Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: October 19-25
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
Egypt declares state of emergency as anti-colonial struggle against Britain intensifies
100 years ago:
Trotsky and Kamenev removed from politburo of Russian Communist Party
2. Sparsely attended “No Kings” rallies promote Democratic Party amid Trump’s drive toward dictatorship
The day expressed the widening gulf between mass opposition to Trump’s drive toward dictatorship and the efforts of the Democratic Party and its political auxiliaries to contain that opposition within an election campaign.
The contrast with the previous mobilizations was stark. Organizers claimed more than 5 million participants in the first No Kings protests on June 14, 2025, more than 7 million on October 18, 2025, and approximately 8 million on March 28 of this year. No comparable national figure has emerged for Saturday’s events.
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The reduced turnout was what the Democratic Party and its affiliates wanted. Most of the events were organized as local get-out-the vote campaigns. “Unlike previous No Kings actions, No Kings: Vote Early, is not purely a protest,” Indivisible announced. “Now, we are taking the next step, turning people power into voter power.” One local event page instructed, “Please have your signs geared toward voting early.” The organizers made this appeal, as the Trump administration is deploying federal agents to polling sites and trying to purge voter rolls of supposed noncitizens.
In line with the “no politics” call advanced by Indivisible before the event, Democratic Party-approved speakers said nothing about the illegal war against Iran or the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as the witch-hunt against Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, who has been targeted by the Trump administration for deportation.
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The silence of the Democrats on the attacks on Omar underscore that this party is incapable of defending democratic rights, whether its workers and their families being separated, assaulted and killed by the immigration Gestapo or the ongoing assault on constitutional rights.
Despite the Democratic Party politics that pervaded the events, reporters found little enthusiasm for the party. Participants in Washington carried homemade signs opposing war and calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many eagerly accepted socialist literature, including after seeing signs calling for a break with both capitalist parties.
Reporters for the WSWS had a similar experience in Lansing, Michigan. Approved speakers discussed election rules and voting rights without naming Trump, the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. Aside from a reference to “this administration,” the presentations avoided the political crisis: war, deteriorating living conditions and the threat of dictatorship.
Musical performances and sing-alongs were a dominant feature at the events. After brief speeches in Lansing, a parade proceeded with chants of “the people united will never be defeated” and “one vote, my vote.” The audience included retirees, older workers and a contingent of young people. Several young attendees interested in socialism were participating in their first major political rally. Their search for a political way forward found no answer in the proceedings from the platform.
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At every turn the perspective advanced by the Democrats and their adjuncts is that in order to defeat fascism one must vote for the same Democrats that refused to hold Trump and his cabal of insurrectionists responsible for the failed coup, ensuring his return to power five years later.
The smaller gatherings do not mean that popular anger has subsided. On the contrary, they show the limited response to this particular electoral appeal, and even among those who came, the organizers’ perspective met with doubts and opposition.
The Democrats work to smother a hatred of Trump that is broad and growing. Trump’s approval has fallen to 36 percent, his lowest ever. But the Democrats are hostile to a mass movement against Trump from below. They agree with the main elements of Trump’s agenda. Their central difference is over the war against Russia, which will be the main policy of a Democratic Congress if they win in the midterms.
In his report to the Socialist Equality Party’s Ninth Congress in August, David North placed the earlier No Kings protests, “the largest single-day demonstrations in American history,” within a global upsurge of the working class. But, he warned, “The mass movements remain politically captive. The No Kings protests have been channeled back into the Democratic Party, the party of war.” Saturday’s events put that process on open display.
3. Mass mobilization of youth and “Yellow Vests” shakes the French government
If a general strike to bring down Macron and halt social austerity and the escalation of wars in Europe has not already taken place, it is not for lack of will to fight. It is because of the opposition and sabotage of the trade union bureaucracies and their political allies, such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. The inter-union alliance has scheduled only a one-day action for November 5, in an attempt to space out and slow down the rise of the class struggle and prevent a revolutionary confrontation between the workers and a hated French government.
4. French police and state machine overtaken by protests in provincial cities on October 17
Demonstrators chanting “It’s the Revolution, we’re taking the Bastille” entered Marseille city hall before being driven out by the CRS riot police. Violent clashes continued throughout the day between young demonstrators and the police.
5. Student protests in Albania rattle government
A wave of student protests has been rocking the Albanian capital, Tirana, since Tuesday. What began on 13 October as a rally of a few hundred students outside the Ministry of Education has, within a matter of days, grown into a broad-based movement against the entire government of Prime Minister Edi Rama.
By Wednesday, thousands had already gathered outside the ministry, after numerous residents of Tirana had joined the students. The buildings housing the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Justice were set alight during the protests, and protesters also broke into the Ministry of Finance and set documents on fire.
On Thursday, secondary school students joined the protests, and schools in the capital suspended lessons. Due to the protests, Parliament postponed a planned plenary session until next week. On Saturday, thousands protested again and violent street clashes broke out in the center of Tirana.
The movement has now spread across the whole country. Starting in Kamza on the outskirts of Tirana, protests have taken place in Shkodra, Vlora, Lushnja, Elbasan, Durrës and Korçë. Many young people traveled from the provinces to Tirana to continue demonstrating there.
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The police are using extreme brutality against the protesters, some of whom are minors. They are deploying tear gas, water cannons, batons—and, for the first time on Saturday, rubber bullets—against the young protesters. Following widespread outrage at the brutal crackdown, five officers were reportedly suspended for assaulting bystanders.
The students are protesting directly against high tuition fees, unaffordable rents, a lack of financial support, appalling conditions at universities and a dearth of career prospects after graduation. Underlying this is a deep-seated social crisis. On paper, Albania is regarded as one of the most advanced European Union (EU) candidate countries, yet wages, purchasing power and public services lie far below the EU average. For many years now, young people in particular have been leaving the country in droves.
Political scientist Afrim Krasniqi pointed out that students had been protesting peacefully for almost three months. He said the government has ignored their demands and responded with a vicious smear campaign. A law student told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) that he was demonstrating so that corrupt politicians would be brought to justice.
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The student protests are part of a wider protest movement that has gripped the Balkan state since the end of May. The trigger was a tourism project worth around €1.4 billion on the island of Sazan and along the coast near Zvërnec, right next to the Narta Lagoon, a protected habitat for flamingos. The main investor is Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump. After the coastline was cordoned off, the first villagers took to the streets on 23 May; on 30 May, private security personnel attacked demonstrators.
The movement, named after the birds of the lagoon, quickly spread to Tirana and other cities. It has become the largest wave of protests since the collapse of the Stalinist regime in the early 1990s and is deliberately organized independently of political parties. Its starting point—beaches, bays and nature reserves being handed over to billionaires while the population is literally shut out—has become a symbol of a system in which a narrow elite is selling the country off to international capital.
Albania is one of the poorest countries in Europe. More than a fifth of the population is officially classified as poor. The official unemployment rate stood at around 8 percent in the third quarter of 2025, though it was almost twice as high among young people. Yet these official figures barely reflect the reality.
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The events in Albania are not an isolated phenomenon. In France, school students have been blocking their secondary schools since mid-September. They are protesting against overcrowded and dilapidated classrooms, a shortage of teachers, overwhelming timetables and Parcoursup, the French online portal for university admissions. At the same time, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu is pushing through austerity measures totaling €54 billion, while tens of billions are being channeled into the military.
On Saturday, as the situation in Albania escalated, 800,000 people took to the streets in France. Mass demonstrations against high rents, rising prices and unsustainable living conditions have also been taking place for weeks in Spain, Belgium, Portugal and Ireland.
In France too, the movement escalated into a confrontation between young people, the working class and the government. According to the Ministry of Education, lessons were suspended in whole or in part at 891 schools across France, 250 of which were in the Greater Paris area. The National Union of Secondary School Students (USL) put the number of schools blocked by pupils or closed by the authorities at around 1,800, while the Students’ Union reported blockades at 57 universities, including the Sorbonne and the ENS Paris-Saclay.
The police responded to the protests with brutal force. Two students each lost a hand as a result of police grenades, and another was left blind in one eye. Since 28 September, more than 6,000 people have been arrested, the vast majority of them minors.
Here too, the anger is by no means directed solely at dilapidated schools. Many young people are recalling May 1968, when the repression against students triggered a general strike.
The protests in Albania and France are part of an international wave of class struggle that has also swept through other countries, such as Spain and Belgium. Everywhere, the anger of young people and workers is directed against the same trends: austerity, social inequality, police repression, militarization and war.
6. Massive Ukrainian drone attack on St. Petersburg escalates US-NATO war against Russia
Ukraine attacked Russia with more than 1,000 drones overnight Saturday, in the largest bombardment of St. Petersburg since the Second World War. The attack, in which Russia’s Defense Ministry counted 1,015 drones across 15 regions, Crimea and the Black Sea, was one of the heaviest bombardments of Russian territory since the war began.
These strikes are directly funded by the NATO powers, which have provided Ukraine with over $100 billion in weapons, and are carried out on the basis of targeting data provided directly by their militaries.
The latest attack is a response by the NATO powers to the warning Russia gave European governments on September 30, that threats to Russia’s territorial integrity would be met with “the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons.”
Faced with this blunt warning that their actions risk triggering a nuclear war, the NATO powers are escalating. On October 12, General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s top commander in Europe, threatened to “break” the enemy’s “warfighting system,” including “anything and everything that supports, sustains, or controls that force.”
Under these conditions, there is a growing admission within the US and international media that NATO and Russia are entering a “world war.” In one of the foremost examples, the Financial Times published Saturday a column titled, “Are we sleepwalking into World War III?” by its chief foreign affairs commentator, Gideon Rachman. The title of his essay is taken from a 2012 book by Australian historian Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, which provided an apologetic explanation for the policies of German and European imperialism.
According to Clark, the war was the unforeseen outcome of mistaken judgments. The governments of the time and their leaders were not guilty of planning and starting war to achieve geopolitical and economic objectives. This benign interpretation of the war was especially welcomed by the German government and media, which praised Clark’s work and turned him into an intellectual celebrity.
Building upon Clark’s metaphor, Rachman depicts the imperialist powers as similarly clueless about the consequences of their actions. He writes, “Regions and countries that have for decades taken peace for granted—western Europe, east Asia, the Gulf states—now have to wrestle with the prospect, or the reality, of war.” It has become “commonplace,” he notes, “for world leaders to speculate publicly about the outbreak of a third world war.”
Rachman, citing a quote attributed to Leon Trotsky, declares, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
But the US and European leaders are not political somnambulists who are “sleepwalking” into World War III. They have been marching toward it with eyes open since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The first President Bush proclaimed a “new world order” on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War. That war was followed by the intervention in Somalia, the bombing of Bosnia and the 1999 war against Serbia, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the proxy war in Syria and the US-backed Saudi war in Yemen.
Since 2022, these wars have merged into a single global conflagration. It includes the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine; the Israeli genocide in Gaza, armed and defended by Washington; the bombing of Iran in June 2025; and the war against Iran launched on February 28 of this year.
The objective is the redivision of the world among the old imperialist powers. This violent and ongoing project includes the breakup of the existing Russian state, which will open up the vast Eurasian landmass to unfettered capitalist exploitation. For the oligarchs of finance capital, the loss of a few hundred million lives would be a small price to pay for this rich prize.
In Rachman’s telling, however, the danger of world war proceeds entirely from the actions of Russia and China. In this narrative, the threat of “world war” began with the decision Putin made in February 2022, with no antecedent history. Rachman asserts that an inflection point was reached when “Putin launched his ‘special military operation.’ In that time, the global political atmosphere has been transformed.”
The Russian invasion of Ukraine did not come out of nowhere. It was a reactionary and desperate response by the Russian capitalist oligarchy to years of provocations by NATO. NATO’s own leadership has said as much. In an interview published by the Washington Post in May 2023, then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared that the war “didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014.”
In 2014, the United States funded, armed and supported the coup that overthrew the pro-Russian government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and installed the present regime, a dictatorship ruling under martial law. Since then the United States and NATO, as Stoltenberg explained, surged money and weapons to Ukraine, turning it into a frontline state for war against Russia.
But the Maidan coup was itself an outcome of decades of imperialist policy that had pushed the boundaries of the NATO alliance to Russia’s doorstep.
Rachman correctly centers the driving force of the eruption of global war in “a shift in the global balance of power.” He notes that, “In 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the G7 nations—the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan—accounted for around two-thirds of global economic output ... By 2022, the G7 represented about 43 percent of global GDP.”
This shift, according to Rachman, is “encouraging revisionist powers to challenge the global dominance of the US and its allies.” China’s share of world output rose from under 2 percent in 1989 to about 17 percent in 2024, according to World Bank figures.
However, by 2022, Rachman notes, the G7 still accounted for “about half of global military spending.” The old imperialist powers retain a military superiority they no longer possess economically. It is they, not China, that have spent the past 35 years at war, seeking to reverse by force what they are losing in the world economy.
7. Sally Rooney’s books withdrawn from UK sale to avoid prosecution over Palestine Action
The Labour government’s anti-democratic proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization has led to the withdrawal from sale in the UK of books by Sally Rooney, to avoid repression of her protest against the genocide in Gaza.
A bestselling and award-winning Irish novelist, Rooney pledged to give royalties and earnings from her considerable UK sales to Palestine Action. This exposed her and her publisher to prosecution under the Terrorism Act 2000—the same legislation used to criminalize PA—for giving financial aid to a proscribed group.
Under “circumstances where Faber cannot pass on UK earnings to Sally Rooney for her work,” the publisher said, they had mutually agreed to the withdrawal of her books from UK sale.
Others can be targeted. Responding to Adam Boulton’s accusation on Sky News that Rooney’s actions were “anti-Jewish,” the journalist and author Sarah Helm tweeted, “God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action. Sounds like Adam would have all our books swept off the shelves in a jiffy.”
Helm, the author of Gaza: The Long Road to Destruction, 1870-2024 (2025) who has also interviewed Zionists critical of its settlement project, is the wife of Jonathan Powell. Powell served as adviser on national security, foreign policy and intelligence to both Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham. Following demands by Zionist groups, she is now being investigated by the Metropolitan Police “to determine whether any further police investigation may be required.”
Downing Street responded by declaring, “These views are held by an individual who does not represent the government in any capacity.”
Baroness Jacqui Smith, Minister of State for Skills, said the “very careful process… the Home Office went through” in proscribing Palestine Action “has consequences. This is one of those consequences.”
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Palestine Action was proscribed by Keir Starmer’s government after activists entered an RAF base and spray-painted two military aircraft to protest British complicity in the Gaza genocide. Then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced the ban in June 2025, making it a criminal offense to be a member of or express support for the group. The former “crime” carries up to a 14-year sentence.
Banning Palestine Action, a group principally targeting Israeli military supplier Elbit Systems, was aimed at deterring all opposition to the genocide and Labour’s complicity. Thousands were arrested, most for peacefully holding placards reading “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” Under section 13 of the 2000 Terrorism Act, this carries a potential sentence of six months’ imprisonment. Arrests continued even during a judicial review into the decision.
Rooney has been a principled opponent of the Gaza genocide and the repression of opposition to it. She compared Israeli forces firing on an aid distribution site with Palestine Action’s protest action: “One of these actions involved the intentional use of lethal violence against civilians, resulting in the deaths of 23 loved and irreplaceable human beings. The other involved no violence against any living things and resulted in no deaths or injuries. The UK government has now announced its intention to deal with one of these incidents as a terrorist offense. Guess which.”
8. Canada: From the Alberta Prosperity Project to MAGA: The far-right forces behind Alberta separatism
A network of Christian nationalists, anti-vaccine activists, oil executives and Republican political operatives has emerged at the center of the campaign for Alberta independence, exposing the close political relationship between the separatist movement, Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) government and the American far right.
On Monday, October 19, Albertans will vote on whether the provincial government should begin the constitutional process required to hold a future “binding” referendum on separation from Canada along with 9 other questions aimed at advancing the far-right’s political agenda in the province.
The vote follows years of organizing by separatist forces that played an important role in Smith’s rise to power and have since established direct contacts with officials in the Trump administration.
While the Trump administration has avoided explicitly declaring its support for Alberta separatism, it is openly working to exploit the regional divisions within the Canadian bourgeoisie for its own ends. Since returning to the White House, Trump has repeatedly declared his intention to annex Canada as the 51st state or at least crash its economy so as to subordinate the country to US dominance as a vassal. This agenda is part of Trump and the American oligarchy’s drive to establish unchallenged US hegemony in the Western hemisphere to create a base for waging war around the world against its geostrategic rivals, above all China. As for Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and the dominant section of the country’s ruling class, they have rallied around a strategy of intensified worker-exploitation, diminished reliance on the US and expanded partnerships with European imperialism to ensure, in Carney’s own words, that Canadian imperialism is at the “table” of imperialist plunder and not “on the menu” of other states.
The Alberta separatists’ appeal to “Alberta First” regionalism is bound up with demands for unrestricted exploitation of the province’s oil wealth, sweeping reductions in federal authority, attacks on immigrants and a more direct political alignment with the far right and fascist forces in the United States.
Their connections to Smith’s governing party are substantial, despite the premier’s insistence that she supports Alberta remaining in Canada.
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The social and economic factors driving discontent in Alberta have been intensified by declining living standards, deteriorating public services and mounting economic insecurity.
The separatist movement directs these grievances against Ottawa, immigrants and federal restrictions on resource development, while advancing policies that would strengthen the position of the province’s corporate elite.
The federal Liberal government, meanwhile, has responded with its own nationalist appeals, tying opposition to separatism to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s efforts to strengthen Canadian imperialism in its confrontation with Washington.
Carney’s partnership with Smith over pipeline development and energy policy demonstrates the common interests that persist beneath their constitutional disagreements.
The referendum thus exposes competing strategies within the Canadian ruling class over the control of resources, political authority and relations between Canada and the United States.
The growth of the Alberta separatist right and its increasingly extensive connections to Trump’s political movement form part of this wider struggle over the future organization of Canadian and North American capitalism.
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The fight against declining living standards, crumbling public services, war and the growth of far right and dictatorial forms of rule requires the independent political mobilization of the working class, uniting workers in Alberta, across Canada and throughout North America in the struggle for workers’ power and a socialist society based on their common international class interests.
9. India: Protests against Modi government’s purge of voter rolls continue despite mass repression
Despite massive state repression, India’s Narendra Modi-led, far-right BJP government has failed to stamp out a wave of youth-led protests against its purge of millions of rural poor and working-class voters from the electoral rolls.
Last Friday, thousands defied the authorities’ sweeping security crackdown and demonstrated in the heart of New Delhi, India’s capital, in response to a call from the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP)—a recently-formed, “Generation Z” youth protest movement—to unfurl the national flag, “Lehra Do Tiranga,” as part of its campaign to force the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
The BJP-led central and Delhi governments mobilized thousands of police at or near the two protest sites, Jantar Mantar and the Connaught Place park, while, according to press reports keeping tens of thousands of Delhi police and para-militaries in reserve. At least 150 people were arrested at the protests. Earlier in the day, the two most prominent protest leaders—CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and Nehra Bora, the president of the All India Students' Association (AISA)—were taken into “preventive custody.”
Dipke and Bora were effectively “disappeared.” For well over 12 hours, they were denied any contact with their lawyers, organizations, or families, with police refusing to confirm where they were being held. Ultimately, it was learned that Bora was being detained alone at an Anti-Narcotic Task Force office in Manglapuri, some 20 kilometers from central Delhi.
The BJP government has gone to extraordinary lengths to criminalize the burgeoning protest movement. It has deployed state power to quash political opposition on a scale not seen since Indira Gandhi deployed the military to crush a national railway strike in 1974 and then, a year later, imposed the Emergency.
The great fear of Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP is that the protest movement will serve as a catalyst for an eruption of working class opposition to endemic poverty, social inequality on a scale not seen since the height of the British Raj, intensifying worker exploitation, authoritarianism and communal reaction. In April, tens of thousands of workers who took to the streets of Manesar and Nodia, industrial suburbs on Delhi’s outskirts, to protest sweatshop wages and long hours were met with brutal police repression.
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As the WSWS has previously documented, the protests have been triggered by an Indian Express investigation exposing how the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls has struck tens of millions of names—overwhelmingly poor people, migrant workers, Dalits and Muslims—from the voter lists, a gargantuan campaign of disenfranchisement aimed squarely at sections of the population that oppose the BJP.
The state repression directed at the October 16 “Lehra Do Tiranga” protest and the detentions of Dipke and Bora triggered a deluge of critical statements from the entire spectrum of the parliamentary opposition. Former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee declared that “this is nothing short of an undeclared Emergency,” adding that these were the actions of “a fascist regime that cannot tolerate a voice it cannot control.” Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, DMK leader M.K. Stalin and former Delhi Chief Minster Arvind Kejriwal all demanded the immediate release of the two leaders and the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
The theatrical outrage of these opposition leaders cannot conceal the essential character of their politics. They are seeking to shackle the growing rebellion of students and jobless university graduates to the politics and institutions of India’s capitalist establishment, of which they themselves are an integral part.
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None of the organizations leading the movement is calling for the bringing down of the Modi government, which rules through police repression and autocratic methods. All are bitterly opposed to any turn to the working class, the mobilization of its social power in a general strike, and the linking of the struggle to defend democratic rights to the fight against the capitalist oligarchy that stands behind the Modi government.
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The suppression of democratic rights in India is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a global offensive by the capitalist ruling classes against the working class. In the United States, the Trump administration is seeking to rig the 2026 midterm elections, openly praising India's voter purge and SIR as a model. In France and across Europe, governments are deploying police repression against workers and youth protesting austerity, war and the assault on democratic rights. The ongoing genocide in Gaza and the drive toward world war are the most extreme expressions of the same crisis of capitalist rule.
The struggle against the voter purge and the defense of democratic rights cannot be separated from the struggle against the entire capitalist order. Only the building of a mass political movement of the working class in India—one that unites with its working-class brothers and sisters across South Asia in the fight for a United Socialist States of South Asia, as an intermediate step toward world socialism—can find a way out of poverty, war and dictatorship. The enemy is not this minister, this election commissioner, or even simply Modi and his BJP. The enemy is the global capitalist system itself.
The scene is nauseating. Around twenty deputies of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the five from the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) are celebrating together in Magdeburg over the election of a far-right state parliament president, toasting each other in the best of spirits. They have just elected AfD politician Tobias Rausch to head the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament (Landtag) and the fascist ideologue Hans-Thomas Tillschneider as his deputy.The invitation to the celebration came from Jürgen Elsässer, head of the far-right Compact magazine, which has opened a new TV studio in Magdeburg and reported the event on social media. At the celebration they also agreed on how the AfD and the BSW would jointly push a motion through the state parliament and pass speaking time to each other. In this way, they lay the foundation for longer-term cooperation.
The new state premier will be elected in December. Until now, the BSW has claimed that it would not help AfD candidate Ulrich Siegmund win a majority in the first two rounds of voting, which require a candidate to achieve an absolute majority of all members, not just of votes cast. But after the joint celebration, that is in doubt. Even so, Siegmund could still win the secret ballot in the third round, in which only a plurality of the votes cast is required.
If proof were needed that the far-right AfD and Sahra Wagenknecht’s party are close not only on individual political questions but also in program and outlook, and personally, this evening has provided it.
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The World Socialist Web Site, and before it the German-language Neue Arbeiterpresse, have followed Sahra Wagenknecht’s trajectory continuously since the 1990s. She joined the Stalinist state party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), in 1989, shortly before it renamed itself the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and supported the dissolution of East Germany (GDR). Within the PDS she then became spokeswoman for the “Communist Platform” and served the party as a left-wing fig leaf.
What attracted Wagenknecht to the SED and PDS was not communism but Stalinism—the rule of a privileged bureaucracy that rejected the perspective of world socialist revolution, suppressed the working class, used state property for its own enrichment and finally liquidated that property in order to anchor its privileges in capitalist private property.
When the PDS merged with the WASG (Labour and Social Justice-The Electoral Alternative) in 2007 to form Die Linke (Left Party), Wagenknecht was briefly a member of the internal party faction “Anti-capitalist Left.” But she soon distanced herself from it. In 2011 she committed herself unreservedly to capitalism.
Since then, she has moved steadily further to the right. In 2021 her book Die Selbstgerechten (The Self-Righteous Ones) appeared, a tirade against cosmopolitanism and openness to the world. It advocates protectionism and a strong state and denounces immigrants and refugees as wage depressors, strikebreakers and culturally alien elements. The book anticipated the program of the BSW, which partly overlaps with that of the AfD: a mixture of social demagogy, empty peace rhetoric, crude nationalism and agitation against refugees.
Wagenknecht speaks for social layers that for a long time were occupied with keeping class antagonisms under control—trade union bureaucrats, Stalinist and social democratic functionaries. In the post-World War II decades, this was still associated with social concessions and rising living standards. But that has long ceased to be the case.
The gulf between rich and poor, the increase in arms spending, the bitter struggle for raw materials and markets and the greed of the financial markets demand the destruction of all social and democratic gains. This is the reason for the shift to the right of all pro-capitalist parties, including the trade unions, and for the rise of far-right parties.
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The fight against war, social devastation and fascism requires a movement of the international working class that is independent of all establishment parties and the trade unions and fights for the overthrow of capitalism.
11. Australia: Silence on Labor’s agenda at University of Melbourne strike rally
Academic and professional staff members at the University of Melbourne last week held their second strike this year, followed by a week-long ban on teaching. Around 750 staff and supporters gathered for a rally following nominal morning picket lines.
Amid rising discontent over deteriorating conditions and continued real pay cutting under the Albanese Labor government, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) is seeking a new three-year enterprise agreement with the management, as it is at other universities across Australia.
Despite reporting intensive bargaining three hours per day, NTEU branch secretary Elizabeth Strakorssch said there had been “no movement” on “major issues.” The NTEU log of claims, operating within the limits set by the trade union’s national executive, calls for only a flat 20 percent salary increase over three years, despite soaring inflation fueled by the illegal US war on Iran supported by the Labor government.
Many of the other claims are vague, such as “the Agreement will include provisions that protect staff against adverse effects of artificial intelligence systems” and, for professional staff, “the Agreement shall provide for enforceable workload protections and review procedures for staff.”
These claims are in line with what the NTEU pushed through recently at Western Sydney University (WSU), providing no protection against further pro-corporate and pro-military restructuring like that which has eliminated about 4,000 jobs nationally over the past two years. A similar sellout is being prepared at the University of Melbourne.
As the WSU Rank-and-File Committee documented in detail, the NTEU and the other main campus union, the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) rammed through enterprise agreements at WSU, with small voting turnouts, imposing real pay cuts—a nominal 3.5 percent rise per year—increased workloads and no protection against further restructuring like the “Western Reset” that the unions agreed to last year, which axed nearly 200 jobs and displaced about 600 professional staff.
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To break out of the Labor-trade union political and industrial straitjacket, educators and students need to build new forms of organization—rank-and-file committees—totally independent of the union apparatuses, that will develop and fight for demands based on social and human need, including decent pay and conditions and high-quality free education for all, not the dictates of the capitalist elite and the war machine.
Such committees are essential to link up with similar struggles of workers in the schools, hospitals and all industries against the militarist and austerity program, and with educators and other workers globally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
12. Australian state Labor government decimates drama studies in schools
A decade-long collapse in drama enrollments by final year secondary school students in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) has reached crisis proportions, with teachers warning the subject is being driven out of public schools.
The figures, reported by the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) last Monday, confirm the trajectory that the World Socialist Web Site has documented since Premier Chris Minns’ state Labor government launched its sweeping “de-cluttering” of the creative arts curriculum in 2024.
Public school Higher School Certificate (HSC) enrollments in drama have fallen from 2,403 in 2016 to 1,441 last year—a decline of 40 percent. Fewer than 1,000 girls in public schools now study the subject, alongside just 436 boys. Across the public, private and Catholic systems, enrollments have dropped by a third, from 4,724 to 3,192. Dance, textiles and design have suffered comparable losses of around 20 percent.
Drama NSW president Amy Gill described the situation as “devastating,” adding: “There’s a real sense in the drama education community that we are in crisis.”
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The decline in school-level drama cannot be separated from the assault on arts education at the tertiary level, which the WSWS has documented since 2021. The federal government’s decision to nearly double the cost of arts and humanities degrees sent an unmistakable signal that an education in the arts was, in the words of University of Melbourne academic Jo Caust, “effectively an indulgence.”
This was accompanied by the closure of theater studies and musicology at Monash University, the abolition of drama departments at the Newcastle and La Trobe universities, and cuts to fine arts and design at Griffith University’s Queensland College of the Arts.
Research published this year confirms a nationwide reduction in creative arts courses at universities and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) colleges.
The result is a self-reinforcing spiral downwards. Governments cut funding to the arts; universities respond by closing courses; students and parents, seeing that the arts are being strangled, steer away from creative subjects; enrollments fall; and governments then cite the falling enrollments as justification for further cuts.
There is a further dimension to the assault on drama. The Group Performance and Individual Projects targeted by the Minns government are the most student-centered components of the HSC, driven by students’ own interests and frequently exploring contentious social and political questions—climate change, the plight of refugees, attacks on democratic rights, the horrors of war. The Labor government, and the ruling elite as a whole, has no interest in developing young people as politicized critical thinkers.
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Across the country, educators and school workers are fighting soaring workloads, staffing shortages and real pay cuts, confronting sellout agreements pushed by the Australian Education Union and National Tertiary Education Union. The same trade unions have done nothing to defend drama studies.
The Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the rank-and-file educators’ network, calls on educators and school workers to establish rank-and-file committees, independent of the union bureaucracies, to fight for a counter-offensive against the assault on the arts in schools, linked to the struggles over conditions and wages, and for a fully funded public education system.
Only the working class, organized independently, can guarantee the conditions in which the creative capacities of young people can develop to the full. Rank-and-file committees must be built to unite workers across workplaces and industries, as part of a broader movement to fight for the socialist transformation of society.
Recently, the World Socialist Web Site spoke with Richie Respek, a New York-New Jersey port trucker and founder of the Pier Trucker Facebook group, about the long hours, unpaid labor and deteriorating working conditions truck drivers face.
Approximately 16,000 truckers haul freight from the New York-New Jersey ports, according to Respek, with an estimated 75 to 85 percent classified as owner-operators. These drivers transport containers from ports and rail yards to warehouses across the Northeast and beyond.
14. 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.
