Elected Greater Manchester Mayor in May 2017, Burnham sought to
reinvent himself as the “everyman”, pledging to give 15 percent of his
£110,000 salary to homelessness-related causes. This was part of his
pledge to “end rough sleeping in Greater Manchester by 2020”.
Almost
10 years on rough sleeping and homelessness in general remain rife in
Manchester and across the wider conurbation of 3 million people. The Manchester Evening News
reported last December: “New data provided by Shelter through Freedom
of Information requests has shown which areas of Greater Manchester are
hardest hit by homelessness. Manchester is the highest—with 9,589 people
rendered homeless, 4,678 of whom are children. This means that one in
every 61 people are homeless. This is followed by Salford, with a rate
of 2,327 people as of 2025.”
Such a pledge was always incompatible with the mayor’s burgeoning
relationship with big business in Greater Manchester, based on central
Manchester being turned into a haven for property developers—who got Peter Mandelson-style “filthy rich” from the taxpayer funding Burnham has soaked them in for a decade.
Under
Burnham’s tenure, in close collaboration with a Labour-run,
pro-corporate Manchester City Council—which has worked with Tory and
Labour governments for almost four decades around a “private-sector led”
regeneration strategy—around 30–40 luxury skyscrapers have been
completed or begun since 2017.
Dominating the skyline in central Manchester, even the Financial Times
looks on in awe. Its chief UK business columnist, John Gapper, wrote
last month in a piece titled “Inside the luxury towers behind
Manchester’s revival” of the “breathtaking view across its rejuvenated
city centre from a £2.5mn penthouse at the top of the 40-storey Viadux
tower.”
No workers will ever step foot in these developments.
Gapper writes that “much of its appeal to the residents, who mostly rent
its apartments, lies at the foot of the building. The pool, yoga and
fitness studios, and cinema room under the arches of the old railway
viaduct on which it is built are part of the package. In return for an
annual service charge for each owner of about £5,400 for a 1,000 sq ft
flat, residents enjoy amenities rivaling top developments in global
capitals.”
The FT notes that the Viadux developer, Salboy—owned by
a gambling industry billionaire—“sold about 70 percent of the Viadux
apartments between 2020 and 2023 to Chinese and Asian buy-to-let
investors. Asian enthusiasm for UK property has since diminished but
about 20 percent of the W Residences have more recently gone to buyers
based in the Gulf and Middle East, some as second homes.”
The
main property developer profiting from Burnham’s largess, Renaker, has
built seven skyscrapers, with five more having planning permission and a
further four being considered. So far Renaker, owned by billionaire
Daren Whitaker, has received £615 million from the mayor’s Greater
Manchester Housing Investment Loans Fund (GMHILF).
GMHILF was set
up by the Tory government in 2015 to enable the Greater Manchester mayor
to hand out an initial £300 million in loans to property developers.
Since then, its use has exploded, with around £1 billion in loans given
to Renaker and 45 to 50 other property companies across 70–75
developments.
The FT wrote of the plethora of luxury apartment
blocks, “This is as much ‘Manchesterism’ as the public bus network
overseen by Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester’s mayor and prime
ministerial contender.” Burnham has presented the Bee Network of
integrated bus and tram services brought under the control of local
authority–run Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) as his greatest
victory over Thatcherism.
But as the WSWS has established,
this centerpiece policy: “retains outsourcing. While fares and
timetables are coordinated, the system remains a privatization framework
reliant on state subsidy and maintained on the backs of transport
workers exploited to the hilt by private operators.”
The private
bus companies, owned by global transnationals, continue to extract their
returns from the same public subsidy stream Burnham guarantees.
Franchise bidding continues to drive down wages and conditions. Bus
drivers in Manchester are no strangers to the cost cutting carried out
by the bus profiteers, such as those imposed at Go North West in 2021, as franchising was being finalized by Burnham, TfGM and the bus firms.
*****
As the WSWS has argued before:
“The decisive question for the working class is not which carbon-copy
Labour leader is at the head of the country when struggles erupt, but
developing its own socialist leadership in the fight against them.”
Thatcher knew what New Labour was. Workers and youth should know what
Burnham is. The task is to build a party of their own—the Socialist Equality Party.
The
UAW bureaucracy is seeking to impose a fourth sellout tentative
agreement after autoworkers at the Saginaw steering plant rejected the
first three and voted by 86 percent to authorize a strike.
Nurses
at SSM Health St. Mary's Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin have filed for a
union election with the SEIU amid management intimidation, but the
fight for safe staffing and patient care requires rank-and-file
organization independent of a union whose history is one of isolating
and betraying workers.
Early Friday morning, the US Senate passed the Secure America Act, a
nearly $70 billion funding package for the Department of Homeland
Security, providing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with funding through 2029, the end
of Trump’s second term.
The bill passed 52-47. Every Democrat present voted “no,” joined by
Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, while Democratic Senator Michael
Bennet of Colorado missed the vote. The measure now heads to the House,
where Republicans are expected to pass it.
The bill provides
billions for hiring, training, paying and equipping additional
immigration agents and support personnel, expanding detention capacity
and building out the technological infrastructure of the police state.
One section appropriates $3.45 billion for “new nonintrusive inspection
equipment,” “artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other
innovative technologies,” border surveillance systems and the biometric
entry-exit system.
This comes on top of the roughly $170 billion
provided last year for the immigration Gestapo under Trump’s “One Big
Beautiful Bill” Act, which included $45 billion to construct new
detention camps across the United States.
The passage of the bill
is not simply a victory handed to Trump by the Republicans. It is the
outcome of a political process in which every institution of the
existing order, above all the Democratic Party, played its assigned role
in strangling the mass movement that erupted in January following the
murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
*****
Across the country, ICE and CBP continue to kidnap workers from their
homes, job sites and communities. In South Carolina, 48 workers were
taken by ICE while on the job at Burnstein von Seelen, a metal casting
business.
The trade union apparatus and the pseudo-left
organizations around the Democratic Party have played their role in this
process. During the Minneapolis protests, the trade union bureaucracy
told workers to remain on the job and respect “no strike” clauses
negotiated by the union bureaucracies themselves. The pseudo-left,
including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as well as groups
like Left Voice, worked to contain opposition and promote the
fiction that the agreement between Trump and the Democrats represented a
fundamental retreat.
“Abolish ICE,” once promoted by DSA figures
such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has become forbidden language within
the Democratic Party, just as “abolish the police” was buried after the
mass protests following the murder of George Floyd. Ocasio-Cortez has
not issued a statement concerning the DHS funding bill or the continuing
crimes of ICE, though she has found time to post repeatedly about the
New York Knicks. Bernie Sanders has likewise refused to comment on the
funding and ongoing operations of the immigration Gestapo.
Their
silence expresses the political reality that the Democrats are
collaborators in Trump’s police state agenda. The Democratic Party, a
party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence agencies, is
terrified above all of a growth of opposition to Trump from below.
This is a critical experience for workers and youth. The conclusion that
must be drawn is that the defense of democratic rights is a class
question. It cannot be waged through either capitalist party, the union
apparatus or the pseudo-left organizations attached to them. The entire
state apparatus, including ICE, CBP, DHS, the police and the military,
exists to defend the wealth and power of the oligarchy.
The Socialist Equality Party calls for the abolition of ICE, CBP and
every police agency; the closure of all detention camps; and the
immediate freeing of all detainees. The defense of the most vulnerable
immigrant worker is the defense of the democratic rights of the entire
working class.
Little’s death is the fourth at the Palmetto RPDC in the last two
years. Whatever the cause of Little’s death may have been, this is a
staggering toll that exposes conditions not only inside the
one-million-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility, but across USPS as a
whole.
Workers took to social media to express outrage and grief
on social media. On Facebook, one worker wrote: “The stress level is
real at USPS and UPS which I retired from. The management doesn’t care
about employees’ health or safety.” Another commented: “This is
happening way too often. How many of the USPS employees have to die
before action is taken.” A third reported: “Working there really messed
with my son’s mental health. It’s toxic!” Yet another wrote simply: “All
they care about is getting the mail out, not the employees.”
At the same facility, RussellScruggsJr.,
44, died last November when he suffered a cardiac event, fell and
struck his head. A supervisor had denied Scruggs’ request to go, who
reported he was not feeling well.
Coworkers told the WSWS that supervisors stood around him without
administering CPR, that no defibrillator was available and that it took
over an hour for an ambulance to arrive after initially going to the
wrong entrance. While the autopsy classified the manner of death as
“natural,” the circumstances were entirely preventable.
EricSmith,
59, collapsed and died of a heart attack in the lunchroom on June 3,
2025. Another worker died at the facility just one week later; their
name and cause of death was never made public.
ShannonBarnes, 48,
collapsed during her night shift on August 18, 2024, after telling a
coworker she wasn’t feeling well. Because there is no cell phone service
inside the building, someone had to run outside to call 911. It took 30
minutes for paramedics to reach her. She was already dead when she
arrived at the hospital.
As the WSWS wrote
after Smith’s death, a medical emergency in this facility “becomes a
test of a system already at its limits.” The USPS Office of Inspector
General’s July 2025 report documented disregarded safety issues, broken
equipment left unrepaired and chronic absenteeism.
The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committees, a nationwide group
of workers formed in opposition to both management and pro-corporate
union bureaucrats, is carrying out an independent investigation.
Citing a source, it reported that the Palmetto facility “has never had
written safety protocols.” Billions were spent on automated equipment,
the committee found, “yet there is no money for medical equipment,
on-site health professionals, or even basic safety procedures,” the
investigation concluded.
These conditions are the product of
USPS’s 10-year “Delivering for America” (DFA) restructuring program.
Since its launch in 2021, DFA has produced chronic understaffing,
inadequate training, operational failures and service disruptions at new
Regional Processing and Distribution Centers (RPDCs) across the
country. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) audits repeatedly identified serious problems at all of the new RPDCs. Palmetto is among the worst.
*****
The union bureaucracy has responded with silence. The APWU has issued
no statement on the Palmetto deaths or on Acker’s death in Detroit. The
National Postal Mail Handlers Union has been equally silent. At
Manhattan’s Morgan PDC, workers reported that management and union
officials focused on taking employees off the clock after a worker died
rather than informing them about what had happened.
Having
endorsed Delivering for America and collaborated in its implementation,
the postal unions function not as organizations of struggle but as
partners of management while conditions continue to deteriorate and the
death toll mounts.
Workers are fighting back. In April, postal
workers at the Springfield, Massachusetts, NDC formed a local committee
affiliated with the national USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee,
citing the APWU’s failure to enforce contractual rights or respond to
safety hazards.
The Springfield committee’s founding statementdeclared:
“USPS is a public service, not a profit-making enterprise. Hundreds of
thousands of living-wage jobs, employment for veterans, and a national
lifeline for seniors and those living in rural communities are at
stake.” It asserted “the right of postal workers to take decisions
affecting our jobs, safety and the public interest into our own hands.”
A statement
by the National USPS Rank and File Committee issued earlier this year
advanced immediate safety demands: defibrillators and nurses in every
facility, an end to the blocking of cell phone signals, written
emergency plans subject to workers’ oversight and strict enforcement of
lockout/tagout procedures. It stressed that these are “inseparable from
broader demands needed to protect both jobs and lives by ending
overwork.”
As the committee warned:
“The only way we will see justice is if we reveal the truth, hold
accountable those responsible for the conditions that put us in harm’s
way, and set up our own shop floor organizations to take control.”
The Lebanon strikes are an escalation of the Israeli war, waged in
coordination with the US-Israeli war against Iran, that has killed at
least 3,516 people and wounded 10,674 since March 2, the Lebanese health
ministry reported. The United Nations counted at least 88 killed over
the May 30-31 weekend, and Israeli attacks killed at least eight on
Tuesday, nine on Wednesday and four on Thursday. Among the dead was a
paramedic, one of more than 130 medics killed since March.
On
Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the
occupation of Southern Lebanon permanent. Israel needs “security zones:
separation and security areas on the other side of the border,” he told
mayors in Northern Israel. “This is a fundamental change.”
While
the US media remains focused on “peace” negotiations between Trump and
Iran, events in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank make clear that any
“ceasefire” is merely a cover for ongoing mass killing.
The
Committee for Public Education urges educators and workers to join the
meeting to discuss how to develop the fight against the sellout deal
between the Australian Education Union and the Victorian state Labor
government, and the underlying austerity and war agenda of the federal
Labor government.
Germany
lost the vote for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council to
Portugal and Austria, reflecting growing global opposition to its
imperialist foreign policy and militarism.
As Wall Street powers ahead and major banks go all out promoting the
initial public offering (IPO) of the Elon Musk-owned SpaceX and those to
come of the AI companies Anthropic and Open AI, collecting fat fees
running into hundreds of millions of dollars, warning bells on the state
of the US economy and the global financial system are growing louder.
There is increasing focus on the narrowness of the stock market boom,
which is concentrated in the handful of AI companies amid a slowing of
the rest of the economy. Profits as a proportion of GDP are rising, but
rather than leading to a “trickle down” effect in which workers receive
higher wages, real wages are falling, and the most profitable companies
are those which shed the most labor as they seek to cut costs,
increasingly through the use of AI.
The overall data show that
consumption spending in the US is holding up in the aggregate, but an
increasing proportion of this is coming from higher income groups while
millions of families are struggling to make ends meet as inflation,
above all in necessities, surges.
And there is growing concern about the way in which the economy and the financial system are resting on the growth of debt.
*****
The US has been able to finance its debt because of the dollar’s
pre-eminent role as the global currency, enabling it to raise money from
international capital markets. But there is a shift underway as
investors are coming to regard the US as “overstretched.”
*****
The holding of US Treasuries, as well as the debt of other governments,
by central banks has played a crucial role in the global financial
system following the global financial crash. In the period 2008 to 2021,
central banks bought up 63 percent of the debt issued by the major
powers in the G7. In other words, one arm of the capitalist state issued
large amounts of debt, the majority of which was then bought by another
arm.
Thirty-six days into Bolivia’s indefinite general strike, the
government of Rodrigo Paz has not broken the uprising. Road
blockades—which peaked at more than 100 active points earlier this week
before a partial reduction during the Corpus Christi holiday—continue to
strangle access to La Paz and extend well beyond the capital.
Demonstrations
are reported across the country, with Cochabamba having become the new
epicenter of protests. In Santa Cruz, mobilized peasants occupied the
Humberto Suárez Roca oil field on Tuesday and were brutally repressed. A
21-day blockade in San Julián has paralyzed one of the country's main
agro-industrial corridors. The cocalero federations of the Chapare have
announced a mass march converging on El Alto.
On June 2, the
Departmental Federation of Neighborhood Associations of La Paz (Fejuve)
organized a massive popular assembly in El Alto, the working-class city
on the plateau above La Paz where major class battles of this century
have been waged. The assembly declared a “permanent mobilized state of
emergency” and ratified the single demand of Paz’s resignation. After
military clearing operations, protesters retook El Alto’s industrial
zone of Senkata and occupied the surrounding streets that drivers had
been using as alternative routes.
One week ago, Paz signed the
revocation of Law 1341, clearing the legal path for a military crackdown
against the mass uprising. However, the immensely demoralized Bolivian
bourgeois regime has not yet felt in a position to frontally clash with
the working masses.
With the backing of US imperialism and every dirty and illegal method
at its disposal, the Paz administration has spent the last days focused
on bridging that gap.
*****
A clear expression of the mood prevailing among the working class
masses came after a court suspension of the terrorism arrest warrant
against COB executive secretary Mario Argollo—the condition the
confederation had itself set for entering dialogue with the government.
The rank-and-file rejected negotiations regardless, ratified the
blockades, and declared the permanent mobilized emergency. As former COB
leader Jaime Solares summarized after the confederation's own internal
deliberations: “They don't want dialogue, they don't want anything. The
only demand the people have now is that the president has to go.”
The
Bolivian working class has sustained this uprising for 36 days against
everything the government and its imperialist backers have thrown at it.
The counterrevolutionary conspiracy being assembled is a measure of
this uprising’s strength, not its weakness. But the government is not
standing still, and the gap between the determination of the masses and
the political leadership they have at their disposal is the most
dangerous terrain of the conflict.
The power of the working class
in Bolivian society lies in the international nature of this class. It
must understand its own insurrection as part of an unfolding
international revolutionary crisis that poses directly the question of
the world socialist revolution. Only by strategically orienting its
struggle in that direction and by appealing to its international class
brothers and sisters can it defeat Paz and the reactionary national
bourgeoisie and their imperialist patrons.
Rollins was indisputably one of the major figures of 20th century
American music. His passing has been widely covered by the US media and
has triggered an outpouring of respectful, well-deserved accolades,
including glowing references in his New York Times obituary to “the greatest living jazz improviser” and “the greatest virtuoso ever produced by jazz.”
Notably,
Rollins was the last survivor of the 57 musicians in the iconic 1958 photograph by Art Kane known as “A Great Day in Harlem.” The image has
been frequently invoked as capturing the “Golden Era” of jazz, a period
that coincided with the emergence of the US as the leading capitalist
economic and political power but riven by social contradictions.
Rollins’ breakthrough 1956 album for Prestige Records was aptly named Saxophone Colossus,
also the title of Aidan Levy’s extensive but somewhat uneven and
tedious 2022 biography. While not the last surviving bebopper—the
superlative vibraphonist Terry Gibbs is very much alive at 101—Rollins
deserves consideration among such pioneers as alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro and Miles Davis, pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, and drummers Max Roach, Art Blakey and Roy Haynes.
*****
Rollins was raised in Harlem by his mother Valborg and her sister
Mirium, an eclectic left-wing activist, in a family profoundly affected
by the Harlem Renaissance afterglow cast by W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston
Hughes and Paul Robeson but also the shadow of black nationalist,
charlatan and swindler Marcus Garvey , an immigrant from Jamaica who formed a “Back to Africa” movement in Harlem before being convicted of mail fraud and deported.
As
a youth, Rollins attended Camp Unity in Wingdale, New York, described
by his biographer Levy as “an interracial, antichauvinist,
anticapitalist summer camp,” established by the New York branches of the
Communist Party. Many black artists turned toward the CP as the
supposed continuator of the 1917 October Revolution and a beacon in the
struggle against oppression. Tragically, the Stalinized Communist Party
had shifted sharply to the right, doing everything in its power to
subordinate the working class to the Democratic Party and the liberal
sections of the ruling elite.
Rollins later recalled, “It was
considered a communist camp, … a bad word to some people but a good word
to the people in my community because it offered a lot of the black
Americans intercourse with some of the other activities that you
otherwise would be prohibited from engaging in.”
One activity
available to everyone in Harlem, of course, was music, with the major
big bands of Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford and Chick Webb based in
the neighborhood, along with innumerable individual performers such as
Fats Waller. Rollins took up the saxophone at age eight and by his
mid-teens was proficient enough to start working around New York City,
just as the clubs on 52nd Street were becoming the ground zero for
bebop.
*****
Rollins made outstanding records during the 1950s in groups led by Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis, including one notable session with Charlie Parker switching
to tenor saxophone. Unfortunately, like too many of his peers, Rollins
became addicted to heroin. He spent time in custody before breaking the
habit mid-decade, leading to the most creative and productive years of
his career.
In 1955, Rollins joined the Clifford Brown-Max Roach
Quintet and began recording prolifically under his own name, including
the classic Saxophone Colossus, Tenor Madness, featuring a “battle” with
the up-and-coming John Coltrane, and a daring trio album—only bass and
drums, no piano or guitar—in Los Angeles for Contemporary Records, Way Out West.
Rollins followed up with A Night At the Village Vanguard, also with only bass and drums, and several other albums for Blue Note, before 1958’s remarkable Freedom Suite for Riverside Records, using the same spare instrumentation for an unusual four-movement composition
based on a recurrent motif. Intended as a political statement, the
liner notes by Rollins express his inexhaustible spirit of struggle and
optimism but also the undoubted influence of black nationalism.
*****
Rollins’ style remained instantly recognizable, sometimes
fusing elements of his previous periods with rock instrumentation and
increasing doses of calypso. Rollins provided three saxophone tracks for
the Rolling Stones’ 1981 Tattoo You but declined their invitation to tour.
As
an elder statesman, Rollins won multiple awards and honors from the
music industry, academia and the political establishment. He was always
gracious and modest in interviews and with aspiring musicians.
On
September 11, 2001, Rollins was in his apartment a few blocks from the
World Trade Center when the buildings were struck by airliners and
collapsed. Toxic particles infested the area, and he could not be
evacuated until the next day, when he had to descend 39 flights. While
no causal link was proven, Rollins subsequently developed pulmonary
fibrosis, which ended his career. Rollins’ last public performance was
in 2012.
A notable episode in 2014 highlights Rollins as a victim of the general decline of American culture. The New Yorker
magazine published a piece purportedly quoting Rollins that jazz is
“the stupidest thing anyone ever came up with.” Not clearly marked as
satire—and not remotely amusing—the piece shocked and confused fans.
Rollins responded graciously, stating that the article “hurt his
feelings” and that it felt like someone being kicked “when he is down.”
The
legacy of Sonny Rollins embodies the best traditions of jazz and art in
general—democratic, rooted in tradition, disciplined and yet expressive
of individual freedom and expression. It is a legacy worth fighting
for—against the cheapening of popular taste, the racialist reduction of
art and the postmodernist and irrationalist currents that sometimes
drove Rollins inward or away from performing music altogether.
Özgür Özel, the elected leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), published an article on June 1 in the American Newsweek magazine,
addressing the political crisis in Türkiye. The piece is directed at
Türkiye’s imperialist NATO and European Union (EU) allies, framing the
government’s pressure on the CHP as a security threat to the
imperialists.
Özel warns that the obstruction of what he terms a
“peaceful democratic means to change” under CHP leadership by President
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government will plunge the country into
instability—to the detriment of NATO and the EU.
By implying that
the CHP is capable of containing the mounting social opposition to the
Erdoğan government, Özel seeks to win over NATO and EU powers—and in
doing so, lays bare the CHP’s class character and its organic ties to
imperialism.
*****
In his article, Özel argues that the Erdoğan government has seized
control of most of the state apparatus and is working to eliminate “the
last meaningful democratic alternative.” Yet he is unable to explain why
this is happening; his sole stated reason is that the CHP came first in
the 2024 elections.
Attacks on democratic rights, however, are an
international phenomenon that cannot be reduced to the ambitions of
one-man. The WSWS wrote:
What
is unfolding in Türkiye is not a purely national event but a
manifestation of an international collapse of democratic forms of rule
rooted in the deepening crisis of the capitalist system. US President
Donald Trump, having lost the November 2020 elections, mounted a failed
coup on January 6, 2021, seeking to remain in power illegally. Erdoğan,
for his part, is attempting to forestall a likely defeat in the next
elections by neutralizing his principal rival.
The
authoritarianism of governments is not a subjective choice by individual
rulers; it is the product of the objective contradictions of
capitalism. The escalating imperialist wars and aggression across the
Middle East and around the world, alongside unprecedented levels of
social inequality and class tension, are manifestations of this.
In Türkiye, the ruling class is sitting atop a social powder keg.
Türkiye ranks among the most unequal societies in Europe, and the
polarization between the working class and the bourgeoisie has reached
extraordinary dimensions.
*****
Whatever the factional conflicts between Özel, Kılıçdaroğlu and
Erdoğan, all three are representatives of the same ruling class, bound
organically to imperialism. That is why Özel’s article did not address
the social and democratic rights of the working class, but rather the
security concerns of the imperialists.
Özel’s central argument
runs as follows: the political crisis in Türkiye could trigger a social
explosion; that explosion would destabilize NATO and the EU; the CHP is
therefore the democratic alternative best equipped to contain such an
explosion—more effectively than Erdoğan. The fact that the CHP prevented
the spontaneous mass protests by young people and workers that erupted
following İmamoğlu’s arrest in March 2025 from becoming radicalized and
managed to bring them under control and bring them to an end, serves as a
concrete and significant example.
In making this case, Özel emphasizes Türkiye’s geopolitical
significance: a gatekeeper of the Black Sea, NATO’s second-largest
military power, a crossroads of Europe and Eurasia. He warns that
Türkiye risks becoming “a strategically indispensable [NATO] member that
no longer functions as a democracy.” This posture is a continuation of
Kılıçdaroğlu’s approach—who declared NATO “the guarantor of democracy in
the 21st century.”
The claim that NATO leaders have any interest
in democratic rights—in Türkiye, in their own countries or anywhere
else—is a fraud of the first order. Since its founding as a bulwark
against the Soviet Union, NATO’s history has been defined not only by
imperialist aggression but by military coups and regime-change
operations. The September 12, 1980 and July 15, 2016 coups in Türkiye,
as well as the 2014 coup in Ukraine—a pivotal moment in provoking the
present war against Russia—were all carried out with the backing of
leading NATO powers.
*****
It is impossible to defend democratic rights and NATO and the EU
simultaneously. These institutions are the instruments not only of their
ruling classes’ imperialist wars of plunder abroad, but of the class
war waged against the working class at home. They are incompatible with
any democratic form of governance.
The struggle for democratic
rights therefore cannot be separated from the struggle against
imperialism and NATO. That struggle requires a radical political
break—from bourgeois parties, and from the Stalinist, Pabloite and
pseudo-left parties that channel the working class and youth behind a
pro-imperialist party like the CHP. Not one of these parties has made an
accounting for its support for Kılıçdaroğlu in the 2023 presidential
election—despite his openly pro-NATO and anti-immigrant platform. They
are now forming up behind Özel’s leadership to play the same role.
This
is the Turkish expression of an international phenomenon: bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois political forces, together with the trade union
apparatus, are joining hands to neutralize a working class that is
beginning to mobilize against war, genocide, austerity and political
repression. The only revolutionary response to this offensive is to
build an independent political movement of the working class—one that
stands against all these forces. The developing independent workers’
movement provides the social foundation for building an alternative
outside the political establishment.
This movement must be armed
with an international perspective rooted in Trotsky’s Theory of
Permanent Revolution. A democratic regime based on social equality and
anti-imperialism can only be established as part of an international
socialist revolution, under the leadership of the working class.
The brutal murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak by 23-year-old Vickrum
Digwa, a British Sikh, is being used to advance the far-right agenda of
Reform UK and smaller far-right groups. Workers must reject attempts to
use this killing to drag them behind their class enemies.
Nowak’s
death is being used to promote the bogus right-wing “two-tier policing”
narrative, claiming whites are penalized because of “woke” attitudes and
“political correctness”.
*****
This week, Digwa received a life sentence with a minimum of 21 years
for the murder of Nowak. Police bodycam footage, made available to the
media, has gone viral and the story has led newspapers and sites for
days.
Millions are appalled at the callous negligence of the
police, of which every working-class community has some experience.
There is also great sympathy with Nowak’s family, who have said they “do
not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or
tensions.”
In contrast, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and the gang
of far-right thugs and provocateurs orbiting around the party saw a
young man’s death at the hands of a criminal family and a stupid,
sneering police force as an opportunity to claim anti-white prejudice
and paint all “non-whites” as a potential threat.
In what he described as “Emergency Address”, “to the nation”, Farage
seized on the event to “suggest” in a video message that people respond
with “pure, cold rage”, warning that “Britain’s historic way of life is
being thrown away.”
Every fascist leader in Britain heeded the call and traveled to
Southampton where Nowak’s murder took place to speak at what rapidly
became a violent protest of a few hundred people. Farage’s clear
intention was to recreate the far-right riots of July 2024, when mobs attacked buildings accommodating asylum seekers after the murder of three children in Southport.
*****
That the far-right was able this week to hang its nationalist,
xenophobic campaign on a case where a white man died horribly thanks to
the actions of the police is incidental. They rove from one scandal to
the next—whether real, embellished or totally unsubstantiated—as fuel
for their violently divisive agenda.
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.
Labour
is presiding over a social catastrophe, including the deepest levels of
poverty in 30 years, and trailing the far-right Reform, the
Conservatives and the Greens in general election polls. If he
successfully becomes an MP, Burnham is expected to challenge Starmer for
the Labour leadership and to replace him in Downing Street.
The World Socialist Web Site condemns in the strongest terms
the latest attempt by local authorities in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, to
silence Luis Daniel Prieto Moreno, a labor rights activist and churro
vendor known locally as 'Churros el Brayan.'
Municipal officials,
acting through compliant courts and coordinated legal harassment, have
obtained a court order barring Prieto Moreno from approaching the seat
of local government where he has long exercised his constitutional right
to protest in this city in central Mexico.
Seven separate
criminal complaints have been filed against him, including by four
councilwomen connected to the administration of municipal president
Edgar González of the right-wing Movimiento Ciudadano party.
These
measures represent a sharp escalation of a years-long campaign of state
and corporate persecution against a worker who has committed no act of
violence and whose only offense has been to speak the truth.
*****
Prieto Moreno has maintained a regular
protest presence outside the Lagos de Moreno municipal presidency, using
hand-lettered signs and chants to denounce corruption and abuse of
power by local officials. His latest protests have focused on two
issues: accusations that municipal police chief Miguel Ángel Pinzón was
involved in the forced disappearance of Luis Fernando Cervantes Moya, a
twenty-two-year-old mechanic who vanished in February 2024 following an
alleged detention by municipal police on a local highway, with
authorities subsequently refusing to provide his family any information
about his whereabouts.
The second involves labor exploitation at
EML (Estructuras y Montajes de Lagos), a multimillion-peso construction
and infrastructure firm owned by municipal president Edgar González
himself.
It takes considerable courage to speak publicly on either of these
matters. Lagos de Moreno is one of the municipalities in Mexico with the
highest number of disappeared persons—more than 600—and has a long
history of repression.
*****
The response from the state and corporate interests has been
relentless. A local labor official sent municipal police armed with
machine guns to arrest him under a falsified rape accusation. In late
2017, his original organizing page was also shut down by Facebook. On
January 31, 2018, two assailants beat him with a metal pipe outside his
home, and months later his car was set on fire in an act of arson.
In
February 2019, thugs attempted a nighttime home invasion days after he
published a solidarity video for US autoworkers. In July 2020, police
pointed guns at him to force him to move his churro cart. In early 2021,
he was illegally arrested on orders from the then-mayor while
peacefully protesting outside city hall; during the detention, which was
carried out without a warrant, officers slashed his clothing with a
knife and filmed him in an attempt at public humiliation before being
compelled to release him.
The case of Luis Daniel Prieto Moreno
illustrates with stark clarity the character of capitalist rule in
Mexico and internationally. A worker who sells churros for a living, who
protests with hand-written signs in front of a public building, who
operates a Facebook page—this is what the municipal government of Lagos
de Moreno, backed by the judicial apparatus of Jalisco, has mobilized
its full legal and political resources to suppress. The reason is not
difficult to understand: Prieto Moreno connects corporate exploitation
to political power and refuses to be silenced.
To oppose the
growing attacks on their democratic rights, workers internationally must
recognize that the ruling classes operate like a mafia to suppress
opposition, and must respond by organizing independent rank-and-file
workplace and neighborhood committees entirely free from pro-capitalist
trade unions and political parties, which have repeatedly failed to
protect workers and have instead facilitated state repression.
As
workers from the United States have expressed their solidarity with
Luis Daniel Prieto Moreno, the international working class is the most
powerful force in history when it stands as a unified body—animated by
the conviction that an injury to one is an injury to all, and capable of
transforming individual acts of courage into a coordinated global
struggle against corporate and state violence.
The employees, most of them women, launched the action on May 19
after learning that the Korean-owned company was planning to sell the
factory to an unknown company. The facility, which has been operating
since October 1991, produces jackets, blouses, trousers and blazers for
export markets.
They were informed by the company on Sunday, May
24 that the factory would be closed from the next day. When they arrived
on Monday morning, they found a notice pasted on the gate—supposedly by
the “new owner”—stating that “the institution will not reopen until you
inform us in writing through the Deputy Labour Commissioner of the
Ja-Ela Labour Office that you agree to cease your illegal strike actions
and return to work.”
This allegation is spurious because it was,
in fact, illegal for ELPHIS to transfer employees to another company
without their knowledge and without clarifying what their job security
and working conditions would be.
Some worker activists rushed to
the nearby Ja-Ela Labour Office and then to the Gampaha District Labour
Office to discuss their problems. However, officials turned them away,
telling them to lodge a complaint with the Labour Department.
The workers entered into struggle spontaneously; the Ceylon Mercantile,
Industrial and General Workers Union (CMU) did not intervene on their
behalf.
*****
All sections of the working class face the same assault on living
conditions and democratic rights, as the government seeks to impose the
burden of the global fuel crisis on the working class, on top of
austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund.
Apparel
workers must build their own action committees in every factory,
excluding trade union bureaucrats and all capitalist parties from these
committees. This will enable them to unite with workers in other sectors
in a common struggle to defend jobs, wages and working conditions.
Sri
Lankan workers must unite with their class brothers and sisters across
Asia and in every country, who are being driven into struggles against
the same attacks, often imposed by multinational corporations. To
coordinate their struggles internationally, workers must join and fight
to build the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
This struggle must be guided by a socialist political
perspective, aimed at abolishing the capitalist system, and establishing
workers’ ownership and control over the means of production.
Lukehart was convicted of first-degree murder and aggravated child
abuse in Duval County for the February 25, 1996, death of Gabrielle
Hanshaw, the five-month-old daughter of his girlfriend, Misty Rhue. On
the afternoon of the killing, Rhue took her two-year-old, who had been
ill, to a bedroom for a nap. Lukehart was left to care for Gabrielle in
another room.
At approximately 5 p.m., Rhue heard her car start in
the driveway and looked out to see Lukehart driving away. She could not
find the baby. About 30 minutes later, Lukehart called from a
convenience store and told Rhue to call 911, claiming the baby had been
kidnapped. That evening, Lukehart was found without shirt or shoes in
rural Clay County, his car abandoned nearby with the engine running.
During
questioning the following day, Lukehart told a Clay County Sheriff’s
lieutenant that he had dropped Gabrielle on her head and then shaken her
and that the baby had died at Rhue’s residence. He said he had
panicked, left the house and thrown the baby’s body into a pond, where
law enforcement recovered the infant’s body.
At trial in February
1997, Lukehart chose to testify in his own defense. He described how,
while changing Gabrielle’s diaper on the floor, the baby repeatedly
pushed up on her elbows. He testified that he forcefully and repeatedly
pushed her head and neck onto the floor, using what he described as
“quite a bit” of force, “until the last time I did it she just stopped
moving.” He said he tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and, when the
baby did not revive, panicked and drove to a rural area, also
accidentally hitting her head on the car door as he got out. He
acknowledged at trial that he did not intend to kill Gabrielle but was
responsible for her death.
The jury recommended death by a vote of
9 to 3, a fact that would take on constitutional significance as his
appeals extended across nearly three decades.
*****
The crime for which Lukehart was executed cannot be separated from the
life that produced him. The evidence presented at the penalty phase, and
developed through years of subsequent litigation, describes an
individual who had been systematically destroyed long before he ever
came before a judge.
Lukehart’s father was an alcoholic who physically and emotionally
abused him and his sister, until Lukehart was at least four or five
years old. When he was approximately 10, an uncle who had been his
primary supporter and confidant died. Around the same time, another
uncle began sexually abusing him. When he was 17 or 18, his sister
Jennifer was killed in a car accident, a loss that left him nearly
suicidal.
Lukehart showed signs of psychological disturbance from
childhood. His parents, unaware of the sexual abuse and unable to grasp
the full extent of his problems, sent him sporadically to counseling. By
the time he was 16, counseling records described him as “clearly a
disturbed individual” and noted that family dynamics had contributed
significantly to his emotional deterioration. In ninth grade, a teacher
reported fearing he would harm himself. His father gave him his first
drink of alcohol at age 4; by 13, he was drinking heavily. He began
using marijuana at age 8.
A forensic psychologist, Dr. Harry Krop,
evaluated Lukehart after the crime and testified at the penalty phase
that he remained a “seriously disturbed individual.” Dr. Krop diagnosed
him with intermittent explosive disorder, substance abuse—especially
alcohol—post-traumatic stress disorder arising from childhood sexual
abuse, and a personality disorder with antisocial, immature and
borderline features. He further testified that Lukehart’s IQ of 79
placed him in the borderline range of intellectual disability.
In Dr. Krop’s assessment, Lukehart acted violently that day because
he could not cope with trying and failing to care for a crying infant,
and whatever he did to stop her crying seemed only to escalate the
situation.
Three of the 12 jurors who voted on Lukehart’s sentence
agreed that this history was sufficient to spare his life. Under
Florida law as it existed at the time of his trial, that was not enough.
*****
Lukehart’s execution is the eighth carried out in Florida this year
and is inseparable from the systematic acceleration of capital
punishment that DeSantis has made a centerpiece of his political tenure.
In 2025, DeSantis oversaw 19 executions—the most in a single year in
Florida’s modern history, more than double the previous record of eight
set in 1984 and matched in 2014. After carrying out no executions in
2020, 2021 or 2022, Florida executed six people in 2023, one in 2024 and
then surged to 19 in 2025. The state currently has more than 250
inmates on death row.
The pace of Florida executions has been
matched by legislative changes designed to lower the legal barriers to
carrying out death sentences. In 2023, DeSantis signed legislation
reducing the jury threshold for a death sentence recommendation from
unanimous to 8 of 12 jurors—one of the lowest standards in the country.
Under the previous system, a single holdout juror could block a death
sentence. Under the new law, prosecutors need the agreement of only
two-thirds of the panel to send a defendant to death row.
Florida’s
death penalty surge does not operate in isolation. It functions as both
a model for and an expression of the Trump administration’s national
death penalty program. On his first day in office, Trump signed an
executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting
Public Safety,” directing the attorney general to pursue capital
punishment “for all crimes of a severity demanding its use” and
specifically targeting the murders of law enforcement officers and
capital crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.
*****
As the World Socialist Web Site has documented across months and years of coverage of the
American death penalty’s relentless advance, the common thread in case
after case is the same: defendants shaped by poverty, abuse, neglect and
untreated illness; legal proceedings their attorneys say failed to
adequately present that history to the juries that decided whether they
would live or die; and a political establishment that has made the
demonstration of the state’s capacity to kill a tool of social
intimidation directed at the working class.
This week President Donald Trump moved to elevate Todd Blanche to
attorney general and install Bill Pulte as acting director of national
intelligence, a further stage in the transformation of the state
apparatus into a personal instrument of presidential dictatorship.
Neither
appointment is based on competence, independence or adherence to the
Constitution. Both men have been selected because they have demonstrated
unconditional loyalty to Trump and a willingness to use state power
against his political opponents.
*****
The response of the Democrats has been to frame their opposition
almost entirely in terms of “national security” and the smooth
functioning of the intelligence apparatus. Their central concern is not
that Trump is erecting a dictatorship, but that his appointments could
complicate the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, the warrantless spying authority used by
the US government to surveil foreign targets while sweeping up the
communications of Americans.
Representative Jim Himes, the ranking
Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, complained that
installing Pulte days before the expiration of Section 702 was “a
stupider thing to do” than almost anything he could imagine.
Representative Adam Schiff likewise warned that Pulte’s appointment
would make it more difficult to secure votes for the surveillance
program.
These statements expose the Democrats’ real priorities.
They do not oppose the intelligence agencies, mass surveillance or the
apparatus of repression. They fear that Trump’s blatant personalist use
of these institutions will undermine bipartisan support for the very
police-state powers they have long defended.
The appointments of
Blanche and Pulte demonstrate that Trump’s second administration is not
merely staffed by loyalists. It is being organized as a personal
dictatorship, in which the Justice Department, financial regulators and
intelligence agencies are subordinated to the president’s vendettas and
the interests of the fascist movement around him.
On the second day of the Minnesota Republican Party convention in
Duluth, Minnesota, delegates approved a motion to hold a minute of
silence for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer
convicted in the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
*****
The moment of silence at the Duluth convention drew the mildest of
objections from Democratic Party officials who called it “inappropriate
and offensive.” For Republicans, the call for Chauvin’s exoneration was
not objected to but, according to the Associated Press, there were
expressions of concern that the action was politically damaging.
The
reactionary moment of silence at the convention in Duluth takes place
while there is an ongoing campaign in far right and fascist circles
challenging Chauvin’s conviction. Arguments that Floyd’s death was
primarily caused by drug abuse or underlying health conditions have been
circulating since his death and were presented as evidence during
Chauvin’s court proceedings.
These claims were rejected by the jury after extensive expert testimony. Legal analysts and medical experts cited by the Washington Post and NPR have noted that the jury’s verdict reflected the weight of video evidence and medical findings presented at trial.
Additionally,
in exchange for a capped federal sentence, Chauvin admitted that he
willfully deprived George Floyd of his constitutional right to be free
from unreasonable force. He acknowledged that he kept his knee on
Floyd’s neck and back even after Floyd lost consciousness and stopped
breathing.
Chauvin also admitted to willfully violating Floyd’s
rights by failing to provide him with medical aid when he was in
distress and had stopped breathing.
Meanwhile, the renewed campaign to exonerate Chauvin is taking place
following the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in
Minneapolis in January 2026 by federal immigration officials and ICE
agents. While these murders were also captured on smartphone video from
multiple angles along with police body cameras and have been seen by
tens of millions of people, no charges have been brought against the
killers of Good and Pretti.
One
thousand American Axle workers continue their walkout which began on
Monday against the key auto supplier and are reporting efforts by the
company to move product across their picket lines while provocations
against pickets have been reportedly instigated by company security
guards.
The annual report on the international role of the euro published by
the European Central Bank (ECB) this week points to the growing
fragmentation of the global financial system amid attempts to shift away
from dependence on the US dollar.
The most striking figure to
emerge from the report was the decline in the proportion of US Treasury
bonds in the reserves held by central banks and the increase in the use
of gold as a reserve asset.
Gold bullion accounted for 27 percent of all global central bank
reserves at the end of 2025, a marked jump from the level of 20 percent
at the end of 2024.
Some of this was a result of the rapid
increase in the price of gold in 2025 when it rose by 60 percent, which
boosted the value of central bank holdings, despite a small slowdown in
purchases from more than 1,000 tonnes over the previous three years to
850 tonnes.
However, the trend is unmistakable. Correspondingly,
the share of the US Treasury bonds fell from 25 percent to 22 percent
over the last year. Dollar-denominated assets remained the highest
proportion of reserves, coming in at 42 percent.
Stocks of gold are now the second highest component of reserves, having eclipsed the euro last year.
*****
Apart from dollar weaponization, there is another significant reason
for the marked shift out of US Treasury bonds. It centers on the growing
concern that the US financial position, expressed in the exponential
growth of government debt—now at more than $39 trillion and an annual
interest bill of around $1 trillion—is unsustainable.
The position
of the US financial establishment is that the present level of record
debt can be sustained, but its rate of increase cannot. All three major
global credit rating agencies have downgraded the US credit rating from
their top level.
US Treasuries have long been regarded as the
safest asset in the world, but that is now being increasingly called
into question under conditions where the US financial system has
undergone a series of major crises, including the 2008 crash and the
freezing of the Treasury market in March 2020 at the start of the
pandemic.
*****
The report issued a reassurance that while gold had achieved a
significant milestone as a reserve asset, this was not sustainable.
“Going
forward, gold faces limitation as an official reserve asset compared
with the major fiat currencies” and does not adjust seamlessly to
“shifts in international demand for liquidity.”
That may well be
true as far as it goes. But this analysis omits one of the central
functions of gold as a store of value. Unlike fiat currencies, of which
the dollar and the euro are the two most prominent and which can be
created by central banks at the press of a computer button, gold is real
value in that it embodies human labor. This property becomes crucial if
confidence in fiat currencies is undermined.
And that trend is
developing. At present, central banks hold almost as much gold as they
did in the days when the international financial system functioned under
the Bretton Woods system established in 1944 when the dollar was backed
by gold at the rate of $35 per ounce. Today the price of gold is around
$4,500 per ounce, signifying the precipitous decline in the real value
of the dollar since the Bretton Woods system was abrogated with the
removal of the gold backing in 1971.
The international monetary
system was reconstituted on the basis of the dollar now operating purely
as a fiat currency and with Treasury bonds issued by the US forming the
central pillar of its operations.
The fact that US debt is being
steadily replaced by gold as a store of value, as set out in the ECB
report, is a sure sign that the international monetary system is coming
under increasing stress. That does not mean it is headed for an
immediate crisis, but it does indicate the fundamental trend of
developments.
Like
previous TAs, the latest proposal does not include any protection
against layoffs, under conditions in which as many as 300 to 400 workers
face job elimination over the next years through automation and
consolidation.
"... Mr. Luce correctly detects a process of radicalization among the world’s
youth. The question is, at what point will this radicalization break
beyond the bounds of the media-vetted pseudo-leftism of people like
Sanders and Mamdani and reestablish contact with the genuine
Marxian-socialist political perspective and culture that was exemplified
in the October Revolution and figures like Lenin, Trotsky and
Luxemburg. This break must and will occur, and the rediscovery of
Trotsky’s extraordinary political legacy and writings will be a critical
element of the reemergence of Marxism as a mass socialist movement
based on the working class."
The NATO war against Russia has reached a new stage. On Wednesday,
Ukraine launched drone attacks in St. Petersburg, Russia’s
second-largest city. Black clouds of smoke rose over the St. Petersburg
Oil Terminal as the International Economic Forum opened in the city.
According to reports, the Kronstadt naval base and other military
targets were also attacked.
The attack is part of a series of
increasing and ever more far-reaching Ukrainian drone and missile
strikes on Russian energy facilities, airfields, arms factories, command
centers, and military infrastructure—some of them hundreds of
kilometers behind the front.
Ukraine is not carrying out these
attacks alone. They are politically covered, militarily enabled,
technologically supported, and strategically coordinated by the NATO
powers, particularly Germany.
The latest attacks implement what
Berlin and Kiev have publicly agreed to in recent weeks. When Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky was received with military honors in Berlin
in mid-April, the two governments signed a “strategic partnership” that
codifies a deepening of war cooperation.
*****
The attack on St. Petersburg underscores that the NATO powers are
crossing every red line. Russia has repeatedly warned that attacks with
Western weapons on Russian territory could lead to countermeasures,
including beyond Ukraine. As early as April, the Russian Defense Ministry published the addresses of German arms companies after Berlin
announced that it would develop long-range weapons and drones together
with Ukraine for attacks on Russia.
The imperialist powers respond to every Russian warning with absolute
recklessness, risking nuclear war. They are not only consciously
accepting that the conflict could turn into a direct war between NATO
and Russia, they are working toward it. Through ever more far-reaching
attacks on Russian territory, maneuvers on Russia’s borders, additional
NATO troops in Eastern Europe, and the expansion of Europe’s war
potential, Moscow is to be provoked into a response that could then
serve as a pretext for NATO’s official entry into the war.
None of this has anything to do with the defense of “democracy,”
“freedom,” or “human rights.” The war in Ukraine is the result of
decades of NATO’s eastward expansion, the systematic transformation of
Ukraine into a military outpost against Russia, and the right-wing coup
in Kiev in 2014 supported by Washington and Berlin. Since the Russian
invasion in February 2022, the NATO powers have continuously expanded
the war.
It is about imperialist interests: the control of
Ukraine, rich in raw materials and geostrategically positioned; the
weakening and ultimately the dismemberment of Russia; access to the raw
materials and markets of the Eurasian landmass; and the redivision of
the world among the major imperialist powers.
*****
The European powers treat the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder for
their own imperialist interests. At the same time, the massive military
expenditures, including a German military budget that will explode to
more than €200 billion per year in the coming years, will be paid for
through brutal attacks on the working class: social cuts, pension cuts,
wage reductions, job cuts, the destruction of public services and the
militarization of schools, universities and workplaces.
The fight
against the madness of war also requires the rejection of the
reactionary policies of the Putin regime. The Russian invasion of
Ukraine was not a progressive or anti-imperialist response to the
decades-long encirclement of Russia by NATO. It was the desperate and
reactionary response of a capitalist oligarchic regime that emerged out
of the Stalinist destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of
capitalism. Putin’s policy has suffered a complete shipwreck. His entire
strategy has been an attempt to win the Russian oligarchy a recognized
place within the world capitalist order through an accommodation with
imperialism.
The International Committee of the Fourth
International has sought to unify the workers of Ukraine and Russia in
opposition to war from the beginning. In its first statement
immediately after the start of the war, the ICFI explicitly denounced
“the Russian military intervention in Ukraine” and stated, “Despite the
provocations and threats by the US and NATO powers, Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine must be opposed by socialists and class-conscious workers.” The
statement declared:
The catastrophe that was set in
motion by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 cannot be averted
on the basis of Russian nationalism, a thoroughly reactionary ideology
that serves the interests of the capitalist ruling class represented by
Vladimir Putin… The invasion of Ukraine, whatever the justifications
given by the Putin regime, will serve only to divide the Russian and
Ukrainian working class and, moreover, serve the interests of US and
European imperialism.
This analysis has been fully
confirmed. Putin initiated the war with a furious attack on the October
Revolution and on Lenin. In his speech before the invasion, he attacked
the Bolsheviks for recognizing Ukraine’s national self-determination and
the founding of the Soviet Union as a voluntary union of equal
republics. In this way, he made clear that his regime completely rejects
the revolutionary and internationalist traditions of 1917 and adopts
the Great Russian chauvinism of Tsarism.
*****
Workers in Ukraine and Russia have no interest in slaughtering one
another for the interests of rival oligarchs and imperialist powers.
Workers in Germany, France, Britain, the United States and throughout
Europe have no interest in sacrificing their wages, pensions, schools,
hospitals and ultimately their lives for the great power plans of their
ruling classes.
The slogan that must be counterposed to the war is
not the defense of one or another nation-state, but socialist
internationalism: For the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers!
Against NATO imperialism and against the Putin regime! For the building
of an international socialist anti-war movement of the working class!
With
the first match just days away, the 2026 FIFA World Cup is shaping up
to be the most expensive and politically charged sporting events in
history. Unfolding across the United States, Mexico and Canada from June
11 to July 19, it is the largest tournament ever staged—48 teams, 104
matches, 16 host cities. Corporate sponsors have poured hundreds of
millions into it. FIFA expects to generate over $11 billion in revenue
across the four-year cycle. Promotional videos speak of “unity,”
“passion” and the universal language of football. The message is
relentless: for one glorious month, the world comes together.
But
one need not look too far beneath the surface to uncover the grotesque
reality behind the spectacle. The 2026 World Cup opens as the United
States wages an active war of aggression against Iran, prepares for war
against Cuba and continues both its material support for the genocide in
Gaza and its missile murder spree against fishermen off the waters of
South America. At home, it is conducting mass arrests and deportations
of immigrant workers at a pace unprecedented in US history as part of a
drive to consolidate a dictatorial regime against the working class.
To
hold the world’s premier football tournament in this
environment—co-hosted by the very state machinery driving these
catastrophes—invites an obvious comparison: Argentina’s blood-soaked
military dictatorship hosting the 1978 World Cup, where political
prisoners in the infamous Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) could hear the
roar of the stadium crowds from the dungeons where they were being
tortured.
*****
US officials have warned that ICE immigration enforcement agents will
be deployed at every stadium and every match. While acting-Secretary of
Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin claimed that this anti-immigrant
gestapo would not be conducting mass roundups, he insisted: “ICE always
does immigration enforcement—but we’re not there solely for that
purpose. We’re in there to do our job.” ICE will operate in coordination
with the FBI and the Secret Service.
Meanwhile, Trump’s travel
bans, which by mid-2025 covered 19 countries affecting over 400 million
people, have created an obstacle course for fans from Muslim-majority
nations, from African nations with high rates of visa denial and from
Latin America. The “world coming together” in 2026 will be a carefully
screened world.
Workers at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles have
threatened to strike if ICE agents are deployed there during World Cup
matches. “ICE should have no role in these games,” declared stadium cook
Isaac Martinez at a protest outside the venue. His concern is
well-founded: FIFA’s requirement that stadium employees submit personal
data before the tournament creates a direct pipeline to an agency with a
documented record of detaining anyone deemed a potential “alien,” with
legal status a secondary concern.
*****
Concerns over the threat of abuse at the hands of US immigration
authorities is a driving factor in what has already a massive fall-off
in overall international tourism to the US. April 2026 visitor numbers
were down 14.1 percent year over year, and four million fewer foreign
visitors arrived in 2025 compared to 2024.
*****
Iran qualified for the tournament and has announced its intention to
participate. As of this writing, however, its delegation has not been
granted visas to enter the United States, where its three initial
matches are scheduled, and has been forced to relocate its training camp
across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. Trump warned on social media that
“the Iran National Soccer Team is welcome to the World Cup, but I
really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own
life and safety”—a statement widely read as a veiled death threat
directed at a delegation attempting to compete in an international
sporting event.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has been targeted
through a different mechanism. Congo qualified for its second World Cup
after 52 years—a historic achievement. US authorities demanded a 21-day
quarantine for the Congolese delegation, citing an Ebola outbreak, even
though every member of Congo’s squad plays professionally in Europe and
none have visited the country since the outbreak began. Congolese fans
are barred under a US entry ban imposed against the DRC over Ebola. The
United States—which recorded over 103 million COVID-19 cases and 1.2
million deaths, the worst pandemic record of any nation on earth—invoked
public health as pretext for an exercise in humiliation rooted in what
can only be described as imperial contempt for the African continent.
*****
Beyond the police-state apparatus and geopolitical provocations, the
economic structure of the 2026 World Cup makes its class character
unmistakable. For the first time in the tournament’s 23-edition history,
ticket prices are governed not by fixed tiers but by “dynamic
pricing”—the market mechanism previously confined to American domestic
sports and stadium concerts, where prices fluctuate to whatever wealthy
bidders are prepared to pay.
*****
Total tournament revenue is projected at $665 million—a 34 percent
increase over the previous edition. FIFA’s stated goal is to “support
positive social change,” but as University of Notre Dame economist
Professor Richard Sheehan, author of Keeping Score: The Economics of Big Time Sports, notes, that claim is “belied by a track record of corruption and lack of transparency.”
The
clubs themselves are owned by the global oligarchs. Chelsea FC belongs
to Todd Boehly ($9.3 billion). Paris Saint-Germain belongs to the Qatari
royal family. According to Forbes, 3,428 billionaires exist worldwide
alongside nearly 30,000 individuals with fortunes exceeding $100
million. To this social layer, listing a World Cup final ticket at $2.3
million is not an outrage—it is a rational business decision.
*****
The commercialization of the sport has extracted other costs less
visible than ticket prices. Elite footballers once played around 50
matches per year; today it has climbed to 70, driven by FIFA’s
tournament expansion and relentless commercial pressure. Scientific
assessments show this increase fundamentally disrupts cellular recovery,
triples the probability of serious joint injury, and may reduce elite
careers by three to five years. Meanwhile, the athletes’ extraordinary
gifts—Messi’s uncanny ability to navigate defenders, Mbappé’s explosive
acceleration—have been meticulously cultivated by sports corporations
and transformed into brand assets generating hundreds of millions
annually from merchandise, endorsements and broadcast rights. The
players bear the cost in shortened careers and broken bodies. The owners
collect the revenues.
FIFA boss Gianni Infantino set the tone for
the tournament last December, awarding Trump the “inaugural FIFA Peace
Prize”—an attempt to appeal to Trump’s bitter resentment at being passed
over for the better known prize awarded by the Nobel Committee. Aside
from providing another gold-plated ornament for the Oval Office, the
prize symbolized the subordination of the Cup to the would-be American
fuhrer and the fusion of the corrupt aims of FIFA and the Trump
administration. It speaks volumes about the moral bankruptcy of
football’s governing body.
*****
Trump responded by appointing himself chair of the World Cup
organizing taskforce, conveniently headquartered in Trump Tower in
Manhattan, signaling the intent to turn the tournament into one more
crooked money stream for the Trump family. The tournament’s structure
reflects the same hierarchy of power: the opening match is scheduled for
the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, but the quarterfinals, semifinals
and the final are all assigned to US venues, along with seven of the
eight round-of-sixteen matches. The geography of the tournament tracks
precisely with the geography of imperial power.
The attempt to use
the World Cup as an instrument of wealth extraction does not go
unanswered. The threatened strike by SoFi Stadium workers is one
expression of a broader pattern of resistance. In Mexico, teachers
organized in the CNTE union have vowed to bring their protests and
strikes over wages and pensions to the gates of the Azteca Stadium.
Teachers demonstrated in Mexico City on Tuesday, blocking main roads
through the capital and setting soccer balls alight as they faced
repression from security forces using tear gas, rubber bullets and
batons.
And the tournament’s own audience tells a more complicated story than
its organizers intend: 75 percent of Americans know the US is hosting
the World Cup, and roughly half plan to watch—but nearly a third are
rooting for another country alongside or instead of the US, a testament
to immigrant roots that no amount of nationalist demagogy can erase.
Socialists do not share the ruling class’s contempt for sport.
Football, at its most elemental level, is a magnificent expression of
collective human creativity—skill, movement, cooperation, drama. The
working class invented the game in its modern form; it is the working
class that fills the lower tiers of stadiums and has driven the culture
of the sport for more than a century.
What the 2026 World Cup
represents, hosted under conditions of accelerating war and repression,
is the attempt by a ruling class in crisis to paper over the class
antagonisms tearing its society apart with 104 matches of carefully
branded nationalism. Workers in the United States are told to cheer for
“their” team—an affinity that supposedly unites them with a ruling class
and its government that are filling detention camps with their
neighbors, raising their food and fuel costs to pay for wars, and
deploying armed thugs against citizens demanding democratic rights. The
antidote to that nationalist appeal is not indifference to the sport,
but political class consciousness: the recognition that a Mexican
worker, an American worker and an Iranian worker share common class
interests that no flag-waving can dissolve.
The game will be
played. The well-healed crowds will roar. The television rights holders
will profit magnificently. But the social contradictions this spectacle
is designed to suppress—the inequality, the repression, the wars—will be
resolved not on a football pitch, but in the intensifying global class
struggle.
Wednesday’s vote in the House of Representatives directing President
Trump to end military operations against Iran is a political fraud
engineered by the Democratic Party, with the support of a handful of
Republicans. It is unlikely to pass the Senate and would be vetoed by
Trump if it did. He vetoed two such resolutions in his first term, in
relation to US military operations in Yemen and Iran, and Congress did
not override either veto.
The actual import of the resolution
adopted by a 215-208 vote is to require Trump to get authorization for
the war from Congress—meaning that there would be a further vote, and
many if not most of those who voted “against” the Iran war on Wednesday
would likely vote to authorize the war if given the chance.
In
other words, the resolution is not an “anti-war” measure at all, but
rather an appeal to Trump to make Congress a full partner in the
war-making process, as required by the Constitution and further spelled
out in the War Powers Act.
*****
Representative Gregory Meeks (D-New York), the ranking Democrat on the
Foreign Affairs Committee and the author of the resolution, said in a
statement: “The passage of my War Powers Resolution is a significant
bipartisan rebuke of President Trump’s illegal and costly war in Iran,
and the first step toward ending it once and for all.”
The
resolution is nothing of the sort. Its purpose is to allow the Democrats
to posture as opponents of the war in the course of the midterm
election campaign, while they reliably vote to fund the war and enable
Trump and his fanatical Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth to order bombing and
mass murder as they please.
*****
There is no doubt that the majority of Americans are not merely tired
of the war, but oppose it vehemently, not only for its economic impact
in terms of gas prices and overall inflation, but as a continuation of
the endless wars in the Middle East that every American president since
George W. Bush, Democrat and Republican, has promised to end—promises
that were never kept.
The New York Times gushed in its
news coverage of the House action: “Adoption of the resolution was a
remarkable rebuke to Mr. Trump and his handling of the conflict, after
he has repeatedly dismissed any effort by Congress to curb his power and
as the G.O.P. has largely ceded its prerogatives to do so, deferring to
him time and again.”
It must be repeated: the resolution does
nothing to stop the war or impede Trump. The Democrats are not seeking
to end the war, only to gain a “seat at the table” so that they will
have input into how the war is to be waged.
*****
Soon after the passage of the Iran war resolution, Democrats won another
victory in the Republican-controlled House, pushing through a
procedural motion by a 218-204 margin, forcing the House to take up for
consideration a bill to provide $9 billion more in aid and loans to the
Ukraine government for the US-NATO war against Russia. Again, a
unanimous Democratic caucus was joined by a handful of Republicans—six,
in this case—to override the opposition of the House Republican
leadership. Those voting to advance the Ukraine war funding included the
entire “Squad” of representatives affiliated with or supported by the
Democratic Socialists of America, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
Rashida Tlaib, Greg Casar and Ilhan Omar.
The Democrats thus demonstrated they are not “anti-war,” but only have
different military priorities than Trump, wanting to focus far more on
the Ukraine war and regarding Iran as something of a diversion.
*****
In its final action Thursday, the House approved the Ukraine aid package
on which the Democrats had forced a vote. This time 18 Republicans
broke with the White House and House Speaker Mike Johnson and sided with
the Democrats. Every “left” Democrat voted for Ukraine war
aid—Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Casar, Summer Lee—with the exception of Ilhan
Omar.
Workers
at Bridgewaters Interiors in Warren, Michigan, have voted to reject a
tentative agreement while thousands of Dana auto parts workers are being
kept in the dark ahead of imminent contract ratification votes.
After
reluctantly calling a second statewide stoppage in November to head off
teachers’ discontent, the QTU leadership shut down further industrial
action and effectively joined hands with the state government to refer
the dispute to compulsory arbitration.
The GKN near-disaster is not an isolated incident. The EPA’s Office of
Inspector General identified 25 high-priority facilities nationwide
releasing ethylene oxide, a carcinogenic gas, at levels associated with
elevated lifetime cancer risks. In 16 of those communities, residents
had not even been informed of the danger.
California provides multiple examples. In the first five months of 2026 alone, the chemical incident tracker “Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters” reported nine accidents, including GKN Aerospace.
*****
Internationally, the same pattern has produced some of the worst
industrial catastrophes in modern history: Minamata, Bhopal, Chernobyl,
Fukushima and Rana Plaza, each exposing the deadly consequences of
subordinating human life to profit.
The danger of hazardous
facilities operating in close proximity to densely populated communities
is increasing due to the policies of the state.
*****
In the US, the political responsibility for this situation lies
entirely on both parties of American capitalism. EPA Administrator Lee
Zeldin’s “Common Sense Approach to Chemical Accident Prevention” rule,
formally proposed in February 2026, systematically destroyed existing
safety standards. It eliminated independent third-party audits after
chemical releases and deleted mandatory evaluation of climate and
power-loss risks. It even rescinded worker rights to anonymously report
safety hazards.
The Trump administration has gone further still, moving to shut down the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board
entirely, the independent agency responsible for investigating exactly
the kinds of accidents that nearly destroyed Garden Grove last month.
In
California, Governor Gavin Newsom, who positioned himself as a national
Democratic leader and potential presidential candidate, has a record of suspending environmental protections when corporate interests demand it, vetoing California Senate Bill 674 in August 2024.
SB
674 would have established uniform statewide fenceline air monitoring,
mandated real-time public alerts during toxic releases and required
third-party audits within 14 days of any incident. These were not
radical demands. They were minimal protections. Newsom vetoed them
anyway, leaving communities in West Long Beach, Carson and Wilmington
without basic access to real-time safety data.
Underlying all of this is the growing physical instability introduced
by climate change, what industrial safety researchers call “Natech”
events: natural hazards triggering technological disasters. The GKN
crisis was a Natech event in embryo. Methyl methacrylate must be kept at
or below 50°F to remain stable.
As Southern California summers
shatter heat records, the thermal loads on industrial cooling systems
increase dramatically and compound the probability of exactly the kind
of valve failure that occurred on May 21. Capitalism has created the
climate crisis while simultaneously destroying the regulatory
infrastructure that might partially buffer its industrial consequences.
*****
The international working class, including the workers who produce the
chemicals, operate the refineries, live in the fenceline communities and
breathe the contaminated air, is the only social force with both the
interest and the capacity to impose rational, democratic control over
industrial production. The working class cannot afford to wait for
another near-miss.
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.
