Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. State killings in Alabama and Texas, a stay of execution in Georgia
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Alabama executed Jeffery Lee by lethal injection Thursday evening, one day after Texas put LeJames Norman to death and a Georgia judge halted the scheduled execution of Stacey Humphreys. Each case lays bare the arbitrary and vindictive character of capital punishment in America. Lee, 49, was sent to death row by a judge who overrode a jury’s 7-5 vote for life without parole—a practice Alabama abolished in 2017 but refused to make retroactive. Norman, 40, was executed after his attorneys showed that the same prosecutor, who praised his remorse and cooperation at his codefendant’s trial, presented a contradictory account of the crime to secure his death sentence. Humphreys, 53, was granted a stay less than 24 hours before his scheduled execution in Georgia to allow a hearing on whether the horrific abuse he suffered as a child qualifies him for resentencing under a new Georgia law.
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Lee’s execution brings the number of people put to death in the US this year to 27, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Florida has carried out 15 of them, followed by Texas with five, Oklahoma with three, Alabama with two and Arizona and Tennessee with one each. All were carried out by lethal injection. Last year, 47 people were executed nationwide, the most since 2009, with Florida alone accounting for 19, or 40 percent of the total.
At least 11 more executions are scheduled for the remainder of the year:
- September 23: Ker’sean Ramey, Texas
- September 29: Curtis Beasley, Florida
- September 30: Christa Pike, Tennessee
- October 7: Jamaal Howard, Texas
- October 13: William Thompson, Florida
- November 5: Jeffrey Weisheit, Indiana, and Michael Taylor, Alabama
- November 12: John Rubio, Texas, and James Pavatt, Oklahoma
- November 19: Reinaldo Dennes, Texas
- December 3: Gary Wayne Sutton, Tennessee
If Texas carries out its four remaining scheduled executions, it will record the most executions in the state in a single year this decade.
The cases of Lee, Norman and Humphreys underscore that who lives and who dies at the hands of the state is determined not by any consistent principle of justice but by the date of a trial, the conduct of a prosecutor, the temperament of a single juror or the interpretation of a newly passed statute. Under conditions of deepening social crisis and the Trump administration’s open embrace of capital punishment, state governments that still practice capital punishment are accelerating the pace of state killing.
2. The Smithfield meatpacking walkout and the toll of death in America’s workplaces
Roughly 100 workers at the Smithfield Foods pork plant in Monmouth, Illinois, walked off the job Monday after Patou Mpinda, a 44-year-old maintenance worker, was killed during the overnight shift. Their action is a sign of growing opposition in the working class to conditions in which thousands of preventable deaths each year are accepted as a cost of doing business.
Mpinda, a Congolese immigrant, died at about 2:31 a.m. A coworker said machinery was involved, but Smithfield has not disclosed which machine, what task he was performing or whether the equipment had been locked out. The county coroner has said the death is believed to be work-related, with a final ruling pending.
At 5:30 a.m., day-shift workers received only a text announcing a “late start.” When they arrived at 7:30, hundreds were gathered in the lunchroom, many learning only then that a coworker had died. Some cried openly; others shouted at the plant manager, “Listen to your people! Why are we here? We shouldn’t be working!”
According to one worker, management still ordered production to begin. African immigrant workers then reportedly took the lead in organizing a walkout, and roughly 100 people left the plant. Smithfield announced that workers could leave without penalty, but only after collective action had begun.
The workers did not wait for permission from the company or from any official organization. The plant is non-union.
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Meatpacking is among the most dangerous industries in the United States. In April 2020, as COVID-19 tore through the plants, including Monmouth, which was forced to close temporarily, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to keep them running. Hundreds of meatpacking workers died. The administration is now moving to lift remaining limits on line speeds.
Last spring, 3,800 workers at the JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado, carried out the largest US meatpacking strike in decades. The Greeley workers, the great majority of them immigrants, stayed out for three weeks against poverty wages, speedup and unsafe conditions. United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 allowed JBS to divert cattle to another UFCW plant in Texas, then ordered the strikers back without a contract and pushed through a deal 30 cents better than the company’s initial offer.
The Monmouth walkout points to the potential for a broader movement. Monmouth lies in the industrial region along the Illinois-Iowa border, where opposition has repeatedly broken into the open. In the nearby Quad Cities, John Deere workers were among the 10,000 nationwide who last month rejected a proposed contract extension. They are determined to reverse the 1,600 job cuts and the concessions imposed since the United Auto Workers betrayed their 2021 strike.
In Joslin, Illinois, Tyson announced on August 13 that it was closing its meatpacking plant and wiping out about 2,500 jobs. Six hundred people packed an emergency community meeting. United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 431 has sought to channel the anger into appeals to corporate and government officials, while boasting of its years of “partnership” with Tyson.
The investigation into Mpinda’s death cannot be left to Smithfield or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). In February, the agency cited the Monmouth plant for a serious lockout-tagout violation after two employees cleaning an auger were exposed to an amputation hazard. In July, it reduced the $14,188 penalty to $9,931.60. Serious citations in 2023 and 2025 also ended in reduced fines.
The pattern is the same at Smithfield’s plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, the largest pork plant in the world. On January 10, Abundio Villa Miranda, 43, died horrifically after falling approximately 25 feet into an area where hogs are stunned with gas. He left two children, ages 10 and 14.
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Across the United States, a worker is killed by a traumatic injury every 104 minutes. The latest complete federal figures record 5,070 such deaths in 2024, and the AFL-CIO estimates that another 135,000 people died from occupational illnesses in 2023.
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This is part of global process. On August 24, 39-year-old ground crew worker Oscar Robayo was crushed to death by the landing gear of an Airbus A350-900 at the Montréal-Trudeau International Airport in a tragedy due to years of deregulation and profiteering.
These deaths are the product of the ruling class’s drive to make workers pay for the crisis of capitalism. Federal debt in the US has passed $40 trillion, annual interest costs exceed $1 trillion, and Washington is preparing a military budget approaching $1.5 trillion as it wages war against Iran, escalates the conflict with Russia and prepares for war with China. The resources for this must be extracted from the working class. On the shop floor, that means mass layoffs through AI and automation, compulsory overtime, speedup and deferred maintenance.
Trump stands at the head of this offensive. His fiscal 2026 budget proposal called for 223 fewer OSHA positions and an estimated 30 percent reduction in inspections, and sought to eliminate the Chemical Safety Board. But the attack is bipartisan. Under Biden, OSHA remained chronically understaffed and the annual toll of traumatic workplace deaths never fell below 5,000, while the Democrats approved record Pentagon budgets.
The union bureaucracies, tied to management and the capitalist parties, work to suppress opposition. They organize no action after workplace deaths and leave investigations to management and government agencies, while promoting the nationalism that binds workers to trade war and military conflict.
Workers need new organizations: rank-and-file safety committees, elected and controlled by workers themselves, to investigate deaths and injuries, secure safety and maintenance records, and organize collective action to stop unsafe production.
There is a model for this. After Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr. was crushed to death at the Dundee Engine Complex in Michigan, an independent rank-and-file investigation exposed the bypassing of lockout protections with “cheater keys,” examined alterations to machine software and held a public hearing.
Smithfield workers should organize an investigation of the same kind, gathering coworker testimony and production and maintenance records and enlisting trusted safety experts to establish how Mpinda was killed and which corporate practices produced the conditions.
There is a developing movement of workers throughout the world. In recent weeks, protests against soaring fuel and food prices, driven up by the US war against Iran, have spread from Guatemala, where truckers blockaded highways and indigenous organizations marched on Congress, to Syria, the Philippines and Portugal.
Volkswagen plans to destroy up to 100,000 jobs as Germany carries out its largest military buildup since Hitler. In Turkey, workers occupied a factory while miners fought unpaid wages and arrests.
At National Steel Car in Hamilton, Ontario, where three workers were killed between 2020 and 2022, 1,200 workers have struck against unsafe conditions and a lethal piece-rate system, and a rank-and-file committee has coordinated support with railroad workers across North America. Postal workers in Springfield, Massachusetts, have formed a committee and called for coordination with workers in Britain, Canada, Germany and Australia.
Smithfield workers should build a committee at Monmouth and call on workers at Tar Heel, Joslin and throughout meatpacking to do the same. Their demands should include workers’ control over line speed, staffing and maintenance; full access to safety records; the right to stop work without loss of pay; and protection for every worker who reports a hazard. Linked through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, such committees can prepare coordinated action across companies, industries and national borders.
The fight for workers’ control of safety and production leads directly to a political struggle against the capitalist system, which subordinates both to profit. The major corporations must be transformed into public enterprises under workers’ democratic control, with production organized to meet human need. The Monmouth workers, acting on their own initiative, have shown the power that lies in collective action. That initiative must now be organized, broadened and directed toward the socialist reorganization of economic life.
3. Sarah Cotte acquitted: Jury rejects British state frame-up
A jury at the Old Bailey on September 18 unanimously acquitted Sarah Cotte, the 22-year-old SOAS graduate prosecuted under Section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000 for allegedly supporting the proscribed organization Hamas. Her “crime” was a speech defending the Palestinian people’s right to resist occupation and genocide.
Cotte had already endured an eight-day trial, ending on July 1, in which jurors acquitted her on one charge but failed to reach a verdict on another. Instead of accepting that failure, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) demanded a retrial.
The CPS gambled that a second jury would give it the conviction the first had refused to deliver. Instead, it collapsed. After only two hours, the new jury returned a unanimous not-guilty verdict.
The verdict is a humiliating defeat for the prosecution and for the wider campaign led by successive Conservative and Labour governments to criminalize solidarity with Palestine. It demonstrates the lengths to which the state is prepared to go to police political speech and suppress opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza.
For three years, Cotte faced the threat of 14 years in prison for expressing solidarity with an oppressed people. Now, 12 jurors have rejected the state’s case. They did not need to share Cotte’s politics, or her background, to recognise a frame-up when they saw one.
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The police raid on Cotte’s home on January 31, 2024—nearly four months after her speech—exposed the emptiness of the prosecution’s case. They found nothing linking her to Hamas: no books or pamphlets, no financial records showing donations, no evidence she had met its leaders, members or supporters.
The prosecution’s entire case rested on an extraordinary supposition: that a young woman supposedly supporting Hamas had left no trace of that support. No documents, messages, transactions, associations—not even the words of the speech itself—established the allegation.
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Cotte’s acquittal is a victory—but the struggle from which it emerged is far from over. The state is fast-tracking new legislation to criminalize ever broader forms of political opposition. Its defeat in this case will not end its campaign to criminalize solidarity with Palestine. It will intensify its efforts, as it has done following every previous acquittal.
The defense of democratic rights requires the building of an independent political movement of the working class, internationally united against war, genocide and capitalism. The acquittal of Sarah Cotte demonstrates what is possible when people refuse to be intimidated and take a principled stand.
4. Sri Lankan Socialist Equality Party holds Fourth Congress
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka held its Fourth National Congress in Colombo from September 11 to 13 amid a worsening crisis of global capitalism, the escalation of imperialist war and growing resistance by workers and the rural masses to the austerity measures of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)/National People’s Power (NPP) government.
The congress adopted the main resolution, “The strategy and program of the SEP in the fight against the JVP government and capitalism.” General Secretary Deepal Jayasekera introduced the resolution, while Lasitha Lakmal, Rohantha De Silva and Saman Gunadasa presented supplementary reports on the JVP’s evolution, Sri Lanka’s racialist war and the lessons of the 2022 mass uprising.
Jayasekara stressed that the Congress was taking place under conditions in which the threat of world war had become an immediate reality. “The Third World War is no longer a threat that is expected in the future,” he stated. “It is a reality unfolding before our eyes.”
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Workers need to realize that “the revolutionary struggle is international, not an extension of the existing nationalist bourgeois framework,” Gunadasa stressed. “Socialist consciousness does not arise spontaneously. It requires conscious revolutionary leadership. That is the challenge before this congress,” he concluded.
The Congress unanimously adopted a resolution on the campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk.
The congress elected a new Central Committee (CC). The members of incoming CC reelected Deepal Jayasekara as general secretary and reelected Saman Gunadasa as assistant national secretary; Lasitha Lakmal as national editor and Pani Wijesiriwardane as assistant national editor.
The congress established that the SEP’s work in Sri Lanka—amid escalating war, social inequality and attacks on democratic rights—was an integral part of the international struggle to build the world party of socialist revolution.
Its reports, resolutions and contributions will be published on the World Socialist Web Site to politically arm workers and young people for the struggles ahead.
5. No2Nato No2War interviews Johannes Stern on Bogdan Syrotiuk and political crisis in Germany
The wide-ranging interview focused on the political persecution of Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk and the international campaign for his freedom. It also discussed the return of German militarism, the rise of the far-right AfD and the deepening social and political crisis in Germany.
6. Australian Labor government spearheads assault on immigrants
Thousands of immigrant workers, branded as visa overstayers, will face raids on their homes and workplaces, imprisonment and deportation under the Albanese Labor government’s anti-immigrant measures, unveiled by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke this week.
Under the government’s plan, 100 additional Border Force “compliance officers” will be recruited, boosting the total to about 300, to hunt down supposed visa “overstayers.” About 250 extra detention beds will be opened immediately near airports and the government will repurpose a mothballed 1,000-capacity COVID quarantine facility in Melbourne to provide for mass detentions and deportations.
The most immediate target will be almost 80,000 people, mostly workers and students, who have allegedly overstayed their temporary visas. That alone will involve a massive deportation program, but that is just the start.
The dragnet will inevitably widen to as many as half a million temporary visa holders as the government also moves to stop them from “visa-hopping,” that is, applying for alternative visas. This will create a police-state atmosphere of raids and arrests in working-class areas.
Those most vulnerable include the 432,000 people who were on bridging visas as of March this year, which allow people to remain in Australia lawfully while their visa applications or appeals against decisions are heard, and the 93,000 asylum seekers refused visas and still living in the community as of February.
Burke’s speech at the National Press Club on Thursday underscores the reality that when it comes to blaming immigrant workers and students for the worsening cost-of-living, fuel and housing crisis there are no real differences between the Labor Party and the far-right anti-immigrant One Nation or the Liberal-National Coalition, all of which are vying to outdo each other in slashing immigration.
Labor is intent on spearheading this offensive despite the widespread revulsion to immigration police raids, as seen in the mass opposition to the dawn raid and imprisonment of a Sri Lankan family in the rural town of Biloela in 2018, and in the reaction to the Trump administration’s brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, incarcerations and deportations.
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These measures are an attack on the working class as a whole. Stripping work rights away from workers or students will push them into the black economy of especially unsafe, precarious and exploitative employment, undercutting the conditions of all workers.
As refugee and human rights organisations have protested, studies have shown that undocumented workers face the worst forms of exploitation and are least likely to speak up about it, for fear of detection and deportation. Employers often take control of their workers’ visa status, rendering them undocumented in order to continue their exploitation.
This offensive marks a sharp turn by the Labor government to make immigrants scapegoats for the deteriorating social conditions confronting working-class households, intensified by the renewed global inflationary impact of the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran, which the Albanese government has backed from day one.
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From the US to Europe, governments of all political stripes are pursuing anti-immigrant witch hunting to channel mounting working-class anger over soaring social inequality, falling housing unaffordability, cuts to social programs and the funneling of billions into military spending, toward the most vulnerable members of society.
This aims to divide the working class—which in Australia is truly international, with nearly half the population having a parent born overseas and figures reaching two-thirds in major working-class areas—along national and ethnic lines under conditions of an unfolding world war and Labor’s growing integration of Australia into US plans for war against China.
7. Second hunger strike in Ukrainian prisons in 5 weeks
On September 11, hundreds of prisoners in Ukraine, the UK, Turkey, Russia, Austria, and other countries have joined a hunger strike protesting against torture and inhumane conditions in the Ukrainian prison system. According to the website anti-imperialism.by, 408 political prisoners from 18 different countries participated in the hunger strike, up from 362 prisoners who joined the August 5 hunger strike.
Both hunger strikes were organized by the Association for the Rights of Political Prisoners and Human Rights and the Platform for International Solidarity with Political Prisoners. The Association for the Rights of Political Prisoners and Human Rights was founded by the Kononovich brothers, the leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Youth movement which is affiliated with the Stalinist Communist Party of Ukraine. Since 2022, the Kononovich brothers have been subjected to violent persecution by the fascist-infested Ukrainian secret service (SBU). They are still placed under house arrest.
In Ukraine, 58 political prisoners joined the hunger strike, including at pre-trial detention centers in Lukyyanov and Lvov as well as in Nikolaev, where the 27-year old Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk has been held for over two years. On August 10, he was sentenced to 15 years for “high treason”, because he had called for the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian working class in opposition to the war.
The hunger strike focused, in particular, on the situation in the Vinnitsiya Penal Colony No. 86, where prisoners have reported severe torture, forced labor and other inhumane and degrading conditions. One of them, Alexander Mel’nik, who leaked his reports about conditions in the prison to the press and was one of the leaders of previous protests, has been held in solitary confinement for over two months. The strikers demanded an immediate end to the torture and inhumane conditions at the facility, calling it a “concentration camp”, and demanded that Mel’nik be released from his solitary confinement.
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The World Socialist Web Site expresses its full solidarity with the hunger strikes, demands an end to torture and inhumane conditions in Ukrainian prisons and calls for the immediate release of all political prisoners!
As the previous hunger strike and the persecution of political opposition in Ukraine more broadly, the September 11 strike has been completely ignored by the Western media. There is nothing coincidental about this. There is a conspiracy of silence regarding the systematic and violent suppression of political dissent by the Zelensky regime which has been built up and funded by NATO to wage war against Russia. As this war continues to rage, with hundreds of thousands killed and many more maimed, more and more youth and workers are being imprisoned and silenced.
8. Trump administration covered up deaths of US troops in war against Iran
The administration is concealing the number of American dead in an illegal war of aggression that it began, together with Israel, in open defiance of international law. The US-Israeli war had killed at least 3,527 people in Iran by August 28, according to a count Al Jazeera compiled from health ministries and other official bodies.
The majority of the US population opposes the war. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken September 11-14, seven weeks before the November 3 midterm elections, found that 59 percent of respondents disapprove of the US military strikes on Iran.
US President Donald Trump said in the Oval Office on September 4: “I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us.” He added that “we lost 18 people.”
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The Pentagon’s database on Friday listed 832 US troops wounded in action, 414 of them under “Overseas Operations.” The Associated Press reported August 6 that most of the wounded had suffered traumatic brain injuries.
A report by the Pentagon’s inspector general found that Iranian strikes “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and other structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan,” the Associated Press reported September 14. “Dozens of American aircraft and drones also were destroyed or damaged,” the AP wrote.
The Wall Street Journal reported June 25, citing US officials, that Iranian forces had struck at least 20 US military and diplomatic sites across the Middle East with missiles and drones. The damage, the Journal wrote, “has the U.S. re-evaluating its entire footprint in the region.”
The Journal examined satellite images of Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which lies within 150 miles of the Iranian coast. The Journal found that Iranian forces, striking from late February to June, badly damaged the command headquarters, at least 12 other buildings and two satellite communications terminals. The Pentagon, the Journal wrote in June, had not publicly acknowledged the damage.
The Fifth Fleet headquarters building “is no longer usable,” the Journal reported, citing a US official. The Journal put the cost of constructing such a building today at $200 million and of constructing all the buildings damaged at the base at about $400 million. The United States evacuated most of its staff from the base and kept a small number there, the Journal reported.
Iranian forces also destroyed E-3 Sentry radar planes belonging to the Air Force at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia and did “significant structural damage” to Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates and Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, the Journal reported.
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Iranian forces destroyed a Navy logistics base in Bahrain on February 28, the day the war began, the New York Times reported September 2. The region’s other ports that can take a supply ship or an aircraft carrier lie within range of Iran’s missiles and drones, the Times wrote, “making them inaccessible.”
Navy supply ships must now sail to Diego Garcia, 2,200 miles away in the Indian Ocean, or to Singapore, 3,700 miles away, the Times reported. It wrote that the warships’ deployments are open-ended and that “this is not sustainable.”
The Washington Post reported August 30 that the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a classified August 14 document, that prolonging the war at its present scale is “unsustainable.” Admiral Daryl Caudle, the Navy’s top officer, told Hegseth that “barely one-fourth” of its destroyers are ready to deploy, the Post reported.
CNN reported August 4 that almost 80 percent of the military’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors had been used up.
The war on Iran is one front of an escalating global war whose death toll will be far greater than the one the Pentagon is now concealing.
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On Wednesday, 58 House Democrats joined Republicans in handing Trump new powers over war and trade, including the authority to tax goods from China and India, which buy Russian oil, at rates up to 100 percent. The bill, which also keeps the US sanctions on Iran’s energy and arms industries in force until 2031, passed the Senate 86 to 11 on August 7, with 36 of the 45 Democrats voting yes. Trump signed it into law Friday.
9. New Zealand power companies make massive profits while households freeze
According to a report in Stuff last month, New Zealand’s major power companies raked in more than a billion dollars in profit over the year while household power bills surged and many people spent the winter freezing in their homes.
The “big four” generation retailers, commonly known as “gentailers”—Contact, Mercury, Meridian and Genesis—that dominate the market posted combined profits of $NZ959 million. The state-owned Transpower, which owns and operates the national grid, also announced an annual profit of $176 million, a 64 percent increase on the previous year’s $107 million.
The profits accumulated by the four companies was more than 1,800 percent higher than the previous year’s result of $49 million, though short of the $1.5 billion record set in 2022. The Spinoff observed that in terms of operating earnings, it was “comfortably the most lucrative year the companies had ever seen,” bringing in a combined $3.65 billion.
Meanwhile, figures from Powerswitch show 14 percent of people cannot afford to heat their homes properly, 24 percent have missed a power bill payment and 19 percent have been forced to borrow from family or friends to keep the lights on.
The soaring price of electricity is a major component of the escalating cost of living. Over the two years between the June 2024 and June 2026 quarters, salary and wage rates increased by a total of just 4.4 percent, according to Stats NZ’s Labour Cost Index.
Over the same period local authority rates and payments rose 22 percent, electricity 21.4 percent and petrol 17.2 percent. Health insurance increased 39.4 percent, while dwelling insurance rose 9.2 percent. Supermarket prices skyrocketed, ranging from a 28.2 percent increase in beef mince, to 26 percent for milk, 42 percent for butter and 67.6 percent for bread.
Lower-income households are hardest hit with essential expenses commanding more of their budgets. Cold, damp homes are contributing to the spike in winter illnesses.
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The “big four” power companies are now collectively valued at $38 billion. They have been far more focused on paying dividends to their shareholders than reinvesting in necessary infrastructure. In the last decade they have paid out $10.8 billion in dividends, with only $4.5 billion going to new power projects.
According to Consumer NZ, residential electricity prices are, when adjusted for inflation, 65 percent higher than they were when the retail market was created in 1999.
Privatisation has served to redistribute wealth from the mass of the population to a small financial elite, which has been enriched at the expense of working class households.
According to the Electricity Authority, about 700 households per month are having their electricity disconnected for non-payment. Last year 46,895 requests for post-paid electricity connections were declined due to low credit ratings, forcing families onto pre-paid connections.
Essential services like water and electricity are necessities of life that must be provided to everyone. These utilities must be placed in full public ownership—not under the control of the capitalist state, which is an instrument of the financial elite, but under the democratic control of the working class. This requires nothing less than the abolition of capitalism and the socialist reorganization of society.
10. After the AfD’s election victory: Pseudo-left tendencies stoke illusions in the Left Party
The Left Party bears central responsibility for the victory of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the recent Saxony-Anhalt state election. Outrage over social cutbacks, war and the establishment parties found an outlet on the right because the Left Party and the trade unions blocked every avenue on the left.
The ruling class is responding to the deep crisis of capitalism by boosting militarism, stepping up the repressive powers of the state and imposing social cuts. The Left Party goes along with this and provides a left cover. It supports the federal government’s great-power policies, voted in the upper house of parliament for €1 trillion in war credits and persecutes opponents of the Gaza genocide within its own ranks. In the federal states, where it is or has been in government, it has left a trail of social devastation.
The trade unions, with which the Left Party works closely, act as co-managers organizing the destruction of jobs and social provisions and suppress all resistance to this. Just three days before the Saxony-Anhalt election, for example, the union IG Metall agreed to the destruction of a further 50,000 jobs at Volkswagen.
This is why the AfD—a free-market party backed by billionaires such as Henning Conle and Elon Musk—is able to channel social anger and outrage into right-wing channels with its demagogy. The AfD contains numerous fascists, but it is not a fascist mass party. Many voted for it out of protest and opposition to the establishment parties, which offer them nothing but war, unemployment and poverty.
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The claim that the Left Party can be forced, through pressure from below, into a policy in the interests of the working class is not only refuted by the entire experience of recent years but is also historically false. Neither the Left Party nor its predecessor, the PDS, was ever a workers’ party.
As the Berlin Wall fell and East Germany’s Stalinist regime collapsed in 1989–90, the PDS emerged through the renaming of the former party of state, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), as the Party of Democratic Socialism. The SED was not a socialist party but a Stalinist one. It represented the interests of a privileged bureaucracy that leeched off the nationalized property and suppressed every independent stirring of the working class.
When the “Ulbricht Group,” the nucleus of the later SED, returned from exile in Moscow at the end of the Second World War, among its first actions was to dissolve the Arbeiterräte (workers’ councils) that had sprung up spontaneously. In 1953, the Ulbricht regime then bloodily crushed the workers’ uprising of June 17 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
In the context of the Cold War, the SED found itself compelled to expropriate large, landed estates, companies and banks. This was a social advance upon which numerous social and cultural achievements of the GDR rested. But it was not yet socialism. A socialist society could no more be built within the narrow confines of East Germany than within the borders of the far larger Soviet Union. That required workers’ democracy and access to the world economy through the international extension of the revolution. Stalinism rejected both.
As globalization increasingly put the GDR economy under pressure and social tensions grew, the bureaucracy tried to save its privileges by introducing capitalism. It liquidated state property and all the social achievements bound up with it. That was the political content of the transformation of the SED into the PDS.
Hans Modrow, the last SED/PDS head of government in the GDR and later honorary chairman of the PDS, states this bluntly in his memoirs of his time in office. “In my view, the path to [German] unity was unavoidably necessary and had to be pursued with determination,” he writes.
Modrow saw his most important task as defending the state order against a wave of protests and strikes by workers. He describes how strikes and social tensions increased and insists: “What mattered to me was preserving the country’s governability, preventing chaos.”
Modrow’s economics minister, Christa Luft, also a PDS member, founded the Treuhand, the agency that privatized and wound down the GDR economy, destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process.
The PDS and the Left Party have never since departed from the course set by Modrow and Luft, protecting the state order and capitalist property. In the 1990s, working closely with the trade unions, the PDS played a key role in keeping resistance to the destruction of East German industry under control. In the 2000s, as the SPD’s influence began to decline under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the PDS/Left Party took on government responsibility in several East German federal states.
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After more than three decades, the pseudo-left does not cling to the Left Party because it still has illusions in this pro-capitalist party, but because it rejects an independent movement of the working class. It speaks for better-off middle-class layers who fear a genuine offensive by the working class more than they fear the growth of the extreme right.
The SGP and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), of which it is the German section, represent a diametrically opposed policy. They are fighting to organize the working class independently of the Left Party and the ossified trade union apparatuses, to build rank-and-file action committees, and to construct the Fourth International as the new revolutionary leadership of the international working class.
The pseudo-left calls this “unrealistic” and “sectarian.” In fact, it is the only realistic perspective. It rests not on superficial impressions and false hopes, but on an objective analysis of the crisis of world capitalism and on the lessons of more than a hundred years of the Marxist workers’ movement.
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“The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events,” writes Leon Trotsky in the preface to his History of the Russian Revolution, the revolution he led to victory together with Lenin:
In ordinary times the state, be it monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line of business—kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new régime.
This process is only just beginning. It unfolds neither automatically nor spontaneously. It requires a revolutionary leadership that understands and anticipates the political tasks ahead. Mass consciousness lags far behind objective conditions for a long time before it changes abruptly and erupts into fierce political and social conflicts. If a revolutionary perspective and leadership are then lacking, such struggles risk ending in bitter defeats.
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The fight against the AfD requires a political break with the Left Party and its pseudo-left satellites. An independent offensive by the international working class, directed against war, fascism, social inequality and their root cause, capitalism, will cut the ground from under the AfD.
11. Effects of El Niño intensify across Peru, as Fujimori government prepares repression, not relief
The effects of a widely predicted “super” El Niño are intensifying dramatically in midwinter, bringing unusually high temperatures. Peru’s National Meteorology and Hydrol across Peruogy Service (SENAMHI) reported that Lima reached 29°C this week, breaking a record that had stood since 1997. The reading is 9°C above the September average. Under normal conditions, such temperatures would be expected only during the hottest summer days, between January and March.
Because of the extreme heat, the government has placed 21 regions under red alert, covering virtually the entire country—the coast and the Andes— except the Amazon lowland departments.
The anomaly is so destructive that, so far this year, starvation has killed at least 9,570 sea lions, 2,144 guano birds, 30 Humboldt penguins, and hundreds of pelicans, gulls and other species. The Coastal El Niño, which pushes the cold, nutrient-rich waters of the Humboldt Current away from Peru’s coast, taking the fish with it—the main source of food for seabirds and marine mammals—is forecast to reach its peak between November and January 2027. These deaths were recorded in protected areas where the government collects figures. The actual toll is likely far higher, since many coastal habitats are not monitored and the worst of El Niño’s destructive force is still to come.
Infobae reports estimated economic losses of $15 billion to $25 billion in Peru. More than 13,500 families in the northern city of Lambayeque and thousands more in Piura face precarious economic conditions and reduced availability of traditional fish species such as silverside.
Conveagro, Peru’s National Agrarian Convention, estimates agricultural losses exceeding $3 billion, with sharp declines in olives, strawberries and corn. The Peruvian Institute of Economics estimates El Niño will reduce GDP growth by a combined 0.8 percentage points in 2026–27.
The Coastal El Niño also affects Ecuador, where 494,274 hectares of crops face high flood exposure and 606,584 hectares face high landslide exposure.
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Since pre-Inca times, Peru’s coastal peoples have depended heavily on the ocean. El Niño affected civilizations including the Paracas, the Moche and the Chimú. Researchers continue investigating whether exceptionally strong events contributed to the decline of the Moche civilization, which flourished on the north coast between roughly AD 100 and 800 — particularly the “mega-El Niño” events around AD 550 and 650. Torrential rains and floods destroyed crops, irrigation systems and adobe structures, followed by prolonged droughts and famine.
El Niño is a natural phenomenon of enormous proportions that cannot be controlled, and global warming is making these events more frequent and stronger. Society, however, can anticipate its effects, protect food supplies and reduce suffering among people and animals.
Even the Inca state maintained vast storehouses, known as qollqas, containing corn, quinoa, chuño, textiles and other goods. These surpluses were produced through the labor and tribute obligations of local communities. During poor harvests, droughts and other emergencies, authorities could redistribute stored reserves to affected populations.
By contrast, today the vulnerability of global food systems to climate shocks is registered primarily through the volatility of commodity prices. Financial markets allow speculators to take positions based on expectations of good or poor harvests. When agricultural disasters produce shortages, investors can profit from rising commodity prices. Under capitalism, food production and distribution are subordinated to markets and private profit rather than to preventing mass hunger and starvation.
The solution to capitalism-induced global warming and its effects, including massive disruptions of food supplies, requires organizing production internationally according to human need rather than private profit, through ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the international working class.
12. Mass roadblocks over fuel hikes in Guatemala threatened with repression
On September 11, the government of Bernardo Arévalo deployed the Guatemalan Army alongside the National Civil Police to break up roadblocks against soaring fuel prices, giving demonstrators 30 minutes to disperse.
Interior Minister Marco Antonio Villeda declared that the protests had “mutated from demonstrations into criminal acts.” Anyone blocking a road would “be arrested and placed at the disposal of the courts,” their vehicles confiscated.
Defense Minister Henry Sáenz went further. “We are not talking about demonstrations,” he said. “We are talking about coordinated activities with very dark interests.” Three army forces and 23 operational commands were mobilized.
At their height that day, 14 blockades were reported across 10 of Guatemala’s 22 departments. The Constitutional Court ordered the roads cleared within six hours, under threat of removing officials who failed to comply.
They closed the Periférico at Bethania in the capital, the Atlantic highway, CA-2 West at Cuyotenango and CA-9 North in Zacapa. Transmetro Line 18 was suspended, cutting a bus route workers depend on.
Nothing has been settled. A blockade was again reported on September 16 on CA-1 West near Huehuetenango.
The community council in La Bethania said on September 13 that residents could return to demonstrations or blockades.
The next day market traders association, transportation groups and indigenous organizations (28 Cantones and the Sololá Mayorship) launched an indefinite occupation of the Plaza de la Constitución. “This September 15 there is no independence,” said Julio Rivas of the Association of United Market Traders, “because they have us sunk in an economic and fuel crisis.”*****
Between January 1 and July 20, diesel rose from Q24.92 to Q39.54 a gallon—58.7 percent. By September 16 it had reached Q50.89 ($6.67), the highest price in Guatemalan history. Regular gasoline hit Q44.09 ($5.79).
Food prices have registered a major increase as a result, with corn, the most important staple, increasing from Q550 per quintal (100 pounds) to Q600 in just three weeks.
Set against wages, the figures are devastating. The 2026 minimum wage is Q4,252 ($557) a month; and the average monthly income is Q2,748, and 65.9 percent of those employed work informally, without contract or protection. Current price hikes are resulting in major deprivation.
Guatemala imports all its fuel, and the chief cause of the price increases lies in the US-Israeli war against Iran and the collapse of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes in peacetime.
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Guatemalan workers are being made to pay for a war waged half a world away over the control of oil. So are workers everywhere.
In the same weeks, Mexican truck drivers blocked several of the country’s eleven commercial border crossings after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement revoked their B1 work visas.
The drivers are being ruined by the same administration whose war on Iran is driving up Guatemalan fuel costs. These are not separate grievances but a clear demonstration of the potential for uniting the struggles across borders.
The protests in Guatemala are not socially homogeneous, however. The transport employer chambers demand tax exemptions and direct subsidies—public money transferred to fuel importers and bus owners, leaving the price mechanism intact.
The indigenous leaderships that were demonstrating alongside these bodies demanded the opposite: measures against fuel speculation, frozen transport fares, state action on food prices and enforcement against hoarding. They explicitly rejected subsidies.
Significant sections of the working class have been mobilized through their neighborhood associations, and behind market traders and some rural communities; however, the working class has not intervened massively in the struggle yet. Significantly, the trade union federations have issued no national call to action and no appeal for a strike.
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Arévalo, who was elected running as a democratic, left-wing answer to the far right advancing across the hemisphere, said on a televised address on September 13, that a convergence of local politicians, drug trafficking networks and gangs are behind the blockades: “The spurious electoral interests of some and the criminal interests of others converge.”
He alleged that in Río Hondo, Zacapa, politicians had paid people to man the roadblocks and described similar arrangements in Cuyotenango and Villa Nueva. He named no one and produced no evidence.
The charge is not rhetorical excess. Guatemala has joined the Trump administration’s “Shield of the Americas,” launched in March around a commitment to “using lethal military force” against cartels.
To brand a movement of bus drivers, truckers, market traders and village councils as narco-financed is to place it inside that framework and to justify its repression.
On May 19, Arévalo spoke by telephone with War Secretary Pete Hegseth. The New York Times reported, citing three people familiar with the talks, that he agreed to US airstrikes and other military action on Guatemalan soil. The government denied it and insisted only the Guatemalan Congress may authorize foreign troops. It confirmed, however, that Defense Minister Henry Sáenz had requested US “cooperation.”
That is the same minister who now calls workers blocking roads over the price of diesel “coordinated activities with very dark interests.” In August, Hegseth announced that the government of Guatemala, along with new far-right regimes in Colombia and Honduras, had agreed to joint US operations on their respective territories.
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In 1952, the civilian Jacobo Árbenz government expropriated uncultivated estates. United Fruit, which held 550,000 acres of which 85 percent lay idle and whose annual profits were twice the revenue of the Guatemalan state, lost more than 400,000 acres.
Under the leadership of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles, who had both arranged deals for United Fruit, the Dwight D Eisenhower administration authorized Operation PBSuccess in August 1953 to overthrow Árbenz. A CIA-orchestrated invasion in June of 1954 installed Col. Carlos Castillo Armas as the country’s US-backed dictator.
What followed was 36 years of civil war and some 200,000 dead. The UN-backed truth commission attributed 93 percent of the carnage to the state and found it committed acts of genocide against the Maya.
The apparatus built to defend United Fruit’s interests was turned, decade after decade, against strikes, land occupations and the villages of the highlands. That is the historical function of the “cooperation” his ministers have requested.
Arévalo’s biography runs through this record. The son of President Juan José Arévalo (1945-51), he served in Guatemala’s embassy in Israel from 1984 to 1988, when Israel was a principal arms supplier to a military fresh from its scorched-earth campaigns against the indigenous population.
His party, Semilla, founded in 2017 out of a Washington-connected NGO milieu, has its major constituency among the professional upper middle-class. Arévalo entered the 2023 runoff with 15.51 percent of the first-round vote—fewer than the 18.17 percent of ballots cast null—and won with just a 44.98 percent turnout.
On taking office, he thanked Washington and the army for securing his inauguration.
Living standards cannot be protected by pressuring the government that has already deployed the military against the population, criminalizes its protests and invites the Pentagon to collaborate.
The working class requires independent organization—in Guatemala, Mexico, the United States and internationally—against war and the capitalist system that produces it.
13. Riverstone: The routine face of Sri Lankan state murder
In 2025, Sri Lankan writer-director Lalith Rathnayake’s Riverstone won Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography prizes at the Shanghai International Film Festival, as well as the Best Director award at the Singapore International Film Festival. This year, it won a Golden Cyclo, the top prize at the Vesoul International Festival of Asian Cinema in France.
These awards are well deserved. Rathnayake’s two-hour drama, his second feature, is a work of considerable artistic intelligence, and its subject matter—the extrajudicial killing of a prisoner by Sri Lankan state security forces—is a reality that has afflicted the island for decades.
Thousands died in such killings during the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna-led uprisings by rural youth in 1988–90 and during the 26-year communal war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which ended in 2009. More recently, over 100 police custodial deaths have been reported in so-called anti-crime and anti-drug operations, with suspects allegedly killed while “attempting to show a weapon cache” or “trying to escape.”
Set in the aftermath of Colombo’s bloody war against the LTTE, the story unfolds almost entirely within the confined space of a police vehicle travelling through the central highlands to Riverstone, its destination in the spectacular Knuckles mountain range.
The drama involves three policemen—a senior officer, a sergeant and a junior constable—and Nanditha (Randika Gunathilaka), the alleged criminal, who is being transported to a pre-arranged execution.
While the film’s protagonists are mainly confined to the police vehicle, long stretches of winding mountain roads, enveloped in mist, rain and dense forest, reinforce a mounting sense of entrapment. Director Rathnayake repeatedly juxtaposes the serenity of the natural world with the casual brutality of official power.
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The police violence depicted in Riverstone is not some relic of the past. The same institution continues to suppress dissent, crush strikes and enforce government austerity, helping to explain its strong resonance with Sri Lankan audiences.
That Rathnayake has made such an unflinching exposure of what the state does and what it makes of the men who do its work is significant and testifies to the persistence of artistic conscience in a country whose ruling elite has little use for truth-telling of any kind.
In a global cinema landscape dominated by trivia, cynicism and the industrial production of distraction, a work of this honesty and seriousness deserves the widest possible international distribution.
14. Canada: Why is the USW so afraid of the rank and file at National Steel Car?
National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee:
On Sunday, September 13, reporters from the World Socialist Web Site visited the picket line at our Hamilton, Ontario plant to speak with some of us. Within minutes, United Steelworkers Local 7135 President Frank Crowder arrived, summoned by his associates, and launched into a violent outburst, repeatedly calling the reporters “trash” and physically blocking them from talking to strikers.
His aggressive behavior is just the latest example of the USW bureaucracy’s hostility towards rank-and-file workers speaking out about the six-week-old strike. Crowder already blocked WSWS reporters from discussing the strike with rank-and-file workers on another occasion last month. He and his colleagues in the USW apparatus have taken to referring to the National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee, an organization built by workers at our plant independently of the USW bureaucracy, as organized by “rats.”
The thuggish behavior by Crowder and his associates exemplifies the bitter hostility of the entire USW bureaucracy towards rank-and-file strikers at National Steel Car. They know that our overwhelming strike vote and anger over the dangerous working conditions in the plant demonstrate that we are ready to wage a genuine struggle against the exploitative piecework system, and for decent-paying, safe jobs for all. But their primary concerns are protecting their relations with NSC owner Greg Aziz and upholding the union’s alliance in “Team Canada” with the federal Liberal and provincial Tory governments.
They are therefore determined to suppress all independent rank-and-file action in our strike for fear that we could break out of the straitjacket in which the union leadership has confined our struggle, and that we could start mobilizing broader layers of the working class against corporate profiteering, unsafe working conditions, austerity and war.
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The WSWS has a more than decade-long record of reporting on workers’ struggles at National Steel Car. It exposed the horrific conditions behind the death of Quoc Le in June 2022, the third worker to die at our plant in just 18 months. When we established the NSC-RFC during our last strike in 2023, the WSWS provided a platform for the rank and file’s demands and a perspective to guide our struggle. Our statements warning about the pro-employer collective bargaining system and the danger of expecting the capitalist courts to do anything about the deaths of our colleagues were vindicated by the sellout of our last strike after 41 days and the wrist-slap fine of $240,000 received by NSC for Le’s death.
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Workers on the line should take Crowder’s hysterical outbursts against the NSC-RFC and the WSWS as a sign that the USW Local 7135 leadership is preparing to unveil another sellout agreement. We know that Aziz has important orders whose deadlines are coming up. We have been on strike for six weeks with no substantive communication from the executive, let alone the elaboration of a strategy to challenge the company and the political establishment that stands behind it.
We know that a key element of the upcoming sellout tentative contract will be the retention of the “incentive” system, i.e., piecework. Ending this highly exploitative and frankly murderous system is a precondition for establishing a safe workplace. Yet it was only weeks before the contract deadline and under pressure from the rank and file, that the USW bureaucracy announced it was launching a “fight” against piecework.
In reality, this was a “fight” that was set up to fail. Showing more concern for the multi-millionaire Aziz’s bottom-line than the members who are living pay cheque to pay cheque, the union proposed a new a base rate of $32 per hour that for many workers would mean a real-terms pay cut. Then, after an arbitrator issued an undemocratic and flagrantly anti-worker ruling that the USW has no right to bargain over the existence of piecework (because it signed it away in a side letter years ago), Crowder and Co. abandoned the fight to abolish piecework altogether.
Now the USW bureaucrats are saying they want to be in on setting the piecework rate, that is, on determining the rate at which we should be incentivized to accept speed-up and dangerous working conditions.
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A genuine working-class leadership would mobilize the whole membership, encourage every worker to take an active role in the struggle, and arm us with the information and organization needed to win the strike. The USW does none of this, because an informed, active and organized rank and file is the one thing its privileged officials fear above all else.
Instead, Crowder and his associates spend their time slandering the NSC-RFC and the WSWS. Crowder asserted that the WSWS is on the line looking for handouts, that the NSC-RFC “divides” the union, that the WSWS twists the words of workers, and that the committee is collaborating with National Steel Car management.
We are not looking for handouts. It is the USW bureaucrats who collect our dues while angling for higher office, and the top union bosses rake in six-figure salaries.
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The union sits on more than $2 billion in assets built up from our dues money, but starves us on $420 a week in strike pay. In 2023, it starved us out for 41 days on $260 per week in strike pay before pushing through a sellout.
Nobody has divided the rank and file from our allies throughout the working class better than the USW bureaucracy. It has isolated our strike and refused to link it to the struggles of other workers, including the 225,000 other USW members in this country and 850,000 across North America.
The WSWS does not twist the words of workers. It publishes what workers actually say and gives the most militant and class-conscious workers a voice by printing our committee’s statements. It is the bureaucracy that does not communicate with its members, bars them from talking to anyone, and won’t answer elementary questions as to what we are fighting for and what is the strategy to win the strike.
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The issues in our strike extend far beyond Local 7135. The USW’s nationalism chains us to our own capitalist ruling class and divides us from our brothers and sisters in the United States, Mexico and around the world. Its alliance with corporate management prioritizes the profits of the bosses over our needs and those of our families.
This is not a failure of individual bureaucrats like Crowder, McMullin, or even a higher-up like Marty Warren. It is the logic of the entire trade union apparatus that has been integrated through corporatist ties with the state and big business, and serves as an industrial police force by suppressing our struggles on behalf of the ruling class.
The answer is not to retreat before these threats. It is to build the NSC-RFC as part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees in order to join our fight with the rapidly escalating struggles of the working class across Canada and the US, and internationally. The bureaucracy’s resort to smears and intimidation are a measure of its weakness and isolation from the rank and file. It attacks us and our supporters precisely because it cannot win the argument in open debate.
There is a strong basis to win support for our fight throughout the working class so we can go on the offensive. Some 275,000 education workers across Ontario have been working without a new contract for almost three weeks as the right-wing Ford government seeks to escalate the onslaught on public education, which millions of people in this province depend on. Anger is widespread among workers in the United States towards Trump’s trade war with Canada and “America First” agenda, while millions of workers on this side of the border are being thrust onto a collision course with Carney’s government as it sells off the country’s infrastructure and raw materials to oligarchs and investment funds, and cuts public spending to pay for war. We must appeal directly to these sentiments by making our strike the spearhead of a broader counteroffensive that mobilizes the industrial and political power of the working class to achieve decent-paying, secure jobs, well-funded public services and an end to imperialist war and the enrichment of the financial oligarchy.
The NSC-RFC declares:
• Build the NSC-RFC throughout the plant, department by department and shift by shift.
• Elect our own negotiating committee, answerable only to the rank and file.
• Demand rank-and-file control of the strike, of safety and of production.
• Abolish the incentive system, with base pay equal to the maximum wage including the incentive rate. Full worker control over production line speeds and safety.
• Broaden the struggle: send delegations to Dofasco and Stelco, to the railroads and the factories and the warehouses, and link our fight to the growing rebellion of workers across the continent through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
Contact the NSC-RFC at nscrfc@gmail.com or by filling out the form below.
This year’s Trades Union Congress (TUC) was presented by Britain’s pseudo-left tendencies as an occasion that would demonstrate a changed relationship between the trade unions and the Labour government under Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Instead, it confirmed that the relationship established under Keir Starmer remains one of mutual support for austerity and war.
The pro-worker rhetoric of the assembled bureaucracy during the four-day event in Brighton, September 13–16, rang hollow. None of the resolutions adopted were based on mobilizing the working class against mounting social inequality, attacks on democratic rights, anti-migrant chauvinism and, most acutely, escalating war.
Instead, the congress used the so-called “Burnham bounce”, a slight uptick in support for Labour sans Starmer, to consolidate the bureaucracy’s corporatist relations with the government and big business.
The annual event has long ceased to occupy a meaningful place in working-class political life, and the TUC’s representation of 5.3 million workers is in the role of an industrial policemen and opponent of class struggle.
The cynicism of the union bureaucracy was summed up by TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak’s opening remarks. He paid lip service to outsourced workers “feeding our patients, protecting our public and cleaning our trains”, bounced from “one private company to another” on insecure work and inferior terms before declaring, “Time to end the outsourcing rip-off. Time for real public services, not private profit.”
Nowak inhabits an entirely different world from the “colleagues” that he spoke of meeting two months earlier at an NHS hospital. His estimated remuneration of £167,000 plus expenses places him in the top 10 percent of income earners. He is the leading representative of the privileged stratum of trade union bureaucrats who have facilitated the explosion in private-sector contracts under Labour since it came to power in 2024, with “soft facilities” contracts covering cleaning, catering and security rising from £3.5 to £6.6 billion. And it is in this capacity that he has taken up a position as non-executive director of the Bank of England.
The bureaucracy peddled the lie that Starmer’s pro-business and most right-wing Labour government in history would fulfill its promise to “bring about the biggest wave of insourcing of public services in a generation.” It is now attempting to revive this discredited claim under Burnham and his fraudulent promise to end 40 years of “neoliberalism.”
Burnham’s “public ownership” policy is in fact modeled on Tony Blair’s “Third Way” public-private partnerships, which saddled National Health Service hospitals with crippling debt and led to service cuts, and on his franchise model as Mayor of Greater Manchester where public transport services were carved up among private operators.
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The alignment of the bureaucracy and pseudo-left with Burnham is most starkly exposed on the issue of war. Burnham became prime minister in a palace coup supported by big business, who had concluded that Starmer had proved himself incapable of simultaneously escalating war abroad and attacking the working class at home through deeper austerity.
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A genuine fight against austerity and war is only possible through a fundamental break from the bureaucratic apparatus of the TUC and its member unions that acts as an extension of employers, government and the state in suppressing the class struggle.
The next stage of working-class resistance, whether inside or outside the existing unions, must break the bureaucracy’s grip or face defeat. The fundamental task posed is the building of rank-and-file committees, capable of mobilizing workers across workplaces and communities and uniting them in a conscious fight against the capitalist system and for socialism.
16. Fight war, oligarchy and climate catastrophe! Fight for socialism!
The ruling class knows the mass social opposition its wars and economic crises bring and is preparing police-state measures and far-right political forces to meet it. Scores of young people have been tried and branded terrorists for direct action protest against a genocide. Major demonstrations have been hit with police restrictions and mass arrests. Strikes have been served with court orders.
Reform UK, like the French National Rally, Alternative for Germany and countless other examples internationally, is being lined up to wage a savage war against the working class begun with anti-migrant and benefit claimant scapegoating.
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The insanity of capitalist war is matched only by that of capitalism-driven climate change, which threatens the health, lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions around the world. The clock is being run down on the time humanity has left to secure a livable planet for future generations.
Europe has been battered by unprecedented heatwaves and droughts, leading to tens of thousands of deaths and billions in economic damage. What is likely to be the hottest year on record in 2027 threatens more mass starvation and displacement, concentrated in the poorest parts of the globe. International agencies have already warned of an additional 50 million people forced into acute hunger.
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Social inequality, the private ownership of production and the obscene fortunes of a few are the source of this catastrophe. The world’s richest 1 percent have the same combined carbon footprint as the poorest two-thirds of humanity. To appeal to these forces to put a stop to carbon emissions and other environmental catastrophes is like discussing vegetarianism with a pack of hungry wolves.
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These experiences have generated a groundswell of popular protest and struggle. Millions have taken to the streets to protest the Gaza genocide. A wave of strikes was launched against the cost-of-living crisis coming out of the pandemic. Before Covid, millions of young people across the world were driving a protest movement against the climate crisis.
The problem is not a lack of opposition, but of political perspective. People are rejecting capitalism and turning towards socialism in numbers unprecedented for generations. But they are being led to defeat by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, Zack Polanski and their international counterparts, who put themselves forward as the answer.
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Corbyn has now consummated his ten years of betrayal of left-wing sentiment with the debacle that is Your Party. Polanski’s double-talk on NATO, bond markets and the Labour Party line him up to do the same. Their role is best underscored by the experience in Venezuela, where the “Bolivarian socialism” of Hugo Chavez has delivered the country’s working class to American imperialism.
These movements failed because they were based on national programmes aimed at reforming capitalism. But a ruling class driven to war and dictatorship by fierce competition and economic and social crisis cannot be pressured or persuaded. It can only be defeated, and only by a world revolution that topples capitalist states and expropriates the oligarchy.
Plenty of organizations on campus will provide pseudo-socialist arguments for lending semi-critical support to Your Party, the Greens, and even the Labour Party, on the basis that they are the best there is. We reject this perspective entirely.
The global crisis is preparing an almighty movement in the international working class. This social force, numbering in the billions, will mount increasingly determined fights against right-wing governments and the major corporations. If these struggles are to succeed, then they must acquire a revolutionary socialist program and leadership based on the lessons of the twentieth century.
Developing that leadership is the work of the IYSSE—the youth section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the world Trotskyist movement. Trotskyism is the continuation of Marxism in the 21st century, founded in the struggle to defend the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the program of world socialist revolution on which it was based against the nationalist degeneration represented by Stalin.
Through meetings, lectures, film screenings, classes and campaigns, we will create the conditions on campus for students to learn this history, develop as revolutionaries, and take their place in the fight for socialism. Sign up today!
17. Workers Struggles: Asia & Australia
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
17. Students and youth in London demand freedom for socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk
Students and youth in London have spoken out against the persecution of the 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk. On August 10, the Pervomaisk City District Court sentenced Syrotiuk to 15 years in prison for “high treason… under martial law” for his opposition to the war in Ukraine and calls for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers.
Jennifer, a member of the recently established International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) society at Birkbeck University of London, said, “I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that they arrested him and convicted him on high treason for simply saying, ‘hey, wait a minute, we should look at this from another angle.’ He did not say Ukraine is in the wrong here, we should kowtow to Russia’s demands. He didn’t do anything of that sort.
“He simply said, ‘I think there may be other options here that may be worth exploring.’ And that was enough to call him a traitor. It’s similar to here in the UK, where people in balaclavas can shut down a port city [in a far-right protest] and have no arrests, but an 80-year-old woman holding a ‘stop genocide’ sign gets tried as a terrorist.”
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College student Hector said Putin and Zelensky are “both right-wing. The difference is one is being funded by Europe. I’m not really surprised [by Bogdan’s persecution], they do it with any political activists.”
The war in Ukraine was not over democracy, “It’s a fight of who gets more ownership of what, who gets more capital at the end of the day. That’s what I think. If NATO was actually useful, they’d help the Africans, they’d help the South Americans, they’d help the Asians that were suffering against French and Spanish and English imperialism.”
For those who speak out, “they kill people. That’s the Western way to silence somebody, it’s just killing them. If not, they’ll pay to assassinate them. If not, they’ll start a war. Like Sudan, Libya, Syria, multiple African countries and Middle Eastern.”
Hector was concerned about the drone strike on the prison holding Bogdan, which underscores the extremely dangerous conditions in which Bogdan remains imprisoned.
To fight for the freedom of Bogdan and an end to the war, “us being peaceful won’t solve anything. Us being quiet won’t solve anything. We need to speak out more. We need to socialise and… go against these huge companies!”
On the use of propaganda by the ruling elite to justify war, Hector said, “With the military they say ‘A true patriot goes to fight for their country’ but truly, that’s the least patriotic thing you can do, that’s the least Christian thing you can do. Because at the end of the day, you’re oppressing a whole country, killing multiple children, and you’re the reason why people starve in the future.”
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The WSWS urges every reader to go to FreeBogdan.org and act:
- Sign the petition, and add a statement of support in your own words.
- Write to the court, in your own language and in Ukrainian, using the letter-writing tool. If you have written before, send your letter again with the Ukrainian translation.
- Donate to the campaign.
- Post your support on social media, and share the campaign’s posts.
- Share the site widely with your contacts, in your workplace and in your neighborhood.
18. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
