1. The Stalinist bureaucracy launches a war on the Trotskyist movement
This is the concluding part of a four-part lecture “Internationalist Socialism vs. Nationalist Reformism” delivered by Clara Weiss 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. Part 3 by Peter Symonds is here.
2. The Russian Opposition Replies to the Capitulators
A seminal text written in 1929 by Christian Rakovsky, who was murdered by Stalinist henchmen in a camp in September 1941, shortly after the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union.
It is being published at the World Socialist Web Site to augment lectures that were delivered at the 2025 Summer School of the Socialist Equality Party (US) on the history of the Security and the Fourth International investigation.
3. California Democrats’ “school alert” bill entrenches Trump’s authoritarian deportation framework
The California state legislature has passed a bill (SB 98) requiring schools and universities to prepare plans to notify parents, students and faculty whenever federal immigration enforcement agents appear on campus. If signed by Governor Gavin Newsom by October 12, the legislation would remain in effect until 2031.
The bill would require California K-12 schools, community colleges and state universities to send immediate notification to all pupils, parents, guardians, teachers, staff, and relevant community members if immigration enforcement officers are present or confirmed at a school or campus.
Notifications would include details such as the date, time, and location of the confirmed enforcement activity, along with links to additional resources, ensuring privacy and excluding any personally identifiable information.
The alleged intent is to prevent panic and maintain a sense of safety and security for all students, particularly those from immigrant families, by providing timely and transparent communication.
The claims of “protections” offered by SB 98 are entirely cynical. The notifications required by the bill are to be sent after immigration enforcement is already present on campus. They do not provide advance warning or prevent raids from occurring, leaving students and families to react in real time to armed federal agents.
In practice, the legislation shifts responsibility onto the working-class victims themselves, forcing parents, students, and faculty to scramble for safety while the state takes no meaningful action to halt the raids.
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State Senator Sasha Renee Perez, who authored the bill, admitted: “The presence of immigration enforcement officers can have detrimental effects on students — especially those who may be undocumented or otherwise without permanent status.”
Yet Perez and her colleagues do nothing to challenge these raids or stop ICE operations altogether. Their warnings serve only to deflect responsibility while maintaining full collaboration with federal authorities.
Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, a Democrat from Torrance, declared: “Students cannot learn unless they feel safe. For decades we had a bipartisan agreement to keep educational institutions, schools, campuses, free from immigration enforcement activities.”
Muratsuchi’s statement exposes the true character of the legislation. Far from confronting the assault on immigrant families, Sacramento is codifying a new status quo: campuses are no longer safe zones. Federal raids are now treated as inevitable, and the state’s role is reduced to issuing text messages and emails warning students and their families to prepare for the arrival of armed federal agents.
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Far from being a “safe haven,” California is actively integrating state and federal agencies as well as educational institutions into a unified repressive framework.
Governor Newsom, in particular, plays a two-faced role. While Democrats posture as defenders of immigrant rights, Newsom has expanded funding for border militarization, surveillance infrastructure and police deployments, including the California Highway Patrol (CHP), which he has recently placed at the center of two major new state enforcement regimes:
- A statewide “crime suppression” expansion, authorizing CHP to intervene aggressively in working-class neighborhoods under the pretext of combating “organized crime.”
- A “homeless encampment clearance” task force, in which CHP officers coordinate with local police to forcibly evict unhoused residents — often immigrants and low-wage workers — from public spaces.
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Trump has announced plans to deport millions of immigrants through sweeping military-style operations, mobilizing federal and local forces as well as private contractors. These plans are already being tested in California, where ICE raids have increased in scope and coordination.
A group of 115 House Democrats, called The New Democrat Coalition’s Immigration and Border Security Task Force, issued a recent immigration reform proposal exemplifying the Democrats’ role in advancing repressive, bipartisan immigration policies.
The plan, introduced by Arizona Representative Greg Stanton and California Representative Salud Carbajal, seeks to significantly bolster border enforcement by increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and Customs and Border Protection officers, and implementing advanced surveillance technologies.
While it proposes pathways to legal status for certain undocumented immigrants, such as Dreamers and Temporary Protected Status holders, it imposes stringent conditions, including fines and background checks, that effectively criminalize the undocumented population. The Democrats’ framework mirrors the Trump administration’s approach, institutionalizing a system of repression and underscoring their complicity.
The Democrats’ role must also be viewed in relation to their broader political adaptation to the far right. The ongoing “gerrymandering wars” in California, Texas and across the country demonstrate that the Democrats are not fighting Trump’s authoritarian agenda but are active participants in the breakdown of American democracy.
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The Democrats’ campus alert bill exposes a fundamental reality: neither Democratic nor Republican parties can defend immigrants, students, or democratic rights. The bipartisan assault—from Trump’s ongoing coup and mass deportations to Newsom’s CHP-led repression—reflects a unified strategy to protect ruling-class interests.
The attacks on immigrant students and families are the first stage of a broader offensive against the entire working class, targeting all workers regardless of status. Raids, mass detentions and militarized policing are being tested on the most vulnerable as a template for repressing resistance to inequality, exploitation, dictatorship and war.
To resist, the working class must act independently, breaking from both capitalist parties and the trade union bureaucracy in a struggle for international socialism. Attacks on immigrants in California are linked to authoritarianism, genocide, imperialist war and social counterrevolution worldwide. Only through the international unification of the working class and the overthrow of capitalism—a system of oppression, dictatorship, and war—can true equality, freedom, and democratic rights be secured.
Few concrete details emerged on Thursday’s summit of over 30 heads of government in Paris chaired by French President Emmanuel Macron, to plan a “coalition of the willing” to deploy troops to Ukraine in what would be a major escalation of the war on Russia.
The inability of the coalition, led by Britain and France, to agree anything of substance at its eighth meeting underscores the European imperialist powers continued military dependence on Washington. They are responding by launching an all-out austerity onslaught on the working class, to raise the resources necessary for rearmament and war with Russia.
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This coalition was established in response to Trump’s attempted accommodation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The European powers fear this will cut them out of a share of the spoils from Ukrainian and Russian raw materials and markets. Amid the US-provoked Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Britain, France and Germany had bet heavily that the trans-Atlantic alliance with US imperialism would enable them to jointly plunder Ukraine and Russia. They even massively cut imports of cheap Russian gas critical for European industry.
But Washington, guided by Trump’s “America first” policy, increasingly views the European powers not as allies, but as rivals in a rapidly developing redivision of the world. America’s would-be dictator has not only raised the prospect of a deal with Putin at the Europeans’ expense but also slapped 15 percent tariffs on European Union imports to the US as part of his global trade war. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote after Trump’s summit with Putin in Alaska last month,
Trump, reviving the tradition of the far-right “America Firsters” of the World War II era, speaks for layers of the American ruling class oriented toward war in the Pacific and the confrontation with China. He has coupled this outlook with tariff and trade war measures directed against the European powers. For this faction, disengaging from the conflict with Russia over Ukraine offers potential advantages: securing access to vital resources in Russia and Ukraine, loosening Moscow’s alignment with Beijing, and weakening European imperialism.
The European imperialists are determined to reduce their military dependence on Washington through a mad rearmament programme—spending some €800 billion under the European Union’s “Rearm Europe” programme and €1 trillion on a German government fund for its military and upgrades to war-relevant infrastructure.
But implementing this agenda, which entails obliterating what remains of the concessions made to the working class in the post-World War II era, takes time. They therefore responded to Trump’s shift by trying to sabotage a potential deal between the White House and Kremlin. They kept the US in the war by making demands totally unacceptable to Russia, like sending NATO troops to Ukraine.
With Prime Minister François Bayrou’s government set to fall and France teetering on the verge of state bankruptcy, the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) is making a calculated bid for support from the French ruling class on a program of savage austerity against the working class. This is the content of the “Letter to France’s CEOs” drafted this week by RN party president Jordan Bardella.
The deal Bardella proposes to French big business is straightforward. Calling for rapid snap elections as President Emmanuel Macron’s popularity plummets to barely 15 percent, he proposes to come to power and carry out unprecedented cuts to social spending in order to resolve the debt crisis and massively boost French corporate profits. He pledges to cut €100 billion euros from the French budget, over double Bayrou’s already massively unpopular €44 billion in cuts.
As America’s far-right president sets up a billionaire’s dictatorship in America, workers voting for the far right in France and across Europe must be warned: they are being played for fools.
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The possibility that the bourgeoisie would install the RN in power amid the current, historic crisis of rule in France is very real. Currently, polls show the RN would take 31 percent of the vote in new legislative elections—the largest share of the vote of any party in the National Assembly. This comes after more than a decade over which the RN has been granted extensive access to the media, and the bourgeoisie has encouraged significant layers of workers to vote RN on fraudulent pretexts.
It has not won support thanks to the growth of a mass fascist movement like Hitler’s Brown Shirts, but by exploiting mass disaffection and bitterness among workers with the reactionary policies of parties falsely marketed by capitalist media as “left.” These voters were in their large majority not fascists, but instead moving to the left. Indeed, millions of them took part in protests against Macron’s pension cuts in 2023, which were sold out by the union bureaucracies.
6. Trump appeals to Supreme Court to rule on “reciprocal tariffs”
The Trump administration has launched an appeal to the Supreme Court to overturn decisions by two lower courts, which ruled that the president had exceeded his powers in imposing so-called “reciprocal tariffs” under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act of 1977, ranging from 10 to 50 percent on almost every country in the world.
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If the Supreme Court takes on the case, as it almost certainly will, its decision will have far-reaching significance for Trump’s tariff war against the world. More than that, it will have implications for his drive to establish a personalist dictatorship based on the repeated claim that his exercise of executive power must be unfettered by “unelected” bureaucrats and “radical, leftist” courts.
“The stakes in this case could not be higher,” Sauer wrote. “The president and his cabinet officials have determined that the tariffs are promoting peace and unprecedented prosperity, and that the denial of tariff authority would expose our nation to trade retaliation without effective defenses and thrust America back to the brink of economic catastrophe.”
As Trump pursues his goals—economic war against the world and dictatorship at home—reality is stood on its head.
Far from promoting peace, the elevation of tariffs is, as the history of the 1930s demonstrates, a major factor in the promotion of geopolitical conflict and war. And far from promoting prosperity, Trump’s measures threaten to bring a significant reduction in world trade and a cut in global growth.
In the US they are fueling inflation—the effects of which are starting to show up in the recent spike in the producer price index—and are in essence a tax paid by US importers and ultimately by consumers. And their cost to major corporations—General Motors and Nike have already reported a hit of $1 billion to their bottom line—will result in cost-cutting measures to maintain profits, leading to sackings, lower wages and the worsening of conditions.
Their only “beneficial” effect will be to increase government revenue to pay for the massive handouts in the form of tax cuts to corporations and the ultra-wealthy in the “big, beautiful budget.”The argument that striking down the reciprocal tariffs would expose the US to retaliation was perhaps the most absurd of all. The US only faces retaliation from major powers, China and others, friend and foe alike, because of the tariffs it has imposed that have completely overturned the post-war international trading system.
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Every time a court decision has gone against him, Trump has railed against the judges as “radicals” and even “Marxists.” In this case, Republican and Democratic appointees were on both sides of the appeals court decision and the dissent judgement, supported by three others, was authored by Richard Taranto, an Obama nominee.
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It would be a mistake to simply dismiss Trump’s warnings about “devastation for our country” and its transformation into a “third world nation” if the tariffs were removed simply as mad ravings.
In their own deranged way, they are an expression of the growing economic crisis of the capitalist system as a whole—a rot which, like a fish, starts at the head. It is significant that the head of its most powerful imperialist nation insists that its very survival depends on the Mafia-like extraction of wealth and money from the rest of the world.
7. China holds huge military parade to mark end of World War II
A huge military parade took place in Beijing on Wednesday, showcasing the latest in Chinese armaments, to mark the 80th anniversary of the Japanese surrender in World War II.
Chinese President Xi Jinping presided over the carefully choreographed affair, standing alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
While the US was not named, Xi used the occasion to respond to the Trump administration’s unmistakable, accelerating build-up to war with China. “The Chinese nation,” he declared, “is a great nation that is never intimidated by any bullies and always values independence and forges ahead.”
Two fronts of an emerging world war are already underway—the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and the widening US-backed Israeli war in the Middle East. Although not specifically referring to these conflicts, Xi warned: “Today, humanity again has to choose between peace and war, dialogue and confrontation, win-win cooperation and zero-sum game.”
The fact that Putin stood alongside Xi has been widely commented upon in the US and Western media. Almost three weeks after his much-vaunted meeting with Putin in Alaska, Trump’s efforts to bring about a ceasefire in Ukraine have so far come to naught. Trump’s objective has never been “peace” but rather to strengthen US relations with Russia at China’s expense as Washington’s military build-up against Beijing continues apace.
In comments in the Oval Office, Trump declared that the military parade was “very, very impressive” and referring to Xi, Putin and Kim added that “my relationship with all of them is very good.” But he was clearly piqued by the image of the three of them together, tweeting on X:
“Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.”
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Trump’s threats and bullying appeared to backfire this week, to the consternation of sections of the American political establishment, as various world leaders appeared in China not only for the military parade, but also for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit earlier in the week. The US imposition of 50 percent tariffs on Indian imports for continuing to buy Russian oil was the major factor in Prime Minister Narendra Modi reversing his earlier decision not to attend the SCO meeting.
Washington’s aggressive confrontation with China—diplomatically, economically and militarily—has been mounting for more than a decade since President Obama announced his “pivot to Asia.” However, Trump’s tariff war is undermining US alliances and strategic partnerships throughout the Indo-Pacific aimed against China—such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue that includes India, as well as Japan and Australia.
Increasingly, US imperialism has focused its propaganda and military build-up on Taiwan, seeking to goad China into invading the island, just as it provoked Russia into invading Ukraine. Washington has steadily undermined the One-China policy under which it de facto recognizes Beijing as the legitimate government of all China including Taiwan. Washington knows full well that any formal declaration of independence by Taipei would provoke military action by China.
Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in June, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that US allies boost military spending and declared that war with China over Taiwan was “imminent.”
The military parade in Beijing this week simply demonstrates that Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have no progressive response to the escalating threat of war. On the one hand, the Chinese regime is engaged in an arms race with the US, while on the other offering a fanciful vision of a peaceful multi-polar world of mutual cooperation and development.
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Beijing has repeatedly criticised the US for engaging in “Cold War mentality,” but it is not a cold war that US imperialism is preparing for. In its historic decline, the US is slipping economically behind China, which by some measures is already the world’s largest economy and advancing in hi-tech areas previously dominated by American corporations. As it has done over the past three decades, the US is relying on its residual military might to reassert its global hegemony, whatever the catastrophic consequences.
Xi and the CCP, however, are utterly incapable of making any appeal to the one social force capable of halting the slide into world war and nuclear Armageddon—the international working class, including in China. Xi’s speech was saturated with Chinese nationalism and patriotism from beginning to end that can only serve to divide Chinese workers from their class brothers and sisters internationally.
Xi’s obligatory reference to Marxism-Leninism and Socialism with Chinese characteristics cannot disguise the fact that the CCP presides over a capitalist economy and represents the interests of a super-wealthy oligarchy at the expense of the vast mass of working people. Unable to make any social appeal to workers and youth, it seeks to build a base among layers of the upper middle class on the basis of reactionary nationalism.
8. London Underground and Docklands Light Rail strike begins
More than 11,000 members of the Rail Maritime Transport Workers union (RMT) on the London Underground (the Tube) and Docklands Light Railway (DLR) began a week of rolling strikes Friday over pay, working conditions and chronic understaffing.
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The right-wing media have initiated a smear campaign against Tube and DLR workers out of fear that London’s rolling strikes could spark a wider eruption against the Starmer Labour government’s austerity measures. In 2022, strikes on the London Underground kicked off the biggest strike wave since 1987 that nearly toppled Margaret Thatcher’s hated Conservative government.
Tube and DLR workers are fighting the consequences of massive austerity cuts and wage suppression enforced by Transport for London (TfL) on behalf of successive Tory and Labour governments.
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Workers must reject all claims that there is “no money” to fund their demands. Billions must be allocated to upgrade and expand the Tube, DLR and national rail system, improving pay, conditions and pensions for staff and making public transport affordable. This means a political struggle against the Starmer government, which is funneling billions to military rearmament and war, with workers footing the bill through brutal austerity.
9. German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall begins mass production of ammunition
While thousands of jobs are being destroyed in Germany every month in civilian industry, the arms business is generating fantastic profits.
The share price of Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest arms manufacturer, for example, has risen by almost 2000 percent since the beginning of the Ukraine war. From under €100 [$US117] before the war, it has at times soared to €1,900. In 2024, the company recorded revenues of just under €10 billion, 36 percent more than the previous year. For the current year, a further increase in revenue of 25 to 30 percent is expected.
Rheinmetall is expanding broadly both in Germany and internationally. The arms firm no longer only produces tanks, cannons and other weapons of war in preparation for conflicts but is now manufacturing ammunition on a large scale for waging war.
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These developments leave no doubt that Germany and Europe are once again moving towards a war economy.
According to official propaganda, the massive expansion of the arms industry serves only defence and deterrence. But the gigantic production capacities for artillery ammunition alone show that the aim is not deterrence, but warfare. The German military is to be enabled to wage war against Russia for years to come.
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With this extreme expansion of arms production, Germany is returning to the Nazi war economy. Rheinmetall, then known as Rheinmetall-Borsig, made massive profits under Hitler and by 1937 was the Third Reich’s second-largest arms manufacturer.
Rheinmetall is not only continuing economically where its predecessor left off. The new munitions factory stands on the same site where Rheinmetall-Borsig murdered hundreds of forced labourers during the Second World War, and where even the newborns of Jewish concentration camp workers were killed.
Built in 1899, the plant already played an important role in the First World War and was among the largest artillery producers under Kaiser Wilhelm II (reigned 1888 to 1918).
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Now, 80 years later, shells and rockets are once again rolling off the assembly lines at the same site, and German imperialism is once again preparing to use them against Russia.
10. Judge orders Philadelphia transit system to halt, reverse all service cuts
SEPTA, the main transit system serving the Philadelphia region, faces a significant structural budget shortfall of $213 million for the 2025 fiscal year. The deficit stems from decades of state underfunding and budget cuts. Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro’s most recent proposal allocates only $165 million, with negotiations having stalled with the state legislature. Shapiro’s offer falls far short of the transit system’s needs, leading to its current plan targeting drastic cuts of up to 45 percent in service and fare increases exceeding 20 percent.
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A lawsuit brought by riders and advocates contended that SEPTA’s cuts unnecessarily harmed low-income and minority riders and that the system could utilize its existing more than $300 million Public Transportation Trust Fund (PTTF) instead of sacrificing critical transit services. George Bochetto, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said their legal challenge should “send a message directly to the governor that we need a resolution, that we need the budget passed, and that SEPTA will need additional funding at some point in the future.”
The judge’s ruling mandated SEPTA to “immediately cease and desist” all route eliminations, service reductions, layoffs and furloughs impacting the transit system, which included the elimination of 32 bus routes, reductions on 16 others, and a broad 20 percent service cut in many areas.
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The problems at SEPTA are part of broader state and national crises facing cities and municipalities. Similar transit funding crises plague cities like Chicago and New York, with Chicago’s Transit Authority facing a billion-dollar shortfall, leading to potential massive service cuts and layoffs. These struggles reflect nationwide attacks on public transit driven by austerity and decades of funding starvation.
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SEPTA attorney Matthew Glazer stated in court that the plaintiffs’ idea to tap into the fund was unrealistic, saying, “Plaintiffs suggest there is some easy, magical fix that SEPTA has simply overlooked. If only that were true.” He added that using more of the fund would breach PennDOT’s requirement to maintain three months of cash on hand and could force SEPTA to use a costly line of credit.
In issuing the ruling, Judge Thomas-Street is hoping to force the state government’s hand in finding a less drastic solution. The fundamental concern has nothing to do with the fate of Philadelphia’s population, of which 1 in 5 people live in poverty.
This fact was underscored in July when Thomas-Street issued a series of harsh injunctions against striking municipal workers, forcing many back to work while the strike continued. The strike was sold out when the AFSCME municipal union ordered workers back after a tentative agreement that met none of their demands or needs.
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On Wednesday, sports gambling company FanDuel announced it would cover the additional operating costs to transport football fans to Lincoln Financial Field on Thursday as the Philadelphia Eagles played the Dallas Cowboys.
The prioritization of business and sports spectacle over the needs of the population prompted the Philadelphia Inquirer to remark: “The city’s schoolchildren can rightfully ask why the struggles of football fans—with at most a dozen home games a year—have gotten so much more attention than their own, which are a part of their daily lives.”
Nearly 53,000 Philadelphia schoolchildren and hundreds of educators rely on the transit system. School absences and lateness increased by 63 percent as the budget cuts went into effect.
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The School District of Philadelphia faces its own $300 million financial crisis, and teachers are livid over the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers leaders’ move last week to push a vote on a new three-year contract offering below-inflation pay and benefits.
11. Democrats dominate second annual “People’s Conference for Palestine” in Detroit
This year’s event was headlined “Gaza is the compass,” and the keynote address was titled “Gaza is the center of the world.” Every panel featured discussion on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has claimed officially over 63,000 Palestinians, including nearly 20,000 children in less than two years.
Among attendees and participants, there are some genuinely opposed to the genocide in Gaza. Speakers included Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who spoke powerfully about conditions in Gaza and the deliberate efforts to destroy the healthcare system. Abu-Sittah was one of many speakers who were forced to address the conference over the internet after the US banned him from entering the country.
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Behind the various speeches and panel discussion, however, was one overriding perspective promoted by the organizers: an orientation to the Democratic Party, one of the parties of Wall Street responsible for the genocide. This corresponds to the Stalinist politics of the PSL [Party for Socialism and Liberation], which is the guiding force behind the politics of the conference.
At this year’s conference, as at last year’s, the organizers blocked Mehring Books, the publishing arm of the World Socialist Web Site, and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, the student movement of the Socialist Equality Party, from having a table. This is because they wanted to prevent attendees from hearing any criticism of the Democratic Party.
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One of the more famous speakers at the convention was Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and legal US resident, who is still facing deportation by the Trump administration for the crime of peacefully opposing the genocide.
Following his release from a Louisiana detention facility earlier this year, Khalil quickly aligned himself with New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Khalil’s embrace of Ocasio-Cortez, who refused to vote to block arm sales to Israel this year, has drawn criticism from many opposed to genocide.
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Overall, the genocide in Gaza was presented at the conference as an isolated event, which could be stopped through moral appeals and the resistance of the Palestinian people. The genocide in Gaza, however, is one front in the rapidly escalating Third World War. The fact that the same countries that are supporting genocide in Gaza, including but not limited to, Germany, United Kingdom and Canada, are the same that hail the Zelensky regime filled with fascists was not remarked upon.
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The entire perspective advanced by the main organizers of the People’s Conference for Palestine has proven to be utterly bankrupt. At last year’s gathering, the Palestinian struggle was presented as a linear chain of “resistance” victories that would, perhaps in another “100 years,” culminate in liberation. The World Socialist Web Site warned at the time:
To be blunt, the people in Gaza do not have another 100 years. The genocide in Gaza has already led to the deaths of over 36,000 people officially, a significant under-count, while hundreds of thousands are on the brink of famine.
One year later, this warning has been borne out with devastating clarity. The death toll has more than doubled, with estimates as high as 300,000, and last Friday the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification confirmed that famine has officially set in Gaza City.
12. Trump’s dictatorship and the American oligarchy
If ever a scene embodied the Communist Manifesto’s maxim that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” it was Thursday’s conclave of technology oligarchs at the White House. It demonstrated conclusively that Trump’s efforts to establish a dictatorship in the United States serves the interests of the financial oligarchy, and that the targets of this dictatorship are the workers whose labor creates the oligarchy’s wealth.
Among those present were:
• Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, the second-largest company in the world with a market capitalization of $3.6 trillion. Sam Altman of Microsoft proxy OpenAI was also present, along with former chairman and CEO Bill Gates (net worth $122 billion).
• Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, the third-largest company in the world, with a market capitalization of $3.5 trillion.
• Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (Google), the fourth-largest company in the world with a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, with a net worth of $191 billion, was also present.
• David Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, attended on behalf of Jeff Bezos (net worth $256 billion) and his company Amazon, the fifth-largest corporation in the world, with a market capitalization of $2.4 trillion.
• Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (Facebook), the sixth-largest corporation in the world, with a market capitalization of $1.8 trillion. Zuckerberg is the third-wealthiest man in the world, with a net worth of $263 billion.
Inside the White House, a newly-gilded Rococo ballroom seated thirty men and women representing corporations with a market capitalization greater than the gross domestic product of every country in the world except the United States. Outside, the streets of the American capital were patrolled by armed and masked soldiers, gripping assault rifles and supported by armored vehicles mounted with gun turrets, amid Trump’s occupation of major American cities as part of his effort to establish a dictatorship.
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Having presided at Trump’s inauguration ceremony, in which he took office by capitalizing on the collapse of support for the incumbent Democratic Party, the technology oligarchs gathered once again to consecrate Trump’s self-coronation as king and dictator of America.
In exchange, Trump gave his full blessing for the initiative of the technology companies to integrate Artificial Intelligence—run on their servers, their consumer hardware, and their software—into all aspects of social and economic life, paving the way for an economic restructuring that is expected to destroy 800 million jobs by 2030.
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Virtually the same group of technology executives prominently flanked Trump at his inauguration. In the seven months since inauguration day, the market capitalization of those major technology companies has risen by a further $3 trillion.
The open endorsement of Trump by these leading representatives is all the more significant in that Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all disproportionately donated to the Democratic Party up through the last election cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org. The embrace of Trump’s dictatorship by the oligarchy is the reason why their hirelings in the Democratic Party have done nothing to oppose Trump’s efforts to initiate a dictatorship.
The basic fact is that the vast wealth piled up by the financial oligarchy is built on a mountain of worthless paper. If power were really measured in market capitalization, then the men and women in that room are ten times stronger than they were a decade ago. But all of that vast wealth is valued in dollars. And dollars are valued in nothing. The power and preeminence of American imperialism is not predicated on productive capacity, but by its position in the global economic order. And the American state – and the dollars it prints – are bankrupt. Every dollar racked up by the oligarchs is either a dollar borrowed or a dollar typed into a spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve.
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But the working class will have its own say. To date, the mass protests against the Trump administration have been dominated by sections of the middle class. We are now at an inflection point, in which the seat of struggle will shift to the factories, where the AI-fueled bloodbath will lead to the destruction of countless jobs, speedups, and attacks in working conditions – coupled with a systematic onslaught against Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlement programs.
Central to the development of working-class opposition must be the conception, seared into the mind of every class-conscious worker, that in fighting Trump, they are fighting the capitalist oligarchy on behalf of which he speaks, and that the struggle against the Trump administration is the struggle against the capitalist system on behalf of which he rules.
13. Israel destroys high-rise buildings in Gaza City, as final genocidal offensive nears
On Friday, Israeli forces struck the Mushtaha Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Gaza City, with at least three projectiles, reducing the 12-story high-rise to rubble. Verified footage and reports from ABC News show the tower collapsing in a cloud of dust, with the shockwaves from the strike shaking tent encampments surrounding it, where hundreds of displaced Palestinians had been sheltering.
According to eyewitnesses, the military issued an evacuation order just 15 minutes before the first strike, leaving many families camped around the building with nowhere to go. The force of the explosion overturned tents and caused panic as people fled. Doctors at Al-Shifa Hospital described being overwhelmed by the number of dead and injured.
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Fear and desperation among the population are being deliberately brought to new levels in the barbaric genocide that has been unleashed on Palestinians since October 2023. Israel is wiping out the skyline of the largest city in Gaza in preparation for a massive ground invasion.
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Behind the death and devastation in Gaza stands a detailed “post-war” plan developed in close collaboration between the Israeli government and the Trump administration, with critical roles played by Israeli businessmen, the Boston Consulting Group, the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Fund, and the Tony Blair Institute.
This scheme, as reported by investigative journalists, aims to sweep Gaza clear of its Palestinian population and turn the Strip into a “seaside resort” for Western and Israeli business interests. The plan entails massive new privatization of land and resources, the introduction of special economic zones controlled by foreign investors, and the permanent exclusion of the native population, with the blessing and logistical support of the US and Israeli militaries.
While publicly couched as “humanitarian reconstruction,” the real intent is obvious: ethnic cleansing, economic exploitation, and the utter erasure of Palestinian national rights, engineered by figures like the war criminal Tony Blair and implemented at the direction of the financial and corporate elites behind US and Israeli policy.
14. Australian Labor government moves to bar access to key political documents
Without any prior notice, the Albanese Labor government this week tabled in parliament a huge bill designed to further gut the already limited and severely eroded Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. In particular, facing growing social and political discontent, the government wants to extend the secrecy surrounding all supposedly cabinet-related documents.
Containing hundreds of amendments, the bill was obviously long in preparation, but it was never mentioned during the May 3 election campaign. In fact, in both the 2022 and 2025 federal elections, the Labor government postured as an opponent of the previous Liberal-National government’s anti-democratic secrecy and the Coalition’s Trump-style authoritarian agenda.
Labor’s bill, personally championed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, is the most serious attack on the FOI laws for decades. It is not taking place in a political vacuum. It marks another move to prevent public and even parliamentary scrutiny of Labor’s pro-corporate, anti-immigrant and militarist program, on top of its secretive deal for mass deportations to Nauru, continued furtive permits for weapons exports to Israel as the US-backed Gaza genocide intensifies and closed-door talks with the Trump administration.
Albanese and Attorney-General Michelle Rowland claimed that the changes were needed to halt a deluge of “vexatious” or spam FOI applications. That is clearly false. The official statistics show that the number of applications has halved under the Labor government, accompanied by lengthy delays.
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The key aspects of Labor’s bill include:
- The existing FOI Act exemption for documents related to cabinet-related decisions would be expanded to include anything that has been supposedly brought to the cabinet’s attention, even for “noting,” or that might inform something that is shown to cabinet in future.
- Any document in which ministers, public servants or other officials record their thoughts about policy could be exempted as “deliberative material”—including what the bill’s explanatory memorandum calls “blue-sky thinking” that might relate to some future policy deliberation.
- Powers for the Information Commissioner (IC) to set as-yet-unknown fees for FOI applications, internal agency review requests and first-level tribunal reviews by the IC office itself, all of which are currently free.
- Unprecedented powers for ministers and officials to arbitrarily reject FOI applications as “vexatious” or seeking to “disrupt” government operations.
- Ministers and officials could also refuse an FOI application if it allegedly would involve more than 40 hours of searching and “processing” time—which includes the time taken to decide whether to release documents.
Above all, Labor’s “reforms” are intended to extend cabinet-related secrecy. Under the current FOI laws, documents that have the “dominant purpose” of possibly going to cabinet for potential discussion are exempt from being disclosed. A key change would alter the wording from “dominant purpose” to “substantive purpose.” That will allow a wider bar on access to any documents that ministers or top officials say could be contained in a submission to cabinet.
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The introduction of FOI fees is calculated to prevent applications by ordinary people, not wealthy or well-resourced ones. Already, FOI applications are complicated and rarely free in practice. Ministers and government agencies have wide powers to impose hefty charges for time allegedly spent locating, deciding on and releasing documents.
15. New Zealand nurses hold more nationwide strikes
Some 36,000 nurses, healthcare assistants and midwives at public hospitals across New Zealand held two 24-hour strikes on September 2 and 4, in response to the right-wing National Party-led government’s wage-cutting proposals and its under-staffing of the health system.
The dispute has dragged on for nearly a year, with members of the New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) holding strikes last December and in July 2025.
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The ruling class wants to set a benchmark for drastic pay reductions across the public and private sector, in order to drive up the rate of exploitation, fund tax cuts for the rich, and divert billions of dollars to the military to prepare for imperialist wars.
Thousands of doctors struck in May and 20,000 secondary teachers held a one-day strike last month after getting similar wage offers. Both disputes remain unresolved.
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With hospitals across the country freezing recruitment to cut costs, Health NZ data shows that between January and November 2024, 51 percent of day shifts and 35 percent of evening shifts were understaffed.
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There is widespread anger with the government, and workers want to fight back against its austerity agenda. The union bureaucracy, however, is keeping nurses, doctors, teachers and other workers isolated from each other to create the conditions for workers to accept a sellout agreement.
A postal worker at one of the 35 delivery offices piloting USO “reform” spoke with the World Socialist Web Site this week. Their name and location have been withheld to prevent victimisation. The pilot scheme was drawn up by Royal Mail and Communication Workers Union (CWU) deputy assistant general secretary Martin Walsh to trial the Optimized Delivery Model (ODM).
The ODM is a workplace regime aimed at dismantling the universal mail service. USO reform was rubber-stamped by regulator Ofcom on July 28 based on alternate weekday delivery for second class and “non-priority” letters. Contrary to official claims, it also downgrades first class letters with watered down quality-of-service targets, allowing delays of up to three days.
Walsh and the CWU postal executive agreed to trial this gig economy delivery model last December as part of a Framework Agreement supporting Royal Mail’s takeover by billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s EP Group. CWU members had no say. It replaces fixed duties with “core” and “combined” routes, leaving three postal workers to perform the work of four, increasing delivery spans to five hours and call rates by 30 percent.
Walsh publicly attacked the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) and the World Socialist Web Site for “interference” after a campaign taken up at delivery offices to scrutinise the pilots and organize a collective struggle against plans to deploy the ODM across all 1250 delivery units nationally.
In the face of rank-and-file opposition, the CWU had insisted there was “no alternative” but to accept the pilots. But they have now been forced to admit the ODM is unworkable and have submitted an “alternative model” of cost-cutting to the company which they are trying to sell to members.
17. Norwegian election campaign overshadowed by military build-up for war with Russia
Voters go to the polls in Norway Monday to elect a new parliament under conditions in which the entire political establishment agrees on investing massive sums to wage war against Russia, and turning the country into a massive military staging ground.
Whether current Labour Party Prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre or Conservative leader Erna Solberg emerges as the next head of government following the election, nothing fundamental in the ruling class’ policies of war and offloading the costs onto workers will change.
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The election will be decided depending on whether the parties of the left or right, also known as the “red” and “blue” blocks, win a majority. The red block is led by Labour, and includes the Socialist Left, whose origins lie in a fusion between a split-off from Labour in the early 1960s and a breakaway group from the Stalinist Communist Party of Norway in 1975, and the Red Party, which emerged out of the Maoist Workers’ Communist Party during the 2000s.
The “blue block” is led by the Conservatives, although the far-right Progress Party has contended for the position of the largest party in the block.
The militarization of the country is endorsed by every party in parliament, from the far-right Progress Party to the supposedly “left-wing” Socialist Left and Red Party. Last year, all parties in parliament united to agree on a massive expansion of financial resources to the Norwegian armed forces through 2036 that will see the military budget double. In March, all parties agreed to boost funding to arm Ukraine during 2025 by 50 billion kroner (about €4 billion). The Nansen Support Program, established by the government in early 2023 with the unanimous approval of parliament, will therefore provide a total of 205 billion kroner (€17.5 billion) for the Ukrainian army by 2030.
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Norway’s oil fund, the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, is worth some €1.7 trillion—four times Norway’s GDP—and owns approximately 1.5 percent of all global stocks. Presented as a mechanism for the revenues generated by the country’s large oil deposits to serve future generations, the fund has become a means to restrain public spending and allow the Norwegian bourgeoisie to play an outsized role relative to the country’s small size on the world stage.
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While none of the parties in parliament has objected to the use of oil fund money to fuel the US-NATO war on Russia and the opening of a new “northern front” across the Nordic region, opposition parties have tried to score political points against the government by criticising the fund’s investments in Israeli companies. Criticism came from the Conservatives, Socialist Left, and Red Party during August after Stoltenberg refused to answer questions addressed to him by a parliamentary control committee about the fund’s investments in Israeli companies. The Red Party calls the extermination of the Palestinians in Gaza a genocide and supports a boycott of trade with Israel.
The Norwegian government was one of the first in Europe to formally recognize a Palestinian state. The oil fund has withdrawn its investments from 23 of the 61 Israeli companies in which it held stocks since June. In mid-August, Stoltenberg announced the exclusion of six firms linked to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and onslaught on Gaza, but once again ruled out divesting from all Israeli companies. Three days after Russia’s US-provoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the government ordered the oil fund to divest from all Russian holdings.
The deployment of vast resources to fund militarism and war is accelerating a long-term trend of growing social inequality driven by reduced public spending and privatization. Several studies have pointed to the growing gap between rich and poor. Public broadcaster NRK published research in early August revealing that in 96 of the 156 counties examined, social inequality grew between 2015 and 2023. Using the example of Tonsberg, a town with one of the sharpest divisions between rich and poor, the report noted that while approximately three out of four voters went to the polls at the last election in the wealthiest areas, areas where poverty was high saw barely half of the electorate vote.
The Socialist Left and Red Party have sought to capitalize on opposition to growing inequality with promises of higher taxes for the rich, better healthcare coverage, improved job security, and increased welfare benefits. But both parties serve in parliament to secure a majority for a potential Labour-led government—a party that has traditionally dominated Norwegian politics for decades and has presided over public spending cuts, anti-immigrant agitation and Norway’s emergence as a frontline state in the war on Russia over the past quarter century. Between 2005 and 2013, the Socialist Left joined Stoltenberg’s Labour Party government.
Moreover, both parties’ solid support for the imperialist war on Russia in Ukraine underscore where their true allegiances lie. The Socialist Left reversed its longstanding call for Norway to withdraw from NATO in 2023 in response to the US-provoked Russian invasion of Ukraine.
While the Red Party still calls formally for Norway to leave the alliance, it backed the military spending plan to bring Norway’s military budget up to 2 percent of GDP—directing 600 billion kroner away from public spending and towards weapons of war over the next 11 years—and supports a defense alliance with neighboring Nordic countries, all of whom are NATO members.
18. UK Labour government in crisis as ruling class demands ramped up war on the working class
A tax sleaze scandal has been used to remove Angela Rayner as Britain’s deputy prime minister and deputy leader of the Labour Party.
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Behind this escalating government crisis lay the demands of Britain’s ruling elite that Labour massively escalate its offensive against the working class to tackle rising public debts and create the necessary conditions for imperialism to pursue an agenda of trade and military war.
International attention has focused on the budgetary and political crisis in France, but British capitalism is moving rapidly toward its own reckoning. The government has faced sustained criticism from corporate circles for climbing down from some of the savage cuts demanded of them, and for failing to ramp up military spending with sufficient speed.
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British capitalism is in a perilous position. Public debt is now around 96 percent of GDP. This was, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) noted in July, the “fourth highest among advanced European economies, and the sixth highest among advanced economies”. Since the pandemic, debt as a percentage of GDP has been the highest the UK has seen since the 1960s, when it was on its way down from a Second World War-era peak of 270 percent of GDP to a low of 24 percent in 1991-2.
The OBR added that the deficit between annual public income and public expenditure was 5.7 percent in 2024, “four percentage points higher than the average advanced economy and the third highest among 28 advanced European economies.”
International investors are turning the screws, with the UK government forced to pay over 5.7 percent interest on 30-year bonds, the highest rate in 27 years, and 4.5 percent on 10-year bonds in June, the “third-highest borrowing costs of any advanced economy”. Close to 10 percent of government expenditure now goes towards paying interests on its debts, nearly £125 billion in 2024-5.
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The UK’s mountain of debt, mirroring France, Italy, and the United States, is one of the most severe manifestations of a long-term, deeply rooted crisis of world capitalism. Two enormous economic shocks in less than two decades—the financial crisis of 2007-8 and the pandemic crisis of 2020-21—drastically widened the gap between national governments’ revenues and expenditures. Everywhere, the difference was made up by taking on massive levels of debt.
After the 2008 crisis, an era of “austerity” was declared to close the deficit, making workers pay for the capitalist crisis. In the UK, public spending was slashed from 44 percent of GDP to 38 percent of GDP in 2019. However, the pandemic crisis reversed this process, taking public spending back to 44 percent of GDP in 2024.
Piling on the pressure, Starmer’s and every European government is committed to finding the money for a boost in military spending comparable only with rearmament drives during the 1930s—a process which has barely begun. Britain has so far only increased spending on the military from 2.2 to 2.3 percent of GDP in the last five years. It is targeting 3.5 percent by 2035, amid howls from the military that it must go much further much faster.
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The solution demanded by the OBR, Britain’s international creditors and the financial press is the same as in every other country: redoubled austerity, cutting social spending commitments—and, if necessary, some selective raising of taxes.
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Talk of IMF involvement invokes the spectre of its 1976 intervention during the Labour government of James Callaghan. Amid soaring inflation and high unemployment, Callaghan agreed to major cuts in return for an IMF loan that led to the “Winter of Discontent” strike wave and paved the way for the election of Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979, who then embarked on a program of savage counter-revolution against the living standards of the working class.
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However, there are stark differences in the domestic and world situation that herald a far more brutal offensive than that waged by Thatcher in the 1980s. A major pillar of her program was a fire-sale of public assets, for which there was much greater scope. When she came to office, Britain’s net public wealth (the value of state assets minus the value of state liabilities like debts) was roughly £1 trillion in today’s money. In 2023, the figure was -£825 billion.
In the same time period there has also been a vast transfer of money to the rich, with the poorest half of the population today receiving a much smaller percentage of the national income than in 1980, and a larger proportion of people living in relative poverty.
Moreover, military spending actually fell during Thatcher’s time in office—after a sharp rise in the first few years—from 4.7 percent to 4 percent of GDP, and would fall much faster thereafter, largely thanks to the boost provided to world imperialism by the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China.
Today, British imperialism is moving in the opposite direction. Rapid globalization has been replaced with trade war and punishing tariffs and a drive to redivide the world between the major imperialist powers involving military hostilities directed above all against Russia and China.
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Advocates for capitalism are now openly proclaiming that it cannot provide basic social protections like healthcare and old-age pensions. What they declare an unavoidable necessity is in fact proof of the historical bankruptcy of this social system.
The resources and the technology to provide a good quality of life for all exist in abundance. Standing in the way is senseless production for private profit not human needs, the monopolization of vast swathes of wealth by the super rich and the anarchy of the market which plunge millions into hardship, and the division of the world into antagonistic nation states that leads inexorably to trade and military war.
A world crisis demands a world solution, which can only be provided by a socialist party of the international working class. If capitalism is bankrupt it should be dissolved, not bailed out by workers, and a new socialist system established in its place.
19. United States: Nearly 500 workers rounded up in massive immigration raid at Hyundai plant in Georgia
On Thursday, multiple federal agencies, including Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)—a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), carried out a massive immigration raid on the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America campus in Ellabell, Georgia.
According to HSI, the fascistic raid resulted in the kidnapping of 475 workers. In a press conference Friday, Steven Schrank, the special agent in charge of HSI in Georgia, said it was the largest single-site raid in the agency’s history.
Schrank claimed the workers had either entered the US illegally, overstayed their visas, or were violating their visas by working. He stated that most of those arrested were from Korea and that they had already been transported to an ICE concentration camp in Folkston, Georgia.
The $7.6 billion complex is located in the town of Ellabell, outside Savannah, Georgia. Its 2,900-acre campus includes an electric vehicle plant and a still-under-construction lithium battery cell manufacturing facility, the latter of which was the specific “Target Premises” in a warrant unsealed Friday.
Notably, the warrant only listed four “target persons” to be searched, none of whom appear to be Korean. However, it also granted federal agents authority to seize “all records” on the premises related to employment and identity, a sweeping authorization that was used as the pretext for the mass detention of nearly 500 workers.
The factory is a joint venture between Hyundai Motor and LG Energy Solution. After receiving a $2 billion handout from the Georgia state government, Hyundai pledged to employ 8,500 workers at the facility by 2031. According to company and US government officials, many of the detained workers were employed by subcontractors.
Thursday’s raid is the latest in a series of mass workplace roundups earlier this year, including raids at meatpacking plants in Iowa, a student housing construction site in Florida, and multiple ICE operations outside Home Depot locations in Los Angeles County. These large-scale workplace raids give the lie to Trump’s claims that immigration police operations are directed towards “criminals” and “murders.”
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In the face of mass roundups and deportations, the unions categorically refuse to call for strike action or organize any genuine resistance.
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and socialist who ran for UAW president in 2022, issued the following statement in response to the Georgia Hyundai raid:
I denounce this barbaric raid and demand the immediate release of all the workers who have been rounded up by the immigration gestapo. This is not only an attack on immigrant workers, it is an attack on the entire working class. If the government can use flimsy warrants naming four people to justify flex-cuffing nearly 500, then it will use the same methods against citizen workers who resist attacks on their jobs, living standards, and democratic rights. We have already seen this year how the Trump administration stripped union protections from nearly a million federal workers—what is happening to immigrants today will be used against all of us tomorrow.
The nationalist trade union bureaucracies, including the AFL-CIO and UAW, have not called for a single strike to defend immigrant workers, jobs, or basic democratic rights. They have once again proven themselves an arm of the corporations and the state. That is why workers must build new organizations—rank-and-file defense committees in every factory and job site. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees fights to unite workers across all borders, languages, and nationalities in a common fight.
I call on all workers to come to the defense of our class brothers and sisters at seized in the Hyundai raid, demand their release, and mobilize in opposition to the escalating assault on immigrant workers throughout the country.
20. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:DNATA baggage handlers at Perth Airport hold second strike
DHL Express workers at Brisbane Airport strike for pay parity
Rockhampton Regional Council workers strike for improved pay offer
Northern Territory public hospital pharmacists take action over staffing and pay
CBH Kwinana grain terminal workers locked out
Queensland public sector trades workers strike for 36-hour week
Solvay Interox factory workers in New South Wales strike for higher pay and safety
Schindler Lift technicians in New South Wales on strike
Derwent Valley Council workers strike for pay rise
Hydro Tasmania workers prepare to strike
Cascade Brewery workers in Tasmania strike for higher pay
Bangladesh:
Police and military fire at protesting factory workers, killing one
Eurozone Fashion Garments workers protest over unpaid wages and allowances
India:
Telangana ASHA workers protest for promised pay increase
Strike action by Tamil Nadu State Transport workers enters third week
Chennai police attack port workers demanding compensation for deceased migrant worker
Chhattisgarh contract workers strike for permanent jobs
South Korea:
Hyundai and GM auto manufacturing workers strike
Hyundai Heavy Industries shipbuilding workers strike
Sri Lanka:
Public transport workers strike against joint transport initiative
Public sector doctors strike at Ratnapura teaching hospital over the director’s conduct
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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.
