There were, indeed, “but two sorts of men in the world, freemen and
slaves,” John Adams concluded. For the first time in world history,
slavery became conspicuously wrong, requiring therefore a defense, an
explanation that ultimately created racism as a modern ideology.
A map shows the West Indies and Caribbean, 1732
As the Trump administration imposes the military closure of the ports
of Iran, part of its wider neo-colonial war against the peoples of the
Middle East, it is notable that 250 years ago last week, on April 6,
1776, the Continental Congress, the revolutionary government of the
American colonies, announced that its ports would be open to world trade
rather than just to the ships and merchants of imperial Great Britain.
It
was a declaration as consequential as any battle of the American
Revolution, and one that speaks with unexpected directness to the
present.
*****
Trotsky once wrote of the world imperialist system that with the Russian
Revolution “the chain broke at its weakest link.” “But,” he added, “it
was the chain that broke, and not only the link.” A similar observation
could be made about the American Revolution in 1776. It destroyed the
mercantilist system and monarchical world where it was weakest, at its
very outer edge. But the results were nonetheless momentous. As Marx
wrote to Lincoln in 1864, “the American War of Independence initiated a
new era of ascendancy for the middle class,” giving birth to “the idea
of one great Democratic Republic.” It was then and there that “the first
Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse
given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century.”
It seems that the conflicts that shaped one era have a way of
resurfacing in another. The tyrannical power that the revolutionary
generation of 1776 confronted in monarchy and its mercantilist system
has, in our own time, reappeared in new and grotesque forms. The Trump
administration has erased the line between public office and private
enrichment with a brazenness that would have impressed even the most
predatory of the old Crown monopolists—a government in which the
president’s family openly profits from tariffs he imposes, from
cryptocurrency ventures he promotes by executive decree and from foreign
governments seeking access to his favor. US “trade policy” now
reproduces features of the mercantilist logic the Revolution dismantled:
that slices of the world are to be seized through war for the personal
enrichment of the American oligarchy, or else be destroyed so no one
else can have them.
Behind all of this lurks the attempted resurrection of something the
Founders would have recognized immediately—the aristocratic principle:
the claim that public office is simply an extension of private property,
that wealth confers the right to rule, that inherited and accumulated
fortune is its own justification, and that the distinction between the
great man and the commoner is natural and permanent. It is a system that
once again holds labor, the working class, in contempt.
These attributes are not the personal qualities of Donald Trump, but the
characteristics of a diseased and exhausted social order that has long
outlived its historically progressive role. Just as the monarchical
system of the 18th century had become an intolerable fetter on the
development of society—and was swept aside not by the wishes of great
men but by the objective logic of history—so too the decayed capitalism
of our own time is creating the conditions for revolutionary upheaval.
The force that will carry this forward is the international working
class, the true heir to the emancipatory traditions of 1776, 1789, 1865,
1917, and indeed all that is progressive in history. It is a powerful
weapon in the hands of the working class.
The Pentagon is planning a military operation in Cuba to topple the Castroite government in Havana, according to a USA Today report published Wednesday.
Sources
familiar with discussions told the newspaper that the White House has
issued a direct order to ramp up preparations for action against the
island, marking a dangerous escalation in Washington’s long-standing
campaign to reassert colonial domination across the hemisphere.
These
preparations follow a series of increasingly explicit threats by Donald
Trump. Standing next to a woman wearing a “DoorDash grandma” T-shirt at
the White House on April 13, Trump spoke in the language of a gangster
talking about a drive-by shooting, declaring that the United States “may
stop by Cuba” after concluding its war of aggression against Iran. Two
weeks earlier, he similarly said that “Cuba is going to be next” for
military intervention.
Such statements are not idle rhetoric.
They are the public expression of advanced war planning that is already
underway. The same administration that is posturing as alternately
escalating and de-escalating its war against Iran is, in reality, using
negotiations as a tactical cover.
In the case of Iran, diplomatic
maneuvers buy time to mobilize the necessary resources for the next
phase of US operations: securing control over the Strait of Hormuz and
Iran’s vast oil and gas reserves, by whatever means necessary, including
the open threat of annihilating Iranian society.
A similar
strategy appears to be unfolding in relation to Cuba. Limited contacts
with the Castro family, alongside carefully calibrated concessions—such
as the decision to allow a single ship carrying Russian oil to dock with
at most a two-week supply—could suddenly give way to a devastating
military intervention against a country of roughly 8 million people
whose economy and armed forces are already in shambles.
The humanitarian situation inside Cuba is catastrophic. Decades of
the genocidal US economic blockade—intensified through an oil embargo
since January—have resulted in daily blackouts lasting for hours,
alongside severe shortages of drinking water, food, and medical
supplies. The economy has effectively ground to a halt, with workers
frequently unable to report to their jobs due to lack of transportation,
electricity, or basic necessities.
Internationally, tensions are
mounting. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated during a visit
to China that Moscow would continue providing assistance to Cuba and
expressed hope that the United States would not return to the era of
“colonial wars.” A Russian tanker, the Universal, is currently
sailing in the North Atlantic and is expected to reach Cuba within
approximately 15 days. Analysts have identified it as the likely next
fuel shipment to the island.
Washington, for its part, has
indicated that such shipments will be permitted only on a “case-by-case”
basis—another lever of pressure in its escalating campaign.
*****
Cuba occupies a position of immense strategic importance for US
imperialism. Its proximity to Florida, its control over key Caribbean
shipping lanes and its potential use as a military base all contribute
to its significance. Washington has repeatedly invoked allegations that
China and Russia maintain signals intelligence facilities on the island
to justify its aggressive posture.
Executive Order 14380, issued
in January 2026, declared a national emergency over Cuba and threatened
punitive tariffs against any country supplying it with oil. This move
effectively forced Mexico, Cuba’s primary supplier after the US
intervention cut off Venezuelan exports, to halt shipments.
The current offensive is codified in what has been termed the “Trump
Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, outlined in the 2025 National
Security Strategy. This doctrine reasserts US dominance over the Western
Hemisphere by denying rival powers access to “strategically vital
assets,” including ports, military bases and natural resources.
Framed
in openly expansionist terms—akin to Hitler’s “Greater Germany”—the
administration has advanced the concept of a “Great North America,”
stretching from Greenland to the equator through a program of
recolonization.
The objective is not merely geopolitical control
but the dismantling of all social gains associated with the working
class and national liberation struggles of the 20th century, including
the 1959 Cuban Revolution that led to vast nationalizations and basic
social and labor rights.
*****
Already, the Cuban regime has implemented sweeping measures to open
the economy to foreign investment and has actively courted wealthy Cuban
exiles in Miami—the very social layers that have historically supported
terrorist attacks and coup attempts against the island.
In this
context, the continued role of pseudo-left organizations to
mischaracterize the regime and thus US imperialism’s actions is
particularly pernicious. The Morenoite Left Voice, affiliated
with the so-called Permanent Revolution Current, claims that the Cuban
government continues to be a bureaucratic workers’ state that retains a
“socialist character” and merely needs to be pressured by the working
class to adopt more democratic policies. It warns of “capitalist
restoration” in the absence of greater mass participation, thereby
promoting the illusion that the existing regime can be reformed in a
progressive direction.
Within the United States, Left Voice
calls for opposition to Washington’s policies through appeals to union
bureaucrats and activist networks dominated by the Democratic Party.
These proposals are designed not to mobilize the working class
independently but to subordinate it to the very institutions of the
capitalist state responsible for imperialist aggression.
This
mirrors the role played by revisionist tendencies in the 1960s, which
hailed Fidel Castro’s movement as a model for socialist revolution and
denounced the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
as “ultra-left” and “sectarian” for rejecting this characterization.
The Socialist Workers Party, led by Joseph Hansen, promoted the Cuban
revolution as the “acid test” for Trotskyism, arguing that a
petty-bourgeois guerrilla movement had established a workers’ state.
In
opposition, the Socialist Labour League, the British section of the
ICFI, defended the fundamental principles of Marxism. It insisted that
conscious revolutionary leadership by the working class is
indispensable, that Cuba represented a negative confirmation of the
Theory of Permanent Revolution and that Hansen’s empiricism amounted to
an adaptation to bourgeois and non-proletarian forces.
Today, as
the United States prepares for a new colonial war against Cuba, these
lessons assume urgent relevance. It is not long before Trump speaks of
turning Cuba into the 52nd state—having already proposed the annexation
of Venezuela as the 51st. The implications of this war must be grasped
in their full historical and political significance.
Washington’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has been in force since
Monday in what marks a major escalation of the war against Iran. The
attempt by US forces to halt all tanker traffic to and from Iranian
ports aims to compel Tehran to accept sweeping concessions to American
imperialism, while also cutting across the interests of China, which
relies on cheap oil from Iran and the broader Gulf region for much of
its energy imports.
US
Vice President JD Vance made clear Tuesday that the US war of
aggression is aimed at restructuring the Middle East. He declared at an
event that President Donald Trump was not interested in “small deals”
but was seeking a “grand bargain” with Iran, which would see the US
treat Iran “economically like a normal country.” Trump and Vance want to
roll back the clock to before 1979, when the Iranian Revolution ended
US imperialism’s financial and military dominance over the country of 93
million people.
Trump’s statements since the beginning of the war
demonstrate that American imperialism will resort to the most ruthless
barbarism in order to secure its preeminence over the world’s most
important energy-exporting region. He vowed to bomb Iran “back to the
stone ages” and made the genocidal threat on 7 April that an “entire
civilisation” could be wiped out. The US/Israeli bombardment of Iran was
conducted with indiscriminate bloody-mindedness, as shown by the
destruction of a girls’ school on the first day of the war, killing over
160 children. Independent investigations and on-the-ground reports
following last week’s ceasefire revealed that even when the US claimed
to be hitting military targets, the collateral damage to surrounding
civilian infrastructure and residential buildings was extensive.
In
an interview this week with Fox Business, the war criminal Trump
menaced Iran with further war crimes if it refuses to bow to American
imperialist dictates. Speaking like a mafia don, Trump said, “If I
pulled up stakes right now, it would take them 20 years to rebuild that
country. And we’re not finished...We could take out every one of their
bridges in one hour...every one of their power plants.”
Trump speaks for American imperialism, which has never forgiven the
Iranian people for the 1979 revolution that toppled the US-funded Shah’s
repressive dictatorship. His concern is not with Iranian “terrorism,”
let alone the democratic rights of the Iranian people. Rather, as David
North put it when summing up the historical relationship between US
imperialism and Iran in a recent lecture
given at Berlin’s Humboldt University, it all boils down to “oil,
geopolitical influence, and the class interests of American capitalism.”
*****
Home to the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves and second-largest
natural gas reserves, Iran exported between 80 and 90 percent of its oil
to China. Beijing has benefited from cut-price Iranian oil over recent
years due to the brutal sanctions imposed on the country by Trump during
his first term in office, when he unilaterally abrogated the UN-backed
nuclear accord with Tehran in 2018. In 2021, China signed a 25-year
strategic partnership with Iran that included major investments in
Iranian infrastructure in exchange for $400 billion worth of oil for the
Chinese economy. Washington now hopes that what its sanctions could not
accomplish can be achieved through brute military force, but the first
six weeks of this war have demonstrated that even the world’s most
powerful military cannot overcome the impact of American imperialism’s
protracted decay.
Prior to the war, China was receiving some 1.4
million barrels of oil per day from Iran and over 5 million barrels per
day from the Gulf region as a whole. Although the US blockade does not
directly hinder exports from other Gulf states to China, the region’s
output has been hit sharply by the war, threatening global economic
disruption. China reportedly has oil reserves able to cover 5 months of
demand, but long-term reductions in supply could seriously weaken its
already fragile economy. Moreover, the prospect of a global economic
recession, raised this week in a report by the IMF, would mean a
decreasing market for Chinese exports, which the Stalinist regime in
Beijing relies upon to maintain economic growth.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated during a visit to Beijing
Wednesday that Moscow could offset any oil shortfalls for China
resulting from the war in the Middle East. However, this assertion is
more than dubious. Pipelines between Russia and China are reportedly
already operating at full capacity, and Russia lacks the tankers needed
to substantially increase its approximately 2 million barrels of oil per
day reaching China. Russia would have to more than double its present
exports to China to offset entirely Iranian oil exports and partially
cover the decline from other Gulf nations.
Faced with the aggressiveness and criminality of American imperialism
unparalleled since the Nazi regime during World War II, Beijing has
responded to the US blockade by holding out the prospect of a stable
“multi-polar world” in which the interests of all states are respected.
According to a Xinhua report, Xi told Lavrov that Beijing and Moscow
should “strengthen multilateral cooperation, firmly uphold and practice
multilateralism, join hands to revive the authority and vitality of the
UN, engage in closer coordination and cooperation within the frameworks
of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS countries, and
promote the development of the international order in a more just and
reasonable direction.”
This modern-day version of the Soviet
Stalinist bureaucracy’s policy of “peaceful coexistence” has even less
of a basis in the realities of world capitalism today than it did during
the 20th century, when it led to the Stalinists’ liquidation of the
Soviet Union in a failed bid to integrate Russian capitalism into the
imperialist world order. Under the would-be dictator Trump, American
imperialism is fully committed to waging a third world war to defend its
global hegemonic position amid its accelerating economic decline.
Trump’s blood-curdling threats to wipe out Iranian civilization testify
that American imperialism is not simply going to peacefully accept an
expansion of Chinese and Russian influence under the banner of
“multilateralism” at its expense.
As workers around the world are hit with the ever-worsening
consequences of the US war on Iran—crippling rises in petrol and gas
prices, food price hikes and the growing threat of food shortages in
poorer countries—major corporations and banks are raking in increased
profits to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
First in
line to benefit from the profit bonanza, as could be expected, are the
oil companies. But the flow of increased money extends across the board.
*****
Apart from the oil producers, trading firms which deal in oil, food,
metals and other necessary commodities, largely dominating global
markets, are already cashing in. The Wall Street Journal
reported that the Swiss commodities trader Gunvor said it had already
made as much money in the first quarter of this year as it did in all of
2025 when it made a profit of $1.6 billion. Others will be experiencing
a similar boost.
Also not surprisingly, US arms manufacturers have been cashing in. On
the first day of the US attack on Iran major firms recorded a rise in
their total market value of up to $30 billion.
The profit and price gouging extends across the US economy under conditions where, according to a recent article in the New York Times, corporate profits “have reached a record share of the US economy.” Corporate America intends to keep it that way.
*****
Major US banks have also been cashing in on the opportunities
generated by the war. The six major US banks reported collective profits
of $47.6 billion for the first quarter, much of it generated because
market volatility provided conditions for significantly profitable
trading.
*****
JPMorgan led the way in absolute terms with a 13 percent increase in
profits, over the same period last year, to $16.5 billion, with market
jitters being characterized as a “gift to trading desks.” Goldman Sachs
reported a 19 percent increase in profits to $5.6 billion. Citigroup
reported a 42 percent profit surge and Morgan Stanley’s profits rose 29
percent.
The combined increase in the profits from the trading desks of the major banks is estimated to be the highest in 12 years.
*****
The banks have benefited from the relaxation of regulations under
Trump. Bank of America chief financial officer Alastair Borthwick said
the bank was “encouraged by the work the administration is doing,” as it
bought back $7.2 billion of its own stock in the quarter, the highest
level in four years. The Trump regime is moving to reduce the amount of
capital the banks must hold as a reserve, freeing up money for trading
and buybacks.
The overall sentiment on Wall Street is that the
profit bonanza will continue, at least for now, with the S&P 500
passing the 7,000 mark for the first time on Wednesday. Inflation
profiteering fueled by the war is one factor. Another is the wave of
mass layoffs, hitting tens of thousands of workers in many cases,
especially in the high-tech industries.
*****
Giant corporations and banks are feeding on death, destruction and
the impoverishment of the working class the world over. This makes it
urgently necessary for workers and youth to draw the sharpest political
conclusions.
The war on Iran itself is not the product of the
individual Donald Trump, but is driven by the historic crisis of
imperialism, of which he is the most grotesque personification.
Likewise,
the obscenity expressed in the present day economic and financial
system is not the product of the individual greed of the ruling
oligarchs, though that exists in abundance. It is a product of the
capitalist system itself, the objective logic of which, as Marx
explained 150 years ago, is the creation of fabulous wealth at one pole
of society and poverty, misery and degradation at the other.
Today the necessity for its overthrow and the establishment of socialism is not confined to the pages of Das Kapital but is being written large in the language of daily life.
Since February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel have waged a
war of aggression against Iran. Trump publicly threatened to exterminate
Iranian civilization, in remarks of an undeniably Nazi character. Tens
of thousands of Iranian civilians have been killed or wounded. The
nuclear site at Natanz and the famous Golestan Palace have been struck.
The war has set the entire Middle East ablaze and is shaking the world
economy.
In the face of this, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his France
Unbowed (LFI) party has not called on the millions of workers who vote
for LFI to strike or protest against the war. They confined themselves
to lamenting the violation of international law, while remaining silent
on workers’ struggles in Iran and on Washington’s political maneuvers to
manufacture a crisis there before it launched the war.
Mélenchon's inaction in the face of the war has the same roots as his
silence on the intrigues Washington used to prepare it. It stems from
the class character of LFI: a populist and anti-Marxist party, born out
of the bourgeois Socialist Party (PS), whose founder explicitly rejects a
policy oriented towards the working class and the socialist revolution.
In L'Ère du peuple, published in 2014 as he founded LFI,
Mélenchon declared that the entire left was dying: “The harm is well
advanced. It will not be repaired with clever explanations to
distinguish the true left from the false.” He called for burying the
foundations of Marxism: “Here, it is the people that takes the place
formerly occupied by the ‘revolutionary working class’ in the left’s
project. The citizens’ revolution is not the old socialist revolution.”
These
conceptions primed LFI to serve as a political instrument of French
imperialism to block a mobilization of the working class against the war
in Iran and the genocide in Gaza, and against the global social and
economic crisis that flows from the catastrophes in the Middle East.
*****
The full social power of the working class in France, Europe, the
United States, and the Middle East must be mobilized to stop imperialist
governments who are committing crimes of historic gravity. This is not
an abstract political question.
In December 2025, before the
demonstrations backed by Washington and Tel Aviv erupted, a wave of
strikes swept through Iran, objectively indicating the possibility of
such a mobilization. These strikes had deep causes. Years of US
sanctions had ravaged the Iranian economy, causing persistent inflation
and a continuous fall in workers’ living standards. The war waged by
Israel and the United States against Iran in June 2025 had further
aggravated this situation, disrupting oil exports and deepening the
economic crisis.
Thousands of oil, gas, and electricity workers demonstrated on 10
December in Tehran outside parliament. Steelworkers struck in Shadegan
on 8 December, and more than 5,000 workers at the key South Pars
refineries had walked out on December 8-9. Workers at the Middle East
Sugar company in Shush followed suit during the second half of December,
as did railway workers in Lorestan, Zagros and Andimeshk.
Mélenchon
and LFI, like the entire French media and political establishment, were
silent on Iranian workers’ struggles. Instead, they latched onto a
movement that began at the end of December with demonstrations by bazaar
merchants, centered on the fall of the Iranian currency and the collapse
of the Iran’s Ayandeh bank. It was not by accident that Mélenchon
ignored the strikes while focusing on this second movement. A
working-class, internationalist policy would have required supporting
the strikes, explaining what was at stake, and calling on workers in
France to support them and to mobilize against the policy of war,
sanctions, and genocide being waged in Gaza, against Iran, and
throughout the Middle East. Mélenchon does not practice this kind of
politics.
The popular demonstrations in Iran testify to the dead end of a
religious power trying to manage a developed society without gagging it.
A people like ours always watches with sympathy the popular
insubordination that asserts the right to a dignified life. However, in
expressing its support, the Mossad seeks to inflame tensions among
Iranians.
This declaration exemplifies Mélenchon’s political
method. It mentions the Mossad’s intervention only to minimise its
significance, relegating it to the role of an external factor that
“inflames” Iranians, rather than explaining the way imperialism and
Zionism intervened in this movement. In doing so, it suppresses the
essential fact: Washington deliberately engineered the economic crisis
that triggered these demonstrations and then tried to exploit it
politically to achieve regime change.
Two weeks later, on January 13, the Wall Street Journal
wrote: “The harbinger that everything was about to collapse in Iran did
not come from the anger of the opposition in the country, or from the
frustrated hopes of young people eager for personal freedoms. It came
from the collapse of a bank. At the end of 2025, the Ayandeh bank, run
by regime insiders and saddled with nearly $5 billion in losses, had
gone bankrupt.”
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated
publicly on 5 February, 2026, before the Senate Banking Committee: “What
we did was create a dollar shortage in the country. That ended quickly
and gloriously in December, when one of Iran's largest banks collapsed.
The central bank had to print money, the Iranian currency went into free
fall, inflation exploded, and so we saw the Iranian people in the
streets.”
Trump has since admitted to having attempted to arm the demonstrators by
sending weapons via Kurdish nationalists in the region. This confirms
that the fascist in the White House sought to transform protests into a
pro-imperialist armed insurrection. His policy does not aim to defend
the democratic rights of Iranians.
From the very start of the movement, however, it was already clear that
NATO and Israeli leaders were aggressively intervening to try to steer
it. Mossad officials had publicly expressed their support for the
demonstrations; former CIA director Mike Pompeo tweeted: “Happy New Year
to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking
alongside them.” These forces were monitoring and directing the movement
from its outset, precisely because Washington had engineered the
financial crisis that provoked it.
This information was available as Mélenchon was hailing the movement.
His tweet of January 1 treated it straightforwardly as a popular
affirmation of the right to dignity, without warning workers that
Washington and Tel Aviv had deliberately triggered and were actively
steering the movement.
*****
As the Iranian regime crushed armed attacks targeting its police and
internal security forces, Mélenchon applauded the movement. In his post
of January 14, headlined, “You are right to be afraid!”, he lumped
together bazaar merchants ruined by the US Treasury and insurgents
linked to the CIA and Mossad as actors in a “citizens’ revolution.”
*****
It is revealing that Mélenchon described the December-January
movement as a “citizens’ revolution” the central concept from his own
2014 book. The “citizens’ revolution,” by definition, transcends classes
and unites “the people” against power. It does not ask which social
classes or political forces organize and direct a movement. It need not
ask who engineered the dollar shortage, who triggered the banking
collapse or which Mossad agents marched among the demonstrators.
Mélenchon deliberately suppressed these facts, which were nonetheless
accessible, thereby depriving his readers of the information necessary
to analyze the ongoing movement and to oppose the war that was being
prepared.
The bankruptcy of this position becomes glaring in light
of subsequent events. The genocidal forces carpet-bombing Iran and
threatening to exterminate its civilization had instigated and supported
from the very beginning the movement that Mélenchon presented as a
quest for human dignity. To present this operation as a movement for
dignity is to whitewash imperialism using pseudo-left language.
*****
Mélenchon adopted an apparently critical posture after the start of the
war on February 28, but in reality continued his previous policy. While
observing on X that a war of aggression is the “negation of all
international law,” he proposed to workers that they trust not the class
struggle but Macron’s diplomacy in the face of the aggression against
Iran: “Faced with the mounting danger, now more than ever law and the
United Nations are France’s only means.”
In his tweet, Mélenchon denounced Ayatollah Khamenei—the head of the
Iranian regime, killed along with his family in an American-Israeli
strike—as “the butcher of the Iranian people.” This formulation, at the
very moment when the most powerful military state in the world was
carpet-bombing Iran, deserves comment.
It is true that the Iranian
regime had suppressed by force the movement instigated by Washington
and sentenced opponents to death. But calling Khamenei “the butcher of
the Iranian people” at the moment of his death in American-Israeli
strikes is to cover for imperialism. The biggest butcher of the Iranian
people resides in the White House: it was he who threatened to
exterminate Iranian civilization, bombed civilian sites, and organized the economic collapse that led up to the war. He has for this purpose
the active complicity of the French state, which placed its Istres base
and its Persian Gulf bases at Washington’s disposal.
Mélenchon’s statements do not mention these facts. They do not mention
the tens of thousands of civilians killed, nor the families of regime
officials who bear no direct responsibility for the regime but are
nonetheless struck by bombs. The asymmetry between Mélenchon’s severity
toward the Iranian regime and his silence on Washington’s crimes and
French complicity amounts to pro-imperialist hypocrisy.
*****
LFI’s response to the war against Iran vindicates the irreconcilable
opposition of the International Committee of the Fourth International
(ICFI) to the pseudo-left tendencies oriented to the political
establishment. Mélenchon uses his influence not to organize the working
class’s resistance to imperialist war and the continuous reduction of
its living standards under Macron, but to subordinate it to the
framework of the capitalist nation-state.
Mélenchon was a member
of the Organisation communiste internationaliste (OCI), Pierre Lambert’s
party, which broke with the ICFI in 1971 to support Mitterrand’s
bourgeois PS. His trajectory—from the OCI to the PS for more than 30
years and finally to LFI—produced not a revolutionary workers movement,
but a faction of the capitalist establishment that drapes itself in
radical language in order to contain mass opposition.
The war
against Iran provides the most recent and damning demonstration of this.
Only the intervention of workers into the historical process can stop
this war. The task is to prepare the mobilization of the working class:
to build the rank-and-file organizations capable of opposing the war, to
unify workers’ struggles internationally, and to prepare workers to
wrest power from the war-making capitalist oligarchies.
*****
The Parti de l'égalité socialiste (Socialist Equality Party), the
French section of the ICFI, puts forward the following demands, on the
basis of which it calls on workers, youth, and progressive layers among
intellectuals to give it their support:
— Stop the war against Iran and the genocide in Gaza!
— French troops out of the Middle East!
— Not a euro, not a soldier for the wars of imperialism!
— For an international movement of the working class against war and for socialism!
It is well-established science that the concept of race is a social
construct not a biological reality. Genetic variation within “racial”
groups is greater than between them, thus refuting claims there is any
scientific basis for claims that there are fundamental racial
differences. Yet racism, in various forms, persists in the modern age
under capitalism, as a weapon employed by the ruling class to divide and
oppress the working class. What role does inadequate education in
genetics play in perpetuating the concept of racial difference, and the
superiority of one “race” over another, in the face of scientific
knowledge to the contrary?
*****
Genetic essentialism is a form of psychological essentialism, which
is an early-developing bias in humans. Psychological essentialism is
observable across human cultures and refers to the belief that members
of a social category share an unobservable and internal essence that
determines their traits. People who endorse genetic essentialism believe
that such essences are genetic, which leads them to believe that
same-race individuals are genetically homogeneous, that races are
nonoverlapping genetic groups, and that most racial differences are
therefore determined by genes.
Essentialist beliefs are socially
dangerous and a biological misconception. For example, genetic
essentialist beliefs about race facilitate intergroup hostility, support
for eugenic policies, discrimination and disinterest in cross-racial
friendships.
*****
“The problem is that the basic genetics education that the US public
receives is a risk factor for the development of genetic essentialism
during adolescence,” he writes. “Because basic genetics education does
not discuss patterns of racial similarity in the human genome, and
because it does not discuss the multifactorial basis of complex human
traits, students are never exposed to information that explicitly
counters genetic essentialist views about race.”
*****
To test the hypothesis that teaching a more complex view of genetics
and inheritance could effect a reduction in genetic essentialism and, by
consequence, racism, Donovan and his associates designed and carried
out a series of scientifically controlled experiments with middle and
high school students and teachers from six US states. “Participating
teachers received 40 hours of professional development to learn how to
implement the humane genomics intervention and how to align their
Mendelian and molecular genetics curricula with basic genetics.”
To
randomize the effects of teaching basic genetics versus humane
genomics, half of each class was taught the two modules in that order
(basic genetics first followed by genomics) and the other half in
reverse order. The researchers took care to avoid any biasing factors
which might imply a preferred result, such as implications that genetic
essentialist beliefs are socially unacceptable.
At each stage of
the program—before the start of instruction, after the first module, and
at the end— students were tested to gauge their understanding of the
subject. They were measured with regard to a number of parameters:
“…
(a) basic genetics knowledge, (b) knowledge of genomics, (c) belief in
the genetic discreteness of racial groups, (d) genetic attributions for
complex human traits, (e) environmental attributions for complex human
traits, (f ) belief in racial genetic essentialism, (g) belief in social
constructionism, (h) colorblind racial beliefs, and (i) emotional
response to instruction.”
The results were clear.:
The
results of the first model fully supported each component of the humane
genomics hypothesis. Relative to basic genetics, classrooms that
received humane genomics instruction had greater knowledge of genomics
and less belief in genetic essentialism. Humane genomics classrooms also
had less belief in racial discreteness and lower genetic attributions
for complex human traits. Furthermore, humane genomics classrooms had
greater environmental attributions. All effects were reproduced in the
second half of the crossover trial.
In the subsequent analysis, the resulting data “was explored
[regarding] whether students gravitated toward racial colorblindness or
social constructionism.” These are two alternative concepts of race.
“People who believe in the former [racial colorblindness] contend that
racial discrimination is no longer a problem or that it can be ignored
because race is not socially important, or real. By contrast,
constructionism contends that race is a social concept and that racial
disparities are caused by prejudice, discrimination, and institutional
racism.” According to the authors, colorblindness tends to be associated
with genetic essentialism.
The study found that “[w]hereas there
was no effect of genetics instruction on racial colorblindness, there
was a positive effect of humane genomics instruction on belief in social
constructionism after the first and second rounds of instruction.”
Based
on this result, the researchers “… contend that the ideal instructional
sequence to reduce genetic essentialism is to introduce students to the
models of Mendelian genetics and then move beyond these models and
highlight their limitations using a humane genomics curriculum.”
Furthermore, they recommend that “[c]oherent learning experiences that
are implemented repeatedly can create enduring changes in how people
view the world. Several humane genomics learning experiences spread over
many years of biology instruction will be needed to reduce the
prevalence of genetic essentialist beliefs.”
This study is a
valuable contribution to our understanding of the role of education
design in developing a correct, scientific view of how racist
conceptions are, if inadvertently, reinforced by an insufficient course
of study in genetics. Furthermore, it demonstrates that racist attitudes
are learned and are not in any way innate. However, it does not, and
did not attempt to address the underlying social, economic and political
factors that promote racism, which is a tool of class oppression used
to divide and subjugate the working class under capitalism.
Racism and other forms of discrimination, such as those based on
religion or sex, did not begin with capitalism. They are inherent in
class society as tools employed by the elite to divide and subjugate the
oppressed classes. Education alone cannot overcome the ill effects
which are products of the objective economic interests of the ruling
class in defending its social position. It is precisely those interests
that are driving the Trump administration’s assault on science and
historical truth. Discrimination of all kinds can be definitively
eradicated only with the elimination of class society.
It is in fact because of this study’s value that the lead author,
Brian Donovan, is one of the many scientists targeted by the Trump
administration and his scientific career destroyed. The study was
initially supported by a grant to Donovan from the U.S. National Science
Foundation (NSF). Based on this study, Donovan was awarded this year’s
Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education by the Genetics
Society of America, recognizing someone who has helped the public better
understand the science of DNA. The article in STAT cited above chronicles the long struggle by Donovan to build his research team and carry out the investigation.
Despite
the high praise the study received, last April, both of Donovan’s
National Science Foundation grants were terminated, part of a mass
cancellation of science education awards. The NSF’s justification was
that the grants “no longer effectuate administration priorities.”
Donovan and his team at the University of Colorado were left without
jobs. They were not alone. The Trump administration massively slashed
grants for science education, accounting for 40 percent of the agency’s
terminations and 65 percent of funding cuts. In spite of his
groundbreaking research and the high regard with which he is held by
many in the field, his quest for an academic position has also been
fruitless. He is now studying to become a nurse.
Both Democrats
and Republicans are carrying out major assaults on education and science
as part of their drive to increase the wealth of the super-rich
oligarchy and to prepare for world war.
Thailand’s new government was formally sworn in on April 6, two months
after the February 8 general election. The Bhumjaithai Party (BJT)
secured a parliamentary majority through a coalition with Pheu Thai (PT)
and a number of small conservative and military-aligned parties.
The coalition government led by Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, who
is one of Thailand’s wealthiest politicians, is no more stable than its
predecessors. Years of court rulings, Senate interventions, backroom
deals, and military influence have eroded even the semblance of a
democratic façade that took shape after the formal end of the most
recent military junta in 2019.
*****
The new cabinet, in which the BJT holds 31 positions and Pheu Thai
holds nine, is unmistakably pro-business and pro-military. It includes
Lieutenant General Adul Boonthumjaroen as defense minister and Police
Lieutenant General Rutthapol Naowarat as the justice minister. The
economic ministries have been handed to an assortment of trusted
corporate and bureaucratic figures.
The new government faces the
worst economic conditions since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997.
Global shocks from the US/Israeli war on Iran portend a significant
economic contraction with declining investment and tourism, rising
inflation and the destruction of jobs.
With total trade equivalent to more than its annual GDP, Thailand is
one of the most vulnerable in the region to the ongoing energy crisis,
with the World Bank predicting the country’s economy will grow by only
1.3 percent this year as a result.
The Strait of Hormuz is a vital
source of resources for Thailand including oil, liquefied natural gas
(LNG), and fertilizer. Diesel has risen from 23 to 52 Thai baht per
litre, the Asian spot LNG price has risen from 350-420 baht per MMBtu to
about 680 baht, and urea, the main fertilizer used, has risen from
17,500 baht to just under 24,500 baht a tonne.
The government has
no solution but to foist the new economic burdens on working people.
Household debt, already among the highest in Asia relative to GDP with
86.7 percent, leaves millions highly vulnerable.
*****
Political tensions and border clashes last year were seized upon by
the Thai conservative elites to force out the previous Pheu Thai
government and to brand social opposition as “unpatriotic.” Anutin was
only able to form a minority government with the support of the People’s
Party, which claimed to offer a democratic alternative to the country’s
conservative establishment dominated by the military and monarchy.
The
appointment of Adul as defense minister is significant. He previously
served as deputy defense minister in Anutin’s first cabinet. His
military career was spent in the lower Isan border area with Cambodia,
where he was made commander of the 2nd Army Area in 2023. Adul retired
from the army in 2024 and retains close connections to the military top
brass.
In his policy statement, Anutin pledged to increase the number of
volunteer soldiers by 100,000 and to cancel or suspend the 2001
Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) 44 with Cambodia—an agreement tied to
negotiations over the shared maritime boundary. The MOU and similar
agreements ostensibly established guidelines for resolving the border
dispute between the two countries stemming from France’s colonization of
Indochina over a century ago.
Last year during the conflict that began in May, more than 640,000
people were displaced near the land border between Thailand and
Cambodia, with military clashes resulting in over a hundred soldiers and
civilians killed.
Pheu Thai, which has long postured as a party
of reform, is completely discredited. Over the past two decades, it has
twice been ousted by military coups. In 2010, sustained mass protests
Pheu Thai’s “Red Shirt” were violently suppressed by the military which
gunned down protesters in the streets, killing nearly 100.
*****
Last August, a second Pheu Thai prime minister, Paetongtarn
Shinawatra, was removed from office by the Constitutional Court over
“ethical violations” based on the claim that she had criticized the
military’s handling of the border dispute with Cambodia. Now under
conditions of economic crisis, Pheu Thai functions as a junior partner
to the right wing BJT in the name of the “national interest.”
Pheu
Thai has been appointed the key ministries of agriculture, education
and labor. In other words, it has been charged with suppressing unrest
among farmers, students and the working class, under conditions of
spiralling costs of living, mounting debt, and deepening social
inequality.
All of the capitalist parties, including Pheu Thai and
the People’s Party, have proven utterly incapable of meeting the
democratic aspirations and pressing social needs of the masses of
ordinary working people. The right-wing Anutin government will not
hesitate to resort to police state measures in an attempt repress any
social opposition.
On Tuesday, the Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers
(SWC-UAW), which covers over 3,000 student workers at Columbia
University in New York City, announced that the UAW leadership rejected
its request for strike approval.
The SWC membership had voted by 91.5 percent to authorize a strike
last month, 1,129 to 105. They voted 82.2 percent in favor of starting
the strike on April 23. Over a hundred members wrote letters urging
Region 9A Director Brandon Mancilla and UAW President Shawn Fain to
authorize their strike.
In an email to the membership, the SWC
wrote, “This does not mean we cannot strike this semester, but it does
mean that we would not get strike pay from the UAW should we go on
strike to win some or all of our demands.”
The UAW bureaucracy has
twice now rejected their democratic vote. Student workers must organize
to impose their decision, with or without the approval of corrupt and
unaccountable bureaucrats! Columbia student workers should form
independent rank-and-file strike committees to prepare a struggle
themselves and to demand full strike pay, which is paid out of their own
dues money.
Columbia student workers should appeal to the working
class throughout New York City and beyond for support and solidarity.
Graduate workers at Harvard University, also organized in the UAW, have
already set a strike deadline of April 21.
Will Lehman
Will Lehman, a rank-and-file autoworker and candidate for UAW president,
responded to the UAW’s decision by declaring: “Your fight against
intolerable learning, living and working conditions at Columbia
University, which the Trump administration has made a central target of
its efforts to establish a presidential dictatorship in the United
States, will resonate powerfully with workers across the globe. Power
must be seized from the bureaucracy and placed in the hands of the rank
and file so that we can fight for a politically conscious movement of
workers together.”
*****
Student workers should reject with contempt the argument that their
demands are “too political.” The prospect of a political strike
terrifies management at Columbia, because it would pose a serious
challenge to the status quo: The Trump-Columbia partnership, Columbia’s
collaboration with US imperialism, and the staggering disparity between
the multi-billion-dollar assets of the university and the paltry wages
and benefits it gives student workers in one of the most expensive
cities in the world.
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote:
“The union bureaucracy, bound by a thousand threads to the political
establishment, primarily through the Democrats, functions as the
corporate oligarchy’s industrial police force… The more powerful the
potential for a mass movement, the more openly and shamelessly the union
bureaucracy attempts to disrupt it.”
In Michigan, UAW leadership
has kept 1,300 Nexteer Automotive workers on the job for nearly two
weeks after workers rejected a sellout contract by 96.2 percent. When
workers asked why a strike had not been called, UAW officials said it
was “illegal” to walk out under the terms of the contract.
At the
University of California, UAW leadership kept 40,000 academic workers on
the job for nearly three weeks without a contract after 93.3 percent of
workers voted to strike. It refused to set a strike date and ultimately
rammed through a contract without a fight.
It
is high time to revive the old union slogan, “No contract, no work!”
But this cannot happen without confronting the union bureaucracy, a
parasitic layer full of figures
like Mancilla and Fain who siphon six-figure salaries off workers’ dues
while doing everything in their power to demobilize the fighting
strength of the working class.
*****
In a recent article in the Columbia Daily Spectator, SWC
president Grant Miner remarked nervously about “undue scrutiny from
parties which are not a part of our community and not a part of our
bargaining… people from outside of the University who don’t have,
frankly, the best interest of either the union or the University at
heart.”
The UAW’s denunciation of unstated “outside parties,” long
used as part of a red-baiting strategy to cut workers off from
socialist militants, reflects the extreme nervousness about their
ability to keep a lid on the situation and enforce the UAW’s no-strike
dictate.
Fain and the rest of the UAW apparatus fear that the
Trump Administration could use a strike as the impetus to reverse a 2016
National Labor Relations Board ruling that gave governmental sanction
to student workers unions, thereby jeopardizing their dues base. They
are also fearful that a movement of student workers, opposing not only
poverty-level wages but also the fascistic assault on immigrants and
genocidal wars, can serve as a nucleus for a broader offensive of the
working class far beyond what the union bureaucracy can control.
In
New York City, 34,000 building workers are poised to strike next week.
Next month, the contract expires for 40,000 transit workers, raising the
prospects for a strike that could cripple the city.
*****
The working class is the only social force with the potential to bring down the Trump administration, stop the war against Iran,
and end social inequality, but it cannot do so without breaking free of
the shackles imposed by the union bureaucracy and building independent
organizations controlled directly by the rank and file. Columbia student
workers: Do not let the UAW bureaucracy sabotage your struggle. Seize
the initiative, build rank-and-file committees and get involved with the
International Youth and Students for Social Equality today.
The World Socialist Web Site urges members of the Writers
Guild of America to reject the tentative agreement with the Alliance of
Motion Picture and Television Producers by the widest possible margin in
voting from April 16 to April 24. This is not a “contract” but a slave
charter, surrendering key positions without even the pretense of a
fight.
The contract contains huge givebacks on healthcare, accepts
sub-inflation pay increases and has no meaningful AI protections. The
union did not even seek a strike authorization vote before springing the
contract a full month before the expiration of the old one. It is
dealing far more ruthlessly with the strike of its own staffers than with management: cutting off healthcare and taking punitive measures against them.
Not
only the current struggle, but future ones are at stake. The four-year
deal moves WGA workers off the schedule of SAG-AFTRA, who are also
currently in contact talks. This splits the industry and allows
management to divide and conquer.
*****
A growing “Vote No” movement has formed among rank-and-file writers.
They reject claims that there is no alternative, considering
unprecedented levels of wealth.
But this opposition must be
organized. Writers and other workers in the entertainment industry must
be organized, with a particular appeal to SAG-AFTRA members, and support
must be built across the entire working population. Rank-and-file
committees must be organized to build a movement from below, freeing
writers from the straitjacket of the WGA bureaucracy and taking the
initiative to build a broader movement.
*****
The Writers Guild leadership presents the four-year deal as necessary
to stabilize a health plan it says is close to insolvency. The deal
would add $321 million to the plan, but $41 million of this is obtained
by cutting benefits and shifting money from other union funds, including
parental leave.
For decades, the “Guild Shop” model provided a
basic level of security in a highly unstable freelance industry, with
employer-funded benefits helping offset irregular work. The new
agreement breaks with this model. Writers who previously had fully
covered healthcare will now face higher premiums, deductibles and
out-of-pocket costs.
For a family of four, these changes mean thousands of dollars in new
annual expenses. This is effectively a cut in real income, especially
for lower-paid writers already struggling with high living costs in
cities like Los Angeles and New York.
*****
Under the deal, writers receive a 1.5 percent raise in the first
year, followed by 3 percent annual increases, provocative numbers that
fail to keep pace with inflation.
The 2026 agreement does not stop
the use of AI to slash jobs. It allows studios to use writers’ work for
training through union-approved deals, without giving individual
writers the right to refuse. AI can still be used in early stages such
as outlines and concepts, letting studios reduce the role of writers and
lower pay.
Loopholes around “source material” remain: The 2026
deal allows studios to work around it indirectly, especially through
early-stage AI use and ownership control. Disclosure rules are weak,
making it difficult to verify how AI is used. At the same time, any
financial gains from licensing may not go directly to writers. In
practice, the deal regulates AI use while leaving the main threats to
jobs, pay and creative control intact.
The agreement does include
limited improvements, such as minimum standards for “page-one” rewrites
and expanded eligibility for guaranteed second steps. But enforcement is
weak, and the long-standing practice of unpaid “shadow rewrites”
remains largely untouched.
*****
These tensions are unfolding alongside major industry consolidation. The
proposed merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery
creates a media giant with unprecedented control over film and
television production. This reduces the number of buyers for scripts,
weakens writers’ bargaining power and allows studios to impose lower
rates and stricter terms.
Streaming platforms further reinforce this shift. Viewership data is
tightly controlled, reducing transparency and weakening residual
payments. At the same time, short-term contracts, “mini-rooms” and other
forms of contingent work are becoming more common, deepening the
“gig-ification” of writing work.
*****
The defense of democratic and social rights is bound up with the
defense of culture. Corporate America is carrying out a massive
vandalism operation, laying off tens of thousands of cultural workers
and millions across all industries. AI is being used not only to
eliminate writers and actors, but to undermine genuine independent
artistic expression.
In its place, the corporations hope to have
made-to-order, homogeneous, machine-produced content aimed at the
highest possible margins and the lowest common denominator. A related
goal is to deaden the public’s senses, as a way to deal with a growing
mass movement as it develops against dictatorship and inequality. Media
consolidation is cementing a framework where a handful of huge
corporations, integrated with the state, are working to censor critical
voices.
The union bureaucracy everywhere is doing its best to disrupt this
movement in order to avoid disrupting its connections with management
and the political establishment. This latest sellout follows the
cancellation of the strike in Los Angeles of 70,000 teachers and school
workers, as well as the struggles of New York City nurses, Kaiser
Permanente nurses, San Francisco educators and others.
*****
The fight against this agreement is inseparable from the broader
struggle of the working class against austerity, censorship and
authoritarianism. Writers are not alone! Teachers, nurses, logistics
workers and others are confronting the same attacks and the same
apparatus of suppression. A unified movement, built from below and
across industries, can break this stranglehold and open the way for a
genuine defense of jobs, living standards and artistic freedom.
The German government is planning the most comprehensive attack on
public healthcare since Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck introduced
statutory health insurance in 1883.
In this, Bismarck was reacting
to the growth of the officially banned Social Democratic Party (SPD),
which under August Bebel advocated a Marxist program. By protecting
workers in the event of illness, and later also with pensions, Bismarck
sought to weaken the influence of the SPD and prevent a revolutionary
development.
After the November Revolution of 1918, and again after the Second
World War, Germany’s statutory health insurance system was further
expanded. Through income-based contributions and the free co-insurance
of family members, low-income wage earners could also access relatively
good healthcare, even if it never reached the level of care of the
wealthy privately insured.
This is now over. The squandering of
hundreds of billions of euros on war and rearmament and the boundless
enrichment of billionaires and multimillionaires can no longer be
reconciled with equitable social compensation. The defense of health,
pensions and other social rights requires nothing less than a social
revolution.
*****
Central is the attack on free family co-insurance. For the time
being, it is only to be abolished for spouses who have no children under
7 years of age and no relatives in need of care. In the future, a
contribution of 3.5 percent of the family income is to be levied.
Children, pensioners, caring relatives and parents of children under age
7 will remain co-insured for the time being. But once the ice is
broken, the cuts will continue.
A further focus is directed
against the chronically ill and the elderly, who regularly rely on
medication. For them, the 50 percent increase in co-payments means a
considerable financial burden. Instead of €5 to €10, they will in future
have to pay €7.50 to €15 for each individual medication. Many will not
be able to afford this, will fall ill more often and die earlier.
Another
austerity measure, the effects of which can only be guessed at so far,
is the capping of hospital expenditure. From now on, expenditure on
nursing staff is not to grow faster than the income of the health
insurance scheme, and the refinancing of contractually agreed pay
increases is to be curtailed. This will further exacerbate the
catastrophic situation in hospitals and the miserable working conditions
of nursing staff, which were already unbearable during the COVID
pandemic.
*****
Other austerity measures also show the inhumane brutality with which
the government is acting. For example, the free skin cancer screening
previously available every two years is to be abandoned. This does not
save the health insurance any money, since cancer treatment is much more
expensive than the relatively simple screening. But many cancer
patients will die earlier and thus relieve the pension and social
security funds—which is likely the actual purpose of the austerity
measure.
No one should underestimate the aggressiveness with which
the government is proceeding against social achievements and democratic
rights in order to realize its rearmament and war plans. It
unconditionally defends the Israeli war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank,
Iran and Lebanon and acts against anyone in Germany who criticizes them.
It supports the goals of Trump’s war against Iran, even though the US
president has threatened to bomb the country with its 90 million
inhabitants “back to the Stone Ages.”
A government that endorses such war crimes is also capable of any atrocity against its own population.
*****
The resistance against the government’s social devastation can only come
from those affected themselves. It requires the independent mobilization of the international working class based on a socialist
program directed against war, social cuts and capitalism.
Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS), released yesterday,
is a statement of the Labor government’s complete commitment to US-led
wars globally, and above all to Washington’s advanced preparations for a
catastrophic war against China.
The NDS has been accompanied by a
commitment to increase military spending by $53 billion over the coming
decade, on top of record defense expenditure of almost $60 billion this
financial year.
As significant as the size of the outlay is the focus of the NDS and an
associated “Integrated Investment Program” on the acquisition of
missiles, drones and other weaponry of a plainly offensive character.
That is in line with Labor’s 2023 Defence Strategic Review, which called
for every branch of the military to be overhauled, with the aim of
“impactful projection” and strike capacity, above all in the
Indo-Pacific.
*****
The entire build-up is occurring as part of a deepening of the
US-Australia alliance. That includes the establishment of a vast naval
precinct in Perth, Western Australia, which will function as one of the
main US maritime bases adjacent to the strategically critical Indian
Ocean, and the transformation of the north of the continent into a
launching pad for aerial operations far into the Indo-Pacific, including
by US B-52 bombers, which can carry nuclear weapons.
An overloaded fishing trawler carrying hundreds of Rohingya refugees
and Bangladeshi nationals has capsized in the Andaman Sea, in what is
one of the deadliest maritime disasters in the region in years. Around
250 people—men, women and children—are missing and feared dead after the
vessel, which left from Teknaf in southern Bangladesh and was bound for
Malaysia, went down around April 9.
The trawler was routed along a
well-known sea lane towards Malaysia, a primary destination for
Rohingya seeking to escape the squalor of Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar camps, where many have lived for years after being driven from their
homes in Myanmar. According to UN agencies, the boat was grossly
overcrowded and ill-equipped for the open sea when it encountered rough
conditions and capsized in the Andaman Sea, close to the Indian Andaman
and Nicobar archipelago.
The tragedy only came to light by sheer
chance. On April 9, a Bangladesh-flagged tanker, the M.T. Meghna Pride,
spotted people clinging to drums, logs and debris and rescued nine
survivors—eight men and one woman, three Rohingya and six Bangladeshi
nationals. They were later handed to the Bangladesh Coast Guard and
police in Teknaf.
One survivor, identified in local reports as Rahela Begum, a Rohingya
woman, described drifting “two days and one night” in the sea, clinging
to a piece of wood until she lost consciousness. When she awoke, she saw
the tanker looming over her. She has no idea what became of the
hundreds of others who shared the boat.
Rafiqul Islam, another of the survivors, told Reuters that they had
been at sea for four days. In an attempt to avoid naval patrols, the
crew forced passengers into cramped storage compartments meant for fish
and nets. “There was hardly any oxygen,” he said, adding that at least
30 people died from suffocation before the boat capsized. He estimated
that there were about 240 people still onboard at the time, including
women and children.
Despite the scale of the catastrophe, there is no evidence of a serious,
sustained, multinational search-and-rescue operation to find the
missing. A Bangladeshi official declared that the sinking occurred
outside the country’s territorial waters, implying it had no
responsibility for broader search efforts.
*****
UN data indicate that between January and early November 2025 alone,
over 5,100 Rohingya attempted dangerous sea journeys from Myanmar and
Bangladesh, with nearly 600 reported dead or missing. Many voyages go
unrecorded, meaning the true toll is far higher.
The largely
Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar have been a persecuted minority for decades.
Since formal independence in 1948, military and civilian regimes alike
have systematically stripped them of basic democratic rights,
culminating in the 1982 citizenship law that effectively rendered them
stateless “foreigners” in their own homeland.
*****
Between 2012 and 2015, over 110,000 Rohingya and impoverished
Bangladeshis embarked on rickety boats towards Thailand and Malaysia,
producing the so-called “boat people” crisis that governments across the
region responded to with pushbacks and detentions.
The decisive
turning point was 2016–17. After a smaller operation in late 2016, the
Myanmar military used attacks by Rohingya militants in August 2017 as
the pretext for vast “clearance operations”: village burnings,
massacres, mass rape and landmines seeded along escape routes.
Médecins
Sans Frontières estimates that between August and December 2017, some
655,000–700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh, with MSF documenting at
least 6,700 Rohingya killed. Those who fled joined earlier arrivals,
creating the largest concentrated refugee population in the world.
*****
Bangladesh, which is not a party to the Refugee Convention, labels
Rohingya merely as “forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals” and openly
insists on eventual “repatriation,” despite the fact that the military
responsible for the violence holds power in Myanmar and the country has
plunged into a broader civil war.
*****
Conditions of uncertainly, poverty and exploitation are what awaits
those who reach Malaysia. Like Bangladesh, Malaysia is not party to the
Refugee Convention and has no asylum law. Rohingya and other asylum
seekers are simply “illegal immigrants” under the Immigration Act, and
can be subject to arrest, caning, indefinite detention and deportation.
The
UNHCR registers refugees and issues cards, but these have no firm legal
effect: even card holders can be detained or deported, and access to
detention centres for monitoring has been repeatedly curtailed.
Most
Rohingya in Malaysia live “in the shadows,” packed into substandard
housing on the margins of Kuala Lumpur and other cities. They have no
legal right to work, forcing them into informal, low-paid and hazardous
jobs in construction, plantations, restaurants and factories. Children
are barred from public schools and rely on under-resourced community
learning centres.
Public opinion, stoked by the media and
political establishment, has turned sharply hostile, particularly since
the COVID-19 pandemic. Rohingya are denounced as disease carriers and
job thieves. The state has turned away boats and mounted immigration
“crackdowns” that sweep refugees into detention.
The
plight of Rohingya is an acute expression of a global crisis.
Worldwide, more than 100 million people are displaced, driven from their
homes by war, repression, economic collapse and climate
catastrophe—processes rooted in the mounting crisis of global
capitalism. The working class internationally has a responsibility to
defend the basic democratic rights of refugees to asylum and to oppose
the vilification of some of the world’s most vulnerable people, which is
exploited by governments to justify persecution, dire poverty,
imprisonment and the use of the military to bar entry.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was received Tuesday with
military honors outside the Chancellery in Berlin. The imposing scene,
featuring dozens of uniformed and armed soldiers, underscored the
character of the visit. Snipers were positioned on the surrounding
rooftops to provide security for the first German-Ukrainian government
consultations in 20 years. The focus of the meeting was the signing of a
new “strategic partnership” between Germany and Ukraine.
Then on Wednesday, the Ukraine Defence Contact Group (UDCG) met in
Berlin. German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, together with his
British counterpart John Healey, welcomed NATO Secretary General Mark
Rutte and Ukrainian Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov to the 34th
ministerial meeting of the UDCG. Other participants joined the meeting
online. The focus was on coordinating the NATO offensive in the war in
Ukraine and expanding military support for Kyiv.
Both events
illustrate the aggressiveness with which German imperialism is driving
the war against Russia. The official propaganda that the war is about
defending democracy and freedom was a lie from the outset. The NATO
powers systematically provoked the Russian invasion—through the
continued eastward expansion of the military alliance right up to the
Russian border and the transformation of Ukraine into a military outpost
against the nuclear-armed power Russia.
With the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East and
Donald Trump’s open threats of annihilation against Iran—which German
Chancellor Friedrich Merz cynically justified as “diplomatic war
tactics”—all pretences are now being dropped in the war in Ukraine as
well. Merz and Zelensky visited arms factories together and agreed on
measures to return fit-for-service Ukrainian men in Germany to the front
line.
It must be stated openly: de facto, Germany is once again
at war with Russia—and is continuing a disastrous historical tradition.
In the 20th century, German imperialism twice attempted to subjugate
Russia militarily, committing appalling crimes in the process. Today,
the ruling class is making a third attempt. As in both world wars,
Ukraine is a central battlefield.
*****
Today, the German ruling class is again pursuing the goal of removing
Ukraine and other states formerly part of the Soviet Union from Moscow’s
sphere of influence and bringing them under the control of a European
Union dominated by Berlin. In 2022, the then Social Democratic
Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared that Ukraine’s integration marked a
“starting point” for closer European integration—including the states of
the Western Balkans, Moldova and, in the long term, Georgia.
*****
Regarding Russia, it is not only economic interests—particularly in
raw materials—but also a historical thirst for revenge that is driving
the escalation. While all parties in the Bundestag (German parliament)
essentially support the course of war and rearmament, the Socialist
Equality Party (SGP) warned of this development from the outset. As
early as 2014, we stated:
History
is returning with a vengeance. Almost 70 years after the crimes of the
Nazis and its defeat in World War II, the German ruling class is once
again adopting the imperialist great power politics of the Kaiser’s
Empire and Hitler... In Ukraine, the German government is cooperating
with the fascists of Svoboda and the Right Sector, which stand in the
tradition of Nazi collaborators in the Second World War.
This
warning has been confirmed. Germany is now at the forefront of
Ukraine’s military rearmament—including support for far-right and
fascist forces within the state and military apparatus.
At the same time, this policy is exacerbating tensions between the
imperialist powers themselves, particularly between Germany and the
United States. From the perspective of the German bourgeoisie, the
struggle for supremacy in Europe and over Ukraine is ultimately part of
the preparation for a future confrontation with Washington as well.
The
only way to prevent the catastrophe of a Third World War is to build an
international socialist movement of the working class—in Russia,
Ukraine, Germany, across Europe, in the US and worldwide—against war and
its root cause: the capitalist system.
On Wednesday, the US Senate defeated a Democratic Party-sponsored war
powers motion aimed at bringing a resolution to the chamber floor
calling for the withdrawal of US forces from the war against Iran on the
basis that the war was not authorized by Congress.
The procedural
vote failed 52-47 on a motion to discharge a resolution moved by
Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois from committee. The vote permits the
Trump administration to continue its illegal war against Iran without
any congressional oversight.
This was the fourth attempt by the Democrats to posture as opponents of
Trump’s warmongering, while they know full well that the resolutions
will be blocked by the Republican majority, and while they continue to
vote for trillion-dollar military budgets.
*****
The text of Duckworth’s resolution sought, “To direct the removal of
United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against the
Islamic Republic of Iran that have not been authorized by Congress.” The
resolution does not declare the war illegal, criminal, or a violation
of US and international law. Instead, it accepts the framework of the
war and argues that Congress has been incorrectly excluded from the
decision-making about launching the war and how to conduct it.
*****
A similar charade was under way in the US House of Representatives on
Wednesday with Democrats introducing articles of impeachment against
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth for “unauthorized war against Iran,”
“targeting of civilians,” “obstruction of congressional oversight,”
“abuse of power” and several other items. The motion is universally
recognized as dead on arrival, given the Republican majority in the
House. Even if it were passed, a two-thirds vote in the Senate would be
required to remove Hegseth from office.
Pentagon press secretary
Kingsley Wilson dismissed the impeachment motion as an effort to make
headlines and said Hegseth will “continue to protect the homeland and
project peace through strength.”
*****
While the Trump administration is publicly talking about diplomacy, the
military posture tells a different story. Media reports say that another
carrier strike group and additional amphibious and Marine forces are
moving into the region, with tens of thousands of troops already there
from the first phase of the war.
*****
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the US is
sending more than 10,000 additional troops to the Middle East before the
end of April. Quoting unnamed current and former US officials speaking
on condition of anonymity, the Post reported that the aircraft
carrier USS George H. W. Bush and the ships escorting it, including
6,000 troops, are on the way to the region.
Another 4,200 troops
from the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group and its embarked Marine Corps task
force, the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, are also expected to arrive
in the next two weeks.
This buildup is unmistakable evidence that
the Pentagon is preparing for a resumption of military operations,
regardless of the negotiations. As was the case before the start of the
war, the force posture points to a second phase of war rather than
de-escalation.
The same pattern is unfolding in Lebanon, where
Israeli strikes continue while talks are underway. Reporting over the
last 24 hours showed continued attacks in southern Lebanon, including
strikes that killed medical workers, alongside Hezbollah rocket fire and
the possibility of new Israeli buffer-zone plans.
In both Iran
and Lebanon, the US and Israel are pursuing negotiations as a mechanism
to buy time to allow for the mobilization of military personnel and
hardware and escalate the wars in pursuit of their imperialist and
annexationist objectives.
On Tuesday, April 14, Eric Swalwell, a seven-term congressman from
California’s Bay Area, resigned his seat in the U.S. House of
Representatives. With remarkable speed, Swalwell went from front-runner
in the race to become the next governor of America’s most populous state
to political pariah, denounced by Democrats and Republicans alike.
On Friday, April 10, the San Francisco Chronicle and
CNN ran lurid accounts by four women accusing Swalwell of sexual abuse.
One of the four, a former staffer who has not been identified, claimed
that Swalwell raped her on two occasions when she was intoxicated, once
in 2019 and again in 2024. The other three accused the then-congressman
of sending them sexually explicit and salacious social media posts.
Within
hours of the appearance of these reports, which Swalwell claimed were
fabrications, his campaign managers and Democratic and trade union
endorsers abandoned him and called on him to end his gubernatorial
campaign. These included leading Democratic figures, such as House
Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and
Senator Adam Schiff.
Two days later, on Sunday, April 12,
Swalwell announced the suspension of his campaign for governor. While
calling the specific allegations against him false, he apologized to his
family and acknowledged “mistakes in judgment,” evidently acknowledging
that he had had extra-marital affairs.
By then 50 former staffers had issued a public letter calling on him
to resign from Congress, and numerous lawmakers from both parties
followed suit, threatening to expel him if he refused. The House Ethics
Committee announced a probe, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s
office launched a criminal investigation.
Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press
on Sunday, Pramila Jayapal, chair of the House Progressive Caucus, said
she would vote to expel both Swalwell and Texas Republican Tony
Gonzales from the House of Representatives. Gonzales had been under
investigation by the Houses Ethics Committee after having admitted to
having a sexual relationship with one of his staffers, who subsequently
committed suicide.
Jayapal said, “I think that this is very important that we believe
women, and that we show people across the Capitol and across the country
that we will not accept this kind of behavior.”
Here you have the
totally undemocratic ethos of the #MeToo movement spelled out in all
its crudity. Whatever one thinks of Swalwell, and the World Socialist Web Site has
no brief for this run-of-the-mill capitalist politician, there is no
presumption of innocence, no trial of fact and no due process. The ethos
of the #MeToo witch-hunters is guilty as accused!
Swalwell’s
political demise cleared the way for the removal of another congressman,
Republican Tony Gonzales of Texas, who had already announced he would
not run for reelection after admitting to an affair with one of his
staff. The woman, who was married with children, committed suicide.
Gonzales resigned from Congress under pressure from both parties,
shortly after Swalwell did so.
Press accounts claim that
billionaire Tom Steyer, who closely trailed Swalwell among Democrats
running in the June 2 “jungle primary,” would be the most likely
beneficiary of Swalwell’s removal. Steyer has already spent $110 million
on his own campaign, far more than all other candidates combined,
Democratic and Republican.
Former Democratic leader in the state legislature Willie Brown, a long-time power broker in the party, told USA Today on
Tuesday that the Democrats would benefit from the Swalwell exposure
coming before rather than after the June 2 primary, when Swalwell and a
Republican would likely have emerged as the two candidates going forward
to the general election. According to the newspaper, “Brown speculated
that opposing candidates in both parties knew about Swalwell’s alleged
misconduct, but only Democrats wanted it to come out before the
primary.”
*****
The use of such scandals is invariably associated with a shift to the
right in capitalist politics. Swalwell was a well-publicized critic of
Trump, particularly in his second impeachment over the failed January
2021 coup. He was a constant presence on cable networks and social media
since Trump returned to the White House, denouncing his ICE raids
against immigrants and other dictatorial moves. His removal likely means
a Democratic governor in California more cooperative with the Trump
administration.
*****
Republican Congressman Gonzales had also run afoul of the Trump White
House, occasionally voting against Trump’s policies and criticizing the
most extreme anti-immigrant measures. His district covered the vast
rural area along the Rio Grande, from El Paso almost to the Gulf of
Mexico.
The swift removal of these congressmen is in sharp
contrast to the blockade by the Trump administration—and the Biden
administration before it—of any serious investigation into the Jeffrey
Epstein affair. The convicted sex trafficker died in his Manhattan
prison cell in 2019, under circumstances that suggest murder rather than
suicide.
For seven years since then, and for nearly two decades before his
death, Epstein served as both a financial agent and pimp to
billionaires, capitalist politicians and even British royalty. Despite
the public denunciations by hundreds of former victims, not a single
person, other than the deceased Epstein, has ever been prosecuted.
Last
Thursday, in a particularly bizarre scene, First Lady Melania Trump
gave a surprise press statement denouncing claims on social media
relating to her past association with Epstein. She denied that she had
been one of Epstein’s victims, or that Epstein had introduced her to
Donald Trump, appealed for a congressional hearing to take the testimony
of the victims and left without answering questions from the startled
press corps.
The weekend’s campaign-style events were supplemented with a new
city-run website touting Mamdani’s accomplishments in his first 100
days: $1.2 billion secured for universal childcare, $9.3 million secured
in worker and small business restitution and 100,000 potholes fixed.
While
Mamdani was busy patting himself on the back for initiatives like
“fixing a bump on the Williamsburg Bridge,” a critical analysis of the
last three-and-a-half months of the standard bearer for the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA) sheds a different light on the content of
the supposed “new era” ushered in on January 1.
Speaking on his
accomplishments before an audience of supporters on Sunday, Mamdani did
not dare to highlight the most important political initiative of his
term thus far: his alliance with President Donald Trump. Mamdani has
continued what he calls a productive relationship with the man he
correctly characterizes as a fascist, meeting with Trump at the White
House for a second time on the eve of the criminal war in Iran.
Mamdani and Trump two days before the US launched strikes in Iran
In two addresses Sunday, speaking well over 5,000 words, Mamdani not
once uttered the name “Trump.” He made zero references to the war in
Iran, and managed just one fleeting mention of ICE. The omissions are
not an accident. Mamdani, playing up his “democratic socialism” before
an audience overwhelmingly hostile to Trump, would rather avoid dwelling
on the blossoming partnership with the leading advocate of world war
and dictatorship.
Despite his reticence on the subject, Mamdani’s collaboration with
Trump is extremely significant. Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of
America are put forward as the “left” alternative to the pro-business
and pro-war politics of the Democratic Party establishment and the
fascist politics of the Republicans. Mamdani himself was elected on the
basis of left-wing appeals to address the affordability crisis and take
on a system dominated by an oligarchy.
In the first months of the
Mamdani administration, the strain on the working class is not abating;
on the contrary, it’s reaching a breaking point. Trump’s criminal war in
Iran is the latest catalyst. The administration is determined to make
the working class pay for the unfolding disaster. Trump has requested
$200 billion in supplemental war funds specifically for Iran, and
roughly $1.5 trillion in military spending next year—a World War III
budget. Beyond the inevitable cuts to social services to pay for war,
the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz has already led to major increases
in energy prices and will reverberate into all aspects of the economy.
And an expansion of the war would have catastrophic consequences for the
working class everywhere.
Alongside the war crimes in Iran, Trump
is continuing to eviscerate democratic rights within the United States.
Trump’s immigration Gestapo operates without constraints. ICE agents in
New York City have arrested three times as many people in the first
month and a half of 2026 as they did in the same period a year ago.
Meanwhile, Trump is preparing the narrative that midterm elections—if
they happen at all—are illegitimate and can be overturned.
Reflecting on his first hundred days in an interview with POLITICO,
Mamdani made clear that none of the crimes of the Trump administration
are impediments to deepening their alliance. “The president and I
disagree on many things in public and in private,” Mamdani said in the
interview. “We do, however, agree on one thing, which is a love for New
York City. And that love, it is one that allows for our relationship to
be a productive one, and allows for the city to know that it will not
simply be affected by threats.”
David North, the chairperson of the World Socialist Web Site and
of the Socialist Equality Party, responded on X, “If Mamdani were
transported back to the 1930s as mayor of Berlin, he would say: ‘Hitler
is the leader of the Nazis, but he loves sauerkraut and so do I.’”
The main political function of Mamdani’s alliance with Trump is to
disorient those who are becoming radicalized and looking to (democratic)
socialism for an alternative. Mamdani offers the poison that productive
relationships can be forged with fascists, cutting workers and youth
off from an orientation to the independent mobilization of the working
class and a genuine struggle for socialism.
Instead, Mamdani and
the DSA present a watered-down version of “sewer socialism,” offering
minor reforms and managerial efficiency palatable to business interests
and the political establishment. Even then, under conditions of a
deepening crisis of American capitalism, with a ruling class turning
towards dictatorship and war, Mamdani’s appeals to the ruling class and
their political servants are able to yield very little.
*****
Meanwhile, Wall Street bonuses reached a record $49.2 billion last
year, up 9 percent year over year, according to a report from the City
Comptroller. The bonuses reflect an increase in Wall Street profits by
more than 30 percent last year, to over $65 billion.
This
staggering social inequality is coinciding with the beginning of an
upsurge among workers and a political radicalization accelerated by the
Trump administration. Already this year, nurses in New York City struck
at three major hospital systems for 41 days. Next week may see the
34,000 building service workers walk off the job. A similar number of
transit workers are nearing a contract deadline in May. And Mamdani will
come into direct conflict with city workers later this year when DC37
and other union contracts expire.
For the working class to make
real gains in improving living conditions, in defending democratic
rights and resisting imperialist war, sharp lessons must be drawn from
the Mamdani administration’s first 100 days. Mamdani and DSA represent
the interests of an upper-middle-class layer dissatisfied with the
status quo, not seeking to put an end to the horrors of capitalism, but a
more comfortable life within it for those already living in privileged
circumstances (the upper middle class). Mamdani’s fraudulent “socialism”
must be rejected. The decisive question is building a movement that
doesn’t seek to pressure the Democratic Party but politically breaks
from it; one that aims not to more effectively organize oligarchic rule
but fights for workers’ control; and one that rejects collaboration with
the would-be dictator in the White House, instead mobilizing the
strength of the working class internationally to fight fascism,
dictatorship and war.
European governments have rejected the Trump administration’s demands
that they join the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz that Trump declared
Sunday, after announcing a ceasefire last week in his war of aggression
against Iran. A far-reaching and historic breakdown of European
relations with the United States is underway.
At the same time,
the European bourgeoisies’ response is marked above all by cowardice and
hypocrisy. Not only is a blockade itself an act of war, but closure of
the Strait of Hormuz would cut off essential oil, gas and fertilizer
supplies to Europe and the entire world. Yet none of the European
governments have dared denounce the blockade, call to end it, call to
stop the war, or end military and financial assistance to the US
government.
Instead, reflecting the outlook of the corrupt
capitalist oligarchies they represent, Europe’s governments continue to
discuss a naval intervention in the Persian Gulf—though this would face
the same Iranian missile threat that have so far dissuaded the US Navy
from assaulting Iran’s coast. Britain and France are convening a summit
meeting on Friday of an alliance of 40 countries to prepare a naval
mission to the Strait of Hormuz, coordinated independently of
Washington.
“This strictly defensive mission, which is separate from the
belligerents, will be deployed as soon as the situation permits it,”
said French President Emmanuel Macron. He called for “a solid and
durable solution to the Middle East conflict via the diplomatic road, a
solution that would allow the region of a robust framework so everyone
can live in peace and security.” He went on to denounce “the nuclear and
ballistic activities of Iran as well as its destabilizing actions in
the region.”
Macron’s lies are staggering. The essential threat to peace and security
in the Middle East comes not from Iran, which did not initiate this war
or any of the other wars launched against it, but from Washington and
the war of extermination launched by America’s fascist president. As for
peace in the Middle East, Paris is complicit in undermining it, by
consistently stressing Macron’s friendship with the Israeli government
amid its genocide in Gaza.
In Germany, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius responded, “This war is
not our war, we did not start it … What does Donald Trump want a handful
of European frigates in the strait of Hormuz to accomplish, when even
the powerful US Navy could not do so?” Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s
office issued a statement that Trump’s war against Iran “has nothing to
do with NATO.”
Merz’s statement is a pathetic dodge, in that it is
clear that Trump’s war with Iran and in particular his blockading of
the Strait of Hormuz is cutting off key energy supplies to Europe. This
follows the destruction of Germany’s Nordstream pipeline to Russia after
US President Joe Biden threatened that it would be destroyed. This
consistent US policy, by directly threatening to cut off Europe’s energy
supply, most definitely “has to do with NATO.”
British Prime
Minister Keir Starmer told BBC Radio: “We’re not supporting the blockade
and all of the marshalling diplomatically, politically and
capability... that’s all focused, from our point of view, on getting the
Strait fully open.” He added, “whatever the pressure—and there's been
some considerable pressure—we’re not getting dragged into the war.
That’s not in our national interest, because I’m not going to act unless
there’s a clear, lawful basis and a clear thought-through plan.”
*****
One basic contradiction marks the European governments’ policy. When
the US government takes war measures targeting them, they retaliate not
against the United States, but against Iran and the Middle East.
Underlying their collaboration with Trump is not only personal cowardice
but, above all, objective imperialist interests. The European powers
are intervening to defend their own military bases and profits extracted
from the Middle East, and to maintain financial ties to Wall Street as
well as their NATO military alliance with US imperialism.
The cost
of the war in lives and the catastrophic economic impact of the
conflict on millions of workers’ jobs and the purchasing power of the
entire population are of little concern to Macron, Starmer and the
leaders of other capitalist governments across Europe. They are far more
concerned with salvaging the domination of the Middle East by world
imperialism, increasingly threatened by the initial failure of Trump’s
war, than the well-being of the working people of Europe or the world.
Despite the European powers’ refusal to challenge the most reactionary
elements of US imperialist foreign policy, the rift between Washington
and its European NATO “allies” is continuing to widen and grow more
explosive by the day.
*****
While US threats of an energy cutoff visibly pose a mortal threat to
Europe’s economy, such financial moves pose an equal threat to the US
economy. European investors hold an estimated total of $8 trillion in US
assets—Treasury bonds, stocks and corporate bonds—equivalent to 24
percent of the US sovereign debt. If European investors dumped their US
Treasury bonds, either due to increasingly low returns on US dollar
assets or as retaliation for US tariff or energy threats, it could
trigger a massive crisis of the $38 trillion US sovereign debt and a
surge in US interest rates.
The explosive conflicts between the NATO imperialist powers again
illustrate the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist system,
between world economy and the nation-state system, that the great
Marxists of the 20th century identified as the source of the two world
wars in that century. The critical 21st century task for the workers is
to stop capitalism’s accelerating plunge into global war and genocide by
developing an international movement in the working class against
imperialist war, and to take power out of the hands of the capitalist
oligarchy and establish socialism.
An economic crisis marked by widespread hunger and disease continues for Venezuelan workers, even as Chavista
officials boast of how “sexy” the country has become for foreign
investors. This grotesque coexistence of deepening social misery
alongside an unrestricted courtship of transnational corporations
defines the current stage of Venezuela’s crisis.
Even as
executives from Chevron and Shell parade through the halls of government
and oil production again surpasses 1 million barrels per day—amid high
global oil prices—workers continue to live in extreme poverty.
There is no contradiction here. A decade of shock therapy vastly worsened by US sanctions and enforced through low wages by the Chavista government has produced the conditions for the superexploitation of millions of Venezuelan workers.
*****
As part of measures to attract foreign investment, the state oil
company PDVSA is implementing reduced access to subsidized gasoline
while expanding gas stations offering premium fuel. This gasoline is
sold exclusively in US dollars at $3.79 per gallon—far beyond the reach
of most Venezuelans, who are paid in rapidly depreciating bolivars.
These
policies are fueling growing unrest. A coalition of trade unions and
student organizations launched a protest last Thursday demanding wage
increases. An estimated 2,000 participants attempted to march to the
Miraflores Presidential Palace but were violently blocked by anti-riot
police. Security forces deployed tear gas and detained five protesters.
It marked the largest anti-government demonstration since the January 3
US military raid in which President Nicolás Maduro was abducted and
transferred to a New York City prison.
*****
This protest followed another significant mobilization on Wednesday.
Hundreds of students and workers from the Universidad Central de
Venezuela marched through Caracas demanding wage increases. They
denounced that their salaries have not increased in four years and
officially amount to about $1 per month, supplemented by approximately
$190 in bonuses. Teachers have announced plans to strike on April 22,
indicating that broader sectors are preparing for sustained struggle.
Another
protest is planned this Thursday in front of the US embassy, with
organizers declaring their intention to demonstrate before “those who
truly rule in Venezuela.”
Interim President Delcy Rodríguez has responded with a combination of
repression and empty promises. Last week, she appealed to workers for
“patience” in a televised address, pledging a “responsible” increase in
the minimum wage on May Day so as not to fuel inflation. Framed in such
terms, any increase is widely expected to be negligible. The minimum
wage, unchanged since 2022, stands at 130 bolivars—approximately $0.27 per month.
*****
Against this backdrop, the transformation of Venezuela into a
semi-colony has become increasingly explicit. President Donald Trump has
repeatedly praised Rodríguez while his administration advances a
broader project of hemispheric domination, described in terms of a
“Greater North America” extending from Greenland to the equator.
As
part of this agenda, the Pentagon has escalated near-daily missile
strikes on small boats across the eastern Pacific and Caribbean—claiming
without evidence that they are “narco-traffickers”—killing at least 173
innocent fishermen, since September. Caracas has issued no denunciation
of these cold-blooded killings.
Rodríguez is acting openly as a
tool of US corporate interests. This posture can only intensify popular
opposition among workers who have endured more than a decade of
devastating US sanctions, repeated coup attempts, and, most recently,
direct military violence.
At a recent investor forum in Miami—a city long regarded in Caracas
as a center of far-right exile politics and coup plotting—Rodríguez
openly presented Venezuela as a semicolonial supplier of oil and
critical minerals. She emphasized the country’s vast reserves and low
production costs, highlighting renegotiated prices and reduced taxes and
royalties designed to attract foreign investors.
These overtures have been matched by concrete policy shifts. The Chavista
administration has not opposed Trump’s executive order requiring that
Venezuelan oil revenues be deposited into US Treasury accounts and
managed entirely by the US government. This extraordinary arrangement
effectively strips the country of sovereign control over its primary
source of income.
*****
The economic restructuring has proceeded rapidly. Following the earlier passage of legislation on crude oil, the Chavista-controlled
Congress last week unanimously approved a law privatizing gold and
other “strategic minerals.” The law removes exclusive state control and
establishes a framework for 30-year concessions to private corporations,
with royalties that can be paid “in kind”—that is, effectively not at
all. Shipments of gold and minerals are already departing Venezuelan
ports under these arrangements.
The emphasis on economic restructuring also signals the indefinite
postponement of elections overseen by Washington, under the fraudulent
banner of a “democratic transition.”
Jorge Rodríguez, head of
Congress and brother of the interim president, confirmed this
orientation in a recent interview. “Venezuela is becoming quite sexy
from the point of view of foreign investment opportunities,” he
declared. When asked when elections will take place, he replied: “What
matters most right now is the economy. It is necessary for the
Venezuelan economy to advance toward such dynamism that the population
feels that this entire process was worthwhile.”
For the working
class, however, the reality is starkly different. The “dynamism”
celebrated by officials and investors translates into intensified
exploitation, declining real wages, and the dismantling of social
rights.
State censorship efforts are once again being directed against an artist
with Palestinian roots. Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul’s (Christian
Democratic Union, CDU) ministry has reprimanded the Goethe‑Institut for
allowing a work by Basma al‑Sharif to be shown in an exhibition in
Lithuania.
The Goethe‑Institut is a non‑profit cultural institution that
operates worldwide to promote the study of the German language and
international cultural exchange. It is funded primarily by the German
government.
The exhibition in question, shown from October 2025 to
March 2026, was a collaboration between the Contemporary Art Centre
Vilnius (CAC), the Goethe‑Institut and the Academy of Arts in Berlin. It
was curated by the CAC under a title that is particularly
resonant given the wars currently raging: Bells and Cannons–Contemporary Art in the Face of Militarisation.
As part of the exhibition, al‑Sharif’s installation Deep Sleep was
shown. This meditative, dreamlike video was shot in 2024 in abandoned
ruins in Malta, Athens and Gaza. It links these locations to convey the
destruction in Gaza to the viewer. Colourful, flickering lights; sun,
earth, stone, rock, sky and water flood the scenes, accompanied by
rhythmic sounds of waves, bells and footsteps. The installation closely
aligned with the exhibition’s theme, which alludes to the historical
practice of melting down church bells during the First and Second World
Wars to manufacture cannons and ammunition.
Al‑Sharif has been demonised by the government as an antisemite
and an Israel‑hater because, in view of the genocidal actions of the
Israeli armed forces in Gaza, she posted pro-Palestinian content on her
Instagram account, including a call to boycott Israel. Because she
referred to the State of Israel as a “Zionist entity,” she has been
accused of “denying Israel’s right to exist.”
Goethe‑Institut officials
stated they regretted not having been aware of these
posts, claiming they were incompatible with its values. The German
foreign ministry, which provides the bulk of the institute’s funding,
made it clear that “greater diligence is necessary in the planning and
conception of events with cooperation partners, and this is also
expected by the foreign ministry.” This is coded language for censorship
and repression.
*****
Further attacks on Basma al‑Sharif are already under way. She
has been invited to the internationally respected Osnabrück European
Media Art Festival (EMAF), where her award‑winning short film Morning Circle is due to be screened in late April, alongside her participation in a panel discussion.
On March
30, the city of Osnabrück announced that “intensive
discussions” had taken place with festival organisers, who
nevertheless continued to support al‑Sharif. The city subsequently
distanced itself from relevant parts of the program and Lower Saxony's Minister‑President Olaf Lies (SPD), withdrew his
patronage of the festival. However, funding from the city and the state
government remains intact.
The
Coalition leader called for the reversal of the nominally
non-discriminatory immigration program that has existed since the formal
end of the blatantly racist White Australia regime in the 1960s.
While the overwhelmingly young crowd of students and workers was no
doubt drawn to El-Sayed’s rally by opposition to the Gestapo-like
operations of Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) officers and the
fascist Trump administration’s broader attacks on democratic rights and
social institutions, the perspective offered at the rally was a
political dead-end.
El-Sayed, who was born in Detroit of Egyptian immigrant parents,
previously ran for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2018 with
the backing of Senator Bernie Sanders, losing to Gretchen Whitmer. He
has headed public health departments in Detroit and Wayne County.
After
the announcement by Democratic Senator Gary Peters that he would not
seek reelection this year, El-Sayed entered the race for the Democratic
nomination to succeed him. His campus tour is a calculated intervention
by a faction of the Democratic Party—along with its pseudo-left
satellites—to corral the growing leftward movement of students within
the framework of capitalist electoral politics.
In his Senate
campaign, El‑Sayed has positioned himself as the “left” candidate in a
three-way Democratic primary set for August 4, against US Representative
Haley Stevens and State Senator Mallory McMorrow. Polling by Emerson
College in late January 2026 showed McMorrow at 22 percent, Stevens at
17 percent and El‑Sayed at 16 percent among Democratic primary voters,
with a huge 38 percent still undecided, leaving the race wide open.
Former
Representative Mike Rogers is expected to be the Republican nominee.
Rogers narrowly lost a Senate contest to Democrat Elissa Slotkin, a
former CIA agent, in 2024.
*****
At the Ann Arbor rally, addressed by El-Sayed, Piker and
Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Summer Lee (D-PA), the speeches
were most notable for what they avoided. While denouncing the
militarism and outright criminality of the Trump administration, the
speakers made no mention of capitalism or socialism, although Piker
calls himself a “Marxist-Leninist” and Tlaib and Lee are both members of
the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Everything was
carefully edited to focus only on the primary in August and the general
election in November. Toward this end, the content of nearly all the
speeches emphasized El-Sayed’s supposed trustworthiness. “He’s someone I
don’t have to call and check on,” Tlaib stated, adding, “if he’s
elected, I know I won’t have to watch him,” and voters won’t have to
pressure him constantly to “do the right thing.”
*****
None of the speakers made any reference to the death of Danhao Wang, a
Chinese national and U-M researcher who committed suicide following
intense questioning by federal agents last month, or the role played by
the U-M administration in condoning and covering up the incident.
Yousef
Rabhi, a Washtenaw County Commissioner, DSA member and Democratic
candidate for Ann Arbor mayor, also spoke ahead of El-Sayed. Screaming
out a speech peppered with expletives, Rabhi denounced Trump while
stating, “We need to take this country back!” But from whom?
*****
When it was finally El-Sayed’s turn to speak, the “progressive
Democrat” had just as little to offer as the preceding speakers. While
emphasizing that ICE is not reformable and must be abolished, El-Sayed
only presented one path to oppose fascism and war: vote for the
Democratic Party, which is facilitating the rise of fascism and US
imperialism’s wars abroad.
Publicly, El-Sayed expresses rhetorical
opposition to US imperialism’s Middle Eastern wars as matters of flawed
military and political procedure and presidential overreach. Behind
this anti-war appearance, El-Sayed aligns himself with the Democrats’
imperialist foreign policy consensus, citing both the US-NATO war
against Russia in Ukraine and the US-NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 as
examples of positive exercises of US military power.
In line with
the politics of imperialism, El-Sayed’s gestures in support of
expanding healthcare and social spending are of a limited reformist
character that do nothing to challenge or undermine the capitalist
system, the source of inequality, war and authoritarianism pressing down
on workers and youth.
The droning chorus of statements praising
El-Sayed as a steadfast and reliable political representative is true
only in the sense that he will be firm in his allegiance to the
capitalist politics of the Democratic Party and the ruling elite, which
are presently rushing to provide political cover for Trump’s war against
Iran.
In an interview with the DSA-linked publication Jacobin,
El-Sayed emphasized that winning in Michigan would “suggest a way
forward in the rest of the country,” meaning he had a strategy for
rebranding the Democratic Party. While insisting he could “speak truth
to power,” El-Sayed promised the ruling class that his
proposals—single‑payer healthcare, limited debt relief, modest taxation
of the wealthy—would not fundamentally threaten their wealth, property
or control of the state.
Like DSA member Zohran Mamdani, who won the New York City mayoral
election as a Democrat in 2025 on a platform of limited social reform,
opposition to the US-Israeli-led genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and
resistance to Trump’s authoritarianism, and now leads a program of cuts
to social spending and political alliances with the fascist in the White
House, El-Sayed offers no serious alternative to the right-wing
politics of the Democratic Party.
While Trump’s pardons and commutations last year shortened or ended
the sentences of the convicted, they did not erase the actual felonies
from their records. If these motions are granted and the charges
dismissed, they will effectively wipe away the criminal judgments in the
most serious January 6 cases.
Tuesday’s motion claims that
dismissal of the convictions is “just under the circumstances” because
the “United States has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that
dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice.” In
other words, it is in the interests of the Trump administration, and the
financial oligarchy it represents, that fascist militia leaders face no
consequences for their criminal actions.
*****
The DOJ’s motion is a warning to the working class. Under conditions
in which Trump and the Republicans are widely hated, the aspiring
dictator is summoning and preparing the same paramilitary elements that
heeded his violent call to action some five years ago.
Trump is
already moving to disrupt the midterm elections and make it difficult
for workers and their families to vote. He has called for a federal
takeover of elections and has demanded that states send voter rolls to
the DOJ which are then shared with the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) for alleged “citizenship checks” aimed at removing voters. At
least 12 states, including Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana,
Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas
and Wyoming, have already sent lists to the federal government.
Trump
has repeatedly called for eliminating vote by mail, castigating it as
inherently fraudulent, and is also trying to pass the SAVE Act, an
anti-voter legislation aimed at imposing bureaucratic hurdles to proving
citizenship in order to vote.
In the last month, Trump has
deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs to airports to
harass, kidnap and detain workers. War Room host and former White House
adviser Steve Bannon has repeatedly called on Trump to deploy the
immigration Gestapo to polling locations.
That Trump is in a
position to pardon his fascist foot soldiers and disrupt the midterm
elections is entirely the fault of the Democratic Party. On the day of
the attack, then President-elect Joe Biden implored Trump to go on
television and appeal to these fascists to halt their rampage.
Trump
did no such thing, but this did not prevent Biden and the Democrats
from calling for a “strong Republican Party” in the aftermath of the
attack. Throughout Biden’s presidency, his attorney general, Merrick
Garland, stalled efforts to prosecute Trump for the coup. Taking the
measure of the Democrats’ unwillingness to prosecute Trump and his
co-conspirators, Republicans, and even sections of the pseudo-left,
adopted Trump’s lie that the greatest injustice that occurred on January
6 was not the storming of the Capitol and the attempt to overthrow the
election but the prosecution of some of Trump’s fascist foot soldiers.
Throughout
Biden’s presidency, the Democrats did everything in their power to
downplay the danger of dictatorship and rehabilitate the Republican
Party. This was done in order to advance their shared class interests,
namely prosecuting the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the
genocide in Gaza and eliminating all public health and mitigation
measures concerning the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The
Unite union received a mandate for strike action at the start of April.
Contrary to its media briefings that “escalating strike action will be
announced in the coming days”, no dates have been confirmed.
A worker died at Amazon’s PDX9 fulfillment center in Troutdale,
Oregon, on Monday, April 6. For more than an hour after his collapse,
employees at the facility say that management ordered them to continue
working around his body. The death went unreported for a week before the
online investigative outlet, the Western Edge, broke the story on April
13.
The worker, 46 years old, was employed as a “tote runner,”
which involves gathering stacks of yellow plastic bins, loading them
onto a cart and hauling them along warehouse corridors for other workers
to fill. According to multiple employees who spoke to the Western Edge
on condition of anonymity, the facility recently reduced the number of
tote runners, increasing the physical burden on those who remain.
The
unidentified man collapsed on the second level of the loading dock. A
911 call placed at 1:55 p.m. captured a worker describing what he found:
the man had extensive blood coming from his head and was “very blue
looking.” A second caller asked the dispatcher for instruction on how to
operate a defibrillator.
A worker identified as Sam, whose name
was changed by the Western Edge to protect her from retribution, has CPR
training and asked her supervisor for permission to assist a woman who
was already performing chest compressions. The supervisor refused. “It
has to be management or a safety team,” Sam was told. “Please get back
to work.” Sam pressed further. The supervisor reportedly replied, “Just
turn around and not look. Let’s get back to work.”
*****
One worker on social media corroborated the story. “This is my site.
This was a tote runner that worked FHD [who] was an older gentleman who
suffered cardiac arrest likely from heat and over exertion. Fell down,
hit his head. Was given CPR on site [and] by the time the ambulance came
he had already passed. Our hearts and prayers go out to this person’s
family. It’s been truly sad around the facility.”
Workers
also commented on Amazon’s internal messaging app, one noting that,
“Amazon was given a 16 billion dollar tax cut to invest in AI and
robotics so they can cut 600,000 jobs. Do you think Amazon cares about
safety?”
*****
PDX9 has long been among the most dangerous of Amazon’s facilities. A
2019 investigation by the outlet Reveal found it had the highest injury
rate of 23 major distribution centers examined. In 2018, more than a
quarter of all workers at the site had sustained injuries on the job.
The
trend continued during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when
Amazon’s refusal to provide proper protective equipment caused at least
100 infections, making it the fourth-largest workplace outbreak in
Oregon at the time. In August 2021, a second outbreak at PDX9 had
infected 345 workers, the highest total of any workplace in Oregon,
surpassing even overwhelmed medical centers.
*****
The death at PDX9 also exposes the role of the Democratic Party in
setting up America’s industrial slaughterhouse. The facility was built
using $9.6 million in tax breaks granted by the Port of Portland and the
city of Troutdale in 2017, and total public subsidies extended to
Amazon for its Oregon expansion reached $213.1 million. At the time,
Oregon Governor Kate Brown called the facility’s opening “a
celebration.”
Under the Trump
administration, OSHA’s enforcement capacity is being gutted further.
Proposed budgets slash inspection staffing, freeze new rule making,
including a heat illness prevention standard that could have applied to
facilities like PDX9 and replace enforcement with voluntary compliance
by employers. Workers cannot rely on these agencies, which have never
protected them.
The defense of workers’ lives at Amazon and every
other workplace requires workers themselves to organize. The WSWS urges
Amazon workers to build rank-and-file safety committees, genuinely
democratic organizations of, by and for workers on the shop floor, to
fight back against unsafe working conditions and to conduct their own
investigations when workers are injured or killed.
The
cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme target those with
so-called “mild” or “moderate” needs, who will be stripped of supports
or face drastic reductions.
Over the weekend, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local
7 ratified a new contract for 3,800 workers at the JBS beef processing
plant in Greeley, Colorado. The deal runs retroactively from July 2025
through April 2028.
The agreement addresses none of the workers’
demands which led to a powerful three-week strike. It was the largest US
meatpacking strike in more than 60 years. Workers at the plant account
for more than 6 percent of all US beef processing.
The UFCW bureaucracy, after isolating the strike as much as possible, shut it down
on April 4 without a deal. The present contract was announced a week
later, giving workers little time to study and discuss among themselves
before voting.
Local 7 President Kim Cordova hypocritically
declared: “These workers stood together on the picket line for three
weeks because they knew their worth and refused to be disrespected.
Today, that sacrifice has been rewarded.” Cordova claimed that the
“contract is significantly different [from the company’s last offer]. It
is material.”
In fact, JBS spokesperson Nikki Richardson said in a
press release that it “reflects the same economic framework JBS USA
presented in its Last, Best and Final offer.”
Instead of a meager
60 cent per hour raise in the first year of the contract, JBS and Local 7
agreed to a 70 cent increase, an improvement of only 10 cents over the
initial offer. During the second and third years of the contract, the
initially proposed 30 cent increases were likewise raised by 10 cents to
40 cents per hour.
Assuming that plant employees work an eight hour day—even though most
shifts actually have fewer hours—each worker would only receive an
additional $5.60 per day before taxes during the first year of the
agreement. After the second and third year increases, JBS Greeley
workers would see an aggregate $12 increase per day, only 40 cents more
than the current average price of a meal at a Colorado McDonald’s.
*****
The Trump administration is preparing for a renewed offensive in its
genocidal war against Iran and is expecting the trade union apparatus to
fall into line as it demands harsh discipline on the factory floor. The
UFCW, in the latest Greeley agreement, has thus dutifully played its
assigned role.
At the same time that Local 7 reached its agreement
with JBS, the United Teachers of Los Angeles, Associated Administrators
of Los Angeles and SEIU Local 99 also reached a last-minute agreement
with the Los Angeles Unified School District to block a strike of more than 70,000 school workers.
This
all makes the formation of independent rank-and-file committees an
urgent necessity for workers both in the US and internationally. The
trade union apparatus acts as nothing more than an appendage of the
corporations, pacifying worker resistance and ensuring that obscene
profits remain unimpeded in the midst of escalating war and
dictatorship.
The
cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme target those with
so-called “mild” or “moderate” needs, who will be stripped of supports
or face drastic reductions.
Land
and property have become asset vehicles for funneling billions of
pounds from the working class—those who produce society’s wealth—to the
billionaires.
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.
