Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
The Socialist Equality Parties in Europe welcome and support the international day of action by dock and port workers on Friday, October 30, against war, genocide and militarization. Under the slogan “Dockers do not work for war,” workers are demonstrating their determination to oppose the war policies of their governments and use their collective strength to stop them.
The significance of this action extends far beyond the ports. Amid an eruption of strikes and mass protests across Europe, it marks the growing intervention of the working class into the struggle against war, austerity and state repression. It demonstrates the potential for an internationally coordinated movement against the capitalist governments and their war policies.
According to the organisers, workers at 113 ports in 22 countries and regions across five continents are taking part in strikes, demonstrations or solidarity actions. From Marseille, Genoa and Piraeus to Hamburg, Tangier, Mumbai and Oakland, workers are uniting across national borders.
They oppose the genocide and oppression of the Palestinians, the US-Israeli war against Iran and the use of ports to transport military equipment and troops. They reject rearmament and demand that public resources be devoted to social needs, higher wages, secure jobs and shorter working hours, rather than the destruction of jobs through automation.
These demands express the inseparable connection between war and the assault on workers’ living standards. The governments spending hundreds of billions on armaments are simultaneously cutting public services, attacking wages and preparing their populations for war.
The action, initiated by unions in Greece, the Basque Country, Turkey, Morocco, Italy and France, follows an earlier mobilization on February 6 and has expanded substantially. Support has also been announced by ver.di in Hamburg, ILWU Local 10 in San Francisco and Oakland and organizations elsewhere.
Ports are vital arteries of global production and military supply chains. Dockworkers occupy a strategically important position, and their coordinated action points to the enormous power of the international working class to disrupt the machinery of war. This power must now be consciously organized and extended.
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War and austerity are being imposed through increasingly authoritarian methods. Defeating them requires a movement that challenges the capitalist governments.
Yet union bureaucracies and pseudo-left organizations seek to confine the struggles to limited protests and negotiations with those governments. In France, the CGT and other confederations seek to channel mass opposition into isolated strikes and talks with President Macron. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise seeks to redirect it into the institutions of the bourgeois republic. This is the same orientation that led the struggle against pension cuts in 2023 into defeat.
The obstacle is not simply the reluctance of union officials to organize longer strikes. Their political orientation is to preserve their relationship with the capitalist state and prevent the working class from emerging as an independent political force. The fight to expand the dockworkers’ action therefore requires a rebellion against the authority of these bureaucracies and their pseudo-left defenders.
Build rank-and-file committees! Fight for socialism!
The Socialist Equality Parties call for independent, democratically controlled rank-and-file action committees in ports, factories, transport, schools, universities and working-class neighborhoods. These committees must formulate workers’ demands, organize resistance to repression, and coordinate strikes independently of the union apparatuses and capitalist parties.
Their immediate task is to link the dockworkers with railway workers, truck drivers, seafarers, industrial workers and all those involved in military production and transportation, while uniting with young people resisting conscription, austerity and police violence.
This coordination must cross every national border. The ruling elites coordinate their economic attacks, rearmament and repression internationally; workers must answer with their own international organization. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), initiated by the International Committee of the Fourth International, provides the framework for this struggle.
The aim must be the preparation of a sustained European general strike, challenging the rule of the capitalist oligarchy and raising the question of workers taking political power. This is more than a demand for broader industrial action. War, poverty, social inequality and fascism cannot be defeated within the framework of capitalism.
The resources squandered on war must be directed to social needs. The major banks, arms corporations and strategic industries must be placed under public ownership and democratic workers’ control. Against the capitalist European Union, we fight for the United Socialist States of Europe, as part of a world socialist federation.
This requires the building of revolutionary socialist parties in the working class. The Socialist Equality Parties, sections of the ICFI, fight to develop this leadership and transform the growing resistance expressed in the dockworkers’ action into a united political offensive of the international working class against capitalism, war and dictatorship.
2. German Chancellor Merz tours East Asia in search of war partners
Merz, leading a high-level 30-strong business delegation, visited Singapore, South Korea and Japan. The focus was on so-called “de-risking”—opening up new markets and investment opportunities to replace the deteriorating economic relations with China and, though this is less openly discussed, to curb US influence.*****
The chancellor repeatedly stressed the link between military strength and economic power. In a speech he delivered on Wednesday at the German-Japanese Business Summit in Tokyo, Merz emphasized “that freedom and peace can only exist if we protect them with power and also with strength.”
“We are witnessing wars in Europe and in the Near and Middle East. We are witnessing increasing protectionism and intense competition for technologies, raw materials and industrial value creation,” said the chancellor. “But when global supply chains are exploited for political ends, when free access to key technologies is hindered, when securing raw materials is used as a tool of power politics, … then this jeopardizes growth, prosperity and, ultimately, the security of entire regions.”
Merz did not stop at mere words. His delegation included representatives from two major German defense contractors, Quantum Systems and Airbus Defense & Space. Quantum Systems supplies the Ukrainian and German armed forces with drones and is seeking global expansion. Following the collapse of the Franco-German FCAS fighter jet project, Airbus’s defense division intends to join the Global Combat Air Program (GCAP), which is being developed jointly by the UK, Italy and Japan.
When Merz arrived in Tokyo, the US-Japanese military exercise “Keen Sword”—which simulates a war against China over Taiwan—was just drawing to a close. For the first time, a 100-strong medical unit from the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) also took part, practising the joint treatment of wounded soldiers.
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The far-right Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who received Merz with military honors, is in the process of abolishing the pacifist clause in the Japanese constitution and massively increasing military spending. Merz promised to cooperate closely with Japan on the development and production of new technologies and weapons. The business leaders present were delighted.
As in Ukraine, where Germany is working with supporters of former Nazi collaborators, German imperialism is also drawing on reactionary historical traditions in Japan. The Japanese Empire was allied with Nazi Germany during the Second World War and committed appalling war crimes in China and other countries. November 25 will mark the 90th anniversary of the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact between Berlin and Tokyo, which was directed against the Soviet Union and “communism” and from which, four years later, the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan emerged.
In Singapore and Seoul, too, Merz was keen to stake out new spheres of influence. In Singapore on Tuesday, in a “keynote speech,” he called for a “major interregional agreement with the members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership” and, at the same time, urged further trade agreements with individual countries in the region. In the long term, he is aiming for a trade agreement between the EU and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), whose eleven members have a combined population of around 700 million.
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In Tokyo, Merz proposed the establishment of a “global political alliance for rules-based trade” with the aim of defending, strengthening and further developing the WTO and “rules-based trade.” This is directed not only against China, but above all against Donald Trump’s US, which Merz did not, however, mention in his speeches.
While Merz was in Singapore, Seoul and Tokyo, strengthening existing strategic alliances and forging new ones, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was visiting China, where he is due to meet President Xi Jinping on Friday. The trip was coordinated with Merz. Steinmeier is expected to smooth things over with Beijing while Berlin recalibrates its policy towards China, and to avoid an overly abrupt break that would hit the German economy hard.
3. Audi CEO Döllner assists Trump’s election campaign
Audi CEO Gernot Döllner’s campaign appearance with President Donald Trump has provoked outrage among workers at the Volkswagen Group. And rightly so. Döllner’s appearance is neither a slip-up nor “pragmatism”, but an expression of the fact that the German bourgeoisie is preparing to collaborate with fascism—in the US as in Germany. Meanwhile, the IG Metall union is criticizing Döllner for championing American rather than German jobs.
On Saturday evening, Döllner took to Trump’s campaign stage in the US state of Georgia after Trump had delivered one of his notorious racist and fascist harangues. “Make America Great Again—made by Ingolstadt!” writes the business weekly Wirtschaftswoche, referring to the city where Audi is headquartered and has its main plant.
Polls ahead of the midterm elections on November 3 show that rarely has a president been so hated as Trump. Only 31 percent of Americans support his handling of the presidency, which has been defined above all by the persecution, imprisonment and deportation of workers by the immigration Gestapo ICE. Almost 70 percent reject his economic policy, which enriches the super-rich and corporations while ruining working people through social cuts and price rises. The poll figures express the social outrage of the working class. This outrage will not end with the elections; it must and will turn into a struggle against both capitalist parties, Democrats and Republicans alike.
In this situation, Döllner announced he would build an Audi factory in the hotly contested “swing state” of Georgia for $4 billion, around €3.6 billion. There, 4,500 workers are to produce 200,000 vehicles a year of the large SUV models Q7, Q8 and Q9. “We believe in the American market,” Döllner declared next to Trump. Audi was taking advantage of the “fantastic opportunity” to build the “biggest and most premium” SUVs in Georgia. “This is a long-term investment,” he assured, adding, “Thank you, Mr President, for your support and this great opportunity.”
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The attempts by the company and Döllner to play down and justify the campaign appearance have enraged auto workers. According to news weekly Der Spiegel, VW disabled the comments function beneath the intranet post, “Audi plans first US production site in Georgia,” and deleted comments that had already been published. The post had received more than 200 contributions within two days, in which workers gave vent to their anger. Now the page reads, “The discussion under this article has gone beyond the bounds of an objective exchange of opinions and no longer stayed within the terms of use of the Group Wiki and the works agreement ‘Partnership-based conduct in the workplace’.”
While workers are reminded of rules of conduct, company rules evidently do not apply to managers once profits are at stake. These rules oblige them to observe “neutrality in dealings with [political] parties and interest groups” and to refrain from “publicly visible appointments with parties/politicians standing for election” in the three months before an election.
The central warning to VW workers and the entire working class, however, is this: The company is making common cause not with just any president, but with one who is terrorizing his own population and plunging the world into genocide and war. Trump admires Adolf Hitler and imitates his policies. Next year he wants to pour $1.5 trillion into the war budget, while supposedly there is no money left for vital social programs on which tens of millions of people depend.
Under Trump, the US is financing Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, and he has repeatedly threatened Iran with “total annihilation.” Tens of thousands of US workers have been abducted from their jobs and homes, locked up and deported. More than 70,000 people are currently being held in inhumane conditions in ICE’s concentration camps.
In Germany, companies, politicians and the media are declaring that Audi and Döllner had no other choice. Until now, they say, Audi has imported all vehicles for the US market from Europe or Mexico. The tariffs that were introduced and passed on to US buyers have cut sales there by 16 percent in this year alone. Audi therefore needs a US plant, the argument runs. Döllner traveled to Georgia with production board member Gerd Walker for negotiations and stated that the company had accepted the campaign appearance “exclusively in the interests of the company.”
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Today, leading IG Metall officials are providing the nationalist accompaniment to Döllner as the auto industry is restructured. Horst Ott, IG Metall’s district head for Bavaria, who has agreed to the elimination of 8,000 jobs and further cost-cutting at Audi, has demanded that the future viability, capacity utilization and job security of the existing sites be given top priority. “Investing in the US and wholesale cuts in Germany—that doesn’t fit together,” he said.
IG Metall head Christiane Benner said something similar on public broadcaster ZDF’s Morgenmagazin: “Investments are being announced there while workers here fear for their jobs.” She would press “that we get prospects from the board for the sites and also for the Neckarsulm site.”
IG Metall’s “defense of German jobs” is not a defense of workers, but a defense of the competitive position of German capital—that is, exactly the same logic that leads to fascism and war.
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Just as IG Metall and its works council representatives support the cutback programmes and the conversion of the auto industry to a war economy, so too will they advocate collaboration with fascists and dictators.
The defense of jobs and the fight against fascism and war are one and the same. The nationalism of the trade union apparatus must be countered by the international unification of the more than 650,000 VW workers. The workers in Georgia are the allies of auto workers in Germany in the coming struggles.
4. US troops deploy to Colombia as Washington forges new Operation Condor across the Americas
The announcement that more than 300 US soldiers are arriving in Colombia this week for joint military exercises at the Tolemaida base, coming on the heels of the “Coalition of the Americas Against Cartels” (A3C) conference in Santo Domingo, marks a decisive escalation in the Trump administration’s drive to re-colonize Latin America. What is being presented to the world as a campaign against “narco-terrorism” is the construction of a hemispheric military apparatus, integrating the region’s armed forces under US command, aimed simultaneously at the working class of the Americas and at Washington’s imperialist rivals, above all China.
The A3C, launched in March 2026 at US Southern Command headquarters in Florida, now brings together 19 nations of the Western Hemisphere. The Santo Domingo conference, organized by the Dominican Ministry of Defense and US Southern Command, was convened to “operationalize” the coalition, to approve a military campaign plan and a governance charter that will define the organization and to coordinate joint operations.
The official communiqué issued by the Dominican government and US Southern Command states the coalition’s purpose with chilling clarity: “These efforts will help strengthen the exchange of intelligence and information, expand bilateral and multilateral cooperation, and develop joint operations aimed at dismantling criminal networks, protecting borders and critical infrastructure, and preserving collective security.”
This is the language of a new Operation Condor. As the World Socialist Web Site noted in its analysis of the March summit, the Shield of the Americas gathering was directly reminiscent of the “First Inter American Meeting on National Intelligence” held in Santiago, Chile, in November 1975, under the Pinochet dictatorship, which established the integrated network of murderous state repression and coup plotting known as Operation Condor. The difference is that Pinochet’s meeting was held in secret. Trump’s is conducted in the open, with the full participation of the region’s governments.
The 19 nations now enrolled in this coalition are, with few exceptions, ultra-right and fascistic regimes ideologically aligned with Trump. In addition to the US, the pact includes Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, Belize, Chile, Guatemala, Jamaica, Peru, and most recently Colombia, following the August election victory of the far-right president Abelardo de la Espriella. These are the political heirs of the military dictatorships of the 1970s, now back in power throughout the region.
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The keynote address at Santo Domingo was delivered by Eric Geressy, who served as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s company first sergeant in the illegal war of aggression against Iraq and is today his senior advisor for strategy.
Geressy laid bare the fascist character of this enterprise. “This coalition does not manage threats. We eliminate them,” Geressy declared. “I look across this table and I do not see a political committee. I see a combined war fighting council.”
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The arrival of US troops is critical to the counterrevolutionary agenda of Colombia’s President Abelardo de la Espriella, who took office in August. He has staffed his government with retired and active military officers, including the reinstatement of generals discharged under his predecessor Gustavo Petro, and has deployed the term “narco-terrorist” against both criminal groups and his political opponents.
His government has authorized joint US-Colombian military operations, a decision whose constitutional legality is contested, since the transit and operation of foreign troops on Colombian soil requires congressional approval. It was this same constitutional problem that sank a basing agreement reached with the Pentagon under right-wing president Alvaro Uribe in 2010.
The accommodation to US imperialism under de la Espriella was prepared by the “Pink Tide” government that preceded him. The arrival of US troops is hardly unprecedented. Southern Vanguard 23 was held at Tolemaida in November 2022, three months into Petro’s term.
Petro, Colombia's first president from the nominal left, ended his term having approved a $3.54 billion military modernization program, the largest in the country's history. In January 2026, after the US assault on Venezuela, Petro agreed with Trump on “joint actions” against the ELN, and weeks later ordered the first bombing of ELN camps under his government.
Colombia devoted the highest percentage of public spending to its armed forces in the Americas. Like Lula in Brazil, Sheinbaum in Mexico, and the other representatives of the bankrupt Pink Tide, Petro accommodated himself to Washington, authorizing joint operations with the US and Ecuador before leaving office. The pseudo-left's “nationalist” alternative to fascism was always an illusion: the Pink Tide governments prepared the ground for the fascists who now rule in their place.
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The entire US strategy in Latin America rests on a big lie. The “war on narco-terrorism” is a pretext, and a particularly cynical one. The US military-intelligence complex has financed, trained, and armed the very forces now involved in narcotics trafficking. The CIA's own documents have linked Colombian army chiefs to right-wing paramilitaries classified by Washington as terrorists and to cocaine traffickers. The previous dictatorships of the region, and their heirs in today's right-wing governments, are intimately acquainted with the drug trade, which has historically flowed through the same state and paramilitary structures that Washington cultivated as instruments of counterinsurgency.
The importance of Colombia for Washington lies not in its cocaine but in its geostrategic position: a country with both Atlantic and Pacific coasts, bordering Venezuela, astride the gateway to the Andes and the Amazon. It is the pivot of Washington's drive to dominate the hemisphere's resources—lithium, copper, oil, rare earths—and to counter Chinese influence. The billions poured into Colombia over eight decades have served not the Colombian people, but the interests of US imperialism and its comprador bourgeois clients.
Colombia is a country that has suffered so much like the rest of Latin America from US imperialist intervention, from the 1964 bombing of Marquetalia, which gave birth to the FARC, through Plan Colombia and the false positives, to the present deployment.
The answer to this renewed assault is the international unity of the working class of the Americas—Colombian, US, and throughout the hemisphere—against their common enemy. The same capitalist oligarchy that seeks neocolonial dominion over Latin America is abolishing the social and democratic rights of workers in the United States itself. The struggle against the new Operation Condor is inseparable from the struggle for socialism.
5. Peter Gelb of the Met Opera continues his campaign for the proxy war in Ukraine
Gelb has been in the forefront of the anti-Russian campaign ever since 2022. His statement calls Russia’s reactionary invasion, which took place more than four and a half years ago, brutal and illegal, but one word appears to be carefully omitted—“unprovoked.” The invasion was indeed provoked, and it led to the proxy war of the imperialist powers against Russia that continues to this day. This war was prepared over many years. It involved the expansion of the NATO imperialist military alliance to the borders of the former Soviet Union and the overthrow of the elected pro-Russian Ukrainian government by a fascist-backed coup in 2014.
The Met issued an official statement in support of Ukraine immediately after the war began. Moreover, Gelb quickly made it a condition of employment at the Met for Russian musicians to repudiate Vladimir Putin. Anna Netrebko, one of the world’s leading sopranos and a longtime star at the Met, was fired even after she had criticized the invasion, because Gelb did not deem her statement strong enough. Although Netrebko later was awarded more than $200,000 by an arbitrator for the Met’s breach of its contract with her, Gelb stubbornly continues to denounce the soprano, saying recently that he considers her “dishonest.” The attack on Netrebko is bound up with the ethnonationalist campaign by the Kiev regime to blacken all of Russian culture, even to the extent of dropping the works of Tchaikovsky from concert programs. Netrebko’s career has continued to flourish in Europe, but she has not performed in Russia or, with the exception of one small performance in Florida, in the US.
The Met has also jointly commissioned a new opera, The Mothers of Kherson, with the Polish National Opera. The new work has just premiered in Warsaw and is scheduled for performance in New York in April 2028. It is based on the story of the thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russian forces in the early stages of the war. Of course, art can and should depict war’s crimes against children. Although no judgment can be passed on the artistic merit of this work before it is heard, it must be noted that the actions of only one side are being considered. While the Met does not typically disclose the cost of a new opera commission, composer’s and librettist’s fees plus broader development costs can easily amount to more than $1 million. The financial commitment this commission entails fits in with the Met’s propaganda campaign in support of the Zelensky regime in Kiev.
The Met’s record on Ukraine is not the product of the obsession of one man. While Gelb’s wife, Canadian-Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, has been very prominent in this campaign, the fundamental causes are political and not personal in nature. Gelb has acted as he has because of a broad consensus within the American ruling class in support of the proxy war, especially within the New York City financial, political and cultural establishment. A significant layer of affluent petty bourgeois like Gelb obediently follow in the ideological wake of this establishment.
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The proxy war is not about Ukrainian “liberty” and “freedom.” That is just the window dressing designed to obscure the predatory aims of the conflict. That is the only way that the playing of the Ukrainian national anthem before a largely upper middle class and elite audience can be understood. There has been no declaration of war against Russia by the US or by the European powers, but there is a war—a de facto war—one of the fronts in the emerging third world war.
There are plenty of precedents for attacks on free speech and other democratic rights in the history of American capitalism in time of war or preparation for war, and musicians and other artists have not been spared. After the US entered the First World War in 1917, German music was quickly removed from concert programs. German-born conductor Karl Muck, who was well-established as the chief conductor of one of the most famous orchestras of the country, in Boston, was imprisoned on trumped-up charges for nearly 18 months before being deported.
During the Korean War, and the Cold War that preceded and followed it, numerous artists, most famously the operatic bass-baritone Paul Robeson, suffered irreparable damage to their careers. The ultimatums given by Gelb to Netrebko recall the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s and 50s, as well as the demagogic anticommunism of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. Actors, writers and other artists were told they could salvage their careers only if they recited obligatory denunciations prepared for them in advance.
Gelb’s brazen and hypocritical warmongering has triggered very little criticism. There were reports that some musicians objected to turning the opera stage over to war propaganda. This was swept under the rug by instructing those protesting to simply withdraw from that section of the performance.
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While Gelb extols the virtues of the unelected government of Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk has been jailed for more than two years and has recently been sentenced to 15 years in prison for the sole “crime” of writing articles for the World Socialist Web Site opposing both Putin and Zelensky and fighting for the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian workers to put an end to the fratricidal conflict.
Gelb’s actions have the odor of desperation. In the US, among broad layers of the middle class as well as the working class, there is opposition to the genocide in Gaza and to the war on Iran, and opposition to escalation of the proxy war in Ukraine. In Ukraine there is also enormous opposition, including to the forcible conscription of cannon fodder for the war. But this opposition must above all be based on the international working class, in struggle against the criminal and decaying capitalist system.
A statement of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) on the nationwide youth protests on October 31, 2026, in full:
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) support the nationwide protests by school students, university students and young workers on Saturday against social cuts, dilapidated schools, rising living costs and the reintroduction of conscription. The growing opposition to the policies of the Merz-Klingbeil government is entirely justified. But to achieve these demands, a clear political perspective is necessary.
The decisive question is: How can a government be stopped that spends hundreds of billions of euros on rearmament and war while destroying education, healthcare and social security, and preparing young people to die on the battlefields of future wars?
We say clearly: The fight for better schools, affordable housing, secure jobs and a future without war requires the independent mobilization of the working class—that is, the vast majority who create all the wealth and are expected to bear the entire burden of war and crisis. The protests must not be confined to appeals to the government but must become the starting point for a broad movement against capitalism, militarism and dictatorship. This requires a socialist program. The major banks and corporations must be expropriated and placed under democratic control.
The government is preparing repression
The government’s reaction to the announced protests already shows what young people are confronting. Even before the first demonstration has begun, politicians from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD) are warning of allegedly impending outbreaks of violence and extremist infiltration. The police and domestic intelligence service are preparing extensive operations. The Christian Democratic youth group in Berlin-Mitte has even demanded that the Bundeswehr be called upon to provide “administrative assistance” and that the protests be prevented.
These threats are no accident. The ruling class fears that the mass movement that has already engulfed France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and numerous other countries will spread to Germany and merge with the struggles of the working class.
Events in France show what governments are prepared to do. President Emmanuel Macron has responded to protests against dilapidated schools, social cuts and militarism with brutal police violence. More than 10,000 people have been arrested and numerous young people seriously injured. Police weapons have torn off young people’s hands and destroyed their eyes. Yet the movement continues to grow. Hundreds of thousands are demonstrating, and increasing numbers of workers are joining them.
The events in France demonstrate that the ruling elites cannot simply be pressured into making concessions through protests and appeals. Macron is resorting to repression because his government intends to impose the demands of the financial markets and the enormous costs of military rearmament against the resistance of the population.
The Merz-Klingbeil government is pursuing the same policy. It is no more willing to abandon its agenda of war and austerity than Macron, the Meloni government in Italy or the Trump administration in the United States. Everywhere, the ruling classes are preparing to suppress growing opposition through authoritarian and dictatorial measures.
War and social cuts are two sides of the same policy
The destruction of education and the policy of war are not separate developments. They arise from the same capitalist crisis and the interests of the same financial oligarchy.
While schools are deteriorating, teachers are in short supply and families can barely afford their rent, hundreds of billions of euros are being mobilized in Germany for the largest military buildup since World War II. The Bundeswehr is to be massively expanded and prepared for a direct war against Russia. The reintroduction of conscription is a central component of these war preparations.
German imperialism is already driving forward the international escalation of war. Germany has become Kyiv’s largest European supporter and is fuelling the war against Russia with ever more weapons deliveries and military commitments. At the same time, the German government is providing political and military support to Israel in its genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. More than eight decades after Germany’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union and the Holocaust, the German ruling class is demonstrating that it is once again prepared to commit the worst crimes to enforce its imperialist interests.
At the same time, social inequality is intensifying worldwide. A tiny layer of billionaires is accumulating unimaginable wealth while millions of people suffer from falling real wages, rising prices and social cuts. Governments subordinate all social needs to the profit interests of corporations and the military objectives of their states.
This policy cannot be ended through a change of government within the existing political system. The Left Party seeks to direct growing opposition toward appeals to the federal government and parliamentary manoeuvres. At the same time, it is preparing a coalition with the SPD and Greens in Berlin, whose joint exploratory agreement provides for further budgetary discipline and the expansion of the police and security apparatus.
The trade union bureaucracies also prevent the development of a united struggle. While they do not lift a finger here in Germany and themselves help organize the attacks in workplaces, they restrict the opposition in France to isolated days of action and negotiate with the very government that is violently attacking young people. They seek to keep the struggles under their control instead of mobilizing the entire working class.
The working class must enter the struggle!
The great strength of the current protest movement lies in its international development and the fact that it is drawing in ever broader layers of society. In Spain, masses are demonstrating against unaffordable housing; in Greece, school students, teachers and doctors are protesting against social cuts; and in Italy and Portugal, workers and young people are fighting against declining living standards and militarism. In Germany, too, tens of thousands of school students have already taken to the streets against conscription.
The next task is to consciously unite these struggles. School and university students cannot defeat the war policies and the power of the financial oligarchy on their own. This requires the mobilization of the working class, without whose labor no factory, administration or social infrastructure can function.
The working class possesses the social power to bring production to a halt and challenge the capitalist order. It must wield this power independently of the established parties and trade union apparatuses.
The IYSSE and the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) therefore call for the building of rank-and-file committees in schools, universities, workplaces and neighborhoods, democratically elected and controlled by those involved. They must be independent of the capitalist parties and trade union bureaucracies and link the different struggles together.
These committees must unite across national borders in the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). Their aim must be to mobilize workers in Germany and throughout Europe for a common struggle and to prepare a Europe-wide general strike against war, dictatorship and social devastation.
The alternative is socialism or capitalist barbarism
This is not simply about defending individual social gains. It is about which class rules society and in whose interests its enormous productive resources are used.
The demands for good schools, a secure future and an end to conscription are incompatible with a society in which the banks, major corporations and super-rich control the economy and governments enforce their interests through war and repression.
The fight against social cuts and militarism must therefore be linked to the demand for the expropriation of the financial oligarchy and the taking of political power by the working class. The major banks and corporations must be transformed into public property under the democratic control of the workers, and the economy reorganized according to social needs rather than private profits.
The enormous resources currently devoted to war and the enrichment of a small minority must instead be used for education, healthcare, housing, secure jobs and the cultural needs of the entire population.
The international protest movement is an expression of a profound crisis of capitalism. The same crisis that drives the ruling classes toward rearmament, war and dictatorship is bringing millions of workers and young people into struggle. The decisive question is whether this resistance will be united with a conscious socialist program.
As the youth organization of the world Trotskyist movement, the IYSSE fight to build an international revolutionary leadership in the working class.
We call on all young people who want to fight against war, social inequality and oppression to study the program of the IYSSE and the SGP and take up the struggle for international socialism.
The alternative is socialism or capitalist barbarism!
A statement from the newly formed Bradford White Rank-and-File Committee opposing the company-union blackmail, in full:
To our fellow workers at Bradford White:
We have been on strike for more than six weeks. We have rejected three sellout contracts: the first two by 96 percent, the third by 62 percent. We have held the line against strikebreakers, the sheriff’s deputies protecting them, and threats from our own union. The question now is not whether we will fight. The question is who controls the fight.
The company calls its new offer “last, best and final.” That is not a fact. It is a threat. An offer is only final if we accept it as final. The company and the union officials have agreed to treat it as final, but we have the final say on what we accept.
By the bargaining chairman’s own admission, this offer is “essentially unchanged” from the one we rejected by 62 percent last week. The only difference is a bigger ratification bonus, a transparent effort to exploit our economic difficulties and buy a “yes.” But workers have learned: the bigger the bonus, the more rotten the contract.
The wage increase is still under $2 an hour for most of us, topping out at $25.25 after five years. Starting wages as low as $18.25 will still leave us in poverty. The company is paying for the first-year raise by cutting our 401(k) match from 4.5 percent to 3 percent. That is stealing from our retirement to hand us a raise that doesn’t keep up with inflation.
We are told the company cannot afford more because of falling sales and a slowing economy. But we did not cause the downturn, and we will not pay for it. Our wages have been eaten by inflation while this company, one of the largest water heater manufacturers in the world, has profited. The proof of what it can afford is on the picket line, where it pays temp agencies and motels for out-of-state strikebreakers at rates higher than it pays us. The company can find money to break this strike. It can find money to pay the workers who built it.
What the union bureaucracy can live with is not what we can live with. The apparatus does not work for our wages, our retirement or our safety. It can sign anything. We cannot.
Any organization that actually defended workers would tell management what it could do with its “final offer.” It would mobilize thousands of UAW members to defend these picket lines and use the strike fund, our money approaching $1 billion, to hold the line.
The UAW is doing the opposite. It is bringing back essentially the same agreement we rejected, and it is helping management stick a gun to our heads by making clear it will do nothing to stop management from replacing us. That is not representation. That is labor police work for management.
UAW President Shawn Fain used it during the 2023 Mack Trucks strike, when the UAW brought back a “last, best and final offer” virtually identical to the contract workers had voted down by 73 percent, and scheduled another vote rather than rejecting the provocation out of hand.
From the beginning, the UAW apparatus has proven to be the biggest obstacle to winning this strike. Local officials signed the tentative agreement. They threatened that rejecting it would mean a “wildcat” strike with no strike pay and lost jobs. Now they are bringing back a contract they know we rejected, because they want to shut down this militant strike.
The UAW International has left 1,200 of us to fight this battle alone while the company imports strikebreakers and the Barry County Sheriff’s Office protects them. The apparatus pays us $550 a week, using starvation as a weapon to force a “yes” vote.
The strike cannot continue under the control of an apparatus that is working to end it. The answer is to take the strike out of the hands of the bureaucracy.
We urge workers to join our rank-and-file committee, which is accountable only to the workers on the shop floor, so we can take control of this strike. All negotiations must be livestreamed and overseen by the rank and file. The committee’s power comes from the shop floor and the picket line, not the union hall. We must become the authority over our own struggle, as the Nexteer workers in Saginaw did after rejecting three UAW-backed sellout contracts.
Our demands
- Vote NO on the “final offer.” Refuse any ratification vote unless the full contract text is released and we have adequate time to read and debate it.
- An immediate raise to $35 an hour, not $1.96.
- Abolish the tier system and the open-ended use of temporary workers, a weapon to divide us and drive down our pay.
- Rank-and-file control over safety. We work in high heat around heavy metal on machines from our grandparents’ time. A tank fell on a worker in this plant and he died. We will not let the company or the union bureaucrats decide what is safe for us.
- Full healthcare, including spousal coverage, and a real retirement, not a 401(k) match the company is cutting.
- $1,000 weekly strike pay, backdated from day one, paid out of the strike fund that belongs to us.
The UAW has left us isolated, and we must break that isolation ourselves. The committee must reach out to workers at Bradford White’s other plants, at the Big Three, to the workers who have fought this same apparatus at Nexteer, American Axle and Dana, and to workers internationally. This strike can only be won by expanding it, not by waiting for the apparatus to “back” us. They never will.
The UAW apparatus is tied to the Democrats and Republicans alike, to economic nationalism and militarism. Its allegiance is to American corporations in the global struggle for profit, not to us. Our fight cannot be won through either capitalist party or the union bureaucracy. It requires the independent political mobilization of the working class, in the United States and internationally.
We have shown we will fight. What we have lacked so far is an organization of our own. The rank-and-file committee is the instrument to build it.
Vote NO. Build the rank-and-file committee. Take the strike out of the hands of the bureaucracy.
8. The political issues raised by the demand Canada’s federal government nationalize Stelco
Hamilton-based Stelco, one of Canada’s most important steel producers, announced late last month that it will lay off up to 500 workers at locations in Hamilton and Nanticoke, Ontario. Cleveland-Cliffs, Stelco’s US owner, has explicitly cited the trade war between Washington and Ottawa triggered by US President Donald Trump and further fueled by the Canadian government’s retaliatory tariffs as the reason for the job cuts.
Thanks to anti-worker changes made to Ontario’s labor regulations by the province’s right-wing, “Canada First” Progressive Conservative government, Stelco has been empowered to throw workers out of a job without any notice. Over 90 workers suffered this fate on Friday, October 9, followed by another 85 the week after. Prior to the layoffs, the steel producer employed about 3,000 people.
Canada’s federal Liberal government has responded by threatening legal action against Cleveland-Cliffs, on the grounds the company has violated the pledge it made when it purchased Stelco in 2024 to preserve the then number of unionized jobs for five years. Industry Minister Mélanie Joly has called the shutting down of Stelco’s galvanized-steel production a threat to Canada’s “national interest” and vowed “all options” are being considered, while the corporate-controlled media has given widespread coverage to Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves’s close ties to Trump. Joly has suggested Ottawa could force Cleveland-Cliffs to divest its ownership of Stelco, and in a recent speech said the federal Liberal government may purchase shares in companies especially hard hit by the trade war to bolster their financial position.
Workers thrown out of a job overnight, their families, and wider layers of the working class in Hamilton and beyond rightly view the drive to offload the costs of the trade war onto their backs with anger and are determined to fight to defend all jobs.
However, it would be a fatal error to take the claims of the Canadian government at face value. The intervention by Prime Minister Mark Carney and Industry Minister Joly has absolutely nothing to do with protecting the interests of workers. Rather it is aimed at ensuring Canadian imperialism has the “independent” productive capabilities to rearm for war, and at reducing its economic dependence on the US by strengthening domestic industry and diversifying exports.
The defense of jobs and living standards requires the mobilization of the working class in Canada and internationally as an independent political force. Rank-and-file committees in opposition to the nationalist union bureaucracies must be built in every workplace to coordinate a worker-led industrial and political counteroffensive across North America to break the power of the oligarchs, oppose war and economic nationalism, and fight for workers’ power.
The Canada-US trade war is itself part of an imperialist-led drive to repartition the world, with the major capitalist powers, Canada included, fighting to establish their respective control over markets, resources, key technologies, production networks and strategic territories.
The most important and ominous arena of this struggle is the developing global war—of which the NATO-instigated war with Russia over Ukraine; the US-Israeli drive to create a “new Middle East” by mounting a genocidal assault on the Palestinians and a criminal war on Iran; and Washington’s military-strategic encirclement of China are all component parts.
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The Canadian ruling class “opposes” Trump only because his agenda cuts across their predatory interests at home and abroad. As Carney declared in his speech before the world’s oligarchs at last January’s Davos World Economic Forum, Canadian capital is determined to secure its “seat at the table” where the imperialists divvy up the spoils of aggression and war, “not be on the menu.” And Ottawa is ready to do so as a junior partner of Wall Street and Washington in a so-called Fortress North America if they can reach a mutually agreeable accommodation that acknowledges Canadian imperialism’s “sovereign right” to the first claim on the profits extracted from Canada’s workers and resources and privileged access to the US market.
In the inter-imperialist struggle, Ottawa and Washington are rivals, with any alliance between them akin to that of criminal gangs. But on the need for a massive onslaught on the working class to fund the enrichment of the wealthy and war, Canada’s ruling class and its counterpart south of the border are in broad agreement.
Carney is spearheading a push to sell off Canada’s public infrastructure to the international financial elite, raise military spending to 5 percent of GDP with a corresponding onslaught on social spending, and abrogate workers’ right to strike. The government’s defense industrial strategy aims to equip Canada for world war by converting large swathes of industry from civilian to military production, with the aim of supplying 70 percent of the military’s equipment needs from Canadian sources.
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It is within this context that workers must evaluate the calls from various political organizations, eagerly taken up by sections of the mainstream media, for the nationalization of Stelco. New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Avi Lewis, who won the party’s leadership earlier this year by posturing as a “left” challenger to the status quo, Ron Wells, the president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 1005, the bargaining agent for Stelco workers in Hamilton, and the misnamed Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) have all joined the campaign.
“Canada cannot afford to lose its steel industry,” declared Lewis. “If we’re serious about saving these jobs and the Canadian steel industry, we need immediate action.” Ontario NDP leader Marit Stiles agreed, adding that Premier Doug Ford’s Tory government should “work with the federal government to push Cleveland-Cliffs to give up their ownership interest in Stelco and establish public ownership and Canadian management.”
In separate comments to the CBC, Wells presented the USW as a longstanding fighter for workers’ jobs and advocate of nationalizing Stelco. “We said that back in 2014 when Stelco was put in (creditor protection) and nobody really listened to us,” Wells commented. “It’s probably complicated and will take a long time, but in the meantime we need to get our members back to work...in a perfect world, we could have both of those things.”
The “campaign” to “nationalize” Stelco is not aimed at mobilizing workers as an independent force to defend their jobs and working conditions, but at directing them to making appeals to the big business Liberal government and advancing the interests of Canadian capital.
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For Canadian imperialism, state control over key industries in wartime has a long history. In the Second World War, the MacKenzie King Liberal government created 28 Crown corporations to manufacture munitions, synthetic rubber, and other critical goods in short supply. Stretching back to the turn of the twentieth century, the Canadian ruling class has frequently used Crown corporations—be it Ontario Hydro, CN Rail, or Hydro Quebec—or other state-controlled mechanisms to promote and regulate economic spheres deemed critical for the development of Canadian capitalism or one of its regions.
Over the past four decades, the leaderships of the USW, Unifor (formerly the Canadian Auto Workers, CAW), and the other unions have promoted the claim that Canadian capitalism is “kinder” and more “worker-friendly,” and that in alliance with government and corporate management, it is possible to defend “Canadian workers” and “Canadian jobs.”
This nationalist-corporatist strategy has never defended a single job, but rather served to suppress class struggle and assist the employers in imposing mass layoffs and contract concessions. A CBC article recently noted Statistics Canada figures showing that compared to the 29,000 workers employed in steel in 2003, which was already a massive decline compared to the 1970s and early 1980s—when Stelco alone employed over 26,000—only about 14,000 remain today.
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It has never been a principle of the socialist movement to uncritically support, let alone advocate, nationalizations irrespective of the class forces carrying them out. When Lenin and Trotsky at the head of the Soviet government organized the nationalization of Russia’s banks and major industries following the conquest of power by the working class in 1917, it marked a major step in the transition to socialism. A workers’ state, established by a proletarian revolution and based on the democratic organs of the working class—soviets—seized control of the private property of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie and began subjecting it to democratic economic planning.
It was quite another matter when, facing revolutionary working class struggles following World War II, social-democratic governments in Western Europe nationalized key industrial sectors to stabilize discredited capitalism. In Britain, which had been bankrupted by the war, and was losing its global empire to a rising US imperialism and the growth of anti-colonial struggles, the Labour government nationalized the coal and steel industries, and the railways. These measures were both necessary from the standpoint of bailing out British capitalism through the use of state funds to help it rebuild and restructure after the war (including mobilizing the resources to invest in new technology), and to maintain political control over the working class, who were told by the union bureaucrats and Labour “lefts” that the nationalizations would serve workers’ interests. The nationalizations went hand in hand with the integration of the trade union bureaucracies into tripartite “bargaining” structures with the state and big business that served to suppress the class struggle for decades, and under which massive job reductions were imposed in a staged manner.
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All of the political forces in the “nationalize” Stelco campaign, from Lewis’s NDP to the “Marxist” RCP, reject out of hand the possibility of mobilizing Stelco workers in an industrial and political counteroffensive with their colleagues in the United States and the ongoing strike at Hamilton’s National Steel Car in defense of jobs and worker rights, and against trade war and imperialist war. Such a movement would collide violently with their lineup behind the Canadian bourgeoisie in the trade war with the US, their rotten Canadian nationalism, and their political suppression of the working class.
It is precisely such a unified cross-border movement that is urgently required. The most effective way to put Cleveland-Cliffs owner and Trump acolyte Goncalves onto the back foot as he throws workers out of a job in Hamilton and Nanticoke would be to shut down production at his company’s US facilities, where thousands of workers have been laboring for close to two months on contract extensions agreed to by the USW. Between US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs, some 23,000 US steel workers have been without a new contract since August 31 and could be on strike were it not for the union leadership’s stalling tactics, which leave Goncalves with a free hand to lay off workers north of the border at Stelco. With their deafening silence on these developments, the Canadian nationalists in the NDP and RCP demonstrate that as far as they are concerned, the struggle of US steel workers may as well be happening on another planet.
A joint struggle by US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs workers in the US and Stelco workers in Canada could link up with the more than two-month-old National Steel Car strike, which over 1,200 workers launched in mid-August. They are demanding an end to the murderous piecework system at their Hamilton, Ontario, rail car production facility, which is within walking distance of Stelco’s main site. They would also find support from the more than 9,000 Stellantis workers in Canada, who recently voted overwhelmingly for strike action amid plans by the global automaker, which Carney’s Liberals want to facilitate, to sell the Brampton Assembly Plant to a maker of military vehicles.
Organizing this fight is possible only in a rebellion against the corporatist and nationalist trade union bureaucracies. It demands the construction of rank-and-file committees in every workplace as part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to provide workers with the organizations necessary to coordinate their mobilization.
This must be combined with a decisive political break by workers on both sides of the border from the nationalist and pro-capitalist politics propagated by the union bureaucracies and their defenders. In Canada, this means a political settling of accounts with the union/NDP/Liberal alliance, a key mechanism for suppressing the class struggle over the past four decades. South of the border, US workers must break from the Democratic Party, the party of Wall Street and the military and intelligence establishment.
Workers should instead turn to a socialist and internationalist program, one aimed at the struggle for workers’ power to place society’s vast resources, including steel and other manufacturing sectors, under the democratic control of the working class. This is the perspective fought for by the Socialist Equality parties in Canada and the US, and we urge all workers ready to take up this fight to join and build our party.
9. Finance capital’s ultimatum to Lula in Brazil: Impose austerity or your victory “will turn to ashes”
On Sunday, October 25, millions of Brazilian workers and young people voted against the rise of fascism. The turnaround that re-elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party (PT) was driven by a massive rejection of a new government of the Bolsonaros, which in the preceding weeks brought crowds into the streets and drew to the polls millions of workers and youth who had abstained en masse in the first round.
They also voted in the expectation that the re-elected PT government would turn to the left and address their most pressing social needs. Lula held out the prospect of ending the 6x1 work schedule—six days of work for one day off—and of tax exemptions for the lowest income brackets. In the last debate, when Flávio called him “nine fingers,” an insult that exudes the far right’s hatred of the working class, Lula reacted forcefully, recalling that he had lost the finger at 17, on the night shift at a metalworking factory. According to some analysts, this response struck a powerful chord within the working class, helping to secure his victory.
The results at the ballot box were immediately challenged. On Monday, finance capital delivered its own verdict: The Brazilian stock market plunged, the dollar soared and the reelected government began receiving orders to apply the same program of cuts that had been expected from its opponent, dictated with the authority of a dictatorship that submits to no election whatsoever. On Wednesday, the defeated fascistic candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, proclaimed himself Brazil’s president on US soil, under Washington’s protection.
The colossal power mobilized by finance capital and US imperialism, first to intervene in the elections and now to determine the program of the elected government under the permanent threat of its overthrow, poses before the Brazilian working class the question of who actually rules.
Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator from the Liberal Party (PL) and the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the fascistic former president sentenced to 27 years in prison for his abortive January 2023 coup attempt, fled Brazil in defiance of an order of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and was received in the United States with the express approval of Donald Trump. Hours after landing in Miami, he proclaimed himself “the true president-elect of Brazil,” then swapped the title for the euphemism “the leader of Brazil,” and announced: “I will lead the opposition from here.” His letter launches a “parallel government” based abroad: a counterrevolutionary platform that openly conspires to overthrow the elected government and appeals for a military coup.
Trump, who declared that the vote “looked like another rigged election,” has so far not recognized Flávio as president. This ambiguous position legitimizes the fraud claim and keeps a cocked gun pointed at the elected government, which can be fired when conditions are deemed favorable.
The sheltering of Flávio crowns more than a year of economic war and open political intervention against Brazil: 50 percent tariffs on “any and all Brazilian products,” sanctions against the justices of the Brazilian Supreme Court, the designation of the country’s largest criminal factions as “terrorist organizations” and the reception of Flávio at the White House in the middle of the campaign.
The intervention of US imperialism also manifested itself directly in the campaign, in two cases under investigation: There are indications that Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, limited the reach of Lula’s campaign, and an inquiry is examining the Bolsonarist campaign’s relations with the Rockbridge Network, a donor network co-founded by US Vice President JD Vance. This intervention is part of an offensive for the neocolonial domination of Latin America, aimed at asserting direct control over its strategic resources and combating Chinese economic influence, as part of Washington’s preparations for war against China.
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Alongside this brazen criminal interventionism, the main organs of international finance capital are dictating their demands to the elected Brazilian government, in a tone of command that dispenses with diplomatic niceties.
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The dictates of the financial oligarchy are summed up in the sentence with which The Economist closes its editorial: If Lula believes that his victory is “an excuse to double down on the policies that saw off Flávio, he will cause a fiscal crisis and a deep recession. His golden victory will turn to ashes.” What capital demands is that the elected government apply the same austerity program the bourgeoisie expected from Flávio Bolsonaro—the same program the IMF has declared “urgent” on a global scale and that brought hundreds of thousands of young people and workers into the streets of France.
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The government did not wait for the inauguration to respond. On Tuesday, Finance Minister Dario Durigan signaled that fiscal adjustment measures will soon be announced by the new government team now being formed.
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Young people and workers confronting capitalism in crisis encounter everywhere the same kind of political trap: the coalition government of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) in Spain; La France Insoumise (LFI) of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France; the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the United States. The struggle for the political independence of the working class from the PT and its government, propped up by the pseudo-left, therefore has an international strategic significance.
The political coalitions these forces defend are heirs to the Stalinist tradition of the Popular Front, whose core is to undermine the political independence of the working class. The result of this political orientation was demonstrated again and again throughout the 20th century in catastrophic defeats for the working class.
In Chile, Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity, elected in 1970, sought to subordinate the revolutionary upsurge of the working class to the limits of bourgeois legality and placed its trust in the “constitutionalist” character of the Armed Forces, while the Nixon administration ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream”—the same weapon that finance capital threatens to wield against Brazil today. Politically disarmed in the face of imperialism and fascism, the Chilean workers were crushed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s coup on September 11, 1973. The central strategic question, it became clear, was the preparation of the seizure of state power by the working class.
The power of finance capital and imperialism appears inexorable only from the standpoint of the national state. The same historical epoch that concentrates this power has produced its antagonist: an international working class more numerous and interconnected than ever, which is today rising up against the same program of war and austerity, from France, Greece and Italy to Chile and Mexico. In Brazil, the workers and young people who voted against fascism will collide with the austerity demanded by the markets and implemented by the Broad Front.
The decisive task is to prepare this struggle: to establish the political independence of the working class from all factions of the bourgeoisie, to organize rank-and-file committees independent of the trade union bureaucracy, linked internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) and to arm it with a socialist and internationalist program.
Truck drivers and small transport operators blocked or slowed traffic at dozens of points across Mexico on Monday and Tuesday, October 26 and 27, in a national stoppage against the robberies, extortion and killings that have made the country's highways a deadly workplace.
On Monday morning, the Interior Ministry (Segob) counted 38 protest points in 19 states. Drivers closed the highway at Tlaxco, Tlaxcala, and kilometer 17 outside Nuevo Laredo, the main crossing for freight into the United States. In Veracruz, drivers shut the highway to Cardel and blocked access to the port.
By Tuesday, Segob announced that the National Chamber of Freight Transport (Cámara Nacional del Autotransporte de Carga, CANACAR) and its allies had committed to “permanently withdraw the blockades and suspend the demonstrations” in exchange for four “working tables” with federal agencies. La Jornada reported that the roads were cleared after 34 hours.
The minutes commit the organizations to “avoid new disruptions to the public and to free transit.” There is no indication that the drivers were consulted.
The stoppage showed the social power of the workers who move 2.6 million tonnes of freight daily on Mexico's roads. But it was rapidly called off, by an employers' chamber that used the drivers' grievances as leverage for a tax concession. The Morena government of President Claudia Sheinbaum defused the struggle, as it has for two years, with talks and promises.
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Sheinbaum treated the stoppage as a tax revolt by “a very small sector,” saying the change affects 170 of 2,580 beneficiary firms. “What there cannot be is a defense of privileges,” she said on October 27, asking why the truckers “had to stop yesterday and close the roads if there was dialogue.”
She said nothing about the drivers killed and disappeared.
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A bill presented in the Senate in August would cap drivers' shifts at 14 hours a day, a measure of the hours they work now. Morena's program, built on partnership with business through Plan México, defends the inequality from which organized crime draws its recruits.
Drivers' demands on safety, health care, hours and pay find no outlet through these channels. The tables bring government ministries together with associations dominated by the larger fleet owners, whose priorities are tax credits, truck subsidies and flexibility on hours. Drivers' conditions will be bargained over by the very forces responsible for them.
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A decisive question is who controls the struggle. Drivers need rank-and-file committees, independent of the business chambers, the unions and Morena, that mobilize their independent power.
They must also oppose any attempt to use “security” as a pretext for building up the police, the National Guard and the military. These forces belong to a capitalist state whose purpose is to defend the property and profits of the ruling class. It has used them to clear blockades with tear gas and jail drivers, while their own officers extort truckers at checkpoints. Every new power handed to them in the name of fighting crime will be turned against workers who strike, block roads or protest.
These committees must also organize the defense of drivers, sharing information on routes and threats and mobilizing other workers whenever a driver is attacked, disappeared or jailed. They should link up with IMSS [Social Security Institute], auto and port workers, and with drivers in the United States, through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
Ending the violence on Mexico's highways requires ending the poverty, informality and inequality on which organized crime feeds. That means a struggle against the capitalist system itself, organized internationally on a socialist program.
11. Half of US workers go without needed care even before Trump Medicaid cuts take effect January 1
A Commonwealth Fund survey published October 22 finds that the share of working-age adults without health insurance rose from 8.9 percent in 2024 to 11.2 percent in 2026. Half of all adults aged 19 to 64 said they had gone without needed medical care in the past year because of its cost.
Between 2010 and 2025, the national uninsured rate fell by half, from nearly 16 percent to 8 percent, after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) took effect. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now projects 37 million people uninsured by 2036. “The country is on the brink of undoing years of progress in health coverage,” Sara R. Collins, the survey’s lead author, said. The survey, taken between May and July, is a baseline: the main provisions of H.R. 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” take effect on January 1.
The “progress” was never the establishment of a social right. The ACA reduced the number of uninsured by paying private insurers to cover people and by an optional expansion of Medicaid, both resting on appropriations that Congress could withdraw. It was, as the WSWS wrote in 2016, a plan “concocted by and for the insurance companies and corporate America.” What is now being withdrawn was always a subsidy to capital.
The losses came from the publicly supported forms of coverage. ACA marketplace and individual plans fell from 8.5 to 6.4 percent of working-age adults between 2024 and 2026, and Medicaid fell from 15.5 percent in 2022 to 13 percent. Employer coverage held at 57 to 58 percent. Young and low-income workers were hit first. Uninsurance among adults aged 19 to 34 rose from 11 to 16 percent, and among adults below twice the poverty line from 14 to 17 percent.
Holding insurance is no guarantee of care. The survey finds 46 percent of working-age adults inadequately insured: 11 percent entirely uninsured, 12 percent with a gap in coverage during the year, and 23 percent insured all year but underinsured. The last is the largest group, and it consists of people who never lost their coverage.
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A deductible is what the patient pays each year before the plan covers most care; the premium, the monthly price of coverage, is in addition to that. The survey counts people as underinsured when their medical bills, excluding premiums, reach 10 percent of household income, or 5 percent for those below twice the poverty line, or when the deductible alone reaches 5 percent of income.
These lines are easily crossed. A worker earning $50,000 with a $3,000 deductible is underinsured before she sees a doctor even once. A family paying the average worker’s share of the premium, $7,471, gives up 10 percent of a $75,000 income, before receiving any care, and the survey does not count this at all, because premiums are excluded in the calculation.
Among continuously insured adults with employer plans, 29 percent are underinsured, 43 percent went without care because of cost and 31 percent are paying off medical bills. Even among adults the survey classes as adequately insured, 36 percent went without care because of cost.
The premium is part of the wage. The employer’s share is compensation the worker earns and never sees, handed directly to an insurance company, and the worker’s own share is taken from the paycheck. The average family premium reached $28,303 in 2026, according to the KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey. The worker’s share rose 9 percent, to $7,471, while wages rose 3.7 percent, a wage cut administered through the health system. Next year the ceiling on out-of-pocket costs in commercial plans rises to $24,000 for a family, 30 percent of an $80,000 income. The survey’s authors acknowledge that deductibles let insurers, employers and policymakers hold down premiums by shifting costs onto patients. The trade unions have signed these premium shares and deductibles into contract after contract, functioning as the employers’ agents in administering the plans.
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There is no shortage of money in American health care. National health spending reached $5.3 trillion in 2024, 18 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and the government’s actuaries project 20.6 percent of GDP by 2034. The same actuaries project the number of uninsured rising from 28 million in 2024 to 33.3 million in 2028. The United States spends more than any other advanced nation and has lower life expectancy and higher infant and maternal mortality, the Commonwealth authors note. The crisis is the result of political choices, not scarcity: the same economy that cannot provide care to half its working-age adults finances tax cuts for the wealthy and a swelling war budget.
H.R. 1 strips the financing states use to support their hospitals. It lowers the cap on the taxes states levy on hospitals to fund their share of Medicaid, and caps at Medicare rates the extra “state-directed payments” that hospitals serving the poor depend on, a change KFF estimates will remove about $60 billion in federal spending in 37 states. Of the 109 hospitals Harvard researchers found most exposed, 85 percent are urban and ineligible for the law’s rural fund, and the researchers warn the strain may hasten takeovers by private equity.
Lost coverage leaves safety-net hospitals with more unpaid bills. Their distress opens them to acquisition, acquisition raises prices and cuts staff and services, and the higher prices return as higher premiums and deductibles, pushing more insured workers into the ranks of the underinsured.
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In the Commonwealth survey, 73 percent of adults said the federal government has a responsibility to ensure that everyone has health coverage, including 45 percent of Republicans. In a KFF poll in September, nine in 10 Democrats and three-quarters of Republicans said the health system needs a complete overhaul or major changes.
But the government is the instrument of the class that profits from the present system. It is the same state that has cut an estimated $911 billion from Medicaid over the decade to help pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and immigration enforcement, and that is requesting $1.5 trillion for the military. Under capitalism, “government responsibility” for health care becomes its responsibility to cut the costs of health care for the ruling class, to safeguard and increase profits.
Both parties respond to the needs of the ruling class, not the popular demand for healthcare for all. The Republicans carried out the cuts. The Democrats built the ACA as a bailout of the insurance industry and paid for its coverage expansion with subsidies on a timetable that expired. Their congressional fight last year was to keep paying the insurers. Their healthcare policy, from 2010 to the present, has been a subsidy program for capital.
The pseudo-left serves as the Democrats’ organized left cover. [Bernie] Sanders, [Elizabeth] Warren, the Democratic Socialists of America and Jacobin promote “Medicare for All” to capture working-class anger and return it to the party of the insurance bailout, as the WSWS showed of Sanders’ 2017 bill and Warren’s 2019 plan, and Democratic candidates are reviving the slogan in this year’s primaries. Their proposals leave the hospital chains, drug companies, investors and the capitalist state intact. It is an electoral gimmick, not a program.
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Healthcare is a social right. Its conversion into a commodity, like the gutting of public health, shows that capitalism cannot meet the essential health needs of the working class. Securing that right requires the expropriation of the insurance companies, hospital chains, pharmaceutical corporations and private equity firms, and their transformation into a unified, publicly owned health service, free at the point of use, financed by taxing the corporations and the wealthy and placed under the democratic control of the working class.
That program cannot be won through either party or through the trade unions. It requires rank-and-file committees of healthcare workers and patients, independent of the union apparatus, and the independent political mobilization of the working class on a socialist program to reorganize medicine to meet human need.
12. Flooding in Thailand is continuing while survivors struggle to get aid
Large parts of Thailand including the capital Bangkok have been hit with heavy flooding, which has left at least 83 people dead as of Monday. Extensive flooding began in mid-September and peaked in late September/early October but is continuing in a significant number of areas.
The flooding has been caused by a combination of high tides, heavy rains and swollen rivers. The Nation reported on Wednesday that three areas hit by high tides with flooding in parts of Bang Saen, Mae Klong and Samut Prakan.
At the same time, the Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation (DDPM) has warned of possible further flooding due to elevated tidal levels for Bangkok and seven of the country’s central provinces from October 27 to November 5. Low-lying riverside areas and communities outside permanent flood barriers are particularly vulnerable.
The latest DDPM report issued on Tuesday stated that nearly one million people—978,112 people from 327,004 households—are still impacted by flooding across 20 provinces and Bangkok, even though water levels are falling. Flooding has hit 60 districts, 387 subdistricts and 2,738 villages in the country’s provinces, as well as two districts in eastern Bangkok.
Weeks after flooding that devastated neighborhoods across Bangkok, workers and small shopkeepers confront financial crises as a result of the cumbersome and inadequate government compensation system. Residents have had to queue overnight for assistance, while families whose possessions and business equipment were destroyed face the prospect of having to start borrowing again. Their difficulties make a mockery of government claims that relief is proceeding efficiently.
The Thai cabinet approved another 10.51 billion baht ($US313 million) for flood assistance in October, intended to cover about 1.48 million households nationally, alongside loan repayment suspensions and subsidized loans. However, the announcement gave no indication of how quickly assistance would be provided to households, let alone whether it would cover damage and losses.
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Accounts from the flood-hit communities are revealing. Reporting from the Rom Klao housing estate, Thai news outlet “The Reporters” interviewed a 60-year-old electrical-appliance repairer known as Uncle Oi, who estimated his losses at nearly 100,000 baht. “The 9,000-baht compensation isn’t enough. Even 10,000 baht wouldn’t be enough… there’s nothing left except our lives.”
Koi, a 48-year-old cooked-food vendor, described water rising to waist height and destroying her equipment. She saved her gas stove, but estimated reopening would require around 30,000 baht.
As well as the flat-rate payment, Bangkok has a separate damage-assessment process, including home-repair assistance of up to 88,600 baht. However, the latest figures reveal a substantial backlog. As of October 21, Bangkok had received 72,848 applications with officials still organizing the inspections needed to assess damage and approve payments. A further 37,737 applications had been lodged for livelihood equipment and business capital, providing a maximum of 13,500 baht per household.
The precarious position of poorer households was expressed by Suda Phadungwatthana, an elderly resident interviewed by the Nation. She and her husband had borrowed 4,000–5,000 baht to establish a small shop three months earlier. Flooding destroyed their goods. “People do not have the same amount of money. I cannot earn even 4,000–5,000 baht in a whole month,” she said.
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n the absence of a properly funded, coordinated public response, residents have been left to improvise. Neighbors in Rom Klao had to repeatedly pool money to purchase necessities when assistance failed to reach their part of the community. Others relied on volunteer assistance. More than 100 Thai and foreign volunteers mobilized through the Bangkok Community Help Foundation to deliver food and water to flood-stricken residents.
Alongside grants, state financial institutions are offering repayment holidays, loan extensions and new credit. Government Savings Bank is providing emergency loans of up to 50,000 baht which carry no interest for the first three months. However, such measures already occur under conditions where household debt levels in Thailand amount to 85.2 percent of GDP—one of the highest levels in Asia.
Like capitalist governments internationally, the Thai government of Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul is above all concerned with boosting the profits of the major corporations and the wealthy as well as expanding the military, not with protecting the livelihoods and well-being of ordinary working people.
13. Spanish train crash at Urda: The fraud of “human error” and the case for workers’ power
At 8:54 a.m. on Wednesday, a Renfe AVE high-speed train slammed into a stationary Iryo train near Urda, in Spain’s Toledo province. At least 69 people are dead and some 110 injured, nine months after a similar high-speed collision on the same Madrid-Andalucia line killed 46 at Adamuz. Images of the wreckage have shocked millions of people around the world.
This catastrophe is not an accident or, as Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Sumar coalition government has claimed, the product of “human error,” in any meaningful sense of these words. Instead, it sharply reveals fundamental problems of capitalist society.
It comes amid an escalating mass movement of youth and workers across Europe against attacks on public services, social inequality, police repression, the far right and war. There are mass protests for housing in Spain, for youth access to education and jobs in France and Belgium, and against war and conscription in Italy and Germany. A European dockworkers strike against port militarization is taking place today, and one-day nationwide strikes next month in Spain, France and Italy.
The Urda crash reveals basic issues facing this developing movement. It exposes capitalism’s subordination of elementary requirements of social life to private profit and militarism. It makes an unanswerable case for a socialist policy, placing the railways and the economy as a whole under the democratic control of the working class.
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Modern safety engineering exists so that one person’s mistake cannot kill dozens. The danger was known. In 2024, the rail accident investigation commission (CIAF) examined an incident at Cuenca. It warned that replacing automatic systems with human verification is “susceptible to failing,” and recommended switching from outdated systems to a modern, ERTMS Level-2 security system.
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Public infrastructure is being run into the ground. Spanish rail liberalization saw Italian and French private operators Ouigo and Iryo arrive on Spain’s high-speed network in 2021 and 2022, under the PSOE-Podemos government, the current government’s predecessor. It multiplied traffic, but hiring and maintenance did not keep pace. By the Andalusian regional government’s calculation, maintenance spending per train-kilometer had fallen 26 percent by 2024.
This is a European phenomenon. In Greece, the 2023 Tempi rail disaster killed 57 people, many of them students, after the pro-austerity SYRIZA (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) government privatized the railways. In Serbia, the collapse of the Novi Sad station canopy in 2024 killed 16.
All the European powers endlessly divert social resources into the pockets of the rich and to military build-up, while elementary security procedures are neglected and avoidable catastrophes claim an ever-growing number of lives.
EU billionaires have increased their wealth by nearly 70 percent, from €1.44 trillion in March 2020 to €2.4 trillion in November 2025. French billionaires doubled their wealth to €440 billion during Macron’s decade in office, holding more wealth than half the population. Spain’s 33 billionaires held €197.5 billion in 2025, more than 39 percent of Spain’s population; its richest man, Armancio Ortega, went from €70 billion to €110 billion under the PSOE-Podemos and PSOE-Sumar governments.
The EU is also plundering social programs to fund the army, particularly as it escalates the NATO war with Russia in Ukraine. Since 2021, EU-27 military spending more than doubled, according to the European Defense Agency, from €218 billion to €454 billion. In Spain, according to the SIPRI Institute, defense spending rose 121 percent over the last decade, to €34.3 billion.
The Urda disaster shows how, as countless billions of euros are turned to enriching the oligarchy and building up the machinery of mass killing and repression, society is driven to collapse.
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Workers must form rank-and-file committees of action, independent of the union bureaucracies, to unite their struggles across national borders. In the rail industry, they would have the power to oversee and impose the necessary security protocols and modernization, and hire and train needed staff. The struggle to build such organizations is essential to unite the emerging mass movement across Europe, to prepare the transfer of economic and political power to the working class and replace the European Union with the United Socialist States of Europe.
14. Residents in working-class Hutt South speak to SEG on New Zealand elections
“I don’t think our government can actually see what everyone has to fight for on a daily basis. People are begging on the streets in order to live.”
15. Australia: Queensland government intensifies Labor’s anti-strike laws
The Queensland bill aligns closely with the federal Labor government’s anti-strike Fair Work Act, which also contains vast ministerial powers to ban or shut down industrial action.
16. Australia: “They’re not focused on us. They focus on war”—Victorian workers and youth speak on election
“I will not be voting Labor as I have since I was 18 and since I started voting 40 years ago. There’s not enough help for the people.” – Afrah, aged care worker
17. Part One: The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Canada)
The Socialist Equality Party’s founding congress, held in Montreal August 22-24, unanimously adopted the following comprehensive document outlining the party’s historical and international foundations. Following is an abridged version made with the assistance of Socialism AI:
The Principled Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party
1. The systemic crisis of world capitalism — World capitalism is in a multi-faceted systemic crisis dwarfing that of 1914–45, whose most menacing expression is the development of a third imperialist world war. Only the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism through the unified global struggle of the working class can avert catastrophe.
2. The two basic contradictions of capitalism — The crisis is rooted in the contradiction between private ownership and socialized production, and between the global economy and the division of the world into rival nation-states. The two solutions are imperialist war (the bourgeoisie's answer) and world socialist revolution (the working class's answer).
3. The necessity of revolutionary leadership — The working class cannot spontaneously produce a program or leadership. Citing Lenin's *What Is to Be Done?* and Trotsky, the party is the historical organ through which the class becomes class-conscious.
4. The Fourth International and the ICFI — Trotsky founded the Fourth International in 1938 to defend the program betrayed by the Second and Third Internationals. Since 1953 it has been led by the ICFI, of which the SEP is the Canadian section.
5. The task of the SEP (Canada) — To win the Canadian working class to socialist internationalism, mobilizing all sections of the class (French and English-speaking, immigrant, Indigenous) in unified struggle, and to unmask "left" Canadian and Quebec nationalism as ideological barriers to international working-class unity.
6. A party of history — The SEP's program is principled, not conjunctural, based on the strategic experiences of the international working class and the history of the Fourth International's struggles against Stalinism, reformism, Pabloism, and opportunism.
World War I and the Russian Revolution
7. The epoch of imperialism — The 1914 war and the 1917 October Revolution opened the epoch of imperialism (war and revolution). The revolution vindicated the revolutionary role of the working class anticipated by Marx and Engels, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party.
8. The origins of World War I — The war arose from the contradiction between world economy and competing nation-states. Quotes Lenin and Trotsky on the imperialist character of the war.
9. Canadian imperialism in the war — Canada was a major belligerent that profited handsomely; the two world wars were periods of most rapid Canadian capitalist growth. Canadian capitalism emerged "dripping from head to foot... with blood and dirt" through the subjugation of the native population.
10. Confederation as a business deal — The Canadian nation-state was consolidated (1867–71) as part of the forging of the modern capitalist nation-state system. Confederation was organized by railway promoters and the Baring Bank, explicitly rejecting revolutionary-democratic principles in favor of "peace, order and good government."
11. Monopoly capitalism and Canadian nationalism — Canadian capitalism was characterized by monopolies and banking concentration. Rival nationalist factions ("imperialists" vs. independence advocates) united in support of the war, which Canada waged with extreme brutality.
12. The collapse of the Second International — Lenin and the Bolsheviks built a new International after the Second International's betrayal. Lenin demonstrated that the betrayal was rooted in petty-bourgeois opportunism and a labour aristocracy nourished on imperialist profits.
13. Permanent Revolution and the vanguard party — The revolution was realized because it was theoretically anticipated. Decisive were Trotsky's strategy of Permanent Revolution and Lenin's conception of the vanguard party, developed in struggle against opportunism.
14. The missed German revolution — The revolution's spread was vindicated by the 1918 German revolution, but it was defeated by Social Democracy's counter-revolutionary role and the lack of Bolshevik-type parties. Trotsky: "there was nobody to lead... there was no party."
15. The impact on Canada, 1917–21 — A wave of industrial unrest and political ferment. The Trades and Labour Congress used "political action" as a safety-valve against class struggle. The ruling class imposed conscription through the Union government, anti-French chauvinism, and the "khaki election," while the Catholic Church built Catholic unions to divide workers.
16. State repression — Canada joined the invasion of revolutionary Russia, but soldiers mutinied. The War Measures Act and emergency powers were used to suppress strikes and outlaw socialist organizations, with mass deportations of socialist immigrants.
17. The founding of the Communist Party of Canada — The CPC was formed in 1921–22 in response to the Communist International's call, emerging from the struggle to assimilate the lessons of the war and revolution. It demonstrated the fatal inadequacies of the SDPC, SPC, and the One Big Union movement, whose passivity during the Winnipeg General Strike left the initiative to the reformists and the state.
18. The Communist International's strategic conceptions — The CI sought to build a unified combat party based on purging opportunists and centrists, recognizing the pivotal role of revolutionary leadership, and subordinating national tactics to world revolutionary strategy. This was short-circuited by the bureaucratic degeneration of the first workers' state.
The emergence of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the Left Opposition
19. Stalinism as nationalist reaction — Stalinism was a nationalist reaction against the October Revolution, epitomized by "socialism in one country," which transformed the Communist Parties into instruments of nationalist Soviet foreign policy and class collaboration.
20. The revision of Marxism — "Socialism in one country" repudiated the objective foundations of proletarian internationalism. Internationalism is a revolutionary program rooted in the insolvency of the national state, not mere sentiment.
21. The founding of the Left Opposition — The Trotskyist movement began with the Left Opposition's 1923 struggle against bureaucratization and adaptation to the NEP. Trotsky and the Left Opposition articulated the interests of the international and Soviet working class.
22. The British general strike — The Stalin faction ordered the CPGB to promote the reformist trade union leaders ("All power to the General Council"). Trotsky's warnings in *Where is Britain Going?* were suppressed, leaving the working class unprepared for the betrayal of the 1926 general strike.
23. The Chinese revolution of 1925–27 — The Stalinists' revival of the Menshevik two-stage theory facilitated the crushing of the revolution by the Kuomintang. Trotsky defended permanent revolution, insisting only a working-class-led socialist revolution could free China.
24. The legacy of the Chinese defeat — The defeat strengthened the Stalinist bureaucracy and drove the CCP to abandon its working-class orientation, enshrining Mao's peasant-based "People's War" guerrilla strategy.
25. Trotsky's analysis of US imperialism — Trotsky analyzed the rise of US imperialism to global power, concluding that its expansion concentrated the explosive contradictions of world capitalism, and that a major US crisis would "strike the tocsin for new wars and revolutions."
26. The CPC's embrace of Canadian nationalism — The Comintern's opportunist orientation led the CPC to embrace Canadian nationalism in the name of "Canadian independence," forming an opportunist alliance with A.R. Mosher and collapsing joint work with the CP USA. The line was reversed in 1929, but within a decade the Stalinist CPC was again promoting Canadian "patriotism" under the Popular Front.
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To be continued.
18. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Kenya:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Norway:
Offshore oil workers strike for pay rise
Spain:
Metalworkers in Murcia face tear gas and rubber bullets in strike for better pay and conditions
Doctors strike for improved pay and working conditions
United Kingdom:
Strike by refuse collectors in London borough over working conditions
Staff working in the London borough of Barnet walk out over pay and working conditions
Further stoppages planned by blood analysis staff at Lancashire hospital trust in England
Porters at Reading hospital. England walk out to protest overtime rate cut
Middle East
Gaza:
Relief agency staff strike over cutbacks
Iran:
Continuing protests across Iran as economic conditions deteriorate
Lebanon:
internet provider workers begin indefinite stoppage
Syria:
Protests in cities after shooting death of disabled man by Israeli forces
19. 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.
