Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
On Monday, Zohran Mamdani, the most prominent elected official of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), hosted Donald Trump at Gracie Mansion. On Tuesday, Trump went before the UN General Assembly and threatened to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” of Iran and “drive them into hell.”
The sequence has a precedent. Mamdani’s last meeting with Trump, at the White House, came two days before the administration launched the war against Iran. The chronology says everything about the political character of the DSA. It is not an opponent of American imperialism. It is an appendage of it.
Trump’s threat against Iran is the language of Hitler, a threat of genocide against a country of more than 90 million people. It is in and of itself a war crime. It came amid gloating (“to the victor belong the spoils”) over the plunder of Venezuela, whose president was seized by American forces earlier this year and now sits in a federal prison in New York.
Mamdani said nothing about Iran when he spoke alongside Trump on Monday. Iran also went unmentioned in a sympathetic, 22-minute interview afterward with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Explaining his alliance with Trump, Mamdani said that for all their differences, “we have one thing that brings us together, which is the love of New York City.” Since Tuesday, the mayor of the largest city in the United States has said nothing about a threat to exterminate a nation.
This is not an oversight. Mamdani’s silence on Iran is a political position. It expresses the DSA’s acceptance of, and support for, the global aims of American imperialism.
In the CNN interview, Mamdani called Netanyahu “a war criminal” and said the International Criminal Court’s warrant for his arrest should be honored. Yet he embraces Netanyahu’s chief sponsor and protector, who by any rational legal standard should be arrested for war crimes himself. The denunciation of Netanyahu is a fig leaf for his supporters. The embrace of Trump—would-be dictator and actual mass murderer—is Mamdani’s real politics.
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There is another part of Trump’s [Tuesday] speech that was highly significant. The Cuban government, which he said “would fall,” has “cultivated ties to subversive and radical groups such as the Communist Party USA, Antifa and the Democratic Socialists of America.” Trump was restating the State Department’s Cuba report of July, which treats the DSA, the Communist Party, the National Lawyers Guild and Code Pink as extensions of Havana. Antifa has already been designated a “terrorist organization.” To name the DSA beside it is to declare its activities could also be criminalized.
In response to this direct threat, Mamdani has said nothing. Jacobin has published nothing. The DSA’s only formal reply to the charges remains its statement on the State Department report in August, which pleaded that “[Trump’s] report admits that DSA does not organize on behalf of the Cuban Government.”
Nor has the DSA offered any public statement on the meeting at Gracie Mansion itself. The closest thing to one came from Grace Mausser, co-chair of DSA’s New York City chapter, who told Politico: “Most people within DSA understand it’s a strategy and that Trump is a very sensitive and petulant person who receives any perceived slights in unpredictable ways. It’s very risky not just to Zohran himself but to the entire city to insult him directly.”
It is difficult to imagine a more groveling statement. Trump’s “unpredictable” responses include threatening a nation of 90 million with annihilation and branding his political opponents as terrorists. The DSA’s answer is not to oppose him but to take care not to upset him. It is the logic of the courtier. The tyrant is sensitive, so he must be flattered.
Trump’s real fear is not the DSA. The capitalist oligarchy has taken the measure of people like Mamdani and Trump knows what he is dealing with. The target of Tuesday’s tirade is the working class, the social force whose shift to the left has found a distorted initial form in the DSA’s electoral successes. Millions of workers and young people are coming into opposition to war and oligarchy and drawing the conclusion that capitalism itself is the problem.
The conduct of Mamdani and the DSA cannot be explained merely by the personal opportunism and general swinishness of the individuals involved. It has a class basis. The DSA speaks for privileged sections of the upper middle class, whose comfortable position depends on the stability of the capitalist order and the global dominance of American capitalism. They want a larger share of the spoils to be had at home. They have no quarrel with how the spoils are acquired abroad.
Nor will their craven opportunism necessarily save them. Mamdani now basks in the glow of Trump’s smiling villainy. Three weeks before their first meeting, Trump called him “a 100% Communist Lunatic.” Earlier this month every House Republican voted to declare the DSA’s ideology “incompatible with American values and the United States Constitution.” When the political winds shift, Mamdani can be vilified as quickly as he has been embraced.
The fight against imperialist war cannot be waged through the DSA. It can only be waged in opposition to it, through the independent political mobilization of the working class, in the United States and internationally, against both parties of Wall Street and the capitalist system that produces war and dictatorship. That requires a genuinely socialist and internationalist leadership: the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International.
2. In warmongering tirade, Zelensky boasts of arms deals negotiated at UN
This year’s United Nations General Assembly has been transformed into a war summit by the US and European imperialist powers, who have turned an institution whose charter prohibits aggressive war into an arms convention.
The event, which began Tuesday and featured a genocidal tirade by US President Donald Trump in which he threatened to “annihilate” the Islamic Republic of Iran, was capped Wednesday by the remarks of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which he demanded the military defeat of Russia, boasted of the Russian dead and praised the series of arms deals concluded at the UN summit.
Zelensky seemed to take Trump’s genocidal speech as a baseline, adding to it a call for unrestricted war against a nuclear-armed state.
Russia, Zelensky said, “could never have imagined that Ukrainian long-range drones would one day reach its factories … thousands of kilometers from our borders.” He added: “No Russian admiral expected that we would be able to sink Russia’s pride cruisers.”
On September 9, in an attack Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces called a record, Ukraine struck gas-condensate plants in Russia’s Yamalo-Nenets region, nearly 3,000 kilometers from the border.
Zelensky pledged to make the coming winter “painful for Russia.” Boasting that Russia had “lost control of its diesel oil industry,” a phrase he took from a social media post Trump published Monday, Zelensky added: “It is hard to imagine a more humiliating loss for a country that has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and takes so much pride in its oil exports.”
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Zelensky said “the Russian army lost 248,964 people on the battlefield” between January and August, “killed and badly wounded,” adding: “We have an archive of drone videos, videos showing thousands and thousands of Russians losing their lives in kill zones.”
Zelensky boasted of the arms deals concluded at the UN summit: “Today, I signed a drone deal, serious drone deal with Finland, and this is significant. Also today, I signed a security agreement with Australia, and drones are part of it too. And we are preparing drone deals with Canada and with other countries as well.”
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At Trump’s meeting with Zelensky on Tuesday, a British reporter asked point-blank about the prospect of war between Britain and Russia. “A lot of people in the UK are very worried about the mood music from the UK and other European leaders about the inevitability of direct conflict between us and Russia,” the reporter said. “Can you stop that happening?”
Trump and Zelensky gave the reporter no serious answer, but the answer came in the form of Zelensky’s speech. The NATO powers have used the UN summit to massively expand the war with Russia, setting the world on the course for an increasingly direct clash between nuclear-armed states.
3. Pressures building up in yen carry trade
At the end of July, the US and Japan carried out a joint intervention to try to halt the decline in its value against the US dollar.The US joined the operation with the claim it was “helping out” a friend. In fact, the intervention was undertaken by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to defend the US and its financial markets. He feared that Japan would be forced to sell dollars to defend the yen, leading to a decline in the value of US long bonds and a rise in their yield (interest rate).
The intervention was undertaken in such a way as to avoid this problem. The US made available to Japan dollar funds from the US Treasury so that it did not have to sell dollar assets, while its own operations to support the yen were carried out by using euros (unbeknownst to the European Central Bank).
Underscoring the significance of the issue, Bessent warned that “disorderly yen markets can trigger forced unwinds, which could destabilise global markets.”
However, the operation largely failed when the yen, after an initial bounce, started to fall again. Bessent again intervened to apply pressure to the Bank of Japan to lift its interest rate, which it did by a quarter of a percentage point last Friday. But so far this has had little effect, meaning that further interest rises will be needed to halt the yen’s downward slide.
But significant moves in this direction, while they may arrest the yen’s slide, can cause another problem by undermining the so-called yen carry trade, which plays a major role in US financial markets.
For almost 30 years, hedge funds and other investors have been taking out loans in the Japanese currency at low interest rates to make bets in markets around the world, particularly the US.
The size of the trade has been difficult to assess, but it has been estimated to exceed $2 trillion and is at the highest level it has ever been. It has played a significant role in the US Treasury market and more recently in providing finance for the AI boom.
The trade depends on the maintenance of low interest rates in Japan and a low value of the yen.
If either of these begins to rise, then the value of the dollar assets of investors falls in relation to the yen in which their loans have been taken out. This can lead to margin calls from lenders (demands to increase the collateral for their debts) and a sell-off of dollar assets to meet them.
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“Japan is by far the biggest source of foreign direct investment into the US. So if those flows reversed, it would probably have a significant effect on global markets as well as the global economy,” he said.
The impact of any unwinding or reversal of the yen carry trade has already been seen, as recently as July-August 2024 when, after a sudden decline in the market value of AI and tech stocks on Wall Street, the value of the yen began to surge.
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The reliance on leverage, it continued, meant investors would have to respond more strongly to adverse shocks and if this took place “in a jittery and illiquid market environment, volatility could be further exacerbated, and a negative feedback loop be kindled.” In short, rather than being a passing phase, sharp movements in the yen carry trade could set off a much broader and deeper crisis.
If a major disturbance could be set off two years ago on “seemingly minor economic news” then what of the situation today? The Fed has initiated rate hikes for the first time in three years, the Bank of Japan has now lifted its interest rate to the highest level since 1995, and US long-term bonds are trading with yields higher than they have been in almost two decades.
This new situation has brought warnings that the yen carry trade could be the source of a significant crisis of the entire financial system.
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As foreign exchange analyst at Citi, Osamu Takashima, put it: “Once doubts arise about their dollar positions abroad, hedging transactions and repatriating [of capital] this time could be unprecedentedly severe.”
4. Russia holds first war-time parliamentary elections
In the first parliamentary elections held in Russia since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the ruling United Russia party, which is associated with President Vladimir Putin, won a clear majority with 355 seats. The Stalinist Communist Party of the Russian Federation came in second with 40 seats. The far-right nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia received 25 seats, and the New People Party 20 seats. All parties that were allowed to participate in the elections have expressed their support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The elections were entirely dominated by the war. Several candidates running for United Russia were military veterans. Vladimir Putin, although not formally a member of United Russia, publicly threw his support behind the party—something he had previously avoided. Shortly before the elections, he also called upon the population to turn out and vote, stating, “This will become our joint response to those who want to weaken Russia, contain its development, deprive us of sovereignty and the right to determine our fate ourselves. Participation in the elections—this is your joint contribution to the victory of Russia.”
The elections were held amidst Ukraine’s biggest drone attack on Russian territory, involving some 1,600 drones. At least two people died in the Moscow region as a result of the drone strikes. According to Russian officials, many of the drones targeted electoral infrastructure.
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Voter turnout was 59 percent. While still low, it was the second-highest voter participation in Russia since the 1991 destruction of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Among those eligible to vote were residents of the Donbass in areas occupied by Russia since 2022.
In an indication of immense political tensions within the ruling class, in the months preceding the election, the Kremlin made sure to eliminate parties and candidates that openly challenged the war and other policies of the government. The pro-NATO opposition party Yabloko was banned from participating in the elections and its deputy head, Lev Shlosberg, was sentenced to 11 years and 1 month in prison. Several members of the KPRF, too, were barred from participating through various administrative maneuvers as well as last-minute criminal charges brought against them. While the majority of the KPRF and its leadership back the Putin regime and its war in Ukraine, there has been a wing in the party advocating a rapprochement with the NATO-backed opposition around the late Alexei Navalny. Since the banning of Yabloko, sections of the KPRF have also tried to appeal more directly to the former’s electorate.
During the elections, the KPRF reported multiple violations of electoral regulations. Its observers were barred from doing their work in 21 regions. Other parties, including Just Russia, also reported violations.
But the high voter turnout and election results cannot be reduced to the anti-democratic measures of the Kremlin, no matter how reactionary they are. The elections expressed, in a highly distorted way, the immense anxiety and concern within the working class and broader population about what is correctly perceived as an escalating attack by the imperialist powers. The memories of the Second World War, when Nazi Germany, with the help of nationalist collaborators from across Eastern Europe, invaded the Soviet Union, are still very vivid among the population. An estimated 27 million Soviet citizens were killed during the war, including 2 million Soviet Jews and significant portions of the civilian population in major cities such as Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Large parts of the western regions of the Soviet Union lay in ruins. There is barely a family in Russia or any other country of the former Soviet Union that did not lose one or, more often, multiple family members to the imperialist attack. The fact that the imperialist powers, and especially Germany, are now again sending tanks against Russia, while enabling Ukraine to rain missiles and drones on Russian cities, has only reinforced those memories, provoking immense anger and fear.
However, the vote also reflects dangerous illusions that the Putin regime, with its combination of chauvinism, militarism and appeals for a negotiated settlement with imperialism, can mitigate this existential danger and prevent a further broadening of the war.
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Neither the Putin regime’s attempts to appease the imperialist powers and “restore” relations, nor the preparations for a much broader military conflict, are capable of containing the existential threat posed to the working class by the emerging imperialist world war. It is a policy that is rooted in the class interests of an oligarchy that arose out of the Stalinist counterrevolution against the 1917 October Revolution, the first socialist revolution that successfully overthrew the capitalist class and made large portions of the globe inaccessible to direct imperialist exploitation for over seven decades.
In destroying the Soviet Union, the Stalinist bureaucracy—out of which the former KGB agent Putin and many oligarchs directly emerged—worked closely with the same imperialist “partners” that have now launched a renewed imperialist assault on Russia in an attempt to obtain full and direct control of its vast resources. At the time, the Soviet bureaucracy declared that the concept of “imperialism,” developed by Marxists, most notably Lenin in the early 20th century, was a “myth.” With the invasion of Ukraine, which had long been provoked by NATO and its proxy regime in Kiev, the oligarchy has been seeking to return to the “partnership” with the imperialist powers that underlay a protracted period in which the oligarchy could enrich itself, while the working class was plunged into destitution.
But the response of the imperialist powers has not been to negotiate, but to escalate and broaden the conflict. From their standpoint, the invasion of Ukraine, with the immense damage it caused to the political consciousness of the working class, was a welcome opportunity to realize long-held domestic and foreign policy goals. Even as the Ukraine war has turned out to be a bloody debacle, the European imperialist powers in particular have responded by deepening their offensive. This cannot be explained by poor policy decisions. Underlying the renewed push by world imperialism to seize control of the resources of the former Soviet Union is the crisis of the world capitalist system, which has been dramatically accelerated by the development of technologies such as artificial intelligence that heavily rely on critical minerals and energy resources—raw materials that Russia has in large quantities.
No appeals to reason and no military pressure will halt this unfolding imperialist redivision of the world. The only way for the working class to intervene in this dangerous development from the standpoint of its own interests is through the methods of class struggle and a revival of its internationalist Marxist traditions, which the Stalinist bureaucracy and its heirs in the oligarchy have sought to destroy. This means fighting to build the Trotskyist movement in the former Soviet Union and to unite the working class in Russia, Ukraine and beyond in opposition to the ruling class in all countries and the capitalist system as a whole.
Labour’s business secretary Jonathan Reynolds announced plans last week for the Burnham government to “work toward the public acquisition of Speciality Steels UK (SSUK).” SSUK is the UK’s third-largest steelmaking facility, with sites at Stocksbridge, Rotherham and Brinsworth in South Yorkshire and Wednesbury in the West Midlands.
Presented as an intervention to protect 1,300 steelworkers whose company went into liquidation last August, the takeover is being justified as a measure to protect jobs and industrial security. But the government’s own statements point to a different priority: securing SSUK for Britain’s aerospace and defense industries, strengthening the industrial base for rearmament.
The media and trade unions have described the plans as “nationalization”, a term the government has pointedly avoided. Burnham has already abandoned a pledge to bring Thames Water into public ownership. The privatization of water, which has led to the rundown of infrastructure, mass pollution of rivers and seas, and the enrichment of shareholders, has become a symbol for the looting of public services.
Burnham claimed he would end this Thatcherite economic legacy, but while his government shrinks from public ownership of a socially necessary utility, it has rushed into “public acquisition” of a steel company because of its associated importance for war production.
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The takeover of SSUK is part of a wider rearmament program by the Burnham government as part of its escalation of the NATO proxy war against Russia, with an additional £15 billion for rearmament over four years, taking planned military spending to £298 billion by 2029/30.
SSUK produces specialist steels used in aircraft landing gear, engines, turbines, military vehicles and power generation. Losing that capacity would make the British arms industry more dependent on foreign suppliers.
Britain’s ageing steel plants confront a crisis of profitability, with energy costs 50 percent higher than in France and Germany. Decarbonization requires major investment, while global competition keeps prices down. Private investors are unwilling to commit the long-term capital required. For British imperialism, the military value of steel is greater than its market value.
The same logic was behind the Conservative government’s decision in 2021 to purchase Sheffield Forgemasters, which produces specialized steels for Trident nuclear submarine components and artillery barrel forgings for Ukraine through BAE Systems as part of NATO’s war against Russia.
Arms production is also being embedded in universities. Through the Defence Universities Alliance, the Ministry of Defence is reorganising teaching, research and governance around the demands of NATO rearmament. The Alliance describes South Yorkshire as “Home to the University of Sheffield’s world-leading Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre. A growing defence cluster bolstered by BAE Systems’ new artillery factory.”
The trade union bureaucracy has responded with wholehearted support for the Burnham government’s intervention at SSUK.
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The government’s priority is not securing jobs but justifying and implementing militarism. Maintaining a workforce for war production will not reverse the social devastation created by the mass closure of steel plants through the privatisation of British Steel from 1988-1999, with the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs.
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There are no shared “national interests” between steelworkers and the trade union bureaucracy which is working with the government to impose austerity to fund the expansion of military spending. The same government invoking “national security” to bring steel plants under state control is cutting social spending and demanding that workers pay for rearmament through lower living standards.
“National security” is invoked to try and silence broad-based anti-war sentiment against escalating military violence by the British ruling class—paid for first through workers’ living standards and ultimately through their lives. The UK economy and society are being “made war ready”. The government purchase of UKSS is therefore a strategic military acquisition, not an industrial rescue package.
Steelworkers in Britain at SSUK and beyond should unite with their co-workers globally against the division of workers into competing national camps. Workers face a common assault on jobs and corporate restructuring to boost profits amid an intensified trade war. They should build rank-and-file organizations independent of union bureaucracies and governments, fighting for secure jobs, decent conditions and workers’ control of production.
The skills of steel workers should be used for useful production: housing, infrastructure, energy, transport and the needs of society—not bullets and missiles. The resources for this must be taken out of the hands of the private corporations and arms companies whose profits are being swelled through war abroad and class war against the working class at home.
6. Thomas Ruff’s jpegs ny: A formalist response to the September 11 attacks
To mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the David Zwirner gallery in New York is exhibiting German photographer Thomas Ruff’s jpegs ny series. Each of the 12 works on view is an image of the attacks that the artist downloaded from the internet, enlarged and manipulated. The exhibition will be on view until October 17.
Ruff is a prominent member of the Düsseldorf School of photography, alongside other artists such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth. These photographers absorbed the premises of Conceptual Art from their teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher, who rejected expressiveness and artistic personality, instead emphasizing an impersonal, quasi- [or pseudo-]scientific approach that included frontal views, even lighting and sharp focus. Social relations, historical context and even human beings were banished from their work. The Bechers also worked in series, accumulating images like specimens.
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Ruff’s approach jibes with the postmodernist questioning (or denial) of objective social reality. One thinks of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), who theorized the breakdown of the distinction between the real and its representation and held that signs increasingly circulate without stable referents. This type of deeply pessimistic, passive and consciously anti-Marxist perspective has influenced Ruff’s work since his student years.
September 11 is a weighty, complex topic that is difficult to treat artistically. It raises the questions of terrorism, the continuous wars that US imperialism has been waging since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, President George W. Bush’s so-called war on terror, the normalization of torture and the attack on democratic rights. For artists who wish to respond to these events but lack an understanding of history and an engagement with the class struggle, it is nigh impossible to produce anything other than depictions of horror or tragedy.
Ruff’s self-referential formalism is inherently incapable of exposing any new insights about September 11. Rather, it risks emptying the events of their historical and social meaning. Looking at several of these works, the viewer may even find him- or herself strangely unmoved. This is noncommittal art that has renounced the cognition of social life. Ruff is emblematic of a layer of artists who have been cut off from the working class and who have retreated into hermetic formal experimentation. The ongoing radicalization of workers and youth around the world will produce a new art capable of revealing the true social relations and fueling a movement for revolutionary change.
Unifor has said contract negotiations at Stellantis Canada are at an “impasse.” Yet it has refused to call its more than 9,000 members at the Detroit Three automaker out on strike, although their contract expired Monday, September 21.
In the face of repeated company provocations, the union refuses to even set a strike deadline.
Last month, the Detroit Three automaker reneged on its repeated pledges that its Brampton, Ontario, assembly plant would reopen—eliminating in one fell swoop close to a quarter of its Canadian workforce and placing the jobs of thousands of auto parts workers in jeopardy.
Then on September 11, as negotiations with Unifor were in high-gear, the company announced it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the Canadian-based arms manufacturer Roshel to buy the Brampton plant.
Last week, Stellantis Canada President Trevor Longley sent a letter to all 2,200 Brampton workers still on the Unifor membership rolls outlining the company’s intention to permanently close the plant, which was shuttered in 2024 as part of a promised model changeover to produce the next-generation Jeep Compass. Due to “unpredictable trade policies, challenging regulatory requirements and affordability pressures” Stellantis, Longley declared, does not see “a sustainable long-term business case that would support continued operations at the facility.”
Stellantis’ scrapping of the Brampton plant is part of a global reorganization of the auto industry. Automakers around the world are intensifying worker-exploitation in response to trade war; the climate change-driven transition to electric vehicles; the advent of artificial intelligence (AI); and a developing global war of which the NATO-instigated war with Russia over Ukraine and the US-Israeli war of aggression on Iran are two elements.
Working hand in glove with government, the transnational automakers are determined to use this reorganization to slash jobs, impose speed-up, and swell profits.
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The response of the Unifor bureaucracy—like that of the UAW south of the border and the corporatist unions globally—is not to mobilize worker opposition, uniting workers across international borders in opposition to all layoffs, concessions and plant closures.
Rather it is to intensify their collaboration with the automakers and their “own” national governments in fighting for corporate market share, waging trade war and pursuing rearmament.
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The World Socialist Web Site can’t say anything definitive about what role the government has played in the Stellantis-Roshel purchase agreement.
But what is a matter of public record is that the Carney government is prioritizing the rapid expansion of Canada’s military-industrial base; has previously voiced support for turning GM’s shuttered CAMI plant in Ingersoll, Ontario, to military production, and is desperately courting global investment by intensifying the class-war assault on the working class. This includes, just in recent days, announcing a mega tax cut for big business, the privatization of the country’s four largest airports, and the “normalization” of the arbitrary strikebreaking powers accorded the labour minister under Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code.
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The Carney government, building on the rearmament drive initiated by the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, has pledged to spend 5 percent of the GDP—or more than $150 billion—per year on the military and related infrastructure by 2035. This will be paid for through sweeping public spending austerity, including the evisceration of Medicare and other social supports.
The Liberal government’s Defense Industrial Strategy has the goal of producing 70 percent of the military’s required equipment in Canada, an economic nationalist agenda like that advocated by Unifor, aimed at laying the basis for waging war.
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If auto workers are to fight back against layoffs, concessions and the militarization of the economy, they have to recognize that the current contract dispute is not in any sense of the word a traditional collective bargaining struggle.
Workers can only defend their interests through class struggle, rejecting the subordination of their jobs and livelihood to the profits of the automakers and the predatory interests of the rival imperialist and great-powers.
In opposition to Payne and the Unifor bureaucracy, those to whom Stellantis Canada workers should be turning are Stellantis workers and auto workers across North America and globally—not the Carney Liberal government (whose election the union backed) and Ontario’s Doug Ford-led Tory government (with which the Brampton local union leadership has forged close ties.)
An appeal from the Stellantis Canada workers to oppose all multi-tier wages, speed-up and unsafe working conditions, and job cuts and plant closures would strike a powerful chord among workers in the United States, who are being radicalized and moving into struggle against Trump and everything he represents, and with their class brothers and sisters in Mexico and internationally.
Already, Volkswagen workers in Germany have formed an independent rank-and-file committee to fight mass layoffs while similar rank-and-file committees have been formed in industries across North America.
The most conscious expression of the upsurge of working-class opposition to war, dictatorship, job losses, and deteriorating living standards is the campaign for UAW president of socialist autoworker Will Lehman. Lehman advocates a rebellion of the rank and file against the bureaucracy through the building of democratically controlled rank-and-file committees to put power on the shop floor and abolish the union apparatus. He calls for the unification of workers in the US with their class brothers and sisters in Canada, Mexico, and around the world to counterpose an international strategy for workers’ power to the global onslaught on autoworkers and the entire working class by the ruling elite.
Canadian autoworkers should support Lehman’s fight and develop cross-border ties through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. Workers across North America must advance their independent class interests by adopting a socialist-internationalist program and fighting together for the establishment of workers governments that puts social needs before private profit by transforming the banks and key industries like auto into public utilities.
8. Rape of a student at Lima’s Naval Lyceum: The brutality of Peru’s military apparatus
On September 15, a 16-year-old fourth-year secondary student at the Almirante Guise Naval Lyceum in Lima’s San Borja district was sexually assaulted by a group of fifth-year classmates aboard the school bus carrying the futsal (indoor soccer) team back from an inter-school championship. According to the complaint, the attackers used an object, and prosecutors are investigating the assault as rape.
On September 16, the family filed a complaint at the San Borja police station. The Seventh Family Prosecutor’s Office of Central Lima opened an investigation; ten minors were detained, and on September 18 the Third Family Court of Lima ordered four months of preventive detention—the maximum permitted by law—for six of them, who were transferred to the Lima Juvenile Diagnostic and Rehabilitation Center, known as Maranguita.
The abuse cannot be explained as an isolated and extraordinary case, nor as the excesses of a military “culture” or a supposed “hyper-masculinity.” The sexual violence at the Naval Lyceum is the expression, in an elite educational setting, of the function of the capitalist state’s military apparatus: to brutalize, discipline and subjugate. And the institutional response—first minimizing the crime, then sacrificing a handful of adolescents and three staff members to leave the institution itself untouched—confirms that function.
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The school’s first response was to play down what had happened. In its September 16 statement to parents, the administration described the incident as a “serious act of alleged physical aggression,” without mentioning its sexual character, and asked that it not be publicized.
It was the victim’s family, not the school, that went to the police. According to testimony reported by ATV, the principal called the parents in at 7:30 the following morning and told them to file the complaint themselves. The regional director of education for Metropolitan Lima, Cornelio Gonzáles Torres, acknowledged that hours later the school still had not registered the case in SíSeVe, the Education Ministry’s system for reporting school violence, and described the school’s conduct as “negligence.”
Three adults were aboard the bus, the driver and two of the school’s coaches. According to the authorities, they supposedly noticed nothing during the trip; the vehicle had no cameras. According to the victim’s testimony, on arriving back at the school some of the attackers went out to eat at a Chinese restaurant as if nothing had happened.
The father of one of the students under investigation, who spat at a journalist outside the police station, described the rape as “a game that got out of hand” and presented the attackers as “sporty kids.” He later declared that he should have been “more aggressive” with the press.
The Navy, which runs the school through its Welfare Directorate, suspended the principal, a teacher and the soccer coach pending the investigation, and hastened to rule out any interference in the process. The Defense Ministry of Keiko Fujimori’s government confined itself to instructing the Navy to guarantee “due process.” Classes were moved online.
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The Almirante Guise Naval Lyceum is run by the Welfare Directorate of the Peruvian Navy, and admission is reserved first for the children of naval personnel. Applicants must present the father’s Naval Identity Card, and the children of civilians are admitted only to fill remaining places, paying monthly fees of 2,000 to 3,000 soles, compared with the 200 to 500 soles paid by naval families.
It is not a neutral educational institution: it is a training apparatus that reproduces, from childhood, the hierarchy and ideology of the repressive apparatus of the state. Its military regime and its closed, hierarchical character are not accidental features but go to the heart of the school’s mission: to train students in unthinking obedience and in the capacity to exercise violence. The discrimination “by stripes” that parents denounce shows that the Navy’s chain of command is reproduced among the students themselves.
Karl Liebknecht, in Militarism and Anti-Militarism (1907), explains that mistreatment within military institutions—“the horrors of the barracks”—is “an indispensable auxiliary” of military education. Members of the armed forces are not born fit for murderous violence: they must be broken psychologically, stripped of their humanity and trained in unthinking obedience. Sexual aggression against the most vulnerable—in this case, a student in a lower grade—is an extension of that process of brutalization.
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The Naval Lyceum, which trains the children of the Navy, reproduces the same logic of domination in the educational setting. The group violence against a student in a lower grade is a rehearsal, in miniature, of the brutal hierarchy that the military apparatus exercises against the working class and poor.
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To reduce this case to a moral condemnation of the act—or to demands for “better supervision” and “more precautionary measures”—is to obscure its significance. The case also takes on a particular urgency in the current political environment. In her July 28 inaugural address, Keiko Fujimori announced:
The Armed Forces will temporarily assume leadership of security operations and the control of internal order.
The institution whose flagship school tried to pass off a rape as “physical aggression” is part of the same apparatus to which the Fujimori government is now handing control of the streets.
The fight against this violence cannot take the form of reforms within the Navy or ministerial reorganizations. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class to dismantle the repressive apparatus of the state and against the capitalist system that sustains it. Only the abolition of the bourgeois state and its military apparatus—as Lenin argued in The State and Revolution—can put an end to the violence that this apparatus reproduces.
9. Deaths from ectopic pregnancy have doubled in the United States since 2020
A national investigation published September 9 by ProPublica found that 196 women died with an ectopic pregnancy recorded on their death certificates between 2020 and 2025, compared to 106 in the previous six years. Between 2023 and 2025, the national rate reached 9.8 ectopic-associated deaths per million live births, roughly double the rate of a decade earlier.
In the 18 states that enforced abortion bans at six weeks or earlier, the rate reached 13.1 per million live births. In the 27 jurisdictions that never enacted a ban, it rose to 7.1. Though the increase is national, the abortion bans have accelerated it.
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Ectopic pregnancies account for 1 to 2 percent of all pregnancies in the United States and rupture in about 15 percent of tubal cases. Ruptured ectopic pregnancy is the leading cause of maternal death in the first trimester. Up to half of the women who develop one have no identifiable risk factor. Among women who arrive at an emergency department with lower abdominal pain or vaginal bleeding in early pregnancy, 6 to 16 percent, roughly one in ten, have an ectopic pregnancy.
Caught early, it is treated with methotrexate, a drug that halts the growth of the pregnancy tissue, provided the patient is stable and can return for repeat blood tests. Otherwise surgery is lifesaving. Once the tube ruptures, the pregnant woman needs transfusion and an emergency operation. Because methotrexate cannot be given after rupture, delay converts an injection into an operation, and an operation can mean the loss of a fallopian tube, impacting future fertility.
Under established clinical standards, no woman should die of an ectopic pregnancy.
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In a deeper sense, a death from ectopic pregnancy is an indicator of whether a society will defend the lives of working-class women.
The abortion bans are one front in a broader assault on the social right to health care, contraception and education, waged by the same legislatures and the same Congress that have cut Medicaid, defunded the clinics and, from January, will strip coverage from millions through work requirements. That its weight falls first on the poorest working people is not an accident of the market but the class decision of the financial elite.
10. Australian state Labor government bans pro-Palestinian teacher
Morris, a maths and IT relief teacher in Sydney’s southwestern suburbs, a NSW Teachers Federation councilor, and a member of the Teachers for Palestine group, was immediately suspended, without pay, just a day after the Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph notified the department of posts he had allegedly made more than two years ago.
The department’s action was taken without any hearing, charge or conviction. Instead, it rushed to tell the newspaper it had “taken action to ensure this person is not working in NSW public schools.”
While an investigation is supposedly ongoing, the Telegraph published prejudicial allegations claiming that Morris supports Hamas, which Australian governments have proscribed by decree as a “terrorist” organization.
This is a serious attack on basic democratic rights. It is an attempt to intimidate educators, warning that any political opposition to the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, even expressed in a private or political capacity outside classrooms, will cost them their livelihood.
None of the allegations relate to anything Morris did or said as a teacher, or to his ability to teach, but solely to past alleged social media posts, presented misleadingly and out of context.
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Morris is not being barred for supposed support for Hamas’s program, but for expressing solidarity with an oppressed people fighting a genocidal occupier and defending their right to resist.
The Telegraph accusations appear to be derived straight from Zionist organizations that have trawled through social media accounts to concoct evidence of supposed antisemitism, which they and the media equate with opposition to the genocide.
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The NSW Teachers Federation, the trade union covering the state’s educators, has not only refused to defend Morris. It immediately lined up behind his blacklisting, insinuating that he voiced antisemitism. It issued a statement that “The Federation condemns antisemitism and all forms of racism, without qualification.”
The union declared: “Individual council members do not speak for the Federation on their personal social media, and their personal views are not endorsed by the union.” It did not call a single meeting of members to discuss its response, let alone propose any action against the department’s political victimization.
This is the same union bureaucracy that, as the WSWS documented in February, was consulted on the code of conduct changes and provided “feedback” supporting them, telling members the new rules were “unremarkable.”
Morris is a member of Solidarity, a pseudo-left organization, with which the Socialist Equality Party has well-documented differences, including on its insistence that the trade union apparatuses, including the Teachers Federation, can be reformed. However, his banning is a direct attack on fundamental democratic rights which we strongly condemn. We urge all educators, students and workers to demand his immediate reinstatement.
The defense of Morris, free speech and basic democratic rights necessarily requires a political fight against the Labor and union bureaucracy. The Labor government of Chris Minns, like the Albanese government federally, is fully complicit in the US-led imperialist war drive and the Israeli genocide it underwrites.
Rank-and-file committees (RFCs) of teachers, students and parents are needed—independent of the union apparatus—to defend Morris’s right to work, oppose every victimization and insist on free discussion of the Gaza genocide and the wider plunge into war.
The defence of Morris is inseparable from the struggle against war, austerity and the police-state measures that the entire political establishment is implementing.
11. Defend all jobs at GSK’s Dresden vaccine plant in Germany!
On September 11, British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced it would close its vaccine plant in Dresden, Germany. Production is to end in late September 2027, with the site to be fully shut down by summer 2028. The 641 employees face unemployment.
The Saxony Serum Plant Dresden (Sächsisches Serumwerk Dresden), as it is traditionally known, was founded in 1911. It once supplied the whole of East Germany (GDR) with vaccines and today mainly produces seasonal and pandemic influenza vaccines, which are exported to more than 70 countries. According to the company, the vaccines produced in Dresden have protected more than a billion people. This experience and the production culture built up over generations are now to be destroyed.
The workforce was taken completely by surprise. One employee told the press, “It was quite a shock.”
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According to corporate management, the Dresden plant produces a “mature product” whose resources are to be redirected elsewhere. The trade publication FiercePharma explicitly makes this connection in its reporting. The excuses the company leadership now offers for the closure—falling demand for egg-based flu vaccine, WHO preferences and US vaccine policy—are merely an after-the-fact justification for a decision taken months ago.
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Immediately after the cost-cutting program was announced, GSK’s share price rose 6 percent on the London Stock Exchange.
The Dresden jobs are therefore being destroyed not because GSK lacks money or because the product is not needed, but to secure a high profit margin for shareholders. In its second-quarter 2026 report, GSK even raised its profit forecast for the vaccines business.
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In contrast to the company’s global strategy, the politicians and the union are pursuing a narrow, nationalist policy of defending each site in isolation, which is meant to cloud workers’ view of the broader context and can only lead to defeat.
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That a vaccine plant, of all things, is to be closed only a few years after the outbreak of the COVID pandemic is not only an insult to the employees but affects all workers. For the sake of corporate profits, not only are jobs being destroyed, but public health is being ruined. At least 180,000 people in Germany have died of COVID as a result of the “profits before lives” policy, and now the dismantling of the vaccine industry is beginning.
It is therefore particularly cynical that the “plan for the future” argues some production must be kept to ensure “strategic autonomy” in vaccines and medicines—autonomy that is seen as crucial in the event of war. In other words, workers who serve public health are to lose their jobs, but if they can be put to use for the war economy, a reduced workforce may keep working, for lower wages. And the unions even call this a success!
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These attacks can only be fought and all jobs defended if workers are clear about the context in which the destruction of their jobs is taking place. In Germany, hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs are currently being destroyed in order to make the country “fit for war” (in the words of the SPD Defense Minister) and to boost profits. The defense of jobs must therefore be linked to the struggle against the policy of war and the enrichment of the wealthy. The fight to defend jobs at GSK must be understood as part of this struggle.
On September 13, 28-year-old Sikh truck driver Gurvinder Singh was brutally assaulted and stabbed 17 times inside a restroom at the remote Bitter Creek rest stop along Interstate 80 in Wyoming. Singh, a Sacramento resident, was traveling to Pennsylvania when he stopped shortly before 3:30 a.m. to wash his face and take a break.
According to court documents and Singh’s account, another truck driver followed him into the restroom, struck him from behind and repeatedly stabbed him in the neck and chest. A family at the rest stop rendered first aid, photographed the assailant’s tractor-trailer and provided information that helped Wyoming State Patrol troopers locate the suspect. Andrew Kris Bzdak, 44, was arrested in Carbon County and charged with attempted first-degree murder. He is being held on a $1 million bond. Authorities have not announced a motive.
The attack occurred four days after the Department of Homeland Security published a racist social media post depicting a South Asian truck driver facing the Transformer character Optimus Prime. The image declared, “Self-deport or find out,” “America for Americans” and “Get off our roads, you don’t know how to drive Mr. Singh.”
Gurvinder Singh has since been discharged from the hospital. He remains covered in stitches and faces a lengthy recovery requiring continued treatment and follow-up care. He does not have medical insurance. His family has established a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for his medical care, rehabilitation, lost income and other essential expenses.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke with Jasjit Singh, a California attorney and director of legal programs at the Jakara Movement, on September 23. Jakara is a California-based organization that works with Punjabi Sikh youth, families and communities. Jasjit traveled to the Wyoming Medical Center in Casper following the attack to meet with Gurvinder and offer to help navigate the legal system and offer community support.
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Jacob Crosse of the WSWS: You visited Gurvinder Singh at the Wyoming Medical Center. What can you tell our readers about his physical condition when you saw him and what his recovery may involve?
Jasjit Singh: Being stabbed 17 times and being able to just hold a conversation with me and just let me know how he’s doing. I’ve asked him multiple times, “How is he?” And, of course, his response is, “You know, I’m hanging in there. I’m doing all right.” And I think that means something, right? I think he’s obviously trying to be strong, but I think, you know, none of us can probably relate to what it feels like to endure that type of pain, right?
JC: Beyond the attack, what should our readers know about Gurvinder as a person, a worker and a member of the Sikh community?
JS: He has been driving for the last three and a half, almost four years. And he’s actually quite familiar with the route. I think he’s been on this route, on Highway 80, from California into the Pennsylvania, Chicago, Northeastern area for the last almost two years, I believe. So this has been a regular route for him.
I mean, in his own words, he has no traffic infractions, no speeding tickets, no parking tickets. He’s the kind of driver you hope to encounter on the road. Someone who takes his safety very seriously. He takes the safety of others very seriously. And that’s kind of what’s left him in disbelief. I hate to say it, but you know what people say: As long as you follow the rules and you do the right thing, you’re going to be fine, right? Well, here’s someone who follows the rules, does everything right, stops at a rest area to take a break and you get stabbed 17 times.
JC: Four days before the attack, the Department of Homeland Security published an image telling “Mr. Singh” to get off the road. You previously warned that someone might interpret such rhetoric as a green light to take matters into their own hands. Can you speak about the anti-immigrant and anti-Sikh atmosphere the Trump administration has cultivated?
JS: Absolutely. So, you know, the last name, or the surname or the middle name, Singh, is carried by every Sikh male in the world, right? So I think the Trump administration, Department of Homeland Security, whoever had the bright idea of putting out that poster, did it intentionally.
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JC: In 2012, neo-Nazi and US Army veteran Wade Michael Page attacked the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, killing six worshippers and mortally wounding a seventh. Do Sikh Americans see a connection between the atmosphere that produced that massacre and the present climate, in which the federal government portrays people who wear turbans or carry the name Singh as foreign threats?
JS: The correlation the community is seeing is this all occurred just around the 9/11 anniversary, 25 years since 9/11. So the poster came out on the ninth, 9/11 obviously on the 11th, the 13th we have this attack on Mr. Singh and then September 15, 2001, is the 25th anniversary of Balbir Singh Sodhi, who was the first fatal victim of post-9/11 hate crimes in the United States.
So that’s what the community is thinking about. Like, 25 years later, rhetoric, imagery, words. We know, and we know firsthand, that words do matter. Words matter. Statements matter. Imagery matters. And we’ve felt the brunt of that already, and we’ve been feeling the brunt.
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JC: This violence is definitely ingrained in the ruling class, and it’s up to workers to combat this and understand that the attacks on Sikh Americans, the attacks on Latinos, the attacks on immigrants, they are an attack on everybody, on the democratic rights of everyone. If the government can demonize and use this racist imagery against Mr. Singh, it won’t be long until the government turns that against Mr. Johnson. The administration’s talked about deporting 100 million people. There aren’t 100 million illegal immigrants. This attack is part of the expanding attacks on the entire working class.
As the administration intensifies its campaign against immigrant truckers, have Sikh and Punjabi drivers reported increased harassment at rest stops, loading docks or weigh stations, whether from members of the public, police or immigration agents?
JS: I would say that the data is there. I believe an article came out not too long ago that, in 2025, the number of ICE arrests shot up 1,000 percent for Asian Americans. And that was just for California, I believe.
I think the other thing is, you know, oftentimes communities may think, “Well, it’s not our community. It’s another community that’s being targeted.” Well, this is a reminder. Everyone is being targeted. We’re all being targeted. For whatever reason, you know, I have to say it—We just don’t fit the mold, right, that’s wanted in this country by a certain subsection. So, yes, our folks are feeling it. Our folks are very wary.
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JC: Many readers may not be familiar with Sikhism. What are its central principles, and what misconceptions about Sikh identity do you most often encounter in the United States?
JS: The Sikh faith was founded in the Punjab region of South Asia. Panj means five and Aab means bodies of water. The land of five rivers, sits at the top of the Indian subcontinent, and in modern day, post British occupation, is split between the Indian state of Punjab and the Pakistani province of Punjab. The Sikh empire’s capital, once Lahore, is now in Pakistan. The majority of the world’s Sikh population now lives in the Indian State of Punjab.
Founded by Guru Nanak, the first Sikh Guru, the Sikh faith at it’s core has three universal core concepts: Naam Japna (Remembering the One Universal God), Kirat Karo (Earn an honest living), and Vand Chako (Share what you can with others.)
A Sikh place of worship is called a Gurdwara (Guru-Dwara or Door to the Guru.) Major Gurdwaras around the world offer free food nearly 24 hours a day to anyone regardless of caste, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
The tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh founded the Khalsa. The Khalsa is an order of initiated/baptized Sikhs who follow a specific code of conduct. All Sikhs are encouraged to become Khalsa. Khalsa Sikhs carry 5 kakkars, or articles of faith—which are the most recognizable when you encounter a Sikh. Kes (uncut hair), Kara (iron bracelet), Kanga (small comb), Kacherra (long undergarments), and Kirpan (sword/dagger.) These recognizable features make it easy for Sikhs to stand out and be approached in times of need, it has also made them targets of hate, bigotry, and racism.
To reflect on something higher, to give to others, to earn an honest living, these are universal concepts. Lets not to take from others, which I really think is needed in this world right now, when we have trillionaires, you know, kajillionaires or whatever-aires we have now.
JC: What would you like truck drivers and other workers outside the Sikh community to understand or do in response to this attack?
JS: Look, I think this is the moment. Historically, truckers as a group have always looked out for other truckers, right? I think we’re moving away from the world where truckers just talk to each other on the CB radio and say, “Hey, here’s what’s coming up ahead. There’s a cop.” That used to be a common thing. Truckers looked out for each other. You could feel safer around truckers. There’s a camaraderie in the job that you do.
We need to get back to that. The fact that this is another trucker that attacked him, again, unprovoked, really calls into question what type of solidarity needs to be created.
Earlier this month, Ford announced a $1 billion investment in a new paint shop at its Kentucky Truck Plant (KTP), presenting it as a triumph of “American manufacturing.” The new facility will replace the existing paint shop as part of a broader modernization of the plant. But the investment is being made within a restructuring of the entire auto industry in which new technology and capital spending are being used to raise productivity and cut costs, while workers face layoffs, plant closures and speedup.
Ford says the new paint shop will use upgraded technology to deliver “cleaner and more efficient paint quality” and “improved efficiency,” with groundbreaking expected by the end of this year. The company has not announced a completion date, capacity target or staffing changes tied specifically to the project. The Kentucky Truck Plant, which builds the F-Series Super Duty trucks, the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator, is Ford’s largest and highest-revenue US manufacturing plant. It employed about 8,900 workers as of June, more than 8,300 of them hourly.
The investment comes as Ford is already pushing more production at KTP. Last October the company announced another $60 million for training and other changes aimed at increasing the Super Duty assembly-line speed by one job per hour. Ford said this would produce more than 5,000 additional trucks a year with the addition of just over 100 workers. A vehicle already rolls off KTP’s lines roughly every 45 seconds.
The investment is one node in a global restructuring whose costs are being imposed on the working class. Since 2022, Ford has announced or carried out roughly 14,000 job cuts across North America, Europe and India, including 3,000 salaried and contract positions largely in North America and India. Successive European restructuring programs eliminated 7,800 jobs and roughly 3,500 jobs at its Saarlouis plant in Germany.
Across the world auto industry, Nissan is eliminating 20,000 jobs and closing seven plants, while Volkswagen is preparing up to 100,000 job cuts as part of the largest restructuring in its history.
The shift to electric vehicles is a key part of this restructuring. In March 2022, Ford split its EV and combustion-engine operations into separate businesses—”Model e” for electric vehicles and “Ford Blue” for combustion—pledging tens of billions of dollars to the EV push.
At the nearby Louisville Assembly Plant (LAP), Ford is spending roughly $2 billion to convert the factory to build a midsize electric pickup on its Universal EV Platform beginning in 2027. Ford says the new system will use 20 percent fewer parts, 40 percent fewer assembly stations and ultimately cut assembly time by 15 percent. The company says LAP will have the highest level of automation in final assembly of any Ford plant globally.
The restructuring is bound up with an escalating conflict over China, technology and supply chains. Ford’s press release, trumpeting its “commitment to American manufacturing,” landed two days after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent CEO Jim Farley a letter expressing “profound concern” over the automaker’s ties to Chinese companies, particularly the battery supplier CATL. Ford dismissed the letter as a “wrongheaded attempt to capture headlines.” Trump later intervened to declare Ford a “GREAT American company.”
Duffy is demanding that Ford accelerate the reduction of its dependence on Chinese technology and production, attacking its CATL licensing arrangement, ties to Chinese automakers Geely and BYD and continued production of the Lincoln Nautilus in China.
The dispute, however, turns on the pace and method of a shared drive to confront China. Ford cannot abruptly sever its links to Chinese technology and supply chains without disrupting production, while Washington is seeking to force a faster reorganization of those supply chains around the strategic requirements of US imperialism.
China’s position in critical auto supply chains sharply limits any rapid decoupling. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China accounted in 2024 for 91 percent of global refining of magnet rare earths and 94 percent of sintered permanent-magnet production.
The United States has begun expanding domestic separation and magnet capacity, but the IEA says magnet production remains the principal bottleneck in diversification. The extraordinary state support being poured into the sector—including Pentagon financing and guaranteed price floors—underscores that the reorganization of these supply chains is bound up with preparations for economic and military conflict.
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The union bureaucracy is an active partner in trade war. Days after the Ford announcement, UAW President Shawn Fain and Michigan Democratic US Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed delivered anti-Chinese tirades at a UAW conference, attacking Trump from the right for suggesting he would permit Chinese-owned US plants.
Fain called Chinese-owned production “a slap in the face to America” and invoked the slander of Chinese “slave labor,” while El-Sayed declared, “If I’m the Big Three right now, I’m pissed off as hell at Donald Trump.” Fain has called for converting auto plants to produce “tanks and planes and bombs,” and GM Defense is already working with Lockheed Martin on missile components.
The bureaucracy is reviving the ugliest traditions in UAW history—the “Buy American” campaigns and its smashing of Japanese cars of the late 1970s that formed the background to the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American draftsman beaten to death by a Chrysler foreman and a laid-off autoworker.
The purpose of this nationalism is to tell autoworkers that they share a common interest with the corporations that are restructuring production at their expense, and to redirect opposition away from Ford and against workers in China.
In reality, KTP workers face stagnating wages, rising line speeds, unsafe conditions and a union apparatus that has colluded with management at every step. A financial audit of UAW Local 862 documented large, unexplained salary increases for top officials, while one worker told the WSWS that her rent had risen by $1,000 a month since 2017 and that she still lived paycheck to paycheck. Workers have also said they cannot afford the vehicles they manufacture. Workers have reported sewage on the production line, random bag searches, and a worker who suffered nine spinal fractures because his safety complaints were ignored for three years.
The trade war is an inter-imperialist conflict in which the working class has no interest. The “national security” rhetoric is a cover for American imperialism’s aggressive assertion against its Chinese rival—preparation for war, not the defense of jobs.
The workers at the Kentucky Truck Plant have no stake in this fight. Their interests lie in the international unity of American, Chinese and all workers. The billions being spent on “modernization” belong to them, not to the corporate boards and union bureaucrats who serve only profit.
14. London bus drivers and other workers call for Bogdan’s freedom
Socialist Equality Party members and supporters in London have taken the campaign for the freedom of 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk into the working class through workplace and neighbourhood campaigns.
They have encountered widespread support, with many workers calling for Bogdan’s freedom and opposing the escalation of the NATO proxy war with Russia.
Hundreds of bus drivers and residents of Tottenham took the leaflet, “Fascist Ukrainian court sentences Bogdan Syrotiuk, socialist opponent of war, to 15 years in prison”.
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At the Wood Green bus garage in north west London, drivers were also shocked by the sentence and the situation inside Ukraine, “No one should ever be put in jail for expressing their opinion. I follow these injustices around the world. I am very shocked by this. Fifteen years? I will sign the petition, and I will most certainly pass it around at work and online.”
15. Sri Lankan students and workers demand freedom for Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk
Members of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) intervened at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura and the University of Moratuwa, as well as among workers and working people in Colombo. They distributed Sinhala translations of the World Socialist Web Site article reporting on Bogdan Syrotiuk’s sentencing and other campaign material and collected signatures for the petition demanding his freedom.
Syrotiuk, 27, is a Ukrainian Trotskyist and leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists. He was arrested by Ukraine’s Security Service in April 2024. On August 10, the Pervomaisk City District Court sentenced him to 15 years in prison for high treason under martial law for his opposition to the war and his calls for unity between Russian and Ukrainian workers. The court based its conviction on his political writings and correspondence with the WSWS. His lawyers have appealed the sentence.
The campaign has attracted growing international support. More than 7,400 people have signed the online petition, while workers, students, academics, artists and political organizations in numerous countries have issued statements demanding Syrotiuk’s release.
In Sri Lanka, while major Colombo-based English-language newspapers remained silent despite requests to publish the news, at least two leading Tamil newspapers based in the northern city of Jaffna—Uthayan and Thinnakural—gave the sentencing prominent coverage.
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
