Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Leon Trotsky and the Second Chinese Revolution, 1925-27
This is the third part of a four-part lecture “Internationalist Socialism vs. Nationalist Reformism” delivered by Peter Symonds, national World Socialist Web Site editor for the Socialist Equality Party (Australia) to the 2025 Summer School of the Socialist Equality Party (US) on the history of the Security and the Fourth International investigation.Part 1 by Clara Weiss was published here and Part 2 by Chris Marsden here.
The World Socialist Web Site is also publishing a primary source document written by Leon Trotsky to accompany this lecture, Section 3 of The Third International After Lenin, titled, “Summary and Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution: Its Lessons for the Countries of the Orient and for the Whole of the Comintern.” Readers can study this text alongside the lecture. (The full volume is available for purchase here on Mehring Books.)
Leon Trotsky and the Second Chinese Revolution, 1925-27, with Peter Symonds
2. Trump’s Caribbean massacre: A naked crime of US imperialism
The Trump administration launched an airstrike Tuesday on a small vessel in the southern Caribbean on the pretext that it was carrying drugs and alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. The White House and the Pentagon have boasted of killing 11 people in the strike, demonstrating a further use of illegal mass murder to pursue imperialist interests abroad and to justify a dictatorship at home.
The White House immediately trumpeted the massacre on official social media pages, declassifying an aerial video of the boat being blown to smithereens.
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The attack takes place amid the deployment of a growing US naval flotilla off the Venezuelan coast, including at least eight warships, aircraft and 5,000 sailors and Marines. Trump has cast the entire Venezuelan government as nothing more than a “narco-terrorist” cartel, doubling a bounty on the head of President Nicolas Maduro to $50 million.
In a social media post boasting of the attack, Trump claimed Tren de Aragua is “operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro” and is responsible for “acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere.”
This is absurd. Not only does the United States represent the largest drug market in the world, but the US state has long been the main purveyor of violence and terror across Latin America and the Caribbean through countless military invasions, CIA-orchestrated coups and fascist-military dictatorships. According to every credible intelligence report, Venezuela accounts for an insignificant share of the drugs flowing northwards from Latin America. As for Tren de Aragua, the gang has largely ceased to exist, even in Venezuela. In the US, there has been not a single murder conviction of an alleged member of the gang.
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The World Socialist Web Site strongly condemns this criminal act of imperialist aggression. Despite the limited information currently available, it can be stated unequivocally that this was an unwarranted act of mass murder in violation of US and international law, against people who have not been convicted of any crime.
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The US Navy attack on the boat in the Caribbean shortly thereafter sent a clear message: The United States is a nation at war, and the President intends to claim dictatorial powers to wage war and will wage war to claim dictatorial powers.
Such a bloodthirsty pursuit of the interests of US banks and corporations is a warning of the willingness of the White House—and the Pentagon—to resort to the same methods of mass murder employed under the pretext of a “war against terrorism” in the Middle East—from Afghanistan and Iraq, to the ongoing genocide in Gaza—against any group, domestic or foreign, that is perceived as a threat to the US drive to global hegemony, including in what US imperialism has long regarded as its “own backyard.”
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The use of an advanced missile system to obliterate a small boat and murder 11 people in the southern Caribbean, together with the deployment of a naval armada capable or raining Tomahawk cruise missiles on Caracas and deploying Marines on Venezuelan shores go hand in hand with the 50 percent tariffs imposed on the largest economy in the region, Brazil, the threats to bomb and even invade Mexico and other provocations in the region.
For its part, the Venezuelan government has responded by claiming that Rubio created the video of the airstrike using Artificial Intelligence to impress Trump and trick him into supporting further aggression. This attempt to uncover divisions in Washington and appeal to the “better nature” of the fascist at the head of the US imperialist state, as Maduro has done repeatedly, exposes the bankruptcy of bourgeois nationalism in opposing imperialist oppression.
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The onslaught against Latin America, the emerging world war and the threat of a fascist dictatorship in the United States itself can only be stopped by a united movement of the working class across the Americas and beyond to end the capitalist nation-state system and reorganize society on a socialist basis.
3. Florida state government to bar vaccine mandates for all childhood diseases
Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo announced Wednesday that the state government would move to eliminate all vaccine requirements for school children, forcing millions of parents to send their children to school with a growing number of unvaccinated classmates, and threatening to revive diseases like measles, mumps, rubella and polio, long held in check.
Ladapo, a Harvard graduate turned anti-vaccine crusader, stood beside Republican Governor Ron DeSantis at a press conference in Tampa. The venue, a private Christian high school, underscored the deeply reactionary content of the new policy, which suppresses science in favor of religious obscurantism and political prejudice.
The DeSantis-Ladapo agenda aligns Florida squarely with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, which is in fact a war against science and public health that threatens a devastating toll from preventable childhood hospitalizations and deaths.
Instead of speaking as a physician or scientist, Ladapo sounded like a preacher or snake-oil salesman. On school vaccine mandates, he declared: “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery. Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God.”
This is not just religious claptrap—it is the “big lie” of American fascism. Public health officials are not “slave masters.” They are sworn to protect lives, prevent illness, and reduce disability. Vaccines and antibiotics remain among the most powerful, science-based tools in medicine. The record is undeniable: routine childhood vaccinations prevent four million deaths every year worldwide. And a recent Lancet study estimated that over the past fifty years, vaccines have saved 154 million lives.
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Public health is not about isolated individuals—it is about the health of society as a whole. A functioning society cannot be reduced to the whims of financial oligarchs or the illusion of total independence; it is an organism that survives only through cooperation. Scientific public health has always recognized this truth: that vaccines, clean water, and collective action protect us all. That framework is now under assault, and with it, the very principle that society must act together to defend life. Herein lies one component of the broader class-struggle that is coming to the fore.
4. Gold price surge continues as debt mountain grows
In early trading in Asia, it rose 0.9 percent to $3,508 per ounce before falling back to just under $3,500. Uncertainty over the direction of the international financial system and the dollar’s role is also reflected in longer-term trends.
The price of gold has nearly doubled since the start of 2023, much of the rise due to increased buying by central banks. At the end of last year, gold overtook the euro as the second-largest component of central bank reserves after the dollar and now comprises around 20 percent of these assets.
With the removal by President Nixon of the gold backing from the US dollar in August 1971, the dollar has functioned as a fiat currency. That is, it is not backed by real value but rests on the financial power of the American state and its institutions.
Confidence in that power has been steadily eroded because of a series of financial crises—in 2008, March 2020 and the bank failures of March 2023—with indications that a tipping point is approaching. The US is now the most indebted country in history—government debt is $37 trillion and rising, and the interest bill on it at $1 trillion a year is becoming the largest expenditure item in the US budget.
It is being further undermined by the policies of the Trump administration and its overturn of the entire framework of the post-war international economic and financial order. This was seen in the reaction to Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcements in early April, when interest rates in bond markets spiked and, contrary to normal experience in conditions of turbulence, the value of the dollar fell.
The immediate turbulence caused by Trump’s economic war against the world has subsided.
But a new source of instability has been set in motion by the administration’s attacks on the political independence of the US Federal Reserve, manifested in the continuous demands that it lower interest rates—possibly by as much as three percentage points—and the attempts by Trump to have his supporters take control of the Fed’s governing bodies.
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These moves have raised concerns that the abolition of Fed independence is going to intensify a developing crisis resulting from the rise of debt.
Billionaire Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, has been sounding the alarm for some time. In an interview with the Financial Times this week, he escalated his warnings.
The US under Trump was drifting to 1930s-style autocratic politics, he said.
“I think that what is happening now politically and socially is analogous to what happened around the world in the 1930–40 period.”
A central bank, pressed to keep interest rates low, “would undermine the confidence in the Fed defending the value of money and make holding dollar-denominated debt assets less attractive, which would weaken the monetary order as we know it.”
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The clear indications of a crisis building up, noted by Dalio and others, combined with the actions of Trump in weakening confidence in the financial and economic institutions, such as his sacking of the Bureau of Labor Statistics head after a downbeat jobs report claiming the figures were “rigged,” have raised the question of why there has not been a major market reaction.
The stock market, albeit with ups and downs and some worries over the elevation of tech and AI stocks, has continued to power ahead, and there has not been a sell-off in the bond market.
This phenomenon has been the subject of comment in the financial media about why markets have ignored the attack on the Fed and why they are not “freaking out,” as the well-known economist and former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it in a Substack post last week.
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He said the “usual pattern” was one of market complacency “until the last possible moment” and markets acted “as if everything is normal until it’s blindingly obvious that it isn’t.”
He concluded by saying that “the absence of a strong reaction to Trump’s assault on the Fed isn’t a sign that everything is OK. We are, in fact, looking at a policy disaster in the making. But the markets probably won’t react strongly until the disaster is already upon us.”
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The markets may, at least at this stage, be ignoring the warning signs of a major crisis brewing in the very foundations of the profit system, but capitalist governments and the institutions of the state are not.
In every country, there is a growing drive to the imposition of authoritarian and fascist forms of rule—spearheaded in the US, the center of the developing economic and financial crisis, where the Trump administration, in direct violation of constitutional norms, has deployed the military in the capital, Washington, and is looking to use the armed forces in other major cities.
Trump proclaims the great strength of the US economy but has warned that if his reciprocal tariffs have to be repealed as a result of legal action—there have now been two court rulings against them—the US could face a 1929-style depression. This is an indication he is aware that even as the stock market surge continues, all is far from well just below the surface.
The capitalist ruling classes in the US and throughout the world are developing their response to the major eruptions of class struggle which the irresolvable contradictions of the capitalist profit system will inevitably produce.
The working class must also prepare, above all politically, through the understanding that the only way out of the crisis of the capitalist order is the fight for the program of international socialism aimed at the conquest of power.
5. United States: Border Gestapo seize immigrant firefighters battling blaze in Washington state
In an escalation of Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, federal agents last week arrested two firefighters who were actively battling the Bear Gulch fire, Washington state's largest active wildfire. The raid on an emergency response operation exposes again that the true target of the raids is not just immigrants, but the working class as a whole.
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“There's really no way [the wildfire management team] could not have been involved,” said Riva Duncan, a former wildland fire chief with over 30 years of experience in the US Forest Service, speaking to the States Newsroom. “Fire areas are officially closed, very secure and there are roadblocks. Somebody would have had to tell these agents how to get there.”
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Federal officials justified the arrests by claiming the crews were under investigation for time-card fraud—supposedly a 30-minute discrepancy on a timesheet. Such minor administrative issues are routinely handled between organizational leaders, not treated as criminal matters requiring armed raids, and the pretext provided by management was used to quickly give way to immigration enforcement.
The response from local and state Democratic officials has been characteristically complicit with Trump’s ongoing efforts to establish a dictatorship in the United States. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson merely said he was “deeply concerned” and directed his team to gather information. Representative Emily Randall wrote in all caps on Twitter/X that the arrests were “NOT MAKING AMERICA SAFER.”
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The immigration raid against wildfire firefighters also expresses some of the contempt the Trump administration has toward all efforts to combat or even acknowledge the dangers posed by climate change. The fire is in what is typically one of the country’s wettest forests, a small but significant expression of the impact of climate change on Earth’s environment. Trump’s actions are a direct attack on the broad masses of workers who bear the brunt of the ongoing ecological degradation, all of which has been induced by the anarchic nature of the capitalist economy, including industrial production.
The Bear Gulch raid must be understood as part of Trump’s broader strategy to establish a presidential dictatorship through the systematic erosion of constitutional protections, even for emergency responders. The use of administrative pretexts to conduct warrantless raids, the deployment of armed agents against firefighters and the collaboration of management officials are all building blocks for a police state.
This technological surveillance apparatus extends far beyond physical raids. Recent revelations in the Guardian show that ICE has acquired Israeli-made spyware capable of hacking phones and encrypted messaging apps, giving the agency unprecedented access to communications and personal data. This technology has already been abused by governments worldwide to target journalists, human rights activists, and civil society members. The combination of physical raids and digital surveillance creates the foundation for comprehensive suppression of working class opposition.
The trial of the coup attempt led by Bolsonaro and the military high command is a historic political event in Brazil. In a country that spent 21 years under a bloody military dictatorship, between 1964 and 1985, this is the first time that generals sit in the defendant’s dock and that crimes against democracy are prosecuted.
The explosive implications of this event are exacerbated by the accelerating global crisis and, particularly, by the shocks of the violent eruption of US imperialism. What has been described as the “trial of the century” in Brazil is unfolding in the face of Washington’s blatant intervention against the country’s political institutions.
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Far from representing the final nail in the coffin of a defeated fascist offensive, the trial of Bolsonaro and his accomplices occurs amid the persistence and intensification of their efforts to overthrow democracy in Brazil. Supported by broad sectors of the political establishment, the military, and American imperialism, they are already actively preparing a violent confrontation against the decisions being made by the court.
The Brazilian working class stands at a historic crossroads. To confront the mortal dangers of imperialist violence and fascism, it is necessary to understand their real origin in a world capitalist system in crisis. But, above all, Brazilian workers need to understand the source of their own strength: their profound unity of interests with the international working class.
The perspective promoted by Brazil’s ruling Workers Party (PT) and the pseudo-left organizations runs directly counter to these interests. In response to the explosive political situation, all their efforts are concentrated on building reactionary patriotic acts on September 7, Brazil’s Independence Day.
The celebration of Independence Day, which is deeply associated with the political legacy of the military dictatorship and Bolsonaro’s fascist project, will occur precisely amid the trial of the coup attempt. It is expected that the far-right will use the occasion to launch an offensive to implode the case’s proceedings.
7. Germany: Ford Cologne: Reject IG Metall’s so-called “Social Contract”
Workers must reject the so-called “Social Contract” negotiated by the IG Metall union (IGM) at Ford Cologne. The union bureaucrats around General Works Council Chairman Benjamin Gruschka and the IGM representative for Cologne/Leverkusen, Kerstin Klein, must be stripped of their mandate for all further negotiations.
The sole purpose of the contract is to drive 3,560 workers out of the plant and set the course for its complete closure. In addition to the 2,900 redundancies already agreed, another 660 workers are to be forced out who had resisted the last round of job cuts.
To make sure the cuts go through quickly this time, IG Metall and its works council representatives have increased the pressure on the workforce with the present deal. Anyone who refuses the first severance offer will receive a second, lower one worth only 75 percent of the first. Anyone who rejects that will be made compulsorily redundant. Since the social selection rules then apply, younger, unmarried and childless workers would be at a disadvantage compared to older ones.
These perfidious Mafia-like methods are designed to divide the workforce. Each worker is left to make his or her decision alone. The “solidarity” that the union likes to invoke is thus perverted. Whenever IG Metall calls for solidarity, it has nothing to do with genuine unity. The bureaucracy wants workers to shut their mouths and submit to the diktat of the union and its works council.
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Rejection of the “Social Contract” in the ballot must therefore be accompanied by strike preparations, independently and separately from the union apparatus. All workers who really want to fight must unite in an action committee. IGM works council reps and shop stewards who support the contract have no place in this committee, whose members must coordinate their joint action:
- IG Metall and the works council must be forced to release the contract details and all its sub-agreements immediately.
- Klein, Gruschka and Co. do not want to negotiate further or strike further. Their mandate must be withdrawn. They must be prevented from concluding even one more agreement in the name of the workforce.
- Ford is an international corporation with 171,000 workers in plants on four continents. Contact must be established with them—in Germany, Europe, North America and worldwide. Contact must also be made with colleagues in other companies in the car, supplier and steel industries, etc., who face the same attacks.
Such international strategy and cooperation are necessary to resist the blackmail of management and the works council. This is a perspective based on the common interests of all workers worldwide and opposed to the logic of the capitalist profit system, which the union and works council functionaries defend tooth and nail.
8. New Yorkers speak on Zohran Mamdani and the housing crisis
For decades, the Democratic Party in New York and nationally has collaborated with Republicans in a bipartisan effort to cut funding for housing and other social programs and redirect income to the top, sending social inequality in cities like New York to unprecedented levels.
In New York’s primary election in June, the Democratic Party establishment was plunged into crisis as its preferred candidate, Andrew Cuomo, was soundly defeated, despite a vast war chest of dark money and a filthy campaign attempting to smear Mamdani as an antisemite for expressing opposition to the genocide in Gaza. The Democratic Party and the corporate interests they represent remain deeply divided over Mamdani.
Yet for all the consternation of sections of Wall Street, the Mamdani’s proposals, even if fully implemented, would do nothing to fundamentally change a housing racket predicated upon enriching the big real estate developers and landlords. Nor would it meaningfully alleviate the immense housing crisis for the working class that has been deepening for decades.
Mamdani’s signature housing initiative is to freeze the rent for the city’s approximately one million rent-stabilized apartments, expanding on three years of freezes under former mayor Bill de Blasio. It’s notable that during de Blasio’s term, the limited freezes did little to curb the vast housing speculation and profiteering. The rent burden remained exceedingly high, especially for low-income tenants. Overall, rents continued to soar, and homelessness reached record levels.
In addition to the rent freezes, Mamdani plans to construct 200,000 new housing units over the next 10 years, which also roughly aligns with de Blasio’s “accomplishments,” though the former mayor skewed the numbers by including “preserved” units. Even if 200,000 genuinely affordable units are added over a decade, this represents a small fraction of the enormous gap that currently exists.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is intent on dismantling what remains of federal funding for housing. The president has proposed slashing Section 8 vouchers by 50 percent and imposing draconian time limits on recipients. Immigrants are being scapegoated for the housing crisis, and the homeless are being swept off the streets by masked federal agents. Trump’s strategy is to deal with the escalating social tensions through dictatorship.
The lie at the core of Mamdani’s campaign is that Trump can be opposed and the social crisis alleviated via the Democratic Party, without addressing the fundamental cause, the profit system. His platform of modest social reforms is bitterly opposed by the establishment, not because of its supposed radical character, but because they fear it will raise expectations in the working class that can’t be contained within the two-party system.
The World Socialist Web Site discussed Mamdani’s campaign and the housing crisis with New York City residents at Atlantic Terminal, a shopping mall and mass transit hub in Brooklyn.
[Please continue to the World Socialist Web Site article to read some of those responses.]
In a preemptive strike against an upcoming protest in London against the proscription of Palestine Action (PA), counter-terrorism officers have arrested five organizers of the Defend Our Juries (DOJ) legal defense campaign.
A series of nationwide raids were mounted early on Tuesday morning before the organization was due to hold a press conference. Those arrested included Tim Crosland, a DOJ co-founder and former government lawyer, and Paddy Friend, a law student and DOJ spokesperson. The Metropolitan Police said those arrested were two men aged 26 and 55, a 61-year-old woman in London, a 48-year-old woman in Kendal, Cumbria, and a 39-year-old man in Barnsley, South Yorkshire.
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The five were arrested under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act that prohibits support for a proscribed organisation and carries a maximum prison term of 14 years. Chief Superintendent Helen Flanagan, head of operations for the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command, said of the arrests, “Palestine Action is clearly proscribed as a terrorist group, and those showing support for this particular group, or encouraging others to do so can expect to be arrested, investigated and prosecuted.”
DOJ said that “key spokespeople” were arrested in the raids “for addressing Open Calls during which legal information on the risks of opposing Labour’s absurd ban on Palestine Action have been shared.”
A spokesperson called attention the targeted nature of the police operation: “Locking up our key spokespeople just hours before they were due to hold a press conference announcing more peaceful Lift the Ban protests constitutes an unprecedented assault on free speech.
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Amnesty International called for “the immediate and unconditional release” of the five. Kerry Moscogiuri, Director of Campaigns and Communications at Amnesty International UK, said, “The mass peaceful demonstrations they have organised over recent weeks are protected by international human rights law—and to think they run the risk of being imprisoned for up to 14 years is a terrifying example of the UK authorities’ willingness to use authoritarian practices to silence dissent.
“Criminalizing speech or protest is only permitted when it incites violence, hatred or discrimination. To be clear: expressing support for Palestine Action does not meet this threshold. In fact, arresting and prosecuting people in this context, is a violation of the UK’s obligations under human rights law.”
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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.
