Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Parents denounce federal cover-up in Border Patrol murder of Alex Pretti
What has happened in the nine months since Pretti was murdered? ICE agents similarly shot and killed father, husband and construction worker Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, also a father and worker, was murdered in Biddeford, Maine on July 13. None of their killers have been charged. On October 27, the Los Angeles Times reported that an immigrant inside the Otay Mesa concentration camp died, bringing the skyrocketing death toll of people in ICE custody under Trump to 61.
Immigration Gestapo have been deployed to airports throughout the country. Arrests have occurred in terminals across at least nine states. At San Francisco International Airport and Boston Logan International Airport, immigrants have been confined for days in windowless holding rooms.
The Democrats’ efforts to channel mass opposition into elections and court proceedings, enforced by the union bureaucracy and defended by the pseudo-left, have helped the administration continue Trump’s mass deportation operation, which serves as spearhead for dictatorship. There has been no accountability or justice.
Justice for Pretti, Good and all victims of immigration police violence requires the independent mobilization of the working class. The institutions of the capitalist state are not neutral but instruments of class rule.
Workers, immigrant and native-born, must build rank-and-file committees and prepare a general strike against both capitalist parties and independent of the union apparatus. Its demands must include the abolition of ICE and Customs and Border Protection, freedom for those kidnapped in the deportation campaign, and the prosecution of the agents and officials responsible for ordering, financing and carrying out this criminal violence. This struggle must be directed against the capitalist system that produces dictatorship and against the financial oligarchy whose interests the repression serves.
2. Healey’s first UK budget: crumbs for workers, billions for war
The budget Chancellor John Healey delivered on Wednesday for Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s Labour government leaves workers mired in a deep cost of living crisis. It continues austerity to fund the imperialist wars in which Britain is up to its neck.
Healey opened by declaring, “This is a Budget for the working people of Britain. For British businesses, big and small.” His measures proved it an offering to big business, the banks and the military only. Tens of millions of workers were provided crumbs that rising bills will rapidly eat up.
Healey’s “breathing space” for UK households was a continuation of the paltry alms that Burnham put forward upon entering Downing Street in July. The prime minister took 86 pence a week off electricity bills and introduced a £2 cap on single bus fares in England from January 2027.
Working-class families have been battered by soaring energy bills running into the thousands of pounds since 2022. Healey offered only a one-off £100 this winter to up to 20 million households in England in council tax bands A to D, costing £2.6 billion. The government’s online council tax band checker crashed moments after he announced the measure—proof of the crushing austerity felt by millions.
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Billions more pounds were found for war. On the eve of the budget, the right-wing Sun—which along with the rest of the pro-war media is demanding a massive rise in military spending—enlisted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for an interview. His message to Healey was: “Defense needs to be 100% the priority,” adding, “My advice to John is don’t delay.”
Healey told MPs in his speech that he and Burnham had phoned Zelensky that morning. “He told us—you’ve made my day.” This was, Healey boasted, because Britain is committing “£10bn of additional economic and military support—based on loans, Export Finance guarantees, and half a billion in urgent military funding for this winter”. This is on top of the £25 billion already committed by successive Labour and Tory governments, with the other European NATO powers doing likewise—prolonging a devastating war into a fifth year and costing hundreds of thousands of lives.
Healey also filled in the £4.7 billion gap of the Defense Investment Plan announced by his predecessor Keir Starmer. According to the budget’s Red Book, this will be done by “further reducing departmental capital budgets by 1% from 2027‑28 to 2029‑30 to raise £3 billion,” with £1.7 billion from the Treasury’s capital reserve. Among the casualties is the Warm Homes Plan, which will suffer a £1 billion cut.
The chancellor pledged “the maximum amount of private investment into defense, including through public private partnerships,” with the National Wealth Fund and British Business Bank “deploying up to £5 billion of investment and lending over the next four years.”
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Healey’s budget confirms the warning of the World Socialist Web Site that Burnham heads “a government of guns and no butter” and is on a collision course with the working class.
3. Israel plunged into deeper turmoil following inconclusive election
Israel’s general election has ended in deadlock. With more than 90 percent of the vote counted, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc—Likud, the fascist Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism parties and the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ)—stands at 53 or 54 seats in the 120-member Knesset, seven or eight short of a majority.
The opposition “change” bloc headed by former army chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot has 47 or 48. The two Arab-majority lists, the Joint List and Ra’am, have a combined 19.
Up to 480,000 “double envelope” ballots, cast mainly by soldiers, police and diplomats, are still to be counted, with the tally expected to be completed Thursday. Official results will be published on November 4. President Isaac Herzog will then consult party leaders before handing one of them up to 42 days to cobble together a coalition. He pleaded with the parties to come to him with “an open mind” and to do everything possible “to avoid another round of elections.”
For weeks the international media portrayed the election as an historic turning point, a referendum on the Netanyahu era that would finally remove the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. This had nothing to do with concern for the Palestinians.
The hope invested in Eisenkot was that a government headed by a former general who shares every essential element of Netanyahu’s program—ethnic cleansing, the destruction of Gaza, war against Lebanon and Iran—would allow Washington’s European allies, confronting mass opposition at home over their complicity in genocide, to put some distance between themselves and the politically toxic figure of Netanyahu. They would then find it easier to arm, finance and diplomatically shield the Zionist regime.
Liberal Zionists hoped that a less nakedly criminal government would help rescue Israel from its present standing as a global pariah.
That expectation has been dashed. Netanyahu leads the largest bloc, Likud remains the largest party, and he is the likeliest to be handed the first attempt to form a government. For months to come, Netanyahu will remain prime minister and free to pursue the agenda he has drawn up with US President Donald Trump for a renewed and expanded war against Iran.
Trump, who intervened brazenly in the campaign with endorsements on October 18 and 25—warning Israelis that if they chose “the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi,” America would have to do the work against Iran itself—greeted the outcome by declaring, “A tie is sort of considered a win in that case.”
More fundamentally, as the WSWS explained before the vote, no Zionist party ever offered any alternative to war and authoritarianism. The election was a factional struggle within the ruling establishment over how best to manage the wars, distribute the spoils and suppress the social crisis produced by a society organized around permanent militarism. The result confirms this.
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After three years of genocide, an economy bled by military spending that has nearly doubled as a share of GDP since 2022, and a campaign framed as a verdict on Netanyahu, the Zionist opposition advanced by just one or two seats.
Four of Netanyahu’s lost seats came from the ultra-Orthodox parties, largely through abstention. Shas fell from 11 seats to around seven, while UTJ held at seven. Turnout in Haredi strongholds fell sharply as their communities registered their anger over the government’s failure to legislate an exemption for yeshiva students from military service—the issue over which UTJ quit the coalition and Shas withdrew its ministers.
Moreover, Likud’s share of the vote dropped by only around two points, and its raw vote is roughly what it was in 2022. The election showed that there is a core right-wing constituency that has no intention of changing course. Its most worrying expression is in the more than half a million Israelis aged 18 to 22 who were eligible to vote for the first time. Of these, a Channel 12 poll found 74 percent of them describing their views as right or centre-right.
The concept of a more progressive form of Zionism has been decisively refuted by these results. According to polls, only four percent of Jewish Israelis thought the assault on Gaza had gone too far and still backed the eventual formation of a Palestinian state. An Israel Democracy Institute survey from 2026 found that over three-quarters of Jewish Israelis supported continuing the war against Iran.
Those who genuinely desire peace and an end to conflict will never see this by voting for a different grouping of war criminals.
The opposition parties’ pitch to voters is not that Netanyahu wages war but that he wages it badly. Eisenkot is the author of the Dahiya doctrine, the application of “disproportionate force” to inflict “great damage and destruction” on civilian areas, first used against Beirut’s southern suburbs in 2006. He sat in Netanyahu’s war cabinet for eight months to prosecute the genocide in Gaza and left only to attack Netanyahu for failing to finish the job.
Eisenkot has pledged to destroy Hamas’s military wing and end its rule within 18 months and declared that “two states for two peoples is a mistake,” insisting that Israel must hold overriding security control “from the River to the Sea. He supports the prevention of an Iranian military nuclear capability, by force if necessary.
What changed most decisively in the election was the mobilisation of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up around a fifth of the population. Arab turnout, around 55 percent in 2022, exceeded 80 percent this year. The two Arab parties not only nearly doubled the 10 seats they won in 2022 but by raising the overall turnout also shrank the seat totals of the large Zionist lists under Israel’s proportional representation system.
It is being suggested that the Arab vote might deliver a government headed by Eisenkot. But throughout the campaign Eisenkot set four conditions for any partner, including recognising Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and Hamas as a terrorist organisation, and stated flatly that he saw no Arab party that met them.
Asked about joining forces with Arab parties, he said, “It is against my principles.” Should he break that promise, he said, he expected his own party members “to take a stand.” Eisenkot’s appeal is for a realignment within Zionism. “I will make efforts to bring in more Zionist parties,” he explained, “because Israel needs a broad coalition.” Liberman’s and Bennett’s parties have said the same.
The role of the two Arab parties is politically damning. The leader of the Islamist Ra’am, Mansour Abbas, sat in the 2021–22 Bennett-Lapid government that bombed Gaza and presided over a surge in killings in the West Bank. He declared on election night that most voters for Eisenkot’s bloc wanted a government with Ra’am and senior figures had discussed a deal with him before the vote.
Joint List leader Yousef Jabareen heads an alliance of his Hadash, which emerged out of the Stalinist Israeli Communist Party, and is aligned with the secular nationalist parties Ta’al and Balad. Hadash has said he is “ready and prepared to pave the way to oust the Netanyahu government,” proclaiming that “change runs through a Jewish-Arab partnership.”
That both parties declare themselves amenable to installing a government headed by a war criminal who opposes a Palestinian state, champions the destruction of civilian infrastructure and is committed to war with Iran, exposes their hostility to the fundamental interests of the Palestinian masses.
In the longer run, the fact that Palestinian citizens of Israel can determine the composition of the government of the Zionist state will be treated by every faction of the Israeli ruling class as an existential threat. It will spur them to step up the offensive against the Palestinians and to carry it deeper into Israel itself.
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The real historic character of this election lies not in any prospect that it could rescue Israel from its mounting crisis. It is in its confirmation of the reactionary essence of the Zionist project, of a state founded on the expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians, organized as a garrison state for US imperialism, sustained by permanent war, and resting on the Apartheid-style repression of a fifth of its own citizens.
The only way out is the unification on a socialist internationalist program of Jewish and Palestinian workers with their class brothers and sisters throughout the Middle East and internationally, in a struggle against Zionism and imperialism and for the United Socialist States of the Middle East.
4. United States: Anger over actors’ dire conditions erupts in SAG-AFTRA
SAG-AFTRA members qualify for health insurance by reaching a set threshold of earnings within a 12-month period. The minimum earned requirement is $28,090 for 2026 and $28,933 for 2027, with substantial increases scheduled for 2028 and beyond. Alternatively, union members can qualify by meeting an Eligibility Days threshold of at least 108 days.
In the “good old days,” i.e., May 2023, Variety estimated that “only 5-15% of members earn enough to qualify for the health care threshold of $26,470” and that only 2 percent of the union’s membership “safely earn a middle class wage. … The workforce is becoming ever more precarious, gig-like and uncertain.” Since that time, conditions have worsened sharply, including roughly a 30 percent drop in overall entertainment employment and nearly a 50 percent decline in job openings for scripted television.
This has disastrously affected the ability of many once reliably employed actors to obtain health insurance.
The Hollywood Reporter explains:
While many actors have struggled to qualify for health insurance in the past, the sharp drop-off of scripted television series orders and the rise of runaway production amid industry consolidation and cost-cutting in recent years are cumulatively weighing on performers. … And amid rampant health care inflation, qualifying isn’t about to get any easier. Starting Jan. 1, quarterly eligibility premiums will rise, as will the earnings threshold by 1 percent, with more 1 percent bumps coming in the years after.
One of the most irrational and foul features of the situation is that a performer, as actor Cheyenne Jackson points out, “can make $350,000 a year acting, and then the next year it’s lean, but sadly that money from before doesn’t necessarily carry over and help you to the next year.”
The anger over these circumstances has recently burst to the surface. Actors have gone public about a situation that was once considered embarrassing to acknowledge: not being able to meet the union threshold.
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SAG-AFTRA and all the entertainment unions hitched their wagon to the conglomerates, their fate and what the latter claim they can afford. When times were (relatively) good in Hollywood, some of this shortsightedness and treachery was concealed. The present crisis and semi-collapse has revealed the reality. The economic and cultural defense and existence of film and television production depends on breaking the corporate stranglehold through independent working class action. The rank and file will have to take matters into their own hands.
5. Rail workers to strike as train crash in Spain’s Toledo province kills at least 68
At least 68 people are dead after a high-speed train crash near Urda in Toledo province yesterday around 8:53 a.m. With 107 people hospitalized, including 15 still in critical condition, the death toll could rise further.
The crash occurred between two southbound trains heading from Madrid to Seville. Before the accident, a computer failure reportedly took down the outdated LZB track monitoring system used on rail lines linking Madrid to Seville and to other cities in Spain’s Andalucia province. As a result, one train, operated by Spanish state operator Renfe, collided at high speed with another, operated by Italian company Iryo, which was stationary on the track.
The precise causes of the accident remain disputed, with state officials, railway companies, engineers and trade unions offering conflicting accounts of events before the crash, and how such a catastrophic breakdown of rail safety could have occurred. Renfe has suspended operations on the Madrid-Andalucia rail nework while these investigations proceed.
The accident is however clearly bound up with systemic underfunding of infrastructure and security by the entire political establishment, including the Socialist Party (PSOE)-Sumar government. It is the second deadly train crash this year on this section of Spain’s rail network train grid, linking Madrid to Andalucia, after a crash in Adamuz killed 42 in January. On October 16, the SEMAF train drivers union had called a strike of Renfe workers for today to protest the failure of the state and rail companies to improve security conditions after the Adamuz crash.
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The response to the rail disaster is bound up with the growing mass protests in Spain and across Europe and the deepening crisis of the PSOE-Sumar government. Mass protests against high housing costs and the eviction and death of Maricarmen in Madrid have mobilized millions of people nationwide in Spain. The PSOE-Sumar government responded by calling new elections for November 29, to try to press voters to support the PSOE and Sumar against the right-wing Popular Party (PP) and the neo-fascist Vox party.
Before yesterday’s accident, a strike had already been called on October 16 by the SEMAF union, to take place today by Renfe train drivers to protest the failure of Renfe, Adif and the government to take proper security measures after the Adamuz crash.
The SEMAF union said it called the strike as it “noticed, in the recent meeting with the Transport Ministry, Adif, the AESF and Renfe, that agreements signed on rail security, emergency weather protocols, new driver hiring and reliability of rolling stock were blocked administratively. After consulting the Conflicts Commission on October 5, and today’s meeting, the conclusion we have drawn is clear: everything is still as paralyzed as it was in May.” SEMAF criticized the “bureaucratic slowness” of the government and rail companies.
Statements by major outlets of the Spanish bourgeois press cannot hide their fear that the train crashes will provoke explosive public anger at a bankrupt existing order. The social-democratic El Pais published an editorial, titled “Undefendable catastrophes,” which declared: “The second deadly collision of two high speed trains in less than a year is a blow to the confidence of the citizenry in the state.”
The right-wing El Mundo admitted the disastrous impacts of underfunding while rail privatization increased traffic: “For years there have been more incidents, delays, warnings from professionals and denunciations on the need for maintenance of a network subject to increasing pressure. Rail liberalization multiplied rail traffic, but the capacity of maintenance and upkeep of infrastructure did not increase at the same rhythm.”
These rail disasters are warnings that society cannot function if a capitalist oligarchy monopolizes vast wealth and plunges social resources into the military and war. The fact that these accidents are the product of the PSOE-Podemos or PSOE-Sumar governments, not those of the right-wing PP or Vox, only underscores the bankruptcy of the existing order. There is no progressive alternative within Spanish capitalism to the right-wing policies of the so-called “progressive” government.
6. Carney government announces plans to privatize major Canadian airports
At the Canada Investment Summit held in Toronto last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled plans to open up Canada’s four largest airports to private investors. The government’s goal is to free up “the capital that is tied up in those airports” so it can be “redeployed potentially in other ventures that will grow our economy.”
Canadian airports were semi-privatized in the 1990s, when the Chretien/Martin Liberal government handed operations over to nominally non-profit airport authorities. These airport authorities currently pay rent to the federal government, which remains the landowner, and must reinvest surpluses in the airport’s operations.
However, these authorities have already gone a long way to opening up airport services to ruthless competition through the proliferation of subcontracting. The latest announcements are therefore the completion rather than the beginning of a systematic government-spearheaded drive to deregulate air travel. It has already produced a disastrous deterioration in working conditions for aviation industry workers, including increasingly dangerous workplaces, precarious jobs, and low wages.
Less than a month before Carney’s announcement, ramp agent Oscar Robayo was crushed to death by the landing gear of a passenger jet while performing a routine pushback operation at Montreal Trudeau International Airport. His death was the result of the systematic disregard for basic safety procedures practiced by French-based multinational Samsic, a subcontractor for ground services that has expanded rapidly in North America due to government deregulation.
The privatization of Canada’s four main airports in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver promises to be a massive windfall for the representatives of international finance capital who were gathered in Toronto when Carney made his announcement. Alongside airport privatization, the Carney government has presented a “mega” deduction on new business investment worth $36 billion over five years that will cut the marginal effective tax rate for corporations to 6.4 percent, half of what it is in the United States. Just days after the summit, the Liberal government tabled Bill C-39, which gives it expanded powers to criminalize strikes without so much as a vote in the house of Commons.
Extensive evidence from other countries demonstrates that airport privatization comes with a drastic deterioration in working conditions and affordability for the traveling public. A report published by the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), “Public Runways, Private Profit,” evaluated similar projects in New Zealand, Portugal, the US, the UK, and Australia. It stressed that the pressure to boost profits would result in staff reductions, the undermining of working conditions, and more dangerous airport operations.
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The trade union bureaucracies have been complicit in the decades-long deregulation of the air travel industry in Canada and the US by blocking worker opposition, and collaborating with governments and big business. In the US, when President Reagan summarily fired 11,000 PATCO air traffic controllers, the AFL/CIO intervened to isolate the air traffic controllers and prevent broader sections of the working class from coming to their defence.
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The union bureaucracies are also complicit in the sustained undermining of working conditions for ground services via subcontracting and contract flipping. They touted the Liberal government’s claim in 2021 to be reforming section 47.3 of the Canada Labour Code to ensure that subcontractors had to pay at least the same wages to workers following a contract flip as they received from the previous provider. In reality, this was a ruse.
The government intentionally avoided including seniority rights as part of the reform, allowing contractors to simply hire new workers at a lower rate compared to what more experienced staff had earned, or change job titles and responsibilities to avoid wage protections.
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The result of the sweeping deregulation enforced by the government and suppression of working-class opposition by the union bureaucracies is that air transport has the highest lost-time injury frequency rate of all 16 federally regulated sectors. In 2024, there were 21.41 injuries per million hours worked, an increase from 15.4 per million hours in 2019. 4,793 disabling injuries and 9 deaths were recorded in 2024 alone.
The Carney government’s privatization of airports and massive austerity program will make these conditions even worse. To fund Canada’s massive rearmament program, which aims to make Canadian imperialism ready to wage world war III by increasing military spending to 5 percent of the GDP, the Liberals are taking the axe to other areas of government spending.
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Workers across the aviation industry and throughout the population can only oppose airport privatization and the undermining of their working conditions by mobilizing their strength independently of the pro-capitalist trade union bureaucracies. The recent establishment of the Aviation Workers Rank-and-File Committee (AWRFC) marks an important step forward in this fight, because it fights for new organizations of class struggle controlled by workers themselves.
The Committee is part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees in recognition of the global character of the struggle faced by aviation workers, who confront the same onslaught by globally operating corporations and their supporters in government in every country.
Rejecting the exploitation of critical infrastructure like airports for private profit and the corporate domination of the airline industry means taking up the fight for democratic workers’ control over the workplace and a workers’ government so that air travel and its associated industries can be run as public utilities for the benefit of all.
As part of this struggle, the AWRFC has launched an independent workers’ inquiry into the death of Oscar Robayo. Organized by workers themselves, the inquiry is taking testimony from ground staff, pilots, cabin crew, customer service agents, and other aviation workers with experience of the consequences of deregulation and the subordination of workplace safety to corporate profit. It is also appealing to air travel experts to come forward with information about safety violations and the risks facing workers in this industry driven by cut-throat global competition.
The inquiry will show the culpability of corporate bosses, governments, and their partners in the union bureaucracies in creating the life-threatening conditions workers confront, and advance measures that aviation workers must fight to implement to ensure workplace safety.
To contact the inquiry, email aviationworkersrfc@gmail.com
7. After election debacle, the UAW apparatus moves to break the Bradford White strike
This weekend, 1,200 Bradford White workers in Middleville, Michigan, in the seventh week of their strike, are being told by the United Auto Workers (UAW) to vote on what management calls its “last, best and final” offer. The deal is essentially the same one that the water heater manufacturing workers rejected by 62 percent a week ago, after defeating two earlier agreements by 96 percent.
That is, the UAW is bringing essentially the same contract back a fourth time, now with the company’s strikebreaking threat behind it.
The Bradford White strike and the threatened closure of the Dakkota parts plant in Detroit are the first major tests of the apparatus since the union election three weeks ago. In that election, nine out of 10 UAW members refused to take part in the vote. Only 98,666 ballots were counted, a turnout of 8.9 percent, the lowest for any major union election in US history.
Shawn Fain was “reelected” with the votes of about 6 percent of the membership; subtract the ballots of the union’s own officials and staff, and the rank-and-file figure is closer to 3 percent. The media, along with Fain’s backers in the Democratic Socialists of America and Labor Notes, hailed this as a “renewed mandate.” The workers’ verdict was delivered in the boycott, which reflected the alienation and hostility of the workers to the entire apparatus.
The deal the Bradford White workers rejected on October 23, backed by the UAW International and the Local 1002 leadership, limited raises to less than $2 an hour for most workers, with wages topping out at $25.25 after five years and starting pay as low as $18.25. The first-year raise is paid for by cutting the 401(k) match from 4.5 to 3 percent, and the deal expands the use of temporary workers. Top production pay is now about $21 an hour, and turnover is so high that, as one worker put it, “if you hire 50, you expect two to stay.”
Union officials acknowledge the new deal is essentially unchanged. The only difference is a small bump in the ratification bonus, designed to exploit the fact that workers are living on $550 a week in strike benefits, drawn from a strike fund of nearly $1 billion. Region 1-D Director Scott Zuckschwerdt and Fain, paid roughly $4,419 and $5,315 a week, have said nothing about the strike for weeks apart from brief social media posts. Meanwhile, the UAW is channeling its resources into campaigning for Democrats in the midterm elections, even as Fain backs Trump’s tariffs and trade war measures.
Implicit in “last, best and final” is the threat to impose the terms and replace the strikers with scabs. The company has already sent part-timers, managers and supervisors through the picket lines, protected by the Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf, a vicious Trump backer and member of the fascist “constitutional sheriffs” association.
Workers have told the WSWS that Local 1002 officials have warned that continuing the strike without the union’s backing would make it a “wildcat” that left workers subject to termination.
This is the playbook Fain and Co. have used countless times, including during the 2023 Mack Trucks strike, when the UAW brought back a “last, best and final offer” virtually identical to what workers had rejected by 73 percent. Mack worker Will Lehman, who ran against Fain in 2022 and 2026, led the fight against that sellout.
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The UAW bureaucracy has long enforced poverty wages on parts workers to drive down costs for the Detroit Three, which produced this year’s rejection votes of 90 percent or higher at Nexteer, Dana, Bridgewater and other suppliers. At both Bradford White and Dakkota, the apparatus is functioning as a labor police force and arm of corporate management.
The boycott of the UAW elections was not apathy but a sign of growing anger and desire to fight. At Local 155, which includes the Dakkota workers, only 273 votes were cast out of more than 5,600 members. At Local 1002, 65 of the 1,260 Bradford White workers voted. Given the opportunity to vote down a sellout or authorize strike action, however, workers turn out. Across the border, thousands of Stellantis workers packed an auditorium in Windsor, Canada earlier this month and voted by 97 percent to strike to defend their jobs.
The one campaign that spoke to this anger was that of Will Lehman, who ran for UAW president as a socialist. Lehman called for the abolition of the bureaucracy and the transfer of power to rank-and-file committees in the plants; for the unity of autoworkers across the US, Canada and Mexico against the nationalism promoted by the UAW and the Democrats; and for linking the struggle in the plants to a political fight against the capitalist system.
The WSWS and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) calls on workers at Bradford White to reject the “last, best and final” offer and take the strike out of the hands of the apparatus that has kept it isolated for nearly seven weeks. We encourage workers to elect a rank-and-file strike committee made up of and accountable to plant workers.
Such a committee would publish the workers’ own demands: a $35 hourly wage and the abolition of tiers and temporary labor; full healthcare and a real pension; COLA linked to inflation; rank-and-file control over safety; and $1,000 a week in strike pay, backdated to September 16, from the fund the workers themselves built. It would break the isolation by appealing directly to workers at the Niles, Michigan and Rochester, New Hampshire plants, to parts workers at Nexteer, Dana, Dakkota and Bridgewater, and to the Big Three plants in the US, Mexico and Canada to refuse scab-produced goods and prepare joint action.
The same applies at Dakkota, where a rank-and-file committee should fight to keep the plant open, in unity with the Mack Assembly workers whose production depends on it and all Detroit Three autoworkers to defeat any scheme to reopen it under a new name with a cheaper workforce.
These issues face every autoworker and the entire working class. The working class has the power to stop the attack at Bradford White, at Dakkota and everywhere else; the Bradford White strikers have shown it three times over.
8. Video: Attend the Socialist Equality Party launch for the Victorian election!
The SEP launch in Melbourne this Sunday will outline a socialist and international perspective against war, austerity and authoritarianism.
9. New Zealand: Thousands unable to pay exorbitant water bills
The inability of households to pay their water bills underscores that the provision of basic social rights cannot be left to big business, local councils and the government.
Bolsonaro compares himself to Charles de Gaulle, who “led Free France from London, condemned to death by the Vichy regime, and returned to liberate his country.” De Gaulle, it should be recalled, returned behind the Allied armies.
He also invokes José Martí, who organized Cuba’s independence struggle from New York. On the eve of his death in 1895, however, Martí wrote that his task was “to prevent in time, through the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading over the Antilles and falling, with that added force, upon our lands of America.” He added, “I lived in the monster, and I know its entrails.”
His Venezuelan heroes are more precise. Bolsonaro cites Juan Guaidó, the self-proclaimed president of 2019, who served as cover for US sanctions and coup attempts, while never running for president. The letter also mentions the right-wing opposition candidate Edmundo González and the CIA asset María Corina Machado.
When US forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, Trump dismissed Machado, saying she lacked “the support within or the respect within the country,” and dealt with Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez instead. Machado returned last Sunday, with Washington’s approval, to what has become a US protectorate.
But Brazil is not Venezuela, and events will not follow the same script. Bolsonaro received 59.8 million votes, and his party holds the largest bloc in Congress. A leadership in exile gives this fascist coterie a command center beyond the reach of Brazilian courts, and hands Washington an instrument of destabilization against Latin America’s largest economy.
The flight itself was coordinated across borders. On Sunday night, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who oversees an investigation into money laundering and currency evasion in which Flávio is deeply implicated, canceled his Brazilian passports, ordered him to surrender any foreign travel documents within 24 hours and barred him from leaving Brazil. On Monday, Bolsonaro called the order a “clear attempt to intimidate me” and declared, “I never thought about leaving the country. I will hand over my passports.”
Within hours, the jet that would carry him out was parked at Puerto Iguazú, on the Argentine side of the border. On Tuesday the deadline passed, and Brazilian authorities warned the Javier Milei government that he might try to cross.
At 10:50 p.m., Bolsonaro, his wife and two daughters crossed from Foz do Iguaçu into Argentina. Forty minutes later they boarded a Gulfstream G400 private jet with a flight plan for Guayaquil, Ecuador, where it refueled before continuing to Miami. CBS News Miami reported that he entered the US on an Italian passport.
According to the Uruguayan daily El Observador, Argentine President Javier Milei “had the details of the operation.” Bolsonaro thanked him in the letter “for his courage, sense of justice and legality.”
The jet belongs to Baires Fly. Prosecutors have named the firm and its manager, Sergio Mastropietro, a former partner of the convicted money launderer and accused drug trafficker Federico “Fred” Machado, as the “heads of laundering” in a bribery scandal engulfing Milei’s government.
Bolsonaro himself is under investigation for money laundering, and another inquiry is examining his campaign’s relations with the Rockbridge Network, a donor network co-founded by US Vice President JD Vance.
The same night, a US strike on a boat in the eastern Pacific killed five more people accused without evidence of “narcotrafficking,” bringing the toll to at least 243. Washington blows up small boats in the name of fighting “narco-terrorism” while sheltering drug-trafficking criminal and fascistic forces upon which it relies to subordinate Latin America. This is the “Shield of the Americas,” Trump’s coalition with Milei and other right-wing governments, at work.
The Democrats’ response makes them complicit. As of this writing, their leaders in Congress, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, have said nothing about the welcoming of Bolsonaro or the parallel government being plotted from US soil, and no Democrat has demanded that Bolsonaro’s visa be revoked.
The Biden administration, too, let Jair Bolsonaro stay in Florida until the end of March 2023.
The Lula government’s own response is spineless. Lula called the flight “shameful” and said the Bolsonaros’ first homeland was “licking the boots of the United States.” But his ministers have blamed [Justice Alexandre de] Moraes for turning Bolsonaro “from criminal to persecuted.” The Foreign Ministry treats as a matter for “the judicial sphere” what is an act of foreign aggression. No protest has been lodged with Washington.
11. CIA now hiring: Rubio posts ad for spies in Cuba
On Friday, October 23, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio used his official account on X to post what amounts to a classified ad for spies. “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba,” he wrote, “now is the time. The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.”
Within hours the Central Intelligence Agency posted a Spanish-language video and a seven-step guide. Prospective informants are told to use a device “not linked to your identity,” browse in incognito mode, open a disposable email account and connect through a VPN not located in “Cuba, Russia, Iran, China.” They are asked for their city, their job and their “level of access” to information.
On Saturday, Southern Command, the Pentagon’s branch for Latin America, reposted the appeal with a statement from its commander, General Francis Donovan: “No more broken promises, rampant corruption, or tolerating an elite class that lives in luxury while citizens are ignored. Now is the time.”
The campaign came hours after Trump told a midterm rally in Fort Myers, Florida, that he would send Rubio to “close the deal” with Havana, joking about parking warships just off the Cuban coast.
The method has been tested before. On February 12, the CIA released a Mandarin-language video inviting Chinese officers to betray their command amid Beijing’s military purge. In Venezuela, the agency placed a team inside the country in August 2025. According to the New York Times, a CIA source inside the government tracked Nicolás Maduro’s movements in the days and moments before US commandos abducted him on January 3.
The legal pretext has been prepared for such an operation in Cuba. In May, the Justice Department indicted former Cuban leader Raúl Castro, now 95, as it had indicted Maduro before seizing him. On October 19, Florida added a state arrest warrant, announced on the first day of early voting in Miami-Dade.
The CIA set up a Cuba task force of case officers, cyber-operators and covert influence specialists, whose intelligence, the New York Times reported in August, “will help the U.S. military update its options for potential military action against Cuba.”
The ad looks like an absurd way to recruit “discreet” spies. For 66 years, Washington has covertly recruited, paid and armed agents to return Cuba to its pre-1959 status as a semi-colony. Now the secretary of state and a four-star general pursue the same objective using social media, denouncing “an elite class that lives in luxury while citizens are ignored” as they serve Trump and his cabinet of billionaires.
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Washington knows whom it is addressing: the most venal and despicable elements, those ready to sell themselves to the power carrying out a genocide against the Cuban people.
Following its release of a report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” the same State Department spent the summer telling Americans that protests against ICE raids and the Gaza genocide are the work of Cuban agents to lay the groundwork to criminalize opposition at home.
The report charged that Havana ran an espionage empire inside the US government and served as “a kind of concierge service” for America’s enemies. It traced the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War protests, the George Floyd and anti-ICE demonstrations to Cuba “in some way, shape, or form.” Rubio told Fox News that Cuba is “a true superpower” of espionage and that in the protests “there’s nothing organic about it.”
The record shows who infiltrated whom. The last CIA Cuba task force, formed in 1960, produced the Bay of Pigs. As usual, the CIA treats its assets as disposable. The CIA left the 1,400 exiles it landed at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 on the beach without air cover; more than 1,100 were captured and later ransomed for baby food and medicine.
In 1960, CIA-trained exiles also bombed the freighter La Coubre in Havana harbor, killing over 100, and in 1976 blew up Cubana Flight 455, killing all 73 aboard. Researchers put the toll of US-directed and US-linked terrorism against Cuba since 1959 at more than 3,000 dead. Luis Posada Carriles, organizer of the Cubana bombing, died a free man in Florida in 2018.
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The ad and the State Department report are two halves of one policy. The most powerful imperialist state in history, with an economy some 300 times larger than Cuba’s and a military budget roughly 5,000 times greater, is using that power to starve an island of fewer than 10 million people into submission. It pays for this with the taxes of American workers. Having cut off the fuel, the food and the medicine, it now advertises for stooges to help finish the job.
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The regime in Havana cannot defend the Cuban people. It mocks the CIA’s ad while negotiating its surrender with the CIA’s director, and it offers the island to American investors rather than appeal to American workers, whom it fears more than Washington. The World Socialist Web Site gives it no political support.
The power to stop this operation lies with the working class. The blockade, the war preparations and the plunder all depend on the labor of dockworkers, oil workers, truckers, engineers and soldiers. When that labor is withdrawn on an international scale, no state, however heavily armed, can carry them out. Uniting workers in the United States, Cuba and across the Americas in that struggle requires a socialist leadership: the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International.
12. Australia: ACT educators join limited stoppages but union prepares a sellout
After a one-day strike in June, the Australian Education Union has cancelled further fortnightly stopworks and is pleading for a deal with the ACT Labor government.
13. Cross-border tensions rising on Korean Peninsula
In recent weeks, tensions have risen between North and South Korea as cross-border disputes have grown amid a global escalation of war driven above all by the United States. It is a further indication that the conflicts that have erupted in Ukraine and the Middle East, far from being isolated from one another, are part of an unfolding third world war that threatens to erupt in the Asia-Pacific region.
The immediate issue on the Korean Peninsula is a September 21 landmine explosion in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that wounded three South Korean soldiers, two of them seriously. Both Seoul and Pyongyang have leveled accusations at one another over the event.
On Monday, North Korean state media reported that Pyongyang had the previous day sent a letter to the president of the UN Security Council, a position currently held by Greece, calling the landmine incident “fabricated.” South Korea has been trying to “impede” the North’s border fortification efforts, according to Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency.
Seoul sent its own letter to the UN Security Council last Thursday, demanding that Pyongyang take responsibility for the blast and apologize. The South claims to have discovered resin from North Korean landmines and says that several explosives were deliberately planted south of the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), the border between the two Koreas. Thus it ruled out that the landmine had been washed south across the border by summer rains, as is sometimes the case.
Seoul has accused Pyongyang of violating the 1953 Armistice Agreement that ended active fighting in the Korean War, though the conflict technically continues as no peace treaty was signed. The UN Command, which oversees the armistice in the South and is controlled by the US military, also stated the North was in violation of the agreement, claiming to have later found an active North Korean mine south of the MDL.
Pyongyang, on the other hand, has stated that its actions along the border are a “legitimate and just exercise of its sovereignty going in strict conformity with the UN Charter and international law as it is a self-defensive measure to defend its territorial security from outside threat of aggression.” Since 2024, the North has been carrying out border reinforcement work.
Kim Yo-jong, the high-ranking sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, accused Seoul of attempting to intimidate the North and that the military would deploy more tactical strike assets along the border, last week calling the situation “very unstable.” On Sunday, observers witnessed the North openly displaying a 122mm howitzer at the border pointing south, which is rare and interpreted as a rejection of any negotiations to ease tensions.
Kim also stated that the South’s military had fired 201 warning shots and issued 2,780 warning broadcasts towards the North between August 1 and October 17. She said that Pyongyang plans to resume propaganda loudspeaker broadcasts along the entire border after both sides last halted them in June 2025.
Seoul could similarly resume its own broadcasts, which have been a source of tensions in the past. Military tensions spiked in 2015 after another landmine incident injured South Korean soldiers. The South began broadcasts shortly after that, leading to the North reportedly targeting the propaganda speakers, resulting in an artillery exchange. No casualties resulted from the skirmish. However, the episode highlights just how rapidly the situation can escalate.
The rising tensions must be placed within the broader international context, amid an upsurge of militarism around the globe driven above all by US imperialism. Washington has stoked a war with Russia in Ukraine, backed Israel’s brutal genocide in Gaza, and launched an illegal war against Iran. US allies like Japan have also rapidly militarized, deploying long-range strike capabilities.
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In an interview with the Financial Times published on October 18, General Ronald Clark, the commander of US Army forces in Asia, stated, “At no other point in my career have I seen the Army commit this level of resources and capability to the Pacific.” This includes the deployment of a Typhon missile system to the Philippines, capable of striking China’s coast with both SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles. Another Typhon missile system has been stationed in Okinawa, Japan.
The FT reported in the same article that the US has set a record this year for the number of allies taking part in joint military exercises, held in countries like the Philippines and Australia, as well as the scope of the drills. In other words, the US is surrounding China and North Korea in its system of alliances while ramping up war preparations.
South Korea has been an active participant in this war drive against China under both right-wing and so-called “progressive” administrations. Under current President Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party, Seoul has pledged to raise military spending to 3.5 percent of GDP and acquire nuclear-powered submarines.
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North Korea has long been a target of US imperialism, from the Korean War, which erupted in 1950, to the present day. While Trump claims to have a good relationship with Kim Jong-un, he also threatened to “totally destroy” the North in 2017.
Facing these threats, in 2024, Pyongyang and Moscow signed a comprehensive strategic partnership, pledging mutual assistance in the event of aggression against one of the other parties. The North has also dispatched troops to fight alongside Russia in Ukraine.
Now, after watching the attack on Venezuela at the beginning of this year, the threats against Cuba and the war on Iran, no doubt the calculations in Pyongyang include the fear that North Korea could be the next target.
As the crisis for the Trump administration deepens, the situation in Asia becomes ever more uncertain and dangerous. A miscalculation or mistake could be enough to set off a conflict on the Korean Peninsula or elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region involving not only the Koreas, but the US, China and Russia, raising the real risk of a nuclear war.
14. Youth rebellion across Europe frightens ruling elite in Türkiye
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued an open threat to the working class and youth of Türkiye in a statement following a cabinet meeting on October 26. He referred directly to the movement of youth and workers that is shaking numerous countries across Europe.
“If there are those who, emboldened by events in some European countries, dream of a similar attempt, let them know this: Türkiye was not picked up off the street, and it is not a country that will be surrendered to the street,” Erdoğan declared.
Erdoğan’s fascist ally, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli, said on October 13 that the demonstrations in France had the “potential to bring wider masses into the streets” and could spread “wave upon wave” across Europe. He ended his speech with a direct warning to youth: “Do not be tempted by France! Do not be swayed by Western imperialism!”
Europe is being shaken by its largest social movement in decades. In France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Albania and Serbia, mass protests initiated largely by high school and university students are merging with a growing movement of the working class. In November, strikes and national days of action involving millions of workers are planned in a number of countries, albeit under the control of the trade union bureaucracy.
As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has stressed, what is developing is not merely a protest movement, but a fundamental class conflict that directly raises the question of power: Who will determine the course of society—the billionaire oligarchy, which resorts to every means to increase its profits, finance rearmament and wage war, or the working class, the overwhelming majority of the population?
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The European imperialist powers are pouring hundreds of billions of euros into rearmament to wage NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine and the wars in the Middle East. They are making the working class pay for this through cuts to education, healthcare, pensions and social benefits. With the reintroduction of conscription, young people are being prepared for deployment to the front in imperialist wars of aggression that have no popular support.
While energy, rent and food prices erode real wages, the wealth of a handful of oligarchs has reached staggering proportions. Unlike in the 1960s and 1970s, governments controlled by the financial oligarchy have no room to make significant social concessions. Mass resistance is growing against the attempt to make the working class and youth pay the full cost of the financial crisis and war. The ruling class is responding with dictatorial measures and the systematic strengthening of the far right. The developments in Europe show that the class struggle on an international scale has entered a new and explosive stage.
Türkiye is one of the most fragile links in this process. Even according to the doctored figures of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), annual inflation stood at 29.7 percent in September. Education prices rose by 14 percent in a single month, and by 26 percent in higher education. According to calculations by DİSK-AR, the research center of the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions, the purchasing power of the net minimum wage of 28,075 lira eroded by 6,828 lira in nine months, leaving it 9,725 lira below the hunger line. For millions of working class and pensioner families, choosing between rent, food and bills is a daily reality.
As the WSWS has pointed out, as of the last quarter of 2025, 6.5 million of the 24.1 million young people aged 15 to 34 in Türkiye were neither in employment nor in education. Sitting atop this social powder keg, the government is increasingly planning its spending in line with the demands of the financial oligarchy. In the 2027 draft budget law, combined spending on defense, internal security and interest payments exceeds spending on education, central government healthcare and social assistance.
While maintaining its rhetoric of a “negotiated solution,” the government is at the same time integrating Türkiye ever more deeply into the aggression of the US and its NATO allies in the Black Sea and the Middle East. The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on August 7 and expected to be voted on in parliament next week, aims to advance the regional interests of the Turkish bourgeoisie in line with US imperialism’s drive to establish complete hegemony over the Middle East. The reactionary scramble for energy resources and routes also threatens to bring Türkiye into military confrontation with Israel and Greece. Türkiye’s political and media establishment is seeking to promote Turkish nationalism on the basis of rivalry with Israel and Greece. At the same time, however, the Turkish bourgeoisie maintains its alliance with these rivals through the US and NATO alliances.
The Kemalist and Kurdish nationalist bourgeois opposition is turning to the same imperialist powers and seeks to defend the interests of the same ruling class. However much these forces complain about the Erdoğan regime’s mounting repression, they fear the emergence of the working class as an independent political force capable of shaking the foundations of capitalist rule no less than the government does. They are no less opposed to it.
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In Türkiye, as in Europe and the rest of the world, none of the fundamental problems facing the masses of workers and youth can be resolved on a national basis, or by replacing one capitalist government with another. Stopping the imperialist wars and implementing urgent social measures in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population require a frontal assault on the wealth and power of the oligarchy, in Türkiye and internationally. This means the struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe and the Middle East.
We call on all workers and young people who want to fight on the basis of this international revolutionary perspective to join the Turkish section of the International Committee of the Fourth International—the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi - Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party - Fourth International)—and its student and youth organization, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE).
15. Austria: "No future without universities”: Student protests in Vienna
Against the backdrop of Europe-wide mass protests, a major demonstration took place in the Austrian capital, Vienna, last week, on October 22. Around 50,000 people gathered under the slogan “Red alert – #SaveTheUnis”, among them students, lecturers and university staff. The Austrian Students’ Union (Österreichische Hochschülerschaft, ÖH) had called the protest. Doctors and employees from other university cities also traveled to the demonstration.“No future without universities,” “Cut the cut” and “Make the super-rich pay! Lecture halls for the masses!” read homemade placards. Above all, the students and staff were protesting against the underfunding of universities. For the years 2028 to 2030, the university budget remains at around €16 billion, the same level as before. Given the rise in costs, this inevitably leads to far-reaching cuts. Universities anticipate having to save 10 to 15 percent and cut up to 6,800 jobs. Study places would also be affected.
In addition, this budget must now cover the funding for the Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria (IT:U), a technical university in Linz focused on digitalization, and for doctors’ salaries, which had previously been financed on top of the university budget.
The demonstration was the high point of student opposition so far this year. As early as May, around 28,000 students demonstrated in Vienna. On October 13, the ÖH organised a “Ring Lecture” (a pun on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, Ring Street) against the austerity policy. Thousands of students blocked Ringstrasse with a protest rally. Two days later, students occupied the main hall at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
The cut to the university budget is part of a broader attack on education that stretches across Europe. In Germany, universities face the biggest austerity program of the postwar period; the state governments are planning to slash millions from research, teaching and infrastructure. For example, Berlin’s universities already had to accept massive savings in 2025 despite major protests.
In Vienna, the protesters are demanding sufficient courses, good supervision, fair working conditions and no additional tuition fees or barriers to access. Bianca Ivan, press spokeswoman for the ÖH, said, “Our central demand is that the federal government improves the announced university budget by October 31 and closes the funding gap.”
In its press release, the ÖH also calls for “a fairer distribution of society’s wealth, including through wealth and inheritance taxes on large fortunes, as well as the dismantling of fossil fuel and climate-damaging subsidies.”
But these demands are addressed to a government that is currently claiming billions of euros for its war policy. Around €4.76 billion was budgeted for the Austrian armed forces in this year’s budget. Including budgetary authorizations, the Defense Ministry puts the funds available for 2026 at €5.18 billion. This is an enormous increase compared with 2022, when spending was €2.7 billion. Like Germany, the Austrian government has used the Russian invasion of Ukraine to justify its own military rearmament program.
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While some students at the demonstration drew a direct connection to the billions of euros going into armaments projects, the ÖH organizers and university management ignore this connection. The reason is that they are tied to the same parties that decided on and are implementing this rearmament program.
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The policies of all the bourgeois parties have led to growing poverty due to stagnating wages, unemployment, rising rents and living costs, as well as higher homelessness. The number of people at risk of poverty rose from 1,288,000 in 2024 (some 14 percent of the population) to 1,441,000 in 2025 (nearly 16 percent). In Vienna alone, according to Statistics Austria, 11,512 people were registered as homeless or without housing in 2024.
According to the latest student social survey, students spend on average 38 percent of their budget on housing. In nominal terms, their housing costs have risen by around half since 2015.
The Vienna demonstration is taking place at a time when class struggles in Europe are expanding at a rapid pace. In recent days and weeks, no fewer than nine countries have experienced mass protests—not only France but also Albania, Serbia, Spain, Italy, Greece, Belgium, Portugal and Ireland. In Germany, demonstrations in more than 20 cities are planned for October 31.
In France, the protests began over the catastrophic conditions in schools and quickly developed—not least in response to the brutal use of police force—into social mass protests against high rents, low wages, war and police violence. On Saturday, 800,000 people took to the streets in France.
As the WSWS has explained, this Europe-wide movement is driven by real class issues: “the lack of any prospects for the future for young people; rising living costs, energy prices and rents; the squandering of hundreds of billions on armament and war, while pensions and spending on social welfare, healthcare and education are being slashed; the unbridgeable gulf between an oligarchy whose luxury knows no bounds and the mass of the population who have to count every penny.”
The ruling class is responding with smears and calls for repression. Leading Austrian politicians also used the violence at the French protests to warn of a similar development in Austria—and at the same time to blame immigrants and migration policy for the “chaos.”
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Given the Europe-wide movement of students and teachers, it is remarkable that the official student representative bodies in Austria say not a word about it. While Greek demonstrators have openly declared their solidarity with the French protests, the ÖH is trying to confine the opposition to a national framework.
Apart from the participation of university staff in the demonstration, the ÖH makes no appeal to the working class, which is the only social force that, through mass strikes, is capable of stripping the rulers of power. This is precisely where the decisive question for the movement lies.
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It is necessary to free the movement from the influence of the establishment student associations and the bourgeois parties and to orient it to the emerging struggles of the working class against social cuts and war.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) fights among young people worldwide for a socialist program and calls on students in Austria to contact the IYSSE in order to found local groups.
16. 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.
