Palestinian-Australian author and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah spoke in London on October 6 about her new novel, Discipline, as part of a sold-out UK and Ireland tour.
Discipline draws
on her experience of censorship, institutional retaliation, and the
breakdown of democratic norms in Australia and internationally. Tuesday
night’s launch at the Trouble Club was an act of defiance against
mounting repression, raising the central political question of our time:
can society’s deepening crises be resolved through reform, or do they
require revolutionary change?
Abdel-Fattah was recently at the center of a major free-speech
controversy in Australia. In January, Adelaide Writers’ Week disinvited
her—the only Palestinian writer listed—citing “community cohesion” after
the Bondi Beach massacre. The backlash saw 180 writers and artists
withdraw in protest, the director resign, and the event collapse.
After
her UK tour was announced, the campaign against her escalated.
Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp and the Board of Deputies
of British Jews called on Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to bar her
entry to Britain, while a headline in The Spectator demanded, “Don’t let Randa Abdel-Fattah into Britain”.
On
September 4, organizers of the Cambridge Literary Festival cancelled
her planned appearance after a campaign by Zionists, citing “operational
issues”.
Abdel-Fattah told her audience on Tuesday, “Before
Israel’s genocide in Gaza my books were celebrated by the media, arts
institutions and universities, which promoted my work as a symbol of
diversity and gave me prominent platforms.”
She recalled, “That
changed when I criticized Israel. The genocide became a dividing line:
doors closed, censorship intensified, and institutional support turned
into repression.”
*****
Some of the book’s most striking passages concern complicity. Its blurb
asks, “Silence is complicity, but what does it take to speak up?”
*****
On the myth of journalistic neutrality, Abdel-Fattah was at her most
forceful. “What is the other side of [a child’s body] having more than
300 bullets?” she asked. “How can you talk of balance with children’s
dismembered, decapitated bodies in plastic bags?” And on the pretense of
neutrality itself: “It is as absurd as saying, I am neutral over the
extermination of Jews in the Holocaust.”
There was a quiet dignity
in her recalling the Adelaide Festival controversy: “It was my very
presence as a Palestinian that was constructed as a threat,” she
said—noting the bitter irony that festival director Louise Adler, who
had invited her and who resigned over her exclusion, was herself an
anti-Zionist Jewish woman whose parents survived the Holocaust.
*****
On the myth of journalistic neutrality, Abdel-Fattah was at her most
forceful. “What is the other side of [a child’s body] having more than
300 bullets?” she asked. “How can you talk of balance with children’s
dismembered, decapitated bodies in plastic bags?” And on the pretense of
neutrality itself: “It is as absurd as saying, I am neutral over the
extermination of Jews in the Holocaust.”
There was a quiet dignity
in her recalling the Adelaide Festival controversy: “It was my very
presence as a Palestinian that was constructed as a threat,” she
said—noting the bitter irony that festival director Louise Adler, who
had invited her and who resigned over her exclusion, was herself an
anti-Zionist Jewish woman whose parents survived the Holocaust.
World Socialist Web Site journalists Paul Mitchell and Jean Shaoul spoke during the Q&A.
Mitchell
said the attacks on Abdel-Fattah were part of a global turn to
authoritarianism aimed at suppressing opposition to war. Referring to
his coverage of the Old Bailey trial of Sarah Cotte,
who faced terrorism charges for a speech she gave at SOAS at the age of
19, he argued that her acquittal by a mostly white jury demonstrated
the dead-end of race-based politics and the need to appeal to the
working class.
Responding to Abdel-Fattah’s comments on the
failure of political leaders, Labour politicians and trade union
officials, Mitchell insisted, “what is needed is an international party
of working people,” invoking Marx’s call for workers of all countries to
unite.
Shaoul expanded on the international dimensions of the
Gaza onslaught, noting how the United States, Britain, Germany and
Australia continued to arm and politically shield Israel, despite
protests by millions. She argued for an international movement of
working people capable of ending war and the capitalist system that
produces it.
Abdel-Fattah’s answer was remarkable: “I agree that’s
what we need. The genocide has proven to us that the current world
order serving the billionaires is not sustainable. I am a firm believer
in revolution, not reform… I don’t believe in the lesser-of-two-evils
idea… We have to actually create a complete alternative. It’s the
political economy; it comes back to race and class.”
*****
Abdel-Fattah is a brave writer and personality who has paid a heavy
price— a suspended research grant, exclusions, a premier comparing her
to murderers—for saying what millions can see with their own eyes. As
she put it, she wrote her book “for” the communities that are usually
written “about.” That is no small thing.
Discipline is a
literary achievement and a document of this moment in history: a record
of how cultural institutions, universities and media organizations have
aligned with state power to suppress opposition to genocide and war. The
response to Abdel-Fattah’s UK and Ireland book tour, following events
in Australia, demonstrates how this agenda of state censorship and
repression is being challenged ever more openly.
Almost immediately after Carney assumed the reins of power in Spring
2025, he increased military spending to meet NATO’s 2 percent of GDP
target, with the 2025-2026 military budget ballooning to over $63
billion. The Liberal government is now committed to meeting the new NATO
target of 5 percent of GDP for military spending by 2035, saying that
over the next decade, “Canada will unleash half a trillion dollars in defense investment—from submarines and aircraft to drones, sensors, and
radar systems.”
In a bid to attract major investments and offset
the economic damage from the trade war with the US, the Carney
government has at the same time committed to maintaining ultra-low
corporate tax rates and lavishing tens of billions on big business, in
the form of direct subsidies and infrastructure projects. It has
announced a “Productivity Mega Deduction” that it claims will lower the
marginal effective tax rate on new business investment from 13 percent
to 6.4 percent, “the lowest of any major economy in the world and less
than half the rate in the United States.”
This drive to rearm
Canadian imperialism and strengthen Canadian capital requires an equally
massive reorientation of government spending. The Carney government
launched a “Comprehensive Expenditure Review” (CER) in July 2025,
requiring most federal departments to slash their operational budgets by
15 percent over three years and aiming to cut the federal workforce by
nearly 40,000 full time jobs.
Significantly, these reductions are
concentrated in departments that provide critical public services or
regulate industry—Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship; Employment and
Social Development, which administers EI and other social assistance
programs; Transport, which regulates air, marine and rail transportation
safety; Health, which administers the Public Health Agency of Canada
and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. The repressive arms of the
state—the Department of National Defense, the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police (RCMP), the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the
Canada Borders Services Agency (CBSA), and the Communications Security
Establishment Canada (CSEC)—are exempt from the CER budget cuts.
The
CER has resulted in significant job losses across the federal public
sector. Since March 2024, the number of workers employed by the federal
government has fallen by 22,490, a decrease of 6.1 percent over two
years. The job cuts have accelerated, with over 12,600 of those job
losses occurring in the past year, a cut to the overall federal
workforce of 3.5 percent.
Nearly half of the 12,600 jobs
eliminated in the past year were term, casual or student positions, with
workers’ contracts simply not renewed. Such forms of non-permanent
government employment exploded in recent years.
But this was only a
first wave. Multiple departments have invoked the euphemistically named
Workforce Adjustment (WFA) process, the procedure enshrined in the
collective agreements negotiated by the public sector unions that allows
the government to eliminate permanent positions and lay off workers.
Over
25,000 workers have received letters warning them that their positions
were “affected” or “at-risk,” with almost 10,000 permanent positions
currently slated to be cut through the WFA process.
The government
also introduced the Early Retirement Incentive (ERI), reducing the
financial penalties for workers to retire before meeting age and years
of service requirements, to encourage older workers to leave their
positions so that they could be eliminated through attrition. In a
measure of the organizational chaos caused by cuts and their effect on
worker morale, over 10,000 workers applied. The loss of these
experienced workers and their accumulated knowledge promises to deepen
the crisis within departments already reeling from budget and program
cuts.
The workers that remain are expected to “streamline” program
delivery and integrate AI tools to create “efficiencies” that make up
for the sharp reduction in departmental budgets and workforce—an
effective speedup that will place an ever-greater burden on
already-strained public services. Carney has appointed Patrick Pichette,
a former senior executive at McKinsey and Google, as the CEO of Digital
Transformation Canada, a new federal organization with the mandate to
“modernize” the public service through the adoption and scaling of AI
tools.
Working-class
communities confront the consequences of inadequate flood protection,
which is not simply an issue of engineering or natural forces, but of
the ruling class’s refusal to address public safety.
Former
senator Antonio Trillanes’s allegations of Chinese financial ties to
Vice President Sara Duterte have turned the impeachment trial into an
open instrument of Washington’s anti-China war drive.
Translations are more easily available at the YouTube site.
The
turning point in Magdeburg shows that, 80 years after the Nazi terror,
significant sections of the ruling class are once again turning to
fascist methods to impose their policies of war and social cuts against
the population.
Texas
put Jamaal Howard to death Wednesday evening at the state prison in
Huntsville, the first execution in the United States since Tennessee’s
failed attempt to kill Christa Pike on September 30.
More
than 900 electric utility workers at Duquesne Light in Pittsburgh are
entering the second week of a walkout that began September 15, the first
strike at the company in 58 years.
The film opens with a chaotic montage of US military operations
around the world. Decades of carnage and criminality—Border Patrol
raids, Abu Ghraib’s torture cells, mass destruction in Iraq, Vietnam,
etc.—are juxtaposed against hollow “anti-war” statements by US
presidents, Democrat and Republican alike.
The montage places
particular emphasis on “Operation Paperclip,” an initiative authorized
by President Harry Truman in 1945 to recruit former Nazi scientists into
the US military-intelligence apparatus. An estimated 1,600 scientists,
engineers, technicians and counterintelligence officers were recruited
under the program, including former high-ranking members of the Nazi SS.
Despite their complicity in the crimes of the Nazi regime, the
Paperclip recruits were shielded from prosecution by the US government,
which was rapidly ramping up war production at the onset of the Cold War
against the Soviet Union.
In the film, Nazi admirer and
“third-generation Paperclip” scientist Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens)
oversees a top-secret program to produce enhanced “super soldiers”
capable of killing without hesitation or remorse. Three soldiers,
“promoted” for their war crimes against civilians, have been outfitted
with various enhancements: night vision, resistance to physical damage,
enhanced strength, etc. As Kammler puts it, “once they begin killing,
they will not stop until their programming is deactivated or until there
is no one left in their path alive. They are the human equivalent of a
heat-seeking missile.”
*****
There are important historical issues bound up with initiatives like
Operation Paperclip and the alliance between the “democratic” US
government and Nazi elements. Wingard’s inspiration for the Kammler
character was an infamous Nazi SS officer of the same name who oversaw
Germany’s V-2 rocket development and the construction of Auschwitz and
other concentration camps. The real Kammler was “officially” said to
have died in 1945, but there is evidence to suggest he was captured and
transferred to the United States, where he aided in the development of
the US’s own rocketry program.
Wingard’s film touches on these
issues, but can’t make much out of them. The connection between the
growth of fascist militarism and the broader crisis of capitalism—the
breakdown of the postwar order, the explosion of social inequality, the
lurch to the right by the entire political establishment—lies outside
the filmmakers’ grasp. Absent this, Wingard turns to action and horror
clichés, with vague references to “the Illuminati” and other disoriented
conspiracy theories.
The notion that fascism is something
“foreign,” injected into the US’s political bloodstream from without, is
entirely misguided. It finds expression in the somewhat absurd
depiction of the Kammlers, with their heavy German accents and sexual
eccentricities. In reality, the “democratic” Truman administration
(guilty of one of the greatest war crimes in history, the atomic bombing
of Japan) could integrate Nazi elements precisely because the US and
German ruling classes shared a common objective: the subjugation of the
international working class and the defeat of the Soviet Union.
Indeed,
the fascist Trump administration proves that US capitalism is perfectly
capable of producing its own version of Nazi leadership, every bit as
criminal as the Third Reich’s. One would imagine that idiot-warmonger
Pete Hegseth would be highly enthusiastic about a “super soldier” mass
killing program like the one depicted in the film, with perhaps the one
stipulation that test subjects’ testosterone levels be carefully
monitored.
Wingard, like any artist with a degree of sensitivity,
has a feeling that there is something deeply rotten in the upper
echelons of society. When asked at a public event who the most dangerous
“super-villain” is, he responded, “The president of the United States.”
But more thought, more clarity on the real sources of militarism and
oppression, is necessary for artistic success, even (or especially) for
popular filmmaking.
During
the debate on Tuesday evening, both Republican incumbent Susan Collins
and Democratic challenger Troy Jackson defended the capitalist
healthcare system, attacks on immigrant rights and the war aims of US
imperialism internationally.
A
US judge refused to release Cilia Flores from a Brooklyn jail despite
her failing health, as prosecutors added torture charges against her and
Nicolás Maduro. In Venezuela, protests over blackouts and starvation
wages are spreading against the Rodríguez regime.
IMSS
workers must learn from the maquiladora workers in 2019 and begin to
gather in democratic assemblies to form rank-and-file committees in
every hospital, clinic and department, independent of the SNTSS, the
SNTSA and every capitalist party.
It
has been estimated that investment in AI will total $10.3 trillion
between 2025 and 2032 and that “never before has the US economy been so
dependent on the build-out of a single industry.”
The
Trump administration is preparing a major new bombing campaign against
Iran, according to reports published Wednesday and Thursday by The
Atlantic, Axios, NBC News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York
Times.
Harvard
University graduate student workers have voted 88 percent in favor of
strike authorization. In addition to demands on wages and conditions,
they are fighting in defense of international and non-citizen workers.
Across
North America strikes and protests by workers have been growing in
recent weeks, driven by the impossible cost of living and growing
conflict with the corrupt trade union apparatus.
On Thursday, over 100,000 youth and workers marched in France in a
nationwide day of action called by high school student unions against
President Emmanuel Macron’s government. It was two days after nearly a
half-million marched in a similar nationwide protest as protests spread
across Europe—with mass housing protests in Spain, high school strikes
in Belgium and protests against conscription in Germany.
The
decisive question before youth and workers participating in these
movements is independently mobilizing the working class in a broader
struggle. The youth alone cannot defeat police repression, or impose the
revolutionary social and economic change necessary to end austerity,
militarism and war. The full social power of the working class must be
mobilized, across Europe and internationally, independently of
bureaucracies integrated into the existing order.
The case of France highlights the need for independent action: the intersyndicale
(all-trade union alliance) has postponed all nationwide action until
November 5. This call for a one-day action is an attempt to delay
broader struggle, not to develop it. Even though protesters often refer
to the May 1968 French general strike, which was triggered by police
repression of student protests, neither the intersyndicale nor
parties close to it, such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France insoumise
(LFI), have called for a general strike or to bring down Macron.
The Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES) has called
on youth and workers who are in struggle to build committees of action,
independent of the union bureaucracies, to fight in the working class
for a broader mobilization in struggle. This is a path to overcome the
bureaucracies’ delaying tactics and those of their allies, such as LFI.
Youth and workers active in struggle must come together in committees
and go into workplaces and working class neighborhoods to explain the
necessity of a broader mobilization of working class against police
state repression, austerity, war, and capitalism.
The
movement is part of a wave of social and class struggles against
austerity, neo-fascism and war with high school protests in France,
housing protests in Spain and across Europe.
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.
Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received repeated, detailed warnings
about the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, according to multiple reports
published in Israeli and American media outlets over the past month.
— here are the claims indicating Israeli foreknowledge, with the denials and subsequent confirmations noted (Assisted with Socialism AI):
Claims of Israeli foreknowledge
1. The "Jericho Wall" battle plan.
Israel's intelligence services held Hamas's approximately 40-page
operational plan, code-named "Jericho Wall," for more than a year before
the attack. The document "meticulously described the attack method,
mirroring the actual events" — the rocket barrage, drones to knock out
security cameras and automated machine guns, and gunmen entering by
paraglider, motorcycle, and on foot. Hamas "followed the blueprint with
shocking precision."
2. The July 2023 training exercise. A
veteran analyst in Unit 8200 (the army's signals intelligence unit)
warned in emails that Hamas had held an intensive, day-long exercise
three months before the attack that rehearsed the plan — including a dry
run of shooting down aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military
training base. A colonel in the Gaza Division replied, "In short, let's
wait patiently"; the analyst wrote back, "It is a plan designed to start
a war."
3. The Emirati warning. Emirati
President Mohamed bin Zayed telephoned Netanyahu about a week and a half
before the attack to warn him of a major Hamas move, and "urged
Netanyahu to take the situation seriously." Netanyahu "reacted with
relative calm." According to Haaretz, none of the heads of the army, Mossad, or Shin Bet knew of bin Zayed's warning.
4. The Egyptian warnings. Egypt's
intelligence chief Abbas Kamel flew to Israel on September 26, 2023 — 11
days before the attack — with the message, "If you don't change course,
Gaza is going to blow up in your faces." The Wall Street Journal reported that the Egyptians "continued to warn Israel up until 48 hours before the attack."
5. The Sinwar "earthquake" threat.
Palestinian mediator Sufian Abu Zaida reported that Hamas's Gaza leader
Yahya Sinwar dictated a message for Israel on September 14, 2023: "There
will be an earthquake in the negotiations, and the Israelis should
prepare to empty their prisons." Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar briefed
Netanyahu on the threat the next day.
6. The military stand-down. Four days
after the attack, Seymour Hersh reported that, with Netanyahu's
approval, two of the three army battalions guarding the Gaza border
(about 1,600 soldiers) were shifted to the Sukkot festival near the West
Bank, leaving only 800 soldiers to guard the 51-kilometer border.
Separately, Unit 8200 was put off duty on weekends — meaning the unit
that had detected the training exercise was not operational on the
Saturday of the attack.
7. The Shin Bet's own conclusion. The
Shin Bet's investigation, concluded in March 2025, found the massacre
could have been prevented had the agency acted differently, and faulted a
policy of "quiet" in Gaza that let Hamas build up its forces. A state
ombudsman's report cited Netanyahu's order to keep Hamas in power as "an
effective, restrained, and restraining governing authority."
Denied, then later confirmed:
The bin Zayed warning — denied, then effectively confirmed. Netanyahu's office called the Haaretz
report an "absolute lie" on September 8, 2026. But the Associated Press
then reported that Netanyahu flew secretly to Abu Dhabi on September 27
and asked bin Zayed to deny the warning — a trip Netanyahu confirmed,
even as he denied the request. That same week he sued Haaretz
and other Israeli outlets for defamation, calling their reports "blood
libels." The secret trip to persuade the very source to retract is
itself confirmation that the warning was real.
The "Jericho Wall" plan — dismissed, then confirmed.
Israeli military and intelligence officials initially dismissed the
plan as "aspirational," claiming it was too difficult for Hamas to carry
out. This dismissal functioned as a denial of the plan's significance.
The October 7 attack then confirmed the plan's accuracy in detail — as
Damon put it, "there were no dots to connect," because Israel possessed
the entire operational plan and had witnessed the rehearsal for it.
Damon's
central conclusion, restated in today's article, is that these
revelations substantiate the WSWS's December 2023 assessment: Israeli
officials "made a deliberate decision to stand down in order to
facilitate the attack," as part of a conspiracy "aimed at establishing a
pretext for a long-planned genocide against the people of Gaza."
Delegates
to the Socialist Equality Party Canada’s founding congress held in Montreal
from August 22 to 24 unanimously adopted a Statement of
Principles summarized here with the assistance of Socialism AI:
The World Tasks of the Socialist Equality Party
1.
The SEP/PES is the Canadian section of the ICFI (founded by Trotsky,
1938); its principles embody the lessons of the 20th-century
revolutionary epoch, which opened with WWI and the 1917 October
Revolution. 2. The Fourth
International arose from Trotsky's struggle against the Stalinist
degeneration of the USSR; the substitution of nationalism for
internationalism led to the USSR's 1991 dissolution. 3.
The socialist revolution is international in scope (permanent
revolution), forged against "socialism in one country"; national
orientation must flow from world orientation. 4.
Revolutionary struggles, wherever they break out, inevitably assume
global dimensions and can only be completed on the world arena. 5.
Canadian workers' strategy must proceed from world conditions;
socialism in Canada requires the united struggle of Canadian, US, and
Mexican workers for the United Socialist States of North America. 6.
Canadian workers must make North American class unity a conscious
strategy, reviving shared traditions of struggle; closest SEP
(Canada)–SEP (US) collaboration under the ICFI is required. 7.
The SEP expresses the interests of the working class, the decisive
international revolutionary force; its central task is winning workers
to international socialism and the conquest of power.
The Crisis of Capitalism
8.
Capitalism and imperialism are the fundamental cause of modern poverty,
exploitation, and violence; the 20th century's wars and genocides
indict the system. 9. Today's productive forces
could abolish poverty, yet working-class conditions deteriorate and
culture is in crisis—the contradiction stems from private ownership and
rival nation-states. 10. AI, produced by collective
human labor, has progressive potential but under capitalism is turned to
exploitation, job-slashing, surveillance, and war; it must be wrested
from the capitalist class. 11. COVID-19 showed the
profit system is incompatible with safeguarding lives; "profits before
lives" policies killed tens of millions while billionaires' wealth
soared. 12. The climate crisis results not from
overpopulation or technology but from their misuse by an obsolete social
order; only socialist reorganization of the world economy can prevent
civilizational collapse. 13. Capitalism is beyond
reform; key resources must be transferred to society under democratic
workers' control, replacing the law of value with democratic economic
planning.
Imperialism and War
14.
Capitalism remains rooted in the nation-state system; the imperialist
drive for dominance leads inevitably to war, now threatening nuclear
annihilation. 15. Since the USSR's dissolution,
US-led imperialist wars have expanded; the Ukraine and Iran wars mark
stages of a third world war, stoppable only by the international working
class. 16. Canada is a second-rank imperialist
power, historically allied with Britain then the US; its "peacekeeping"
image was always a lie, and it has joined every US war of aggression. 17.
The SEP demands withdrawal of all Canadian troops, scrapping of NATO,
Five Eyes, NORAD, and the Canada-US military partnership, and repudiates
calls for a more "independent" Canadian military. 18.
The SEP supports mass anti-war protest but rejects illusions in
reforming governments; it adopts the 2016 ICFI principles for an
anti-capitalist, independent, international anti-war movement.
The Capitalist State and Parliamentarism
19.
There is no parliamentary road to socialism; the state is an instrument
of class rule, and the multi-party system is a mechanism of capitalist
domination. 20. The Canadian bourgeoisie has no
democratic-revolutionary tradition ("peace, order and good government");
Confederation was a business deal, and democratic rights have been
eviscerated amid a turn to authoritarianism.
Democracy and the Fight for Workers' Power
21.
There is no democracy without socialism; fascism is capitalist
counter-revolution, and "popular front" alliances paved the way for
fascism by suppressing workers' struggles. 22.
Workers' power requires new organs of participatory democracy—a
workers' government—and the abolition of the monarchy, Senate, standing
army, police, and security apparatus.
The Political Independence of the Working Class
23.
The working class must break from national reformism (the NDP), the
union bureaucracy, and "left" nationalism; the NDP has always been a
capitalist party, and "take back the party" efforts (Corbyn, Syriza) are
mechanisms of disarming workers. 24. The
corporatist unions enforce capital's monopoly over politics, suppress
the class struggle, and support capitalist parties through
"lesser-evilism" and nationalism. 25. Canadian and
Quebec nationalism are ideological twins serving the same class
function—obscuring the imperialist character of the bourgeoisie and
dividing workers.
Against Opportunism
26.
The SEP opposes opportunism, which sacrifices long-term class interests
for short-term gains and is invariably an adaptation to the national
milieu. 27. Opportunism has socio-economic roots in
bourgeois and petty-bourgeois pressure on the workers' movement
(Bernstein, Stalin, Pablo/Mandel, the WRP); fighting it is the highest
point of the fight for Marxism.
Socialist Consciousness and the Crisis of Leadership
28. Socialist consciousness does not develop spontaneously; it must be introduced by the revolutionary party (Lenin's What Is To Be Done?); trade unionism is the "bourgeois consciousness" of the working class. 29.
Socialism requires building the Fourth International; capitalism
survived the 20th century because of the insufficiency of the workers'
leadership, not immature objective conditions. 30.
Capitalism exists today because of the betrayals of the
social-democratic, Stalinist, and trade-union organizations—a "crisis of
the leadership of the proletariat" (Trotsky).
Marxist Theory and the Working Class
31.
The SEP bases itself on dialectical materialism—the primacy of matter
over consciousness and the understanding of reality as a complex of
processes. 32. The SEP develops scientific
understanding within the working class and rejects individual violence
as a substitute for the collective mass struggle. 33.
The SEP upholds the principle of telling the working class the truth;
the program must express objective tasks, not the backwardness of the
workers (Trotsky).
The Working-Class Rebellion Against the Trade Unions and the Struggle for Rank-and-File Committees
34.
The upsurge of workers' struggles takes the form of rebellion against
the nationalist, pro-corporate unions, rooted in the global unification
of production. 35. A vast gulf separates privileged
union bureaucrats from workers; unions have collaborated in destroying
industry, enforcing speedup, and exposing workers to COVID. 36.
The SEP fights for rank-and-file committees independent of the union
apparatuses, built as embryonic organs of workers' power, organized
through the IWA-RFC.
Oppose Quebec Indépendantiste Nationalism and the Canadian Federal State
37.
The SEP opposes Quebec separatism, which serves the Quebec bourgeoisie
and upper-middle class; Québec Solidaire's function is to revive indépendantiste nationalism. 38.
Opposition to separatism does not imply support for the federal state;
workers must reject all nationalism and unite for workers' power. 39.
The SEP opposes all language-based privileges and chauvinism, defending
French-language minority rights while opposing Quebec's chauvinist
language laws.
For the United Socialist States of North America
40.
Continental economic unification is an objective necessity, but only
the united revolutionary struggle of North American workers can realize
it as the United Socialist States of North America. 41.
The SEP rejects both protectionism ("Team Canada") and "free trade" as
strategies to augment capital's power, fighting instead for social
ownership and a planned global economy.
For the Rights of the First Nations, Inuit and Metis Peoples
42.
Indigenous peoples' social position indicts Canadian capitalism;
"reconciliation" is a sham, and the "white-settler colonial state"
characterization deflects blame from capitalism and divides the working
class.
For the Defense of Immigrants, Refugees and "Temporary Foreign Workers"
43.
The SEP opposes the entire "border protection" framework, rejects the
classification of any human being as "illegal," and upholds the
unconditional right of workers to live and work wherever they choose.
Class Unity Versus Identity Politics
44.
The SEP exposes identity politics as reactionary, opposes
"multiculturalism" and "affirmative action," and fights for full
equality and the abolition of all discrimination within the struggle for
socialism.
Democratic Centralism
45.
The SEP is organized on democratic centralism—fullest democracy in
formulating policy, strictest discipline in implementing democratically
reached decisions.
Class Consciousness, Culture and the World Socialist Web Site
46.
The fight for socialism demands raising the workers' movement to the
highest theoretical and cultural level; the WSWS and Socialism AI are
the SEP's key instruments for developing socialist consciousness.
Revolutionary Strategy and Transitional Demands
47.
The SEP's aim is the overthrow of capitalism, guided by Trotsky's
Transitional Program to bridge present demands and the socialist
revolution. 48. Transitional demands include
universal employment, wage indexation, shorter hours, free healthcare
and education, housing, workplace democratization, progressive taxation,
and public ownership under workers' control. 49.
Transitional demands are not an à la carte menu; they must form part of
the broader struggle for socialist consciousness, with the destination
never kept secret.
The Working Class and the Socialist Revolution
50.
The SEP's work rests on confidence in the revolutionary role of the
working class; the emancipation of the working class is the task of the
working class itself (Engels).
Will Lehman: "Drop all charges against nurse Chloe Freeman!"
As the World Socialist Web Site has documented, no prominent
Democratic politician—including “progressives” such as Bernie Sanders,
Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—has made a public statement
on Freeman’s case, and no labor union has issued a statement of support.
The Democratic Party helped construct and fund the deportation machine,
and the union apparatuses, integrated into the state and the
corporations, function to contain and demobilize the opposition that
Freeman’s stand has inspired.
[Will] Lehman’s statement concludes with a
call for the independent mobilization of the working class: “I call on
UAW members and workers everywhere to come to Chloe Freeman’s defense.
Healthcare workers at Trinity Health and hospitals everywhere should
form rank-and-file committees to protect their patients and coworkers
from ICE. Autoworkers, nurses and all workers must unite across every
workplace to defend all immigrants and stop the deportations and ICE
raids. Defend Chloe Freeman. Drop the charges now!”
Workers can contribute to Freeman’s defense fund here.
Eight people were killed on the evening of Wednesday, September 30,
when gunmen attacked a bus carrying engineers and workers home from work
in Syria’s Homs province. The victims were reportedly Arab Alawites
from the villages of Fahel, Shaniyeh and Mahfoura in the western
countryside of Homs.
According to Syria’s official news agency
SANA and AFP, the attack took place as the vehicle belonging to the
Al-Matin company was crossing the Masyaf Bridge. One of the wounded died
the following day. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), masked
gunmen disguised as security personnel stopped the vehicle, checked the
passengers’ identity cards and then opened fire. That the killings
followed an ID check points to the sectarian character of the attack.
Violence
against minorities, including the Alawites, has not abated under the
regime of Ahmed al-Sharaa. He is the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham
(HTS), the Sunni Islamist organization with roots in Al Qaeda that came
to power when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December
2024.
Offshore workers in the North Sea have voted for strike action in a major pay dispute with US-based oil and gas giant, Apache.
Unite
has yet to announce a strike date after a mandate it described as
“emphatic” by its 160 members in a ballot that closed on October 1. It
stated in an October 5 press release that strike action “could begin
this month”.
Workers including electrical experts, production
technicians and radio operators rejected the company’s “final offer” of
just 4 percent. APA Corporation, Apache’s US parent, reported $1.4
billion in after-tax profits and $9.2 billion in revenue last year.
Unite says the 4 percent offer represents a real-terms cut for many
workers. General Secretary Sharon Graham has denounced Apache for
“raking in eye-watering profits” and treating highly skilled workers
with contempt.
Summary of Robert Stevens' article produced by Socialism AI:
The article dismantles the Trump administration's claim that Iran was plotting a drone attack on RAF Fairford. Its central points are:
The claim is implausible on its face. The US alleges the supposed plot was "modeled on Operation Spiderweb" — Ukraine's June 2025 strike on Russian airbases deep inside Russia. But that operation took over 18 months of planning, used 117 drones smuggled in on lorries, and struck across a shared border. The US-Israeli war on Iran began barely seven months ago, and Iran has no shared border with Britain and no direct military involvement there. Repeating such an operation would be, as the article puts it, "impossible."
The arrests themselves undermine the narrative. The five men arrested on September 27 — all Britons from London in their twenties — were released on bail the next day, despite police powers to hold terror suspects for 14 days without charge. No explosives were found; only "a quantity of petrol." One of the five even called the police to the scene himself. A former head of the UK's National Counter Terrorism Security Office told Al Jazeera that if there had been any trace of explosives or genuine belief they were terrorists, "they would not have been released." Two further arrests (a British-Iranian dual national and a 22-year-old) have also produced no charges.
The claim rests entirely on anonymous sources. The "Spiderweb" narrative surfaced only on October 5–6, after the Pentagon pulled 12 B-1 bombers from Fairford on October 4. Every outlet relied on unnamed US officials — "one source close to the White House," per the BBC. No named official has backed it up. Trump himself, asked whether Iran had smuggled drones into Britain, said "I can't tell you that," and could only offer that the threat "would be linked to Iran."
The real explanation is a wider US redeployment. The most authoritative rebuttal comes from Air Marshal Greg Bagwell of RUSI, who argues the Pentagon "achieved the headlines they wanted" while masking "a wider US withdrawal of most strategic assets deployed for the Iran War." He notes the USAF's own statement speaks of a "routine redeployment," that other major US bases (Mildenhall, Lakenheath) are unchanged, and that there are reports of a much broader withdrawal of strategic assets across the Middle East. The security angle, he says, serves three purposes: backing up Trump's earlier unfounded claims, masking the wider withdrawal and the failure to achieve war aims, and pressuring a British government less sympathetic to MAGA objectives.
The British government is caught in the contradiction. Prime Minister Andy Burnham initially lent support to Trump's claims of Iranian involvement (eager, the article notes, "to prove his militarist credentials"), but is now distancing itself. UK sources cast doubt on Iran's capability to mount such an operation 2,700 miles away, and the Guardian suggests the withdrawal may presage "a scaling up of operations against Iran after the US midterm elections in November" — with Trump facing record-low approval and a deeply unpopular war.
The article's underlying point is that this is a fabrication in service of the US war on Iran — a pretext to justify escalation and to obscure a strategic withdrawal that signals the war's failure. Fairford has been used to bomb Iran since March, with the permission of the Labour government, and the "terror plot" narrative is being used to sustain that war politically.
Mass
protests have erupted across India after an investigative report in one
of India’s major dailies exposed the staggering scale of the illegal
deletion of voters from the electoral rolls by the Hindu-supremacist
government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Pledged
to a program of austerity, corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and a
massive reduction in immigration, the incoming PQ government will
quickly come into headlong conflict with the working class.
Following tradition, the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court returned from summer recess on the first Monday of October, issued a slew of orders, mostly rejecting petitions for review of cases filed over the last several months, and ceremonially entertained the first oral arguments of the new term.
Promptly at 10:00 a.m., the court marshal announced: “Oyez, oyez,
oyez, all persons having business before the Supreme Court of the United
States are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the
Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable
Court.”
Chief Justice John Roberts then added, “I have the honor
to announce, on behalf of the court, that the October 2025 Term of the
Supreme Court of the United States is now closed, and the October 2026
Term is now convened.”
*****
Beneath this pomp and air of normalcy, tens of millions in the US are
wondering whether the six extreme right-wing justices that form the
Supreme Court’s super-majority will interfere with the impending
November 3 midterm elections, a projected debacle for President Donald
Trump and the Republican Party. Twenty-six years ago, the Supreme Court
voted 5-4 on bogus legal grounds to terminate the ongoing Florida vote
count and install George W. Bush as president, an election theft to
which Chief Justice John Roberts owes his position.
Roberts then maneuvered behind the scenes to engineer the extraordinary July 1, 2024 ruling granting then-private citizen Donald Trump immunity from prosecution for his role in the attempted coup of January 6, 2021.
As
the Supreme Court engaged politely with counsel, picking through
nuances of jurisprudence, Christa Gail Pike emerged from a
phenobarbital-induced coma—bruised, burned, shackled and handcuffed to a
Nashville hospital bed. Tennessee’s barbaric attempt to execute her
based on a conviction 30 years ago proceeded on September 30 after the
six right-wing justices overturned a lower court stay with no
explanation, its most recent resort to the “shadow docket.” The latter
was once a rarely used procedure where emergency orders, principally to
maintain the status quo, could be issued without full briefing or
argument, and frequently with only perfunctory explanations or, as in
the case of Pike, no explanation at all.
Over the 20 months since
Trump’s second inauguration, the court majority has repeatedly resorted
to shadow docket rulings, along with its merits cases, to expand
presidential powers under Article 2 of the Constitution, on the basis of
the so-called “unitary executive” theory. At the same time, the Supreme
Court is creating arbitrary loopholes for itself, such as the
“substantial questions doctrine,” to justify its own future
interventions to block executive actions that it does not like.
Shadow docket rulings
have overruled lower court orders to give masked ICE agents authority
to detain people based on apparent ethnicity, language or type of
employment. They have stripped immigrants of “temporary protected
status” and authorized their deportation to “third countries” with which they have no connection.
Other
shadow docket orders have allowed Trump to impound foreign aid funds
allocated by Congress, and to terminate supposedly “independent” regulatory agency
commissioners. Last summer, the majority used the shadow docket to
implement a Trump administration program that allows state election
authorities to access a notoriously unreliable federal database, compiled from confidential sources, supposedly to verify US citizenship for voter registration.
A
particularly petty shadow docket order issued August 31 overturned a
lower court injunction so that Trump can proceed with the construction
of his oversized, garish ballroom where the White House East Wing used
to stand.
*****
These repeated, unwarranted and blatantly pro-Trump interventions are
discrediting the Supreme Court in the eyes of millions. A recent Gallup
poll measured public approval at the historic low of 33 percent.
Various reforms, including term limits, an enforceable code of ethics
and expansion of the number of justices to dilute the right-wing
majority have broad support.
So far the Supreme Court has accepted
30 cases and scheduled arguments through the end of 2026. New cases
will continue to be added over the next three months, likely bringing
the total of merits cases to around 60, the annual average. Oral
arguments will be scheduled through April. Many will relate to the
flotsam and jetsam that inevitably arise in civil and criminal
litigation, but there are already several “hot button” cases scheduled.
*****
Justice Alito made the rounds of various news shows last weekend to promote his new book So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country,
a conceit that judges are equipped to divine the “original intent”
behind founding documents such as the US Constitution. In practice,
Alito and his co-thinkers junk the clear language and intent of
constitutional provisions, for example the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause, whenever it conflicts with their reactionary political objectives.
Alito
announced that he is toying with potential retirement, which usually
occurs during the summer recess rather than during a term. If the
Democrats took control of the Senate as a result of the mid-term
elections next month, they could block Trump’s nominee for Alito’s
successor, much as the Republicans blocked Obama’s nominee Merrick
Garland after the death of Antonin Scalia.
While Trump would be
hard pressed to nominate a less principled and more fascistic justice
than Alito, he could certainly nominate a younger one. Thus Alito could
retire in time for his successor to be confirmed before the next
Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027, bringing the total number of
Trump justices to four, potentially solidifying an extreme right-wing
Supreme Court majority for decades.
On October 1, thousands of allied health professionals and public sector
doctors in the Australian state of Victoria walked off the job and
rallied in Melbourne.
For allied health workers—including radiographers, physiotherapists,
podiatrists, pharmacists, speech pathologists, occupational therapists
and other health professionals—it was the third 24-hour strike in an
enterprise bargaining dispute that has been ongoing for more than a
year.
Labor has offered allied health workers a meagre 19–21
percent nominal pay rise over four years, barely higher than the current
official inflation rate of 4 percent. This would further entrench the
losses incurred under the last union-Labor enterprise agreement, which
slashed real wages for public sector allied health workers by 10
percent.
Moreover, Labor’s offer would do nothing to address
workers’ concerns over excessive workload, burnout and unsafe
staff-to-patient ratios, or the staffing shortages that underly them.
Prior
to last week’s rally, Victorian doctors had not been presented with any
offer from the state government at all, although their existing
agreement expired in February.
The two sections of workers raised
virtually identical concerns—understaffing, intolerable workloads and
plummeting real wages amid a cost-of-living crisis. Doctors and allied
health workers are up against a common enemy: the state Labor government
and its austerity agenda. This objectively poses the need for a united
struggle.
But the union bureaucracies covering them, the Victorian
Allied Health Professionals Association (VAHPA) and the Australian
Salaried Medical Officers Federation (ASMOF), are doing all they can to
divide the striking medical professionals.
The two rallies last
Thursday were carefully timed not to overlap, and union speakers at each
offered no more than token gestures of “solidarity” to the other. Just
as significant as the physical division of striking workers is their
political isolation. By covering over Labor’s responsibility for the
meltdown of the public health system and the destruction of jobs, wages
and conditions throughout the public sector, the VAHPA and ASMOF
bureaucrats aimed to drive a wedge between allied health workers and
doctors, and cut them off from the rest of the public sector.
VAHPA
Secretary Aneta Menkinoska called for workers to be “optimistic” and
continue pressuring the government for a better deal, adding, “I wish
Premier Carroll would stand on this stage and look out to see what I
can.”
This bankrupt perspective, that Labor will eventually see
reason once alerted to the plight of health workers, is based on a
distortion of reality. Labor is not only directly responsible for
imposing dire conditions on health workers over decades, having ruled
the state for 23 of the past 27 years. It is presiding over the
breakdown of the public health system, as part of an offensive by state
and federal Labor governments to inflict social austerity measures
targeting health, education and other vital services.
New data has indicated the scale of the Albanese Labor government’s
assault on disability funding in schools. More than 300 independent
schools have been forced to repay $12 million in funding already, and
this is just the start.
Schools with high numbers of students
with complex needs are sacking learning support staff, cutting programs
and receiving multi-million dollar repayment demands.
The government announced a $463 million “savings” measure for
disability education funds in its May budget. Cuts that the government
insists are a crackdown on “inaccurate claiming” and “inappropriate
allocation” will have a serious impact on 2027 school budgets across the
country.
Funding for students with disabilities in public
schools is managed by state governments. Independent schools, including
those that cater to students with extensive disabilities and vulnerable
students who otherwise cannot access education, are funded by the
federal government.
The claw back of funds has been presented in
the corporate media as schools being caught rorting the system. But this
obscures the real scandal: Labor is dismantling disability support for
vulnerable children, using the language of “fraud” and “compliance” to
do it.
On Monday, approximately 500 workers belonging to the AGC Display Glass
union in Taiwan launched a three-day strike over low pay and stagnant
wages, an issue facing workers throughout the island. Workers at the
company produce a glass substrate used in AI semiconductor chips.
Workers formed a picket line outside the factory in Douliu, Yunlin
County. The union, headed by Chairman Shen Chuan-cheng, has described
the walkout as Yunlin County’s first ever strike, an indication of the
growing anger and sentiment for a struggle among workers. In a vote to
authorize the stoppage, 90 percent of the union’s approximately 1,000
members took part, with 96 percent voting in favor. There are around
1,600 workers at the plant in total.
Clashes broke out on the
first day of the strike between the workers and management as the latter
tried to force their way through the picket line at the factory. Video
from local news agencies showed members of management and scabs brought
in to break up the strike, pushing and shoving workers as they crossed
the picket line. At least one union official was reportedly injured in
the fighting and required medical treatment at a hospital.
The
union has requested a 5 percent pay increase for workers. The
Japanese-owned company opened the factory in Yunlin County 25 years ago
and has never given a comprehensive pay raise to workers. According to
the deputy head of the union, Huang Tzu-chien, this has led to
“ridiculously” low salaries. Huang also stated that the company has been
eliminating other forms of compensation, including different types of
bonuses, while breaking pledges for salary increases.
The union
stated that the three-day action constituted a “warning strike.” It
previously staged a protest outside the Ministry of Labor (MOL) in
Taipei on September 30, where officials implored the government to
mediate the dispute between the company and the union. Officials from
the Yunlin County General Federation of Industrial Unions, including
deputy head Cheng Nai-wei, also took part in the protest.
The
union called the strike to give workers the impression something is
being done to fight on their behalf, while giving them a chance to let
off steam, rather than develop a genuine struggle against the
exploitative conditions in the factory. At the same time, union
officials hope the government will step in to impose a solution that
would inevitably be in the interests of the company.
*****
Workers throughout Taiwan face serious economic strain while business
is booming for the wealthy, in part due to the semiconductor sector.
GDP growth is expected to reach 11.05 percent in 2026, the highest in 39
years, according to figures released by the Directorate General of
Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) in August.
However, the
Taiwan Political Economy Collaborative thinktank reported that the share
of GDP in 2023 going to workers was just 44.3 percent. As of the first
quarter of 2026, this is estimated to have fallen to 35.1 percent.
The
supposed real wage growth of 1.16 percent in the first half of this
year is also illusory, created by high salaries for a relatively small
number. The Collaborative reported that half of workers are seeing their
real wages decline, forcing them to accept overtime. The DGBAS stated
that overtime for workers in the electronics and component manufacturing
sector reached their highest levels in the 47 years since recordkeeping
began. For all workers across the island, the average monthly amount of
overtime reached 17.8 hours per employee.
The DGBAS also
reported that more than 70 percent of workers take home less than the
average regular monthly wage. The median monthly wage was NT$39,283
($US1,236) through the first six months of this year, or NT$10,000 less
than the average. The agency’s statistics show that 1.26 million people
or 16.8 percent of full-time employees classify as low-wage earners for
annual income, earning less than NT$390,000 ($US12,290), or two-thirds
of the median wage per OECD standards.
Given these overall
conditions, workers in various industries throughout Taiwan are also
going on strike or threatening to take strike action. Workers at Micron
Technology in Taoyuan took part in a strike authorization vote over the
first six days of October. Micron is a US-based company but its major
production facilities for dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and
high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips are in Taiwan. The company employs
approximately 15,000 workers between plants at Taoyuan and Taichung.
Recent
US military and diplomatic visits are bound up with the transformation
of Sri Lanka into a strategic outpost in the build-up to war against
China.
Mexican
Social Security Institute workers are in revolt against a union-imposed
below-inflation raise, as the Sheinbaum government increases military
and debt spending under pressure from Washington and the IMF.
The
election shows how ever larger sections of the ruling class are relying
on the AfD to push through the hated policies of war and cuts against
the population with the utmost brutality.
A
video appeal and a statement signed by 14 detainees expose medical
neglect, sleep deprivation, prolonged imprisonment and abuse at the GEO
Group’s Folkston concentration camp.
Nearly half a million youth and workers marched against austerity and
militarism on the October 6 day of action in France, as high school
protests entered their third week. Amid mass protests in more than 50
Spanish cities against evictions and unaffordable housing, public sector
strikes in Portugal, and youth protests in Belgium and Germany, the
scope of events is clear. A European mass movement is colliding with the
police state and the diktat of the capitalist oligarchy.
In
France, hundreds of high schools have been blockaded or closed. Police
have responded with savage violence and mass arrests. More than 6,600
people, overwhelmingly youth and minors, have been arrested, with more
than 5,000 placed in police custody in barely two weeks. Hundreds have
been injured. In Lens, a 15-year-old boy lost his hand after picking up a
police stun grenade.
Protest signs invoking May-June 1968—when
police repression of student protests triggered the greatest general
strike in French history—are spreading across France. A growing layer of
youth and workers is moving to the left, seeking fundamental social
change.
The question is how the working class can intervene,
mobilize its social power to halt police violence against the youth, and
impose its own solution to the crisis in France and across Europe.
The Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES)
advocates building independent committees of action in France and
internationally, advancing the demands of rank-and-file workers and
youth on every critical question. This is essential to freeing the class
struggle from the grip of the union bureaucracies and capitalist
politicians.
France’s main trade union federations are calling
partial strikes and protests in the coming weeks but have delayed
nationwide action until November 5.
But the working class cannot
wait until November 5. The class struggle must develop freely, starting
now. The explosive energy of the youth protests must be turned toward
mobilizing the working class in France and across Europe.
The
union leaderships seek to retain control over the movement, divide it
into isolated protest days and sectoral actions, and ask the government
for limited concessions while blocking a broader mobilization. This is
the role they played in 2023, when they called strikes against Macron’s
pension cuts that were joined by millions, only to shut down the
struggle after he imposed the law.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La
France Insoumise (LFI) seek, by different means, to contain the movement
within the existing political order. Mélenchon has denounced police
violence and backed the protests but explicitly tries to channel the
movement toward the 2027 presidential election. He wrote that LFI must
“accompany this period of mobilization and political awareness” by
opening a perspective “toward 2027.”
This is the opposite of
developing the political independence of workers and youth. Mélenchon
seeks to transform an explosive movement developing against the
capitalist state into support for his campaign to take control of that
state through elections.
His perspective rests on the claim that
fundamental social improvements can be achieved within French
capitalism. But there is no national or reformist solution to an
international crisis of capitalism.
France’s public debt has risen
to almost €3.6 trillion, or 119 percent of GDP. Debt-service costs are
rising sharply while financial markets demand deeper austerity. At the
same time, the French state is pouring tens of billions into military
rearmament and its nuclear arsenal.
The same pressures operate
throughout Europe. Governments face huge debts, economic stagnation and
growing demands from the financial oligarchy for attacks on social
spending.
The far right exploits this crisis while offering an
even more brutal program. National Rally leader Marine Le Pen is
pledging €140 billion in budget cuts by 2032 while directing social
anger against immigrants and demanding a stronger police and state
apparatus.
The growth of the far right is not the expression of a
population uniformly shifting to the right. It develops amid a mounting
movement of workers and youth to the left, whose independent political
expression is blocked by organizations that subordinate the class
struggle to the capitalist state.
Bound up with this, the European bourgeoisie is turning with extraordinary aggressiveness to militarism and war against Russia.
Here
international conflict and internal class crisis reinforce one another.
The hundreds of billions required for European rearmament can only be
extracted through deeper attacks on wages, pensions, education,
healthcare and other social expenditures. The resulting social
opposition intensifies the ruling class’s turn toward nationalism,
militarism and authoritarian rule.
In the years before the First
World War, Europe was shaken by mass strikes and growing revolutionary
working-class struggle, while the imperialist powers accelerated an arms
race and passed from one international crisis to another.
When
war erupted in 1914, the ruling classes invoked national defense to
demand that workers abandon the class struggle and subordinate
themselves to their own bourgeoisie. In France, the Socialist Party and
trade union bureaucracy joined the Union sacrée; in Germany, the Social Democratic Party supported the Burgfrieden and voted for war credits.
Governments
do not launch wars simply because they confront domestic unrest. The
fundamental causes of imperialist war lie in the contradictions of the
capitalist world economy. But for ruling classes confronting mounting
opposition, militarism provides a framework to demand “national unity,”
impose immense sacrifices and strengthen the coercive powers of the
state.
This link was graphically expressed on October 6. As
hundreds of thousands marched through France, the French military
conducted the first test launch of its latest M51.3 submarine-launched
ballistic missile.
The launch came only days after Moscow issued
an explicit nuclear warning over NATO threats against Kaliningrad. The
NATO powers are proceeding on the reckless assumption that they can
continuously intensify military pressure on Russia without triggering a
catastrophic response.
But repeated survival of earlier crises
does not make the next crisis safe. As 1914 demonstrates, it can create
precisely the complacency and miscalculation that turn military
brinkmanship into catastrophe.
The war escalation and the
explosion of the class struggle are not separate questions. The same
governments that tell workers there is no money for schools, hospitals,
pensions and housing are spending hundreds of billions on armaments. And
the military-police apparatus strengthened in the name of external
security is being deployed against opposition at home.
A
progressive solution requires socialist policies: the international
mobilization of the working class to expropriate the vast wealth of the
financial oligarchy, end its looting of society and stop the escalation
toward war.
The high school and university protests can become a
powerful lever for developing such a struggle. Youth must turn to the
factories, workplaces and working-class neighborhoods and explain the
common dangers posed by the growth of the military-police machine, the
far right, the banks’ diktat over social life and the escalation of
global war. Workers, in turn, must mobilize in defense of the youth
independently of the timetable demanded by the union bureaucracies.
New
organizations of struggle and a revolutionary political perspective are
required. This is the meaning of the PES’s call to build committees of
action throughout the French, European and international working class.
Amid the explosive class struggles of the 1930s, Leon Trotsky called
committees of action a means of breaking the “anti-revolutionary
opposition of party and trade-union apparatus” via the “revolutionary
representation of the struggling masses.”
Committees of action
must be established in schools, universities and workplaces, elected and
controlled by those engaged in struggle and independent of the union
bureaucracies and capitalist parties. They can link school to school,
university to university and workplace to workplace; organize opposition
to police repression; prepare joint demonstrations and strikes; and
break through the national and sectoral divisions imposed on the working
class.
Nor can such a movement remain confined within France.
Struggles in Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Germany and France express an
international process driven by the same capitalist crisis. The whole
continent is becoming a powder keg as its governments accelerate
preparations for war.
The task today is to unify these movements
across national borders and invest them with the greatest possible
force. The alternative confronting workers and youth is not between
Macron, Mélenchon and Le Pen. It is between the deepening descent into
austerity, police-state repression and war under capitalism and the
independent political mobilization of the international working class
for socialism and the United Socialist States of Europe.
*****
Voici la traduction en français de la déclaration du PES (avec l'aide de Socialism AI) :
Près d'un demi-million de jeunes et de travailleurs ont manifesté contre l'austérité et le militarisme lors de la journée d'action du 6 octobre en France, alors que les protestations lycéennes entraient dans leur troisième semaine. Au milieu des manifestations de masse dans plus de 50 villes espagnoles contre les expulsions et le logement inabordable, des grèves du secteur public au Portugal et des protestations de la jeunesse en Belgique et en Allemagne, l'ampleur des événements est claire. Un mouvement de masse européen entre en collision avec l'État policier et le diktat de l'oligarchie capitaliste.
En France, des centaines de lycées ont été bloqués ou fermés. La police a répondu par une violence sauvage et des arrestations massives. Plus de 6 600 personnes, en très grande majorité des jeunes et des mineurs, ont été arrêtées, et plus de 5 000 placées en garde à vue en à peine deux semaines. Des centaines ont été blessées. À Lens, un garçon de 15 ans a perdu une main après avoir ramassé une grenade assourdissante de la police.
Les pancartes invoquant mai-juin 1968 — lorsque la répression policière des protestations étudiantes déclencha la plus grande grève générale de l'histoire de France — se multiplient à travers la France. Une couche croissante de jeunes et de travailleurs se déplace vers la gauche, en quête d'un changement social fondamental.
La question est de savoir comment la classe ouvrière peut intervenir, mobiliser sa puissance sociale pour mettre fin à la violence policière contre la jeunesse et imposer sa propre solution à la crise en France et à travers l'Europe.
Le Parti de l'égalité socialiste (PES) préconise la construction de comités d'action indépendants en France et à l'international, en avançant les revendications des travailleurs de base et de la jeunesse sur chaque question décisive. Cela est essentiel pour libérer la lutte des classes de l'emprise des bureaucraties syndicales et des politiciens capitalistes.
Les principales fédérations syndicales françaises appellent à des grèves et manifestations partielles dans les semaines à venir, mais ont reporté l'action nationale au 5 novembre.
Mais la classe ouvrière ne peut pas attendre le 5 novembre. La lutte des classes doit se développer librement, dès maintenant. L'énergie explosive des protestations de la jeunesse doit être orientée vers la mobilisation de la classe ouvrière en France et à travers l'Europe.
Les directions syndicales cherchent à conserver le contrôle du mouvement, à le diviser en journées de protestation isolées et en actions sectorielles, et à demander au gouvernement des concessions limitées tout en bloquant une mobilisation plus large. C'est le rôle qu'elles ont joué en 2023, lorsqu'elles ont appelé à des grèves contre la réforme des retraites de Macron auxquelles des millions ont participé, pour ensuite mettre fin à la lutte après qu'il a imposé la loi.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon et La France Insoumise (LFI) cherchent, par d'autres moyens, à contenir le mouvement dans l'ordre politique existant. Mélenchon a dénoncé la violence policière et soutenu les protestations, mais tente explicitement de canaliser le mouvement vers l'élection présidentielle de 2027. Il a écrit que LFI devait « accompagner cette période de mobilisation et de prise de conscience politique » en ouvrant une perspective « vers 2027 ».
C'est l'opposé du développement de l'indépendance politique des travailleurs et des jeunes. Mélenchon cherche à transformer un mouvement explosif se développant contre l'État capitaliste en un soutien à sa campagne pour prendre le contrôle de cet État par les élections.
Sa perspective repose sur l'affirmation selon laquelle des améliorations sociales fondamentales peuvent être obtenues au sein du capitalisme français. Mais il n'existe pas de solution nationale ou réformiste à une crise internationale du capitalisme.
La dette publique de la France a atteint près de 3 600 milliards d'euros, soit 119 % du PIB. Les coûts du service de la dette augmentent fortement tandis que les marchés financiers exigent une austérité plus profonde. Dans le même temps, l'État français déverse des dizaines de milliards dans le réarmement militaire et son arsenal nucléaire.
Les mêmes pressions opèrent dans toute l'Europe. Les gouvernements font face à des dettes énormes, à la stagnation économique et à des exigences croissantes de l'oligarchie financière en faveur d'attaques contre les dépenses sociales.
L'extrême droite exploite cette crise tout en offrant un programme encore plus brutal. La dirigeante du Rassemblement national, Marine Le Pen, promet 140 milliards d'euros de coupes budgétaires d'ici 2032, tout en dirigeant la colère sociale contre les immigrés et en exigeant un appareil policier et étatique renforcé.
La croissance de l'extrême droite n'est pas l'expression d'une population se déplaçant uniformément vers la droite. Elle se développe au milieu d'un mouvement croissant de travailleurs et de jeunes vers la gauche, dont l'expression politique indépendante est bloquée par des organisations qui subordonnent la lutte des classes à l'État capitaliste.
Lié à cela, la bourgeoisie européenne se tourne avec une agressivité extraordinaire vers le militarisme et la guerre contre la Russie.
Ici, le conflit international et la crise de classe interne se renforcent mutuellement. Les centaines de milliards nécessaires au réarmement européen ne peuvent être extraites que par des attaques plus profondes contre les salaires, les retraites, l'éducation, la santé et les autres dépenses sociales. L'opposition sociale qui en résulte intensifie le tournant de la classe dirigeante vers le nationalisme, le militarisme et le régime autoritaire.
Dans les années précédant la Première Guerre mondiale, l'Europe fut secouée par des grèves de masse et une lutte révolutionnaire croissante de la classe ouvrière, tandis que les puissances impérialistes accéléraient une course aux armements et passaient d'une crise internationale à l'autre.
Lorsque la guerre éclata en 1914, les classes dirigeantes invoquèrent la défense nationale pour exiger que les travailleurs abandonnent la lutte des classes et se subordonnent à leur propre bourgeoisie. En France, le Parti socialiste et la bureaucratie syndicale rejoignirent l'Union sacrée ; en Allemagne, le Parti social-démocrate soutint le Burgfrieden et vota les crédits de guerre.
Les gouvernements ne lancent pas des guerres simplement parce qu'ils font face à des troubles intérieurs. Les causes fondamentales de la guerre impérialiste résident dans les contradictions de l'économie capitaliste mondiale. Mais pour les classes dirigeantes confrontées à une opposition croissante, le militarisme fournit un cadre pour exiger l'« unité nationale », imposer d'immenses sacrifices et renforcer les pouvoirs coercitifs de l'État.
Ce lien fut exprimé de manière frappante le 6 octobre. Alors que des centaines de milliers de personnes défilaient à travers la France, l'armée française procédait au premier tir d'essai de son dernier missile balistique mer-sol M51.3.
Ce tir intervenait quelques jours seulement après que Moscou eut émis un avertissement nucléaire explicite concernant les menaces de l'OTAN contre Kaliningrad. Les puissances de l'OTAN procèdent sur la présomption téméraire qu'elles peuvent intensifier continuellement la pression militaire sur la Russie sans déclencher une réponse catastrophique.
Mais la survie répétée de crises antérieures ne rend pas la prochaine crise sûre. Comme le démontre 1914, cela peut créer précisément la complaisance et l'erreur de calcul qui transforment la surenchère militaire en catastrophe.
L'escalade de la guerre et l'explosion de la lutte des classes ne sont pas des questions séparées. Les mêmes gouvernements qui disent aux travailleurs qu'il n'y a pas d'argent pour les écoles, les hôpitaux, les retraites et le logement dépensent des centaines de milliards en armements. Et l'appareil militaro-policier renforcé au nom de la sécurité extérieure est déployé contre l'opposition à l'intérieur.
Une solution progressiste exige des politiques socialistes : la mobilisation internationale de la classe ouvrière pour exproprier la vaste richesse de l'oligarchie financière, mettre fin à son pillage de la société et arrêter l'escalade vers la guerre.
Les protestations des lycéens et des étudiants peuvent devenir un puissant levier pour développer une telle lutte. La jeunesse doit se tourner vers les usines, les lieux de travail et les quartiers ouvriers et expliquer les dangers communs posés par la croissance de la machine militaro-policière, l'extrême droite, le diktat des banques sur la vie sociale et l'escalade de la guerre mondiale. Les travailleurs, à leur tour, doivent se mobiliser pour la défense de la jeunesse indépendamment du calendrier exigé par les bureaucraties syndicales.
De nouvelles organisations de lutte et une perspective politique révolutionnaire sont nécessaires. C'est le sens de l'appel du PES à construire des comités d'action dans toute la classe ouvrière française, européenne et internationale. Au milieu des luttes de classes explosives des années 1930, Léon Trotsky qualifia les comités d'action de moyen de briser l'« opposition anti-révolutionnaire de l'appareil des partis et des syndicats » par la « représentation révolutionnaire des masses en lutte ».
Les comités d'action doivent être établis dans les écoles, les universités et les lieux de travail, élus et contrôlés par ceux qui sont engagés dans la lutte et indépendants des bureaucraties syndicales et des partis capitalistes. Ils peuvent relier école à école, université à université et lieu de travail à lieu de travail ; organiser l'opposition à la répression policière ; préparer des manifestations et des grèves communes ; et briser les divisions nationales et sectorielles imposées à la classe ouvrière.
Un tel mouvement ne peut pas non plus rester confiné à la France. Les luttes en Espagne, au Portugal, en Belgique, en Allemagne et en France expriment un processus international porté par la même crise capitaliste. Le continent entier devient une poudrière alors que ses gouvernements accélèrent les préparatifs de guerre.
La tâche aujourd'hui est d'unifier ces mouvements par-delà les frontières nationales et de leur conférer la plus grande force possible. L'alternative qui confronte les travailleurs et les jeunes n'est pas entre Macron, Mélenchon et Le Pen. Elle est entre l'approfondissement de la descente dans l'austérité, la répression de l'État policier et la guerre sous le capitalisme, et la mobilisation politique indépendante de la classe ouvrière internationale pour le socialisme et les États-Unis socialistes d'Europe.
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.
