Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Fascist Ukrainian court sentences Bogdan Syrotiuk, socialist opponent of war, to 15 years in prison
Bogdan Syrotiuk
On August 10, Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist and
opponent of the US-NATO war against Russia, was sentenced to 15 years in
prison. The verdict, handed down by a district court in the Nikolaev region, also orders the confiscation of his property and electronic
devices and the destruction of the socialist books, leaflets and programmatic documents taken from him.
The World Socialist Web Site
and the International Committee of the Fourth International denounce
this verdict and call on workers, young people and all defenders of democratic rights around the world to demand Bogdan’s immediate release.
The
verdict will be immediately appealed. Under Ukrainian law, the appeal
must be filed within 30 days. We call on all supporters of democratic
rights to back these legal actions and call for the annulment of the
sentence.
Bogdan, a leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists
(YGBL), was convicted of “high treason … under martial law.” But the
record of the case contains no act of treason—no espionage, no sabotage,
no collaboration with any military force. The sole evidence presented
against him consisted of his writings, published on the World Socialist Web Site, and his communications with the editors who published them.
The state’s experts examined 14 of Bogdan’s writings and included
seven in the indictment. The court was then forced to drop one of the
seven—an article on the military commissariats’ violent seizure of draft
dodgers—after its own forensic commission could find nothing criminal
in it. Bogdan has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for six articles.
What
was the subversive content? According to the court, the articles
contained “non-recognition of Ukraine’s legitimately elected political
leadership and democratic processes,” “comparisons with fascists and
Nazis,” “negative assessments of Ukraine’s Armed Forces” and
“reinterpretation of national heroes and historical figures.”
In
fact, everything written by Bogdan is politically and historically
accurate. The “legitimately elected political leadership” is a president
whose term of office expired in May 2024. [Volodymyr] Zelensky remains in power
more than two years past his legal mandate, ruling by decree under a
state of permanent martial law. Elections have been canceled and basic
democratic rights suspended. Bogdan has been convicted of failing to
recognize “democratic processes” in a country where no democratic
processes exist. His is a verdict handed down by a regime of illegality.
As for the “national heroes” whom Bogdan is accused of
“reinterpreting,” they are Stepan Bandera and the leaders of the OUN
(Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the Waffen-SS Galicia
Division—Nazi collaborators who supported Hitler’s invasion of the
Soviet Union in 1941 and were implicated in the mass murder of Jews and
Poles. The court’s complaint about “comparisons with fascists and Nazis”
refers to Bogdan’s exposure of the official rehabilitation and
celebration of these forces.
Among the “proofs” of treason cited
by the court are Bogdan’s article “The crimes of the Banderovites
against the Ukrainian people: Notes by a Ukrainian Trotskyist” and his
2023 May Day speech, “For the Unity of the Working Class of Russia and
Ukraine!” In any country where democratic rights retain the slightest
meaning, such writings are protected speech. In Ukraine under Zelensky,
they carry a 15-year sentence.
When Bogdan was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on
April 25, 2024, the state claimed he was functioning as an agent of the
Russian government. In the more than two years since, nothing was
produced to substantiate that libelous allegation. In fact, the articles
that are cited in the conviction make explicit Bogdan’s opposition to
the Russian invasion and the Putin regime.
The verdict refers several times to the “socially dangerous
consequences” of Bogdan’s positions. This exposes the fact that the
prosecution of Bogdan is not about the manufactured pretext of support
for Russia. Rather, it is aimed at the growing opposition to war and the
Zelinsky regime among Ukrainian workers and youth.
The evidence presented in Bogdan’s defense was never answered. A
65-page report by Yuri Irkhin, one of Ukraine’s leading criminologists,
found in Bogdan’s writings no “statements, phrases, sentences, or word
combinations that have signs of propaganda aimed at supporting the armed
aggression of the Russian Federation.” Rather than respond to it, the
court ordered a new examination from a state forensic institute—which,
even so, found in the articles no calls for the overthrow of the state,
the seizure of power, subversive acts or the alteration of Ukraine’s
borders.
The defense established that nothing in the record made
out the elements of treason, and that Bogdan’s writings were political
speech protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human
Rights. The court swept all of this aside.
The verdict was not the outcome of a legal proceeding but the
execution of a political directive from the Zelensky dictatorship. It
states that Bogdan acted “on instructions from a representative of the
World Socialist Web Site, under the pseudonym ‘David’”—identified in the
judgment itself as David North, chairman of the International Editorial
Board of the WSWS. The Ukrainian state is asserting the power to
declare international socialist and antiwar publications criminal
enterprises, and collaboration with them treason.
The decision to destroy the YGBL’s program, its brochures, leaflets and
folders of printed articles exposes the real content of the verdict. The
methods are those of fascist regimes: imprison the opposition,
confiscate its materials, burn its writings. The court even ordered
Bogdan to pay more than 178,000 hryvnia [almost US$4,000 today] to cover the cost of the
forensic “examinations” used to convict him.
The sentencing of Bogdan takes place in a country in which left-wing
politics has been outlawed. Communist parties and symbols have been
banned in Ukraine since the “decommunization” laws of 2015. In 2022, the
Zelensky government suspended 11 opposition parties, including the
largest opposition party in parliament, which was subsequently banned
outright.
Some 20,000 criminal cases have been opened under
Ukraine’s treason and collaboration statutes, according to the United
Nations Human Rights Office, which reported in September 2025 that it
“continues to document cases of torture and ill-treatment” of detainees
held by the Ukrainian state. Human Rights Watch describes the
collaboration laws as “overly broad and vague”; among those prosecuted
are people who carried out “emergency services, construction,
humanitarian relief and garbage removal” in occupied territory.
The World Socialist Web Site has been banned in Ukraine since June 6, 2024, six weeks after Bogdan’s arrest.
All
of this has been buried and concealed from the public by the government
and media outlets that claim the war is being waged in defense of
Ukrainian democracy.
The frame-up of Bogdan is the act of a
desperate regime. Opposition to the war is mounting within Ukraine
itself. More than 300,000 criminal cases have been opened against
soldiers for desertion or absence without leave since 2022, the majority
of them in the past year. In 2025, 69 percent of Ukrainians told Gallup
that the country should seek a negotiated end to the war, a complete
reversal of opinion since 2022. Terrified of the growth of antiwar
sentiment among workers and soldiers, the Zelensky government is
intensifying repression at home while working to create the framework
for the direct entry of the NATO powers into the war.
A sentence
of 15 years in a Ukrainian prison is the equivalent of a death sentence.
The conditions in Ukraine’s penitentiary system are well documented. At
the United Nations Committee Against Torture’s review of Ukraine in
April 2025, experts cited overcrowding, inadequate access to food and
water, the absence of independent medical examinations and a rising toll
of deaths in custody. The Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee,
reporting on its October 2023 visit to Ukraine, described decaying
facilities in which remand prisoners are confined to their cells for up
to 23 hours a day and found conditions in one pretrial detention center
so degraded that it judged them potentially “inhuman and degrading.”
Bogdan,
whose health was already poor at the time of his arrest, has been
denied urgently needed medical treatment for over a year, despite
repeated promises from the prison administration. Every day behind bars
is a threat to his life.
His fate cannot be left to the courts of a
state that has just demonstrated its fascist contempt for democratic
rights. Bogdan’s freedom will be won by the mobilization of the
international working class, youth and all progressive organizations and
individuals dedicated to the defense of democratic rights. We appeal to
workers, trade unions, student and youth organizations, civil liberties
groups, and socialist and antiwar movements in every country: Take up
Bogdan’s case. Pass resolutions in your workplaces, unions, schools and
universities demanding his release. Issue public statements of protest. Sign and circulate the petition for his freedom.
The
fight to free Bogdan Syrotiuk is a fight against imperialist war,
dictatorship and fascism. Fill out the form provided to get involved.
2. Trump’s lawless deportation machine: ICE actions ruled illegal 16,000 times
Federal judges have ruled 16,000 times in the past year that actions
by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in detaining immigrants are
illegal, according to a report published by Politico on Sunday.
Two-thirds
of the rulings concern the same issue: the refusal of ICE to allow
detained immigrants to seek release on bond. In a two-page memo issued
July 8, 2025, ICE overturned a longstanding policy that immigrants
arrested inside the United States for civil immigration violations were
eligible to seek release on bond.
According to Politico:
Every prior president
applied mandatory detention without bond only to people apprehended soon
after crossing the border or who were deemed to be dangerous, not for
those who had built law-abiding lives—married U.S. citizens, had
children, held jobs, paid taxes—since they arrived. ICE’s new memo
erased that distinction
Some 469 federal judges have found the new policy to be illegal,
issuing more than 10,000 orders to release detained immigrants on bond,
after the courts were flooded with suits filed on behalf of those
imprisoned under savage conditions in detention camps run by ICE or
private prison contractors like The GEO Group and CoreCivic. About 50
federal judges, nearly all appointed by Trump, have upheld the new
policy.
The Trump administration has fought every single one of
these cases, appealing them to circuit courts, which have split on the
issue, virtually ensuring that the legality of the detention policy will
ultimately be decided by the right wing-dominated Supreme Court, likely
in the coming term.
*****
The Trump administration escalated the campaign against immigrants last
week in a series of actions. The Department of Homeland Security has
revoked Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than 1 million
immigrants who have been legally present in the United States for many
years, in some cases for decades.
This includes 350,000 Haitians, 610,000 Venezuelans, 72,000 Hondurans
and smaller numbers from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nepal, Nicaragua, South
Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Another 170,000 migrants from El Salvador are to
lose TPS status in September and more than 100,000 from Ukraine in
October.
On August 5, a federal judge issued a final ruling bringing the
termination of TPS status into effect for Haitians, but ICE has not yet
moved against them in large numbers, despite having their current
addresses as part of the TPS program. This has led to howls from fascist
Trump supporters. “The airplanes and the buses should have been ready,”
said Steve Bannon, a former Trump White House aide. “One hundred
percent of the Haitians should have already left the country. It’s
unacceptable they’re not.”
Meanwhile, ICE is continuing to stonewall critics of the conditions
under which detained immigrants are held. In response to a federal court
ruling in the state of Washington that The GEO Group, the biggest
private contractor for ICE, must allow state health inspectors access to
its facility near Tacoma, ICE signed revised contracts with GEO that
state and local laws “shall not apply” to detention facilities it
operates for ICE in three other states.
Facilities run by ICE itself are not subject to state and local
inspection, so another tactic for evading health inspections is for the
private company to sell the prison to the government and then lease it
back. Both The GEO Group and CoreCivic have sold multiple prisons to the
Trump administration, which also allows them to book the revenue from
the sale in the current year, while the lease payments will be made over
a more extended period—in effect, a further subsidy for profit-making
private companies from the federal treasury.
CoreCivic and The GEO Group reported a combined $1.4 billion in
quarterly revenue for the second quarter of the year, not counting the
$1.6 billion CoreCivic received from selling and leasing back four
prisons.
The GEO Group has close ties to the Trump administration.
Former company executive David Venturella is the acting director of
ICE; White House border “czar” Tom Homan was a paid consultant for the
company; and Pam Bondi, US attorney general until Trump fired her in the
spring, was a lobbyist for GEO. Trump himself owns stock in both GEO
and CoreCivic, all purchased after he began his second term in office.
GEO’s stock price has risen from $12 a share in August 2024 to more than
$30 a share now.
3. United Kingdom: Your Party’s collapse—Time to build the Socialist Equality Party
A comprehensive report delivered at Socialist Equality Party (UK) public
meetings explains why Jeremy Corbyn's Your Party collapsed and why it is necessary to support the international program of the SEP.
4. Germany: Massive cuts at universities in North Rhine-Westphalia and Hesse, protests in Kassel against militarisation
As
the German government raises military spending to record levels,
universities face cuts of hundreds of millions of euros—eliminating
degree programs, professorships and research posts, while the arms
industry moves onto campus.
5. France’s social media ban imposes universal identity checks on the entire population
On July 21, the French parliament gave final approval to a sweeping,
reactionary law banning children under 15 from major social media
platforms and extending the existing school cellphone ban to high
schools. The Senate approved the text 243-2 that morning; the National
Assembly passed it 279-81 that evening, with 66 abstentions. Hailed by
President Emmanuel Macron as a defense of children, it is an
authoritarian measure requiring every internet user in France to prove
their age, and therefore their identity, to access social networks.
Under European Union procedure, France cannot promulgate it before
August 10; deputies from La France Insoumise (LFI) and the Socialist
Party (PS) have referred it to the Constitutional Council, which has a
month to rule. Whatever the Council decides, the political meaning of
the vote is unmistakable. In a bogus pretext of safeguarding youth, the
European bourgeoisie is on an offensive to abolish online anonymity,
erect Internet censorship, and tie every digital footprint to a
state-verified physical identity.
Its target is the growing
political radicalization of workers and youth internationally. Macron,
widely despised as the “president of the rich,” is in the final months
of a decade-long presidency. Amid skyrocketing living costs, deepening
social inequality, and escalating war with Russia, his government is
seizing on parents’ concerns over their children’s wellbeing to build
the infrastructure of a total Internet surveillance.
*****
What alarms capitalist governments is not youth suffering or anguish,
but growing youth opposition to their policies of war, austerity and
dictatorship. The Gaza genocide, broadcast in real time on social media,
politicized a generation. Footage of bombed hospitals and decimated
schools exposed the lies of the Western governments that armed the
slaughter. Masses of youth held protests and school strikes against war
crimes they saw on their phone screens. It is such exposures of state
criminality that the social media ban is designed to prevent.
*****
The mechanism of the French law is thoroughly reactionary. Beginning
September 1, children under 15 will be barred from opening new accounts.
From January 1, 2027, social media corporations must identify and
suspend all existing underage accounts, forcing every user in France to
prove they are over 15 to access social networks.
There is no
method of verifying the age of children online without verifying
everyone’s age and thus identity. Indeed, in the final text agreed by
the joint committee, following a negative opinion issued by the European
Commission on July 6, lawmakers stripped out the provisions requiring
platforms to submit age-verification systems to Arcom, the audiovisual
and digital regulator, for approval.
The prohibition remains,
however. The French state has simply pushed the machinery of enforcement
upward, onto the European Union’s Digital Services Act and the
age-verification framework that the European Commission is pressing
member states to adopt before the end of the year.
Users may be
required to upload passports, driver’s licenses or national identity
documents to state-approved third parties such as France Identité or
Docaposte. They may be subjected to biometric facial-age estimation,
using tools from firms such as Yoti, already employed by Meta and
TikTok, that analyze a user’s selfie in real time. Or age may be
certified through the European digital identity wallet, using
cryptographic “zero-knowledge proofs” that confirm an age band without
disclosing a name to the platform.
*****
In an era of explosive class struggle and growing
opposition to war, the capitalist state views online anonymity as a
mortal threat. It seeks to tie every social media post, every political
critique and every effort at working-class organization to a
state-verified physical identity. The policing of circumvention is
already escalating into an assault on privacy tools. Regulators in
France, Britain and Australia are moving to bring virtual private
networks (VPNs) under the same regime.
The surveillance offensive targeting the Internet in France is part of a
global attack on democratic rights. The governments of the United
States, the European Union, Britain and Australia are moving together to
abolish online anonymity and impose universal digital identification,
from the Kids Online Safety Act in Washington to the EU’s “Chat Control”
regulation.
*****
The Parti de l’égalité socialiste and the World Socialist Web Site
oppose this law, censorship and police state surveillance. The defense
of internet freedom is a class question. The only social force capable
of carrying it out is the international working class, which must fight
for the expropriation of the technology monopolies and their
transformation into public utilities under workers’ control.
6. British Columbia declares state of emergency as wildfires force 22,000 from their homes
British Columbia’s New Democratic Party government declared a
province-wide state of emergency Saturday as rapidly spreading wildfires
forced close to 22,000 people from their homes and threatened thousands
more.
The emergency was declared after the Bald Range wildfire exploded west of Summerland in the Okanagan Valley.
*****
As of Monday
afternoon, some 21,400 people from over 12,000 properties remained
evacuated, with a further 11,000 on high alert. One person has been
confirmed dead, and the province’s major population centers in the south
are facing yellow and orange air quality warnings.
First detected
Friday evening, the fire expanded to roughly 50 square kilometres
within three hours and by Saturday had burned more than 100 square kilometers, racing toward Okanagan Lake. All 12,000 residents of
Summerland were ordered to evacuate, while orders spread through
Peachland and surrounding communities.
Helicopters diverted from
firefighting operations rescued more than 50 people trapped by the
advancing flames. Premier David Eby acknowledged that homes and other
property had been destroyed, although officials have not yet established
the full toll.
Even before the losses around Summerland can be
assessed, the devastation this season in British Columbia is immense.
Separate fires in the Cariboo region and on the Okanagan Indian Band
reserve have destroyed about 350 buildings, most of them homes. Some 230
homes were destroyed by the Bradley Creek fire alone.
More than 100 wildfires were burning across British Columbia over the weekend, with nearly half classified as out of control.
*****
Across the Atlantic in Europe, fires have sent thousands fleeing for
their lives and blistering heat has caused more than 25,000 deaths.
The
increasingly ferocious wildfire seasons sweeping the globe are directly
bound up with the burning of fossil fuels. A World Weather Attribution
study released Thursday found that global warming has sharply increased
the likelihood of the extreme fire weather experienced this summer.
Combining
observations with climate models, researchers concluded that the most
intense seven-day fire weather in the Northwest Territories was made
about five times more likely by 1.4 degrees Celsius of global warming,
while prolonged 30-day conditions were made twice as likely. In Ontario,
both measures were made about twice as likely.
*****
As the World Socialist Web Site has documented, Ottawa
committed just $800 million to wildland fire response, prevention and
mitigation from 2019 through 2024. This is a pittance compared with the
$650 billion mobilized to sustain corporate Canada during the opening
phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, $41 billion in military expenditure in
2024-25 and $8.5 billion in fossil-fuel subsidies in 2024.
Under
Prime Minister Mark Carney, the diversion of society’s resources into
militarism has accelerated. Ottawa increased defense spending by more
than $9 billion in 2025-26 to reach 2 percent of GDP, approximately $63
billion, and has pledged to meet NATO’s new target of 5 percent by
2035.
The condition of Canada’s fire services shows the
consequences of these priorities. The Great Canadian Fire Census
reported 123,608 active firefighters in 2024, 71 percent of them
volunteers. Almost half of departments were using out-of-date apparatus,
while nearly one-third said they lacked adequate training to confront
wildfire threats.
*****
Tens of billions of dollars are made freely available for corporate
profits, military rearmament and strategic resource projects.
Regulations are swept aside and the repressive apparatus of the state is
mobilized when these interests are threatened.
Meanwhile,
working people facing wildfires, toxic smoke, mass evacuation and the
destruction of their communities are left with emergency declarations
issued after catastrophe has struck, and overstretched crews confronting
increasingly uncontrollable conditions.
Liberal, Conservative and
NDP governments all defend the capitalist profit system that drives the
climate crisis and blocks the coordinated response required to confront
it. Economic life remains subordinated to private accumulation and
divided among rival nation-states pursuing competing corporate and
geopolitical interests. These conditions make rational international
planning to halt global warming impossible.
A genuine response to protect the population requires a massive
expansion of professional firefighting forces, modern equipment, forest
management, evacuation infrastructure and climate-resilient housing.
Most fundamentally, the power of the financial oligarchy over social
life must be broken and the production forces placed under democratic
control, so that a scientific plan can bring about the rapid shift away
from fossil fuels for energy production and usage internationally.
The
social resources consumed by corporate subsidies, fossil-fuel expansion
and preparations for war must be redirected toward human need.
Achieving this requires the independent political mobilization of the
international working class against capitalism and the socialist
reorganization of economic life under democratic public control.
7. East Asia hit by heatwaves as climate change pushes temperatures to record highs
Devastating heatwaves have gripped many parts of East Asia in recent
weeks as the region experiences record-high temperatures during the
Northern Hemisphere’s summer. Human-driven climate change is resulting
in more extreme weather, which disproportionately impacts the working
class and the poor.
On August 2, South Korea experienced its
hottest day since records began in 1904, with temperatures reaching 42.5
degrees Celsius (108.5 degrees Fahrenheit) in the city of Yangsan,
South Gyeongsang Province. At least 30 people have died from
heat-related illnesses since May while more than three thousand have
been hospitalized. Many of these are farmers and workers. At least seven
people have died in rice paddies or farm fields while six have died at
work sites.
For the past few weeks, heat warnings have been issued on a daily
basis, urging people to limit outdoor activity. However, many workers,
such as those in construction and logistics, are unable to seek refuge
from the heat.
*****
This is not solely a South Korean phenomenon. Workers are being kept
on the job under unsafe conditions in other parts of Asia as well. On
Sunday afternoon in Hong Kong, temperatures measured at the Hong Kong
Observatory in Tsim Sha Tsui reached a record 36.9ºC (98.42ºF), the
highest since 1884. In Sheung Shui, temperatures reached 39.8ºC
(103.64ºF).
A framework supposedly exists for curtailing or
suspending work outside or indoors without air conditioning when
temperatures reach certain levels. Utilizing the Hong Kong Heat Index,
there are three levels in escalating order: amber, red and black. The
system was introduced in 2023 and has been triggered more than 200
times, though red and black alerts have never been issued, including
during the recent record-high temperatures.
Lam Chiu-ying, who headed the Hong Kong Observatory from 2003 to 2009,
said the heat index underestimates the effects of solar radiation,
“making it unsuitable for outdoor work environments,” according to the Hong Kong Free Press.
Lam added, “If even record-breaking temperatures fail to trigger [the
red warning], is it not just a decorative display piece?”
*****
Last year, China also experienced its hottest year on record. The
national average reached 22.31ºC (72.16ºF), the highest since
record-keeping began in 1961, according to the China Meteorological
Administration.
Temperatures in Japan are also setting new records. The single hottest
day came last year in the city of Isesaki, Gunma Prefecture where heat
reached 41.8ºC (107.24ºF). This July was marked by a record five
consecutive days of temperatures over 40ºC. Kumamoto, which was struck
by an earthquake on July 28, experienced its highest temperature on
record on August 3. More than 8,500 remain in emergency shelters and
45,000 households do not have water.
*****
The world’s seas last month were hotter than any previous July on
record, reaching 20.96ºC, beating a figure set in 2023. This has in part
been driven by this year’s El Niño weather pattern in the Pacific,
which is a natural warming of eastern and central Pacific waters leading
to warmer global temperatures. This year’s El Niño is predicated to
become the strongest on record.
8. Pacific foreign ministers fail to agree on statement condemning Chinese missile test
Pacific foreign ministers meeting in Fiji on August 7 failed to agree
on a joint statement condemning China’s recent test of a
nuclear-capable ballistic missile in the region. New Zealand Foreign
Minister Winston Peters lashed out angrily, accusing some governments of
appeasing China.
China test-fired
an intercontinental ballistic missile across the Pacific on July 6,
landing in a patch of ocean between the Solomon Islands, Nauru (now
renamed the Republic of Naoero) and Tuvalu. Tuvalu—a tiny island nation
whose defense policy is effectively controlled by Australia—demanded a
collective Pacific response and criticized the lack of prior notice and
alleged “intimidation” by external powers.
It was the third test
carried out by China in the Pacific, the previous two being in 1980 and
2024. China’s People’s Liberation Army insisted that the test was
routine, complied with international law and did not target any
particular country.
A cacophony of criticism erupted from the US
and its allies. Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign
Minister Penny Wong both branded the test as “destabilizing to the
region.” Peters bluntly warned: “We as a region should not sit by and
allow such tests to become normalized or routine.” The governments of
Japan and the Philippines also issued strongly worded condemnations.
The
US State Department said it had monitored China’s test and absurdly
declared: “At a time when the United States is working harder than ever
to prevent nuclear proliferation, China is doing the opposite… We
continue to urge China to engage in meaningful arms control
discussions.”
The US military, which is engaged in criminal wars
against Iran and Russia, regularly conducts ballistic missile tests in
the Pacific, with two already this year. The US has the world’s largest
nuclear weapons arsenal, which is currently being upgraded.
The dispute is an expression of the sharp geopolitical tensions created
by the advanced US-led preparations for war against China. New Zealand
and Australia are seeking to block China’s growing economic and
diplomatic influence in the Pacific and are presenting Beijing in
increasingly hysterical terms as a military threat. While using aid to
pressure Pacific states, they are militarizing the region and forcing
them to cut economic and diplomatic ties with Beijing.
*****
The failure of the meeting to reach agreement was met with barely
concealed fury in Canberra and Wellington. The ABC reported that sources
had said Kiribati and Naoero, which have both built closer ties with
Beijing, “continued to block consensus on the statement… despite broad
support for it in the room.”
9. Jacobin advises union bureaucracy on how to respond to wave of contract rejection
An expanding rebellion by rank-and-file workers is colliding ever
more openly with the trade union bureaucracy. One of the sharpest
expressions of this is the repeated rejection of sellout tentative
agreements endorsed by union officials and worked out with management.
At
least 16 contracts endorsed by the unions have been rejected so far in
2026 alone, on pace to exceed the high set in 2021. Over the past
several months, workers at BP’s Whiting, Indiana refinery rejected a
six-year concessions contract by 98.3 percent. Roughly 1,700 engineers
and train-service workers at Canadian Pacific Kansas City defeated
parallel nine-year contracts covering operations across 11 states. In
Canada, British Columbia nurses rejected a union-endorsed agreement by
67 percent, while workers at Coast Mountain Bus Company, which employs
more than 5,000 Unifor members in Metro Vancouver, voted down another
tentative agreement.
Parts workers in the United Auto Workers have
rejected at least six contracts this year, at Bridgewater Interior,
Dana and Nexteer. At Nexteer in Saginaw, Michigan workers voted down
three deals, while a rank-and-file committee was formed which called on
workers to “become the authority” and enforce their strike vote. The UAW
responded by colluding with management to ram through a fourth vote,
held on the factory floor and firing worker Antwiane Sanders for
opposing the contract.
This growing collision between workers and
the apparatus is expressed in the growth of rank-and-file committees
fighting to mobilize workers against sellouts and overthrow the corrupt
union apparatus. This is the program advanced by Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman in his campaign for UAW president.
The bureaucracy’s fear of this movement is encapsulated in an article published last week by Jacobin, “What to Do When Your Union Contract Is Voted Down.”
Its
author, Chris Brooks, was until recently the chief of staff and top
strategist for United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain. A former Labor
Notes organizer and NewsGuild official, Brooks was brought into the UAW
after Fain took office in 2023. He helped devise the “Stand Up” strike
at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, a limited walkout which was
followed by sellout contracts and thousands of layoffs.
Brooks-a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-resigned
in December rather than face suspension after the court-appointed UAW
monitor exposed his role in inserting false allegations into a report
used to strip UAW Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock of her duties. Jacobin promptly made him a labor columnist.
Brooks’s career—and his article—expose the political function of Jacobin,
the DSA and Labor Notes as advisers and leading personnel within the
union apparatus. They specialize in particular in supplying rhetorical
and organizational techniques through which officials seek to impose
management’s demands on an increasingly militant workforce.
*****
In his Jacobin piece, Brooks tries to cover his tracks. “I applaud
workers who are making company executives wring their hands over their
refusal to accept that status quo in bargaining.” He adds: “Our standard
of living has declined under the combined pressure of stagnant wages
and rising prices.” In reality, the income of the apparatus is increasing while workers paltry raises are eaten up by inflation. Brooks, for example, received $211,968 from the UAW in 2025.
His applause quickly gives way to a warning that contract rejection brings “real dangers.” He writes:
Workers
might go out on a long and painful strike only to return with an offer
little better than the one they originally shot down. The experience can
divide and demoralize both the membership and the bargaining team. Bargainers can feel abandoned by the members who elected them
[emphasis added]. Members can feel betrayed by the bargainers they
elected. In the end, the union feels weaker, and the boss appears
stronger.
The complaint that bargainers feel
“abandoned” by the members opposed to their sellouts recalls the quip by
German satirist Bertolt Brecht, in response to the brutal suppression
of the 1953 East German uprising, that “the government [should] dissolve
the people and elect another.”
*****
The pseudo-left has risen inside the bureaucracy precisely at the point
when union officials are employing more dirty tricks and
anti-democratic methods to counter the growing rank-and-file revolt. Its
specialists in communications, “organizing” and corporatist labor
relations seek to keep workers confined within institutions that impose
layoffs, concessions and state policy. Their central concern is the
danger that workers will organize new forms of struggle to break the
grip of the bureaucracy.
*****
These politics express the interests of a narrow, affluent
upper-middle-class layer that includes union functionaries, academics,
nonprofit executives and professional political operatives. Its income
and status depend upon positions inside the unions, the Democratic Party
and the state. The class struggle threatens those positions. Populist
rhetoric allows this layer to speak in the name of workers while
defending institutions whose authority depends upon suppressing them.
The
alternative is emerging in the rank-and-file rebellion that Brooks
seeks to contain. The campaign of Will Lehman gives it a conscious
program: abolish the union bureaucracy, transfer power and control over
the unions’ resources to workers on the shop floor, and build
rank-and-file committees independent of the apparatus. The committees at
Nexteer, Mack Trucks and other workplaces organize workers to formulate
their own demands, oversee votes and unite their struggles across
plants and national borders. The decisive issue is who exercises
control. Brooks proposes new machinery for the officials. Workers
require organizations of their own.
10. US economy sheds 23,000 jobs in July
The official unemployment rate, as always, conceals the true scale of
the jobs catastrophe. The number of people employed part-time for
economic reasons—those whose hours have been cut or who cannot find
full-time work—stood at 4.8 million. Of the people who had exited the
labor force, 5.9 million reported that they wanted a job but could not
find work because of a lack of openings. Of these, 1.8 million had
searched for work in the past year but not in the previous four weeks,
and 476,000 were classified as discouraged workers who had given up
looking entirely.
The number of people on temporary layoff jumped
by 153,000 to 921,000—a sharp increase that signals employers are firing
workers at an accelerating pace. The long-term unemployed, those
jobless for 27 weeks or more, stood at 1.8 million, accounting for 25.5
percent of all unemployed people.
*****
The White House response to the jobs data was to attempt to present
the abysmal report as keeping with Trump’s strategy. Spokesman Kush
Desai declared that “the Trump industrial resurgence is on schedule” and
cited growth in manufacturing and factory construction jobs, making no
mention of the net payroll decline or the major negative revisions.
Kevin
Hassett, Director of the National Economic Council, in a Fox Business
appearance, attributed the weak numbers to what he called “special
factors” like the cuts to public education. He insisted the
administration remained “very bullish,” while conceding that “if you
were to get a sequence of numbers like this,” there would be real cause
for concern.
The Democrats rushed to use the report to attack
Trump while saying nothing of their own role in supporting the policies
that produced them. Representative Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, the
ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, declared that “Trump’s
tariff taxes and disastrous Iran war are raising costs, slowing growth,
and hurting the job market.” The Democratic Party voted overwhelmingly
to fund the war, with members wavering on support for the tariffs when
they serve the interests of their own corporate patrons.
On Wall
Street, the report was greeted with relief. Stocks rose, Treasury yields
fell and the dollar weakened, as investors calculated that the weak
numbers reduced the likelihood of further Federal Reserve interest rate
increases. The CME FedWatch tool showed the odds of a rate hold at the
September meeting jumping to 56 percent. For the financial oligarchy,
mass unemployment is a welcome restraint on the wage demands of the
working class who must compete for fewer jobs.
*****
The ruling class of financial oligarchs endlessly gains wealth. As
workers are kicked to the curb, the top 10 percent of Americans control
around 70 percent of all wealth. Among that, the top 1 percent alone
control over 30 percent of all wealth—roughly the same share as the
bottom 90 percent of the entire population.
These conditions
have created a social powder keg, the growth of class conflict and the
political radicalization of workers and young people.
11. Australian government prepares vicious immigration crackdown
The Albanese Labor government is preparing to unveil a wholesale attack on the basic rights of immigrants and asylum seekers.
According
to briefings given to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
last week, the plans include further cutting and delaying access to
family reunion visas, slashing temporary worker visas, and revoking work
and appeal rights for asylum seekers who have their initial protection
visa applications rejected by government officials.
These measures
will affect hundreds of thousands of temporary visa holders, forcing
many into super-exploited black-market work or reliance on charities to
survive, or face deportation, and separate many immigrant families
indefinitely.
The full extent of the assault is still to be
announced, but the thrust is clear. As many as half a million migrant
workers and refugees, currently on insecure bridging visas are
threatened by the abolition of their right to work legally, and their
right to appeal to tribunals and courts against visa denials. Forced
departures or mass deportations will follow.
This offensive marks a
sharp turn by the Labor government to make immigrants and refugees
scapegoats for the worsening cost-of-living crisis and deteriorating
social conditions confronting working-class households, intensified by
the global inflationary impact of the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran.
12. Washington pressures Fujimori to align Peru with US war drive against China
Less than two weeks into Keiko Fujimori’s presidency, the Trump
administration is aggressively pressuring her government to side with
Washington’s campaign to roll back the hemispheric influence of its
global rival, China. A series of openly pro-US appointments to key
government posts points to Lima’s compliance with this agenda.
Take
new economy minister Elmer Cuba, a consultant and former central bank
director who, as Bloomberg News noted, has taught at Peruvian
universities and served as a consultant to the World Bank, the
Inter-American Development Bank and the International Labour
Organization.
Introducing Cuba, Fujimori said he arrives with a
clear mission: to restore stability, confidence and growth to the
economy, which she claims to have inherited “in abandonment.”
Yet a
rather different picture emerges from Central Reserve Bank President
Julio Velarde, who has just announced he will remain at the helm until
2031—news warmly welcomed by foreign investors. Bloomberg described one
of the minister’s tasks as ensuring macroeconomic continuity in what it
called one of Latin America’s most stable economies.
The description of the economy as “stable” is invariably shaped by what it portends for the bondholder, not the worker.
*****
Washington has designated Peru a Major Non-NATO Ally, finalized a
Lockheed Martin F-16 fighter jet deal, and is modernizing the Callao
naval base some 73 kilometers south of Chancay.
*****
The Shield of the Americas, the US-led alliance of right-wing Latin
American regimes, draws on a bloody precedent—and it has nothing to do
with fighting drug trafficking. It is intended as an instrument for
countering by force both China’s growing economic influence in Latin
America and the imminent prospect of revolutionary struggles by the
working class.
It aligns exactly with Fujimori’s call for the
military to occupy the streets in case of “emergency”—a code word for
unrest among Peruvian workers, students and the oppressed rural
masses—and with her proposed construction of five mega-prisons. The real
aim is to suppress the rising struggle of the working class across the
continent. Like workers everywhere, South America’s masses have been
driven into deep immiseration by the US-Israeli war in the Middle East,
and by the widening inequality that is the hallmark of a decaying
capitalist system.
In order to achieve this, she is falling back
on what she has always done best: imitating her father, dictator Alberto
Fujimori (1990–2000), who died on September 11, 2024, while serving a
lengthy sentence for crimes against humanity and corruption. She has
repeatedly spoken of wanting to emulate—even vindicate—him through her
presidency.
*****
That this project advances so openly is a measure of the political
vacuum created by the total discrediting of the so-called “left,”
including the Together for Peru party of presidential candidate Roberto
Sánchez and Verónika Mendoza’s New Peru. These are bourgeois parties
that fear a revolutionary upsurge more than anything else. Their message
to capitalism is a plea for meager concessions—a few more misery-wage
jobs and pauper’s subsidies—lest the class struggle spin out of its
control.
Add to this the discredited union confederations—the
Stalinist CGTP, the Maoist SUTEP and the social-democratic CUT. These
organizations function not as instruments of working-class struggle but
as transmission belts for bourgeois policy, strangling every genuine
fight from below.
Thoroughly disillusioned by disastrous “left”
governments and candidates of the so-called Pink Tide, which served the
interests of big capital rather than those of the masses, workers
abandoned them, paving the way for the ascension of the far right.
It must be recalled that in the 1970s and 1980s—and in Brazil
starting from 1964—South America was plunged into bloody dictatorships
instigated by the CIA. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger summed up
US policy on June 27, 1970, declaring:
I don’t see why we need to
stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of
its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean
voters to be left to decide for themselves.
Kissinger’s words
expressed US imperialism’s unvarnished contempt for the democratic
rights of the South American masses—then and now. The same logic drives
Washington today: the masses cannot be permitted to determine their own
fate.
This repugnant figure played a central role in creating
Operation Condor, established in November 1975 in Santiago by the
military dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and
Uruguay—later joined by Brazil, Peru and Ecuador—with full CIA backing.
The “Shield of the Americas” is Condor reborn.
The danger of the
continent falling back into ruthless military rule is real. It can only
be countered by building revolutionary parties across the Americas,
sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
13. Australian Education Union pushing new sellout of Victorian teachers after anti-democratic conference
The
AEU is once again trying to stampede educators into accepting a sellout
through a rushed ballot that does not allow for discussion or debate.
14. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Brazil:
São Paulo subway workers strike
Canada:
Vancouver municipal bus drivers reject contract for a second time
Toronto Transit subway supervisors vote to strike
Peru:
Artists denounce new government restrictions
United States:
Northern California ready-mix drivers strike CalPortland over unfair labor practices
Augusta, Georgia transit workers ready to strike after rejecting “paltry” contract offer
15. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk in 2015
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
