian threats to turn Iran into the next Gaza—to starve and
endanger millions through the systematic destruction of power plants,
water systems and energy infrastructure.
The destruction of Iran’s
civilian infrastructure would inflame opposition to American
imperialism across the globe. It would mean the deaths of tens of
thousands, directly and indirectly. It would constitute a barbaric
assault on one of the world’s oldest civilizations: a country of more
than 90 million people.
Yet what other path forward does Trump see?
Iran possesses vast, high-quality oil and gas reserves—the
world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves and second-largest proven
gas reserves—both still only partially developed. It is, in that sense, a
potential treasure trove for American imperialism and its allies. Much
of this oil, and much other Gulf oil besides, flows eastward to China
and Asia. And control over the Strait of Hormuz means control not just
over Iran’s oil, but this entire flow. Yet outside of a sustained,
massive ground invasion, it is far from clear how the United States
could seize and hold the strait, let alone the oil and gas fields
themselves.
Iran does not need a functioning power grid to threaten the Strait of
Hormuz. So long as it can send out even a handful of speedboats, the
chokepoint can become effectively impassable for commercial shipping. No
insurer will cover tankers and cargoes worth hundreds of millions of
dollars if there is a chance they will be struck.
*****
Everywhere, this war is opposed. Two-thirds of Americans tell
pollsters they want it ended quickly, even if that means abandoning the
administration’s stated goals. Large majorities oppose the deployment of
ground troops—and yet the White House has refused to rule it out, with
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt saying Trump “keeps his options on the
table.” In late March, the Selective Service System submitted a proposal
to begin automatically registering all eligible men for a potential
draft by December.
The Trump administration’s response has been to
make Americans pay for it. On April 2, at a private Easter luncheon,
Trump told guests it was “not possible for us to take care of daycare,
Medicaid, Medicare—all these individual things. We have to take care of
one thing: military protection.” The next day, the White House released
the largest defense budget in U.S. history — $1.5 trillion, a 44 percent
increase — while proposing $73 billion in cuts to education, health,
housing, and domestic programs.
The war is also deepening divisions within the US-led imperial order.
Trump has told allies to “learn how to fight for yourself” and to “go
get your own oil.” He has threatened to withdraw funding from Ukraine if
European states refuse to participate in the conflict. European leaders
remain, for the most part, complicit lapdogs, but it would be a mistake
to underestimate the resentments building within the European ruling
class as it increasingly bears the consequences of American policy.
The
crisis is accelerating European rearmament and giving new substance to
long dormant ambitions for an independent European great-power
politics—with disastrous implications for the European working class.
*****
The clearest beneficiary in all this is the Chinese state. While
developed-market sovereign bonds have sold off sharply, Chinese
government bonds have begun to function as a global safe haven, with
foreign yuan bond issuance tripling year on year in March to record
levels.
As the WSWS has emphasized,
oil and natural gas imports are regarded as one of China’s central
geopolitical vulnerabilities. Yet Beijing, understanding its
vulnerability, has spent years building the largest strategic petroleum
reserve in world history—an estimated 1.2 billion barrels—which will
provide significant insulation from the shock, both for itself and,
potentially, its neighbors.
As John Calabrese of American
University writes, “As America fights, Asia turns to Beijing.” This can,
for example, be seen in the Philippines, where the crisis is strengthening pro-China sections of the ruling elite.
The
irony is bitter, because the strategic logic of the war was precisely
to help repair the US’s declining hegemonic status and prepare for war
with China. It should be noted that a key bombing target for the US and
Israel has been Iran’s railway system, whose most important connection
is to China.
But instead of strengthening Washington’s hand, the war has accelerated the conditions eroding American imperial power.
It is precisely for this reason that the Democratic political
establishment is tactically opposed to Trump’s foreign policy—not
because of the illegal murder of thousands of Iranian civilians, which
they would be willing enough to carry out themselves given enough spin;
not because they reject the drive to subordinate Iran to American
interests; but because they recognize in Trump’s approach a tactical
blunder that ruins their game.
The administration has charged at
this problem with the intelligence of a bull, surrounded by an
ultra-Christian nationalist echo chamber of fascists better suited to an
asylum than to public office.
But Trump’s disastrous decisions do not make him, or American imperialism, less dangerous—They make the situation more
dangerous. Here, the effort by the left flank of the Democrats, i.e.,
the DSA, to dismiss Trump’s threats to destroy Iranian civilization as
mere “bluster” works to disarm opposition at a crucial moment when working class opposition to war must grow.
The war is not some bad policy slip or an isolated blotch. It is the
culmination of decades of American policy aimed at dominating Persian
Gulf energy—a strategic, bipartisan drive stretching from the 1953 CIA
coup against Mossadegh, through the loss of Iran in 1979, to the
invasion of Iraq and the destruction of Libya.
But simultaneously,
it is one front in a broader strategic offensive that includes the NATO
confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, the genocide of the Palestinian
people, and most crucially, escalating economic and military pressure
targeting Beijing. In the words of a UPS worker interviewed
in January, “World War 3 is brewing.” At the heart of this drive is the
effort by the United States and its allies to use violence to stave off
their accelerating economic and political decline.
With Trump,
and this debacle, what is new is not the objective but the desperation,
and thus confusion, with which it is being carried out.
Shakespeare had fitting words for this. In Henry VI, the future Richard III, lost in scheming ambition, declares:
I,—like one lost in a thorny wood, That rends the thorns and is rent with the thorns, Seeking a way and straying from the way; Not knowing how to find the open air, But toiling desperately to find it out,— Torment myself to catch the English crown: And from that torment I will free myself, Or hew my way out with a bloody axe.
Indeed, the only way forward for Trump in this situation is to “hew” his way out “with a bloody axe.”
And this is not a personal or psychological issue. Trump’s madness is the historic madness of American imperialism in decline.
*****
The war will accelerate the political, economic and social processes
driving the implosion of US imperialism, ushering in an era marked not
by Chinese supremacy but by a fracturing political and economic order,
the constant threat of war and crimes against humanity, and, with all
this, profound revolutionary consequences for the working class
everywhere.
But those consequences will not find progressive expression on their own.
“It is not enough to be appalled,” stated David North in response to Trump’s April 1 speech.
Horror,
left to itself, exhausts itself in impotent frustration or isolated
episodes of individual resistance. What is required is the development
of a mass working class socialist movement, which is guided by an
internationalist socialist program, infused with genuine revolutionary
morality, and opposed in every respect to the depravity of the ruling
class.
We call on all workers and young people who
oppose the imperialist onslaught in Iran to join the call of the
Socialist Equality Party and get involved in the fight for socialism and the end to capitalist barbarity.
While
workers aged 18–21 in the retail, fast food and pharmacy sectors will
eventually receive full adult wages, the ruling still allows junior
rates as low as 40 percent for younger workers.
In 2025 the IMF met in the immediate aftermath of the “reciprocal
tariffs” launched by Trump against the rest of the world. This year the
situation is even more serious as the US intensifies the war against
Iran with a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz following the
inevitable collapse—the US had never intended that they would succeed—of
ceasefire talks at the weekend.
In a speech last week, setting
the stage for this week’s discussions and reports, IMF chief Kristalina
Georgieva made clear there would be a downgrade of the global growth
forecast even in the event of an end to the war. In the days since then
the dangers have intensified.
*****
She warned policymakers not to make things worse through actions such
as export and price controls that could upset global conditions. And
she cautioned central banks not to rush in and immediately raise
interest rates in response to rising prices.
But if the working
class responds to the persistence of inflation with major wages
struggles, then central banks should act forcefully, even if this
brought about a recession.
“If inflation expectations threaten to
break anchor and ignite a costly inflation spiral, then central banks
should step in firmly with rate hikes,” she said. “Rate hikes, of
course, would further dampen growth—that’s how they work.”
Central bankers around the world and leaders of global financial
institutions are all disciples of Paul Volcker, the Federal Reserve
chief of the 1980s who used massive interest rate hikes, resulting in a
deep recession and economic devastation to crush the wages movement of
the working class.
On April 9, the Russian Supreme Court declared “Memorial,” for decades
the most important institution for uncovering biographical and other
information about the Stalinist Great Terror, an extremist organization.
The Kremlin also appears to have shut down the organization’s vast
database of over three million victims of the Great Terror. As of this
writing, it is no longer available online.
The assault on Memorial is a blow against the ability of workers and
youth the world over to come to grips with the crimes of Stalinism,
which, for generations, have undermined the struggle for socialism.
*****
Over one million people were murdered during the Great Terror. Among
them were thousands of Old Bolsheviks and socialist opponents of
Stalinism from the Trotskyist Left Opposition, scientists, writers and
intellectuals. The mass slaughter culminated in the 1940 assassination
of Leon Trotsky in Mexico by a Stalinist agent. Termed a “political genocide”
by Soviet historian Vadim Rogovin, the Terror was aimed at politically
decapitating the Soviet and international working class and wiping out
the living memory of the 1917 Revolution.
The Supreme Court’s
ruling was reached in a closed session and came into effect immediately.
Several diplomats from European countries who tried to attend the
session were refused entry. Memorial is expected to appeal the ruling.
The organization was already outlawed
in December 2021, on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the
time, the Supreme Court ordered the liquidation of Memorial and all of
its subdivisions.
However, despite the ban, Memorial, now run largely from outside of
Russia, de facto continued operation. Its website remained accessible
and staff answered queries about victims of the terror and their
descendants. The organization also continued to issue a bulletin with
articles centered on the Terror. Now, anyone who is involved with the
organization may be subject to criminal persecution in Russia.
In its ruling, the court argued that Memorial was “aimed at the
destruction of the basic foundations of Russian statehood, the violation
of its territorial integrity, and the relativization of historical,
cultural, spiritual and moral values.” As evidence, the court cited that
fact that six individuals affiliated with the organization have been
previously sentenced for calls for terrorist activities and the
discrediting of the Russian armed forces, likely in connection with the
war in Ukraine.
The history of Memorial reflects the problems
bound up with the struggle for the historical truth about Stalinism and
the October Revolution in the former Soviet Union. The organization was
founded in the last years of the Soviet Union when newly released
documents about the Terror and the inner-party struggle of the 1920s
shook Soviet society. Many victims of the Terror, especially
Trotskyists, were only now being rehabilitated. Trotsky was never fully
rehabilitated.
Although heterogeneous, historically, Memorial has
been close to the liberal and anti-Communist sections of the
intelligentsia. Along with victims of the Terror, its co-founders
included several prominent dissidents whose orientation became
increasingly anti-communist and right wing. The most prominent liberal
dissident Andrei Sakharov became the organization’s first head. Many of
its staff and supporters, while committed to historical truth, had drawn
the most pessimistic conclusions about the crimes of Stalinism.
When
the Putin regime invaded Ukraine in February 2022 after years of
provocations by NATO, Memorial condemned the invasion not from the left,
but rather from the right. Yet no matter how reactionary this
orientation toward anti-communist and pro-imperialist forces, the
historical work that Memorial and its staff have accomplished over the
past decades has been invaluable and must be defended.
*****
The attempt to completely destroy Memorial and make its work
inaccessible is a central component of intensified attacks on democratic
rights and the rehabilitation of the worst crimes of Joseph Stalin, in
the words of Trotsky, “the gravedigger of the revolution.” Over the past
year, the Kremlin has dramatically limited access to vast documentation
of the terror in Russian state archives. Thus, the holdings of the Communist International, housed at the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, have been effectively closed off to researchers.
The
main museum dedicated to the history of the GULAG and Stalinist
repressions in Moscow was shut down and replaced with a museum dedicated
to World War II and the “genocide of the Soviet people.” The Kremlin is
also about to launch a new textbook on history for school children
which has been reported to promote Russian chauvinism and minimize the
crimes of Stalin. Across the country, monuments have been built in honor
of Stalin.
Behind the systematic assault on the historical consciousness of the crimes of Stalinism lies a deliberate class policy.
Having
emerged from the Stalinist bureaucracy, which consolidated its rule
through the destruction of generations of revolutionaries in the Terror,
the Putin regime is highly sensitive to any signs of a left-ward shift
within the working class and a resurgence of the class struggle. The
oligarchy’s principal fear is that, amidst the escalation of a global
conflict and intensifying class tensions, a growing layer of workers,
intellectuals and youth will turn again toward the revolutionary and
internationalist traditions of the October Revolution. With the
aggressive promotion of Russian nationalism and ever more violent
suppression of historical truth about the crimes of Stalinism, it seeks
to deal a preemptive blow against the resurgence of internationalist
Marxism within the Russian and international working class.
The blockade is an act of war and an act of international piracy. The World Socialist Web Site
condemns this criminal action, directed against Iran and against the
working class of the entire world, which will pay the price in soaring
energy costs, food shortages and the ever-present danger of a wider
military conflagration.
The ceasefire has proven to be an
opportunity, using Trump’s own phrase, to “reload” for the next phase of
the war. Every ceasefire Trump has announced in the Middle East—from
Gaza in January 2025, to Iran in June 2025, to the April 7 Iran
ceasefire followed hours later by Israel’s strike on central Beirut that
killed more than 250 people—has been a pause to regroup for the next
attack.
*****
The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is, in practice, an act of
economic warfare against China as much as against Iran. Nearly half of
China’s oil and more than a third of its liquefied natural gas flow
through the Strait of Hormuz. The blockade places America’s hand on the
energy supply of its principal rival, and on that of its “allies”—Japan,
South Korea and the states of the European Union, which depend on the
same flows.
Trump hinted at the thinking of US military
strategists at a press briefing Monday: “We don’t need this trade. We
have our own oil, gas, much more than we need. … So we don’t need it,
but the world needs it, and many ships are heading to our country right
now, as we speak, to load up.”
The blockade is part of a broader
US campaign to seize the world’s strategic chokepoints—the Strait of
Hormuz, the Panama Canal, the approaches to Greenland. American
imperialism, in long-term economic decline, is attempting to offset that
decline through military domination of global trade routes, securing
the world’s waterways and raw materials for itself and denying them to
its rivals, above all China.
*****
The same class being asked to pay for the war in cuts to essential
programs is the one being called on to fight it. Automatic draft
registration for all men aged 18 to 26 takes effect in December 2026,
signed into law by Trump as part of the 2026 National Defense
Authorization Act. The children of steelworkers and warehouse workers,
of miners and migrant farmhands, will be sent to die on the destroyers
and on the beaches of the Persian Gulf—to secure China’s energy supply
for American imperialism.
United Auto Workers officials in Saginaw, Michigan, have kept 1,300
Nexteer Automotive workers on the job nearly two weeks after workers
overwhelmingly rejected a concessions-laden contract pushed by the UAW
International and UAW Local 699.
After workers rejected the deal
by 96.2 percent, union officials conspired with management behind their
backs to extend the previous five-year agreement. When pressed by
workers why a strike had not been called, UAW officials said it was
“illegal” to walk out under the terms of the contract.
According
to a post on the UAW Local 699 Facebook page, the 2021 contract was
extended “indefinitely” on April 2, the very same day workers decisively
defeated the UAW-backed tentative agreement. This was carried out
without any membership meeting, discussion among workers, let alone a
democratic vote by workers. The union bureaucrats have such contempt for
workers that they did not even bother to provide an excuse for
trampling over the democratic rights of the workers they claim to
represent.
The rejected contract would have created a new layer
of “third-class employees” among new hires, who would start at $19.05 an
hour—compared to $22.50 for current workers and $24.75 for legacy
workers hired before May 2021. After four years, wages for new hires
would rise only to $20.89. The deal would have also sharply increased
out-of-pocket healthcare costs for workers hired after May 2021, with
weekly contributions for a married couple with children more than
doubling from $26.50 to $53.34.
The extended 2021 contract
maintained starting wages barely above $16–$18 an hour and imposed
years-long “progression” to inadequate top rates, all while inflation is
steadily eroding purchasing power. Workers rejected that framework
then, and they have rejected it again today.
In a cynical
maneuver, union officials circulated a survey for workers to list their
most pressing demands, echoing UAW President Shawn Fain’s bogus claims
that the “membership has the last word.” In fact, everything the union
apparatus has done since the resounding defeat of its pro-company
contract has been against the rank and file, not corporate management.
This demonstrates the long-proven fact that the UAW bureaucracy cannot
be pressured into changing its ways or reformed. It must be abolished
and power and decision-making transferred from the union apparatus to
workers on the shop floor.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain held a livestreamed
“kickoff” rally for American Axle workers in Three Rivers, Michigan,
ahead of the May 31 contract expiration. The event, staged alongside
Democratic Party politicians including Michigan Lieutenant Governor
Garlin Gilchrist and gubernatorial candidate Genesee County Sheriff
Chris Swanson, was aimed at containing growing rank-and-file opposition.
Timed to coincide with ongoing negotiations between UAW Local
2093 and American Axle & Manufacturing, the rally featured
assurances from Fain and Region 1D Director Steve Dawes that the union
“has workers’ backs.” Notably absent, however, was any acknowledgment of
the UAW’s role in imposing wage cuts of up to 50 percent in 2008 or
sanctioning the mass layoffs that followed.
Workers at the Three Rivers facility and across the auto parts industry
confront conditions shaped by decades of concessions. In 2008, wages at
the plant were slashed in half with workers making up to $35 an hour.
Now top pay is $22 an hour. While Fain & co. talk about “corporate
greed,” many workers contacted by the World Socialist Web Site exposed the role of the UAW
in sabotaging any effective rank-and-file resistance.
*****
Fain used the rally to denounce “corporate greed” while offering
empty assurances. While referencing 18 years of “injustice,”—workers
losing their homes and lives—he left out the role of the UAW in helping
management force through the very concessions contracts responsible for
these conditions.
In one revealing moment Fain asserted, “I was
national negotiator for Chrysler during the recession, the same thing
you all went through. And when the company wanted to take everything
from us, and they damn near did.” Fain thus all but admits that he
oversaw the 2009 restructuring of the auto industry under the
Obama-Biden Auto Task Force that devastated workers’ lives. In
attempting to “sell” the 2009 concessions Fain had told Chrysler workers
in Kokomo where his home local was based that the restructuring would
soon be a bad memory like 1979 when workers saw massive job and wage
cuts.
*****
Fain went on to promote the 2023 Stand Up strike strategy—where only a
handful of selected plants were called out—while many of the more
profitable plants continued operating, producing profits for the
companies. Any genuine struggle would have required collaboration with
auto parts workers, which have the potential to shut down the entire
automotive industry. Since the phony “Stand Up” strike thousands of
workers have lost their jobs across the auto industry and wage tiers
have continued. Fain has collaborated with both Biden and the fascist
Trump to ensure the “competitiveness” of US auto companies against the
threat of Chinese domination of electric vehicle production. This
involved not only promoting Trump’s tariffs and trade war, but endorsing
preparations for shooting war against China and other rivals of USA
capitalism. This was behind Fain’s campaign for turning the auto plants
into the “arsenal of democracy” and Biden’s boast that the unions were
his “domestic NATO.”
The ideological and class origins of Fain,
Dawes and all of the so called reformers are rooted in the nationalist
and class collaborationist program of the UAW codified by Walter
Reuther, which subordinated the interests of workers to an alliance with
the Democratic party and defense of capitalism. Reuther initiated the
1950s McCarthyite purge of militant and socialist-minded workers who led
the sit-down strikes. Former UAW President Owen Bieber—from West
Michigan, began his long UAW career at that time.
In a critical shift, in 1979 UAW President Douglas Fraser rammed through
the first ever concessions contracts with Chrysler. In 1982 the UAW
imposed the first concessions at General Motors, lowering wages by 3
percent and all but eliminating cost of living adjustments. In 1984
Fraser’s successor, Bieber, openly adopted the program of corporatism
and union management partnership, tying the union at the hip to the auto
companies through a web of joint structures, which in addition served
as a conduit for 100s of millions and billions of dollars into the UAW
treasury.
*****
The prominent role of Democratic Party politicians at the rally
expressed the union bureaucracy’s function as a key bulwark for
capitalism, tying workers to a party responsible for overseeing the
economic and geopolitical interests of American capitalism. No one on
the platform mentioned the vastly unpopular war in Iran nor the Trump
administration’s brutal attacks on immigrants or assault on the
Constitution. Sheriff Swanson admonished workers to remember “1936 and
‘37” in Flint, without noting that police and sheriff’s deputies had
been mobilized alongside national guard troops and fascists like the
Black Legion to smash the strike. He went on to praise the “successes”
of the Stand Up strike, calling for “unity on the shop floor,” in other
words to unite behind Fain and the UAW apparatus.
*****
The Democratic Party has played a particularly foul role in stoking
nationalist and anti-Chinese sentiment. In Saginaw, Michigan, Democratic
Senator and ex-CIA intelligence officer Elissa Slotkin recently joined
with UAW officials and management at auto parts maker Nexteer for a
public meeting defending “American manufacturing,” against Chinese
“espionage.”
The suppression of strikes and the enforcement of
labor discipline at home are inseparable from preparations for war. The
auto industry is a key component of the US industrial base and could be
converted relatively quickly to military production as it was in WWII.
The union bureaucracy functions as a labor police force, ensuring
uninterrupted production while diverting workers’ anger into controlled
protests and electoral politics.
California’s
high court intervened to stop Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco’s ballot
seizure after warrants revealed the probe relied on debunked election
denial claims and false quotes generated from Artificial Intelligence.
Professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, formerly UC Hastings, Dorit Reiss:
What we know is that our health agencies have been pummeled down, and
they are not likely to recover anytime soon even if Kennedy is gone
tomorrow. They were hurt first by losing enormous numbers of personnel.
Institutional memory and expertise were lost, and those cannot be
quickly restored. The agencies have also been hurt by funding cuts and
by a fundamental change in their sense of mission. It used to be a norm
that the FDA’s policy direction was guided by politics to some degree,
but its decisions on individual products were not. That is no longer
true. The ACIP used to be constituted based on expertise, not
ideological alignment. That is also no longer true. Our agencies are
badly hurt, and fixing them will require time, possibly statutory
intervention from Congress, and will be far from straightforward.
The
second thing we know is that states are increasingly detaching
themselves from the federal government on public health. I do not think
that this can easily be reversed. The states that have distanced
themselves from ACIP guidance are going to remain cautious about
trusting a process that has proven so vulnerable. That means we will
have far less centralized coordination and information sharing than we
did before. States cannot license vaccines or pharmaceutical products on
their own—there are limits to how far they can go—but where they can act independently, many of them will.
Third, we are going to see a real-world experiment unfold, with some
states following the new skepticism toward vaccines and suffering
corresponding outbreaks. Those outbreaks will not stay neatly within
state borders; people travel. But I think we will see a clear pattern in
which states that have weakened their public health frameworks see more
cases and more preventable suffering.
“Democracy has won” was the headline of German magazine Die Zeit’s
comment on the Hungarian elections. Numerous other European media
outlets and politicians reacted in a similar vein, describing the
election victory of Peter Magyar’s Tisza Party alternately as a “victory
for democracy” and a “victory for Europe.” Yet this assessment has
little to do with political reality.
Viktor Orbán, who described
his own regime as an “illiberal democracy” and served as a role model
for numerous authoritarian politicians—from Donald Trump to Marine Le
Pen and Giorgia Meloni—did indeed suffer a heavy defeat after 16 years
in power. With a record turnout of 78 percent, Orbán’s Fidesz secured
just 38.3 percent of the vote, while Tisza won 53.2 percent. As only one
other party—the far-right Our Homeland—managed to enter the new
parliament, Tisza will even hold the two-thirds majority of MPs required
for constitutional amendments.
Yet for the working class—that is, the vast majority of the Hungarian
population—the change of government in Budapest will make little
difference. Election winner Magyar not only hails from Fidesz’s inner
circle of power, but during the campaign he also constantly appealed to
disaffected members of Orbán’s party and refrained from any criticism of
its political line. He intends to stick to both their inhumane refugee
policy and their discrimination against ethnic minorities and LGBTQ
people; at least, he gave no indication to the contrary during the
campaign. Magyar attempted to outdo Fidesz’s nationalism by constantly
waving a Hungarian flag at campaign rallies.
Magyar’s sole
campaign issue was the rampant nepotism and corruption that now pervades
the country like a cancer and is covered up by a judiciary and media
placed firmly under state control. While such allegations of corruption
had previously bounced off Orbán, they are now having an effect due to
the economic crisis. In terms of per capita consumption, Hungary now
ranks last among the 27 EU member states. The population has been in
decline for some time due to the bleak outlook for the future. During
Orbán’s time in office, it fell from 10 million to less than 9.5
million.
At the time of writing, with 56 percent of ballots processed, early
results from Sunday’s Peruvian elections point toward a runoff dominated
by far-right candidates.
Keiko Fujimori, leader of Fuerza
Popular and daughter of the former dictator Alberto Fujimori, leads with
16.94 percent. She is closely followed by Rafael López Aliaga, the
ultra-right former mayor of Lima, and Jorge Nieto of the Partido del
Buen Gobierno. Exit polls place the “Castillista” Roberto Sánchez in
contention for second place, buoyed by support in remote rural regions
whose votes may take longer to count.
These figures do not express
any genuine popular enthusiasm for the far right. Rather, they reflect
the depth of social despair and the absence of any independent political
alternative for the working class.
*****
The elections unfold within an escalating geopolitical struggle in which
US imperialism is escalating its efforts to oust Chinese influence in
the hemisphere.
Peru has become a critical node in global supply chains, particularly
linking copper mining to China’s electric vehicle industry. This
relationship took concrete form with the inauguration of the Chancay
megaport in November 2025 by Boluarte and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
*****
Peru’s political history has been shaped by various forms of left
nationalism and radicalism with significant international influence,
from the bourgeois nationalism of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre’s APRA to
José Carlos Mariátegui’s indigenous nationalism dressed as “Marxism,”
the military reformism of Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado, and the Maoist
guerrillaism of Sendero Luminoso.
By the mid-1970s, the limits of
nationalism were exposed. A CIA-backed coup brought Francisco Morales
Bermúdez to power, aligning Peru with IMF austerity and Operation
Condor. Mass protests and a general strike toppled the regime in 1977.
The
subsequent decades saw the discrediting of all political tendencies.
The APRA government of Alan García ended in hyperinflation and
repression. The United Left provided a “left” cover for bourgeois rule,
while Sendero Luminoso’s guerrilla strategy devastated rural
communities.
This collapse paved the way for Fujimori’s
dictatorship in the 1990s, marked by the 1992 “self-coup,” mass
repression and sweeping neoliberal reforms. His regime ultimately fell
amid corruption scandals, but its legacy persists through Keiko
Fujimori.
Since then, every “left” populist government—from
Ollanta Humala to Castillo—has followed the same pattern: campaigning on
reformist promises, then implementing right-wing policies and
repressing opposition.
*****
Peru’s elections express a historic crisis of bourgeois rule. The
repeated collapse of governments, the consolidation of authoritarian
power and the deepening social crisis all point toward explosive class
struggles ahead.
The decisive question posed is the building of an
independent political leadership—a Peruvian section of the
International Committee of the Fourth International—capable of giving
these struggles a genuine socialist and internationalist orientation.
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has previously documented its blacklisting by major Reddit
communities. In August 2020, moderators of the r/coronavirus subreddit banned WSWS articles to protect the ruling class policy of mass infection. Similar politically motivated bans have been imposed on r/politics and r/railroading.
By
censoring WSWS posts on the persecution of Chinese researchers and the
suicide of Danhao Wang, the Reddit moderators are aiding and abetting
the government witch-hunt, if not directly working in conjunction with
the witch-hunters. The US military and intelligence apparatus considers
the persecution of Chinese scientists a major component of its
war-mongering foreign policy.
This was underscored this past Sunday when Nikki Haley, US ambassador
to the United Nations during Donald Trump’s first term and current
chair of the right-wing Hudson Institute, called for an escalation of
the war against Iran and stepped-up confrontation with China on the CNN
interview program “State of the Union.” Haley made a point of promoting
the witch-hunt against Chinese researchers, saying, “We knew the
students were coming to our universities, working in research, sending
information back… We can’t take our eye off of China. There’s a reason
they’re helping Iran.”
This is also the agenda of the Democratic
Party, exemplified by Michigan Representative Haley Stevens. At a March
26 hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce titled
“US Universities Under Siege: Foreign Espionage, Stolen Innovation,
& the National Security Threat,” Stevens championed her bipartisan
US Research Protection bill. The bill, which amends the 2022 CHIPS and
Science Act, broadens the legal definition of partnership with so-called
“malign foreign talent programs” to include any program that provides
“indirect benefits” to targeted nations such as China. This transforms
routine academic exchanges, access to international laboratories, shared
research data, or even the co-authorship of scientific papers into
potential grounds for federal prosecution, detention and deportation.
The hearing was held one week after the suicide of Danhao Wang.
As
for the U-M administration, its filthy collaboration with the Trump
administration was spelled out by interim President Domenico Grasso at
the same March 26 hearing. Grasso boasted of the university’s
collaboration in the witch-hunting of Chinese researchers.
On April 10, hundreds of people gathered in Dearborn, Michigan, home
to the largest Lebanese population in the United States, for a
candlelight vigil organized by community members with family ties to
Lebanon in honor of the victims of the Israeli bombing.
Last week,
the Israeli military dropped 160 munitions across over 100 sites in
just 10 minutes, killing over 300 people and leaving a further 1,150
wounded. The massacre came less than 24 hours after US President Donald
Trump announced a temporary ceasefire with Iran.
Since October
2023, the US and Israel have waged war in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon,
Syria, Yemen and Iran. The combined death toll across the region runs
into the tens of thousands.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke with attendees about why they came to the vigil.
The
struggle cannot be left to a Unite union apparatus that has tolerated
gagging orders, intimidation, and repeatedly isolated disputes.
Leadership must be taken into the hands of democratically elected
rank-and-file committees.
Simon
Dudley, less than a month after his appointment as Reform’s housing
spokesman, said that the 2017 inferno that claimed 72 lives, was a
“tragedy” but “everyone dies in the end.”
