Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The “No Kings” demonstrations and the political strategy to fight Trump’s fascist conspiracy
This is a report delivered by Socialist Equality Party National Secretary Joseph Kishore to a meeting in Detroit, Michigan on October 18, following the “No Kings” demonstration.
2.“US imperialism is now coming home to roost”: Interviews from the “No Kings” demonstrations
On October 18, World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to protesters at No Kings rallies across the United States. Here are some of the interviews from workers and young people. [Videos included.]
3. Trump builds himself a Versailles on the Potomac
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The White House, while built in part by slave labor, has been occupied by Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant—figures identified with the democratic traditions of the American Revolution and the fight against slavery and reaction in the Civil War. Now, its East Wing is being rebuilt as part of Trump’s Versailles—a palace for the oligarchy erected atop the ruins of American democracy.
In the decades before the French Revolution, Versailles became synonymous with corruption, aristocratic luxury and decay. Trump’s project evokes the same spirit: the attempt by a dying social order to immortalize its power through gilded excess.
The “Versailles on the Potomac” will serve as the venue for high society galas, meetings with billionaires, and celebrations of military power. It is the physical manifestation of a government of, by and for the rich. The administration’s defenders have insisted that “private donations” absolve the project of any scandal, but that is the essence of corruption: the purchasing of access to public power by private interests.
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The destruction of the East Wing and its replacement with a palace ballroom symbolize a broader process—the systematic erasure of the democratic ideals upon which the United States was founded. It coincides with Trump’s moves to invoke the Insurrection Act, to deploy the military domestically, to criminalize opposition, and to elevate his family and inner circle to positions of power. The “renovation” of the White House is inseparable from the reconstruction of the state along dictatorial lines.
But far from being an expression of strength, these developments expose weakness and fear. The American oligarchy—mired in social inequality, financial parasitism and endless war—can no longer rule through democratic means. It must instead rely on gold-plated palaces, propaganda and brute force to maintain its crumbling legitimacy. Trump’s ballroom is being built not out of confidence in the future, but out of dread of the masses.
A White House spokesman responded to the massive October 18 “No Kings” protests, in which more than seven million people participated, with a peremptory dismissal: “Who cares?” Trump himself called the protests a “joke,” describing them as “very small, very ineffective,” while vilifying the demonstrators as “whacked out.”
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Trump and his fascist aides may be blind, but the financial oligarchy as a whole sense the danger, when, on the same day, headlines announce that billionaires are spending $200 million to build a huge new addition to the White House, and that 154,000 school children in New York City are homeless, with nearly 65,000 of them living in shelters.
As Versailles stood for the ancien régime, so too will Trump’s White House renovation stand for a degenerate ruling class whose time is running out, and which faces a social revolution that will take its place in the great historical line from the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
The Office of Special Counsel (OSC) is not a meaningless or powerless position within the US government. The OSC reports directly to the president and Congress and is charged with investigating federal employees who claim retaliation for exposing waste, fraud, abuse or violations of federal law within agencies. It can order agencies to reinstate previously fired whistleblowers and enforces the Hatch Act, which nominally limits the political activities in which workers can engage while employed by the federal government.
In other words, the OSC’s purpose in part is to present the illusion of political neutrality within the US government. By nominating Paul Ingrassia, a Trump loyalist with minimal legal experience and a documented record of extremist, fascistic statements, to head the OSC, Trump was making a conscious political statement that whistleblowers against the administration would not be protected and that the “rule of law” would be subsumed by the “Führer principle.”
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Ingrassia’s fascist politics have been well known for years. A frequent contributor to the right-wing Gateway Pundit, he supported Trump’s “stolen election” lies and advocated that Trump “declare martial law” in response to losing the 2020 election.
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In a report last summer on the fourth iteration of neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference, held in July of 2024 in Detroit, journalist and researcher Amanda Moore followed many Republican operatives at the conference, including Ingrassia.
In her report for the Intercept, Moore observed Ingrassia watching a speech delivered by Fuentes for nearly 20 minutes. In the course of his remarks, Fuentes praised Henry Ford as a “great genius” and railed against “the Jews” who “control what Charlie Kirk does.”
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Following the publication of the Politico article, at least five Senate Republicans publicly stated they would no longer support Ingrassia’s nomination to head the OSC, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who declared on Monday, “he’s not going to pass.” On Tuesday evening, Ingrassia wrote on X/Twitter that he would be “withdrawing myself” from Thursday’s hearing “because unfortunately I do not have enough Republican votes at this time.”
He offered no apology for his racist and fascist texts, instead writing, “I appreciate the overwhelming support that I have received throughout this process and will continue to serve President Trump and this administration to Make America Great Again!”
5. At “No Kings” rally in Washington, Bernie Sanders covers for the Democrats and capitalism
In his 1938 article “The Priests of Half-Truth,” Leon Trotsky denounced those who “feed upon half-thoughts and half-feelings” and “live by half-truths, that is to say, the worst form of falsehood.”
From this standpoint, it is worth examining the speech delivered by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders at the massive rally in Washington, D.C., held as part of the nationwide “No Kings” protests on October 18. The main sponsors of the event, including Indivisible and MoveOn.org, are adjuncts of the Democratic Party. They organized the demonstrations to let off steam and channel mass opposition to Trump back behind the Democratic Party, the graveyard of social movements.
Alarmed by the scale of the opposition and the growing radicalization of the masses—including their increasing disgust with the Democrats and interest in a socialist alternative—the organizers made the decision to have Sanders, who had planned to speak at a small rally in Vermont, address the main rally in Washington, the better to neuter the movement politically.
This is Sanders’ specialty, and he has been at it for decades. When the ruling class needs someone to use radical-sounding phrases to divert workers and youth away from a struggle against capitalism and into the dead-end of the two-party system and electoral politics, Bernie is their man. He is the consummate demagogue.
The perfidy of his role stands out all the more under conditions in which Trump is using Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs to terrorize working-class communities, kidnapping immigrants and even US citizens to send them to concentration camps; dispatching National Guard troops to occupy cities; defying the courts; branding all opponents as “antifa terrorists”; and preparing to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would empower him to deploy active-duty troops across the country.
6. The Battleship Potemkin: A century since the making of Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece
A supreme achievement, Potemkin is consistently included on lists of the greatest films ever made. Initially intended as one of a number of sequences within a broader film to mark the anniversary of the 1905 events, the tale of the sailors’ revolt against atrocious conditions, the enthusiastic support they receive from the Odessa working class and the vicious reprisals of the tsarist forces came to embody the entire experience of that defeated revolution, the “dress rehearsal” for 1917.
In 1925, Soviet society looked back on 1905 in the light of the experience of a successful revolution. October 1917 unleashed a huge wave of revolutionary energy in all spheres of life, including the arts. As Russian workers attempted to forge the basis for a new society, artists found themselves not only inspired by the achievements of the revolution, but also able to develop new creative techniques to reflect that inspiration.
The Battleship Potemkin was Eisenstein’s second feature films (after Strike), but it was also the last one made under the conditions of artistic freedom created by the revolution. As the Stalinist bureaucracy tightened its grip on the Soviet Union, Eisenstein came under pressure to adapt his historical epics to the requirements of the ruling caste. His tribute to the revolutionary workers of Petrograd, October (1928, also known as Ten Days That Shook The World), for example, suffered from having all references to Leon Trotsky removed on orders of the bureaucracy. What he was allowed to show of Lenin in that film was also dictated by the immediate needs of Stalinist policy.
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The Battleship Potemkin, the most fully realized of Eisenstein’s films, captures the brutality of the regime that the workers and sailors tried unsuccessfully to overthrow in 1905, their heroism in facing down that regime and the savage reprisals unleashed against them. This complex revolutionary process is captured in some of the most stunning and iconic images ever committed to film.
Eisenstein himself regarded The Battleship Potemkin as a film that would remain contemporary in character, apparently calling for a new score to be written for it every 10 years.
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Although angry and agitational to the core, The Battleship Potemkin is a work of extraordinary pictorial beauty and great elegance of form. It is broken into five movements or acts. In the first of these, “Men and Maggots,” the flagrant mistreatment of the sailors at the hands of their officers is shown, while the second, “Drama on the Quarterdeck,” presents the actual mutiny and the ship’s arrival in Odessa. “Appeal from the Dead” establishes the solidarity of the citizens of Odessa with the mutineers.
“The Odessa Steps” incarnates the theory that Eisenstein expounded in his writings. He believed that meaning in motion pictures was principally generated by the collision or juxtaposition of shots, montage. He compared this process in film editing to “the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving forward its automobile or tractor.”
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In one of the most renowned segments in “The Odessa Steps,” one of the most renowned scenes in cinema history, the tsarist troops march mercilessly down the stone steps, firing indiscriminately into crowds of men, women and children. This massacre is a pivotal moment that heightens revolutionary sentiment, clarifying the issues: there will be no compromise with the autocracy.
The force of “The Odessa Steps” arises from the viewer combining in his or her mind a series of brief, independent shots to form a new, distinct conceptual impression that outweighs the individual shots’ significance. Through Eisenstein’s manipulations of filmic time and space, the slaughter on the steps—where hundreds of citizens find themselves trapped between descending tsarist militia above and Cossacks below—acquires a powerful meaning.
With the addition of a stirring score by German left-wing composer Edmund Meisel, the agitational appeal of Battleship Potemkin became nearly irresistible; when the film was exported in early 1926, it made Eisenstein world-famous. Ironically, the film was eventually banned by the dictator Stalin over fears it might incite a riot against his regime.
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There is a significant footnote to the Potemkin story. In his book The Battleship Potemkin: The Greatest Film Ever Made (1978), British writer Herbert Marshall revealed that his research indicated that the original version of The Battleship Potemkin
contained an epigraph which came immediately after the act-title “1. Men and Maggots.” It was worded as follows: “The spirit of insurrection hovered over the Russian land. Some enormous and mysterious process was taking place in countless hearts. The individual was dissolving in the mass, and the mass was dissolving in the outburst.”
Marshall explained that the epigraph came from Leon Trotsky’s well-known article, “The Red Navy” (or “The Red Fleet,” depending on the translation), which was included in his brilliant commentary on the 1905 Revolution, 1905 (published in 1907). The essay is “an analysis,” writes Marshall, “of the various mutinies which wracked the Czarist navy in 1905.”
This is Trotsky’s entire original paragraph:
The spirit of insurrection hovered over the Russian land. Some enormous and mysterious process was taking place in countless hearts: The bonds of fear were being broken; the individual, just after managing to become aware of himself, was dissolving in the mass, and the mass was dissolving in the outburst. Liberated from inherited terrors and imagined obstacles, the mass was unwilling and unable to see obstacles that were real. That was its weakness and that was its strength. It was borne ahead like a wave of the sea driven by a storm. Each day brought to their feet new strata [of society] and gave birth to new opportunities [for revolution]. As if some gigantic pestle were stirring a social cauldron down to the very bottom.
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The World Socialist Web Site will be posting a series of articles on the artistic achievements of 1925. A recurring theme has been and will be the impact and influence of the 1917 Russian Revolution on international artistic and cultural life.
Talks resumed Monday between Boeing and the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union under the auspices of a federal mediator, in an effort to shut down the nearly three-month strike by 3,200 workers at the company’s defense plants in the St. Louis area. The workers, who build F-15 and F-18 fighter jets, drones and other weapons systems, have been on strike since August 4 over inadequate pay, extended wage progression and other issues.
The intervention of the federal government reflects the anxiety of the Trump administration to resume military production as quickly as possible. According to a report last month in the Wall Street Journal, US officials have told the arms industry in private meetings that it wants to see a doubling or even quadrupling of production for key missile systems.
At the same time, a mediator provides political cover for both Boeing and the IAM bureaucracy to impose a deal on workers that has already been worked out. That the strike has taken place at all is due to the repeated refusal of rank-and-file workers to accept a sellout deal. After workers rejected a third sellout deal in September, the IAM attempted to shut down the strike by “pre-ratifying” a deal which management had not agreed to. This, however, has failed for the time being.
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The strike is a major center of the class struggle in the US. The workers are facing both a massive defense contractor and behind it the Trump administration and the entire American ruling elite. Boeing plays a key role in arming US imperialism worldwide, including the US-NATO war in Ukraine against Russia and the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The strike thus objectively pits this section of the working class against the American war machine.
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Boeing workers are at a critical juncture. Boeing will not budge not only because it is backed by Wall Street and by the White House but because they can count of the IAM bureaucracy to help starve workers out. Workers are being strung out on $200 a week in strike pay, while the union has done next to nothing to build support for the strike, including among the 30,000 Boeing airline workers in the Pacific Northwest.
Workers must break out of this isolation with a new strategy and new organization, starting with the formation of a Boeing St. Louis Workers Rank-and-File Committee, to formulate their demands and enforce those demands on the picket line and during the contract talks.
Such demands should include: $1,000 a week in strike pay; workers’ control over picketing and the organization of flying pickets to other sections of workers; measures to prevent the training of strikebreakers; appeals for solidarity strikes from machinists on the commercial side of Boeing, as well as from company engineers; and rank-and-file control over all talks to ensure that the fight is carried out to get workers what they need, not what the company or government claims can be afforded.
That there is significant latent support for the strike was shown by the fact that machinists in IAM District 751, which covers 33,000 Boeing machinists across Washington, Oregon and California, donated a collective $32,000 to the strike fund for their brothers and sisters in St. Louis. At the same time, the donation highlights the refusal of the IAM leadership to properly provision the strike.
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The aerospace giant is also well into the process of hiring strikebreakers to replace the skilled workers on the picket line. In an internal memo obtained by Reuters, a Boeing executive said the first batch of replacement workers began training on October 2 for munitions and aircraft assembly positions. The company is also looking at outsourcing work to third parties in an effort to break the strike.
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At the same time, the media has imposed an almost total blackout on the strike, which has been virtually ignored by the national television networks and major newspapers. This demonstrates the fear within the ruling class that the struggle of Boeing workers could become a catalyst for a much broader movement of the working class against declining living standards, the soaring cost of living and the drive to World War III.
That fear is well justified. Saturday’s “No Kings” protests drew millions of people across thousands of locations internationally in cities and rural areas alike. There is mass opposition to the enormous social inequality that exists in American society and the fascist dictatorship Trump is erecting to maintain that inequality.
The only way forward for Boeing workers is to form the Boeing St. Louis Workers Rank-and-File Committee, independent of the pro-corporate IAM apparatus, to appeal for support from workers throughout Boeing and beyond and make their strike the starting point for a powerful counteroffensive by the working class. This must be combined with the building of a mass political movement of the working class to stop the drive to war and fight for a socialist alternative to the bankrupt capitalist system.
8. The north of Cyprus, a strategic island in the Eastern Mediterranean, holds presidential elections
In the presidential elections held in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) on Sunday, October 19, Tufan Erhürman, leader of the Republican Turkish Party (CTP), won by a landslide, defeating incumbent President Ersin Tatar.
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The office of the president in the TRNC has limited executive power. However, because it represents Turkish Cypriots in negotiations, it carries political significance. Therefore, presidential elections are not merely a matter of internal political competition; rather, they constitute an important arena of struggle in terms of the division of the island, Turkey’s decisive influence, and the balance of power in the Eastern Mediterranean.
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Erhürman’s call for a federation and Tatar’s insistence on two states may formally point in different directions, but both lines are driven by the impulse to best protect the interests of the ruling class in Northern Cyprus and Turkey. Neither line offers any solution to the fundamental problems of Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot workers, that is, the oppressed majority on the island: poverty, unemployment, war, and dependence on regional powers and imperialism.
It was no secret that Ankara supported Tatar. Viewing the elections as linked to Turkey’s strategic interests, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government sent many high-level politicians to the island to campaign directly on Tatar’s behalf.
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Cyprus, which gained official independence from Britain in 1960, quickly became the scene of a power struggle between Ankara and Athens, both NATO members, with bloody consequences for the island’s population. Following a coup attempt supported by the Greek military junta in 1974, the Turkish Armed Forces intervened militarily, effectively dividing the island in two. This military intervention and subsequent occupation marked a significant turning point in the ethnic-based division and regional power struggle that has continued for more than half a century. It is reported that the size of the “Turkish Peace Forces in Cyprus”, affiliated with the Turkish Armed Forces, ranges between 50,000 and 100,000.
The recent discovery of hydrocarbon reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean has further increased Cyprus’s importance in terms of regional and imperialist competition. The US, France, Israel, and Greece have formed an axis that excludes Turkey from the Mediterranean by developing energy partnerships with Southern Cyprus. Meanwhile, Ankara has embarked on an effort to expand its sphere of influence and persuade its imperialist allies to accept its demands within the framework of its “Blue Homeland” doctrine.
Cyprus is also gaining importance as a strategic military base. The island is known as an unsinkable aircraft carrier and hosts two major British military bases. These bases have played a critical role in NATO operations in the Middle East and North Africa. Located south of Turkey and southeast of Greece, Cyprus is also in close proximity to Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Egypt.
The US is modernizing the Andreas Papandreu air base it uses in Cyprus, which is critical to American imperialism’s drive for full dominance in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the competition between Ankara and Tel Aviv, which has intensified particularly due to the regime change in Syria, is spreading to Cyprus. Israel, which is increasing its regional influence with its genocide in Gaza and its aggression towards Iran and its allies, is seen as a threat by Turkey, especially given the military ties it has developed with the Republic of Cyprus this year.
According to Anadolu Agency, sources from the Ministry of National Defense made the following statement last month: “We are closely monitoring reports in the press that the GCASC [The Republic of Cyprus] has procured an Air Defense System from Israel. We would like to reiterate that the GCASC’s ongoing efforts to arm itself and its activities that undermine peace and stability on the island could have dangerous consequences.”
The results of the elections held in Northern Cyprus amid regional power struggles and imperialist domination plans will certainly not bring any solution to the social and political issues facing the workers of Cyprus and the region. The way forward lies in rejecting both bankrupt forms of imperialist-backed Turkish and Greek nationalism and in fighting for the international unity of workers on the basis of a socialist program.
9. Sri Lankan president promises meagre wage rises for estate workers amid growing unrest
On October 12, at a public rally in Bandarawela—one of Sri Lanka’s key plantation districts—President Anura Kumara Dissanayake promised to raise the daily wage of estate workers to 1,750 rupees ($US5.60) before the end of 2025. Workers currently earn 1,350 rupees.
Thousands of plantation employees were brought to the rally, where symbolic letters were handed out to 2,000 families from multiple districts, promising new homes on 10 perches (250 square metres) of land. The letters assured ownership deeds upon completion of the project.
These announcements were framed as part of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government’s Thriving Nation, Beautiful Life manifesto. In fact, the housing project came from a 2017 Indian government grant initiated during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Sri Lanka. The launch was staged with Palani Digambaram, a discredited plantation trade union leader known for suppressing workers' rights.
Conscious of rising anger among plantation workers over wages and worsening conditions, Dissanayake told the audience: “The people of Malaiyaham [Sri Lanka’s central hill country] must be given a fair wage to live a decent life.” He claimed his government would meet the demand for a 1,750-rupee daily wage “in one way or another within this year.”
The hollowness of this promise is obvious. Given the steep rise in the cost of living—especially since the 2020 COVID-19 crisis and the 2022 economic collapse—a 400-rupee increase fails to meet even minimal household needs.
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Post-independence, in 1948, the United National Party government stripped Tamil-speaking plantation workers of citizenship and voting rights, citing their Indian origin, as part of a broader strategy by the Sri Lankan political elite to divide the working class.
While these rights were eventually restored, after many families were forced to go to India, the community continues to be treated as second-class citizens. The Sinhala chauvinist JVP, which has a record of hostility to Tamil plantation workers, now references the 1948 injustice in a clear bid to hoodwink the population.
Each Indian-funded house is 550 square feet (51 square metres), with two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, and toilet. Families are expected to contribute labor and materials to cut costs, putting more pressure on the highly exploited daily-wage earners.
According to one estimate, up to 261,000 families are living in estates, which means hundreds of thousands of houses are needed. The estate companies—backed by successive governments—reap high profits by exploiting these workers and have totally ignored the housing problems.
Notwithstanding Dissanayake’s proclamation that plantation workers have “labored hand in hand with the soil” for over 200 years, their conditions are dire and worsening. He pledged to improve their “economic” and “social” circumstances and declared that education, health, income, and mental peace are “fundamental rights.”
However, after promising to renegotiate the IMF austerity program during his election campaign, Dissanayake has only deepened those policies since taking office. Plantation workers are among the worst affected.
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Dissanayake’s speech was especially hypocritical when he spoke about the identity of plantation people. “Your ancestors came to Sri Lanka 202 years ago. … How can you be outsiders? We must recognize you as a community with a unique identity in this country,” he said.
Anyone familiar with the JVP’s political history will recognise the fraudulence of this statement.
In the late 1960s, as part of JVP’s early cadre training, one of its notorious “five classes” labelled India—a semi-colonial country—as an imperialist threat and branded plantation workers as a “fifth column instrument of Indian expansionism.”
Today, Dissanayake promotes the very identity politics pushed by plantation unions acting as political parties and the Tamil nationalist parties in the North and East. He repeatedly referred to workers as “Malaiyaham people,” and called for them to be recognized as a “community with a unique identity.”
This identity politics—promoted by the JVP/NPP politicians and the union bureaucrats—serves to divide the working class along ethnic and religious lines. Union leaders with business interests and along with emerging middle-class elements in estate areas are lobbying for a separate administrative district to serve their own class agendas.
All ruling parties, including the JVP/NPP, are haunted by the April–July 2022 mass uprising, when workers across ethnic lines united in struggle against the ruling class amid a huge social and economic crisis. That movement revealed the potential for class unity against the entire capitalist system.
Plantation workers must reject this divisive identity politics. As Colvin R. de Silva of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (BLPI)—then a Trotskyist leader—declared in Parliament in 1948 while opposing the reactionary citizenship laws:
“If this Government approaches this question from the angle of the capitalist class, our party—we of the Fourth International—approach this question from the angle of the proletariat—the working class. That is to say, we approach it from a class angle independent of racial questions and above racial questions. We are not ready, as amongst the labouring population of this country, to distinguish between man and man on the ground of his racial origin. We say a worker is, first and foremost, a worker.”
Class-conscious workers must reject the reactionary program of Quebec separatism. It is promoted by sections of the ruling class in Quebec who see the creation of a new imperialist state in North America as a way to better position themselves in the global struggle for markets and profits, and to slash social spending in the name of eliminating the dédoublement (duplication) of federal and provincial services.
From their point of view, unlike the Canadian federal state—which must reconcile the demands of other regionally-based ruling class factions in Ontario, Alberta or the West as a whole—an independent Quebec would be exclusively dedicated to advancing the interests of the Quebec bourgeoisie.
Quebec’s separation would result in the erection of a new political structure and state barrier to further divide Quebec workers from their class brothers and sisters in the rest of Canada and the world. Moreover, it would fuel reactionary linguistic, ethnic and regional divisions, pitting workers against each other in fratricidal conflicts in the interests of competing and equally reactionary factions of the Canadian bourgeoisie.
In warning workers and youth against the independence trap, we make no concessions to the federalist forces that oppose Quebec independence on a basis that is just as reactionary as the separatist project itself.
These federalist sections of the Canadian and Quebec bourgeoisie and political establishment oppose Quebec independence with the aim of defending the Canadian federal capitalist state, which for more than 150 years has served as their principal arm in upholding capitalist exploitation.
They fear that the separation of Canada’s second most populous province would deal a severe blow to Canadian imperialism and jeopardize their ability to assert their predatory interests on the world stage. This concern is amplified by the fierce struggles among the imperialist powers for a new redivision of the world, which are taking the form of an escalating third world war.
Our opposition to separatism stems, on the contrary, from the need for workers to reject all forms of nationalism—Canadian or Québécois, pro-Quebec independence or pro-Canadian unity—as part of a political struggle for the unity of the Canadian working class based on an internationalist socialist perspective.
This perspective is itself based on the recognition that the capitalist nation-state system has become a reactionary barrier to the harmonious development of the global economy in the interests of the working class, giving rise to wars and intensified imperialist oppression; and that the contemporary crisis of the Canadian nation-state is rooted in the intensification of the contradiction between the nation-state system and world economy resulting from the development of globally-integrated production.
The only progressive resolution to this contradiction is to break down the artificial barriers of nation-states—not to erect new ones! This is what can guarantee the harmonious and planned development of the world economy to meet the social needs of the masses.
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Since 2020, successive strikes have broken out in Quebec and across Canada in response to corporate attacks on working conditions and democratic rights, while youth and workers in their hundreds of thousands have demonstrated against the Israeli-state’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Palestinians with Washington and Ottawa’s political and military support.
Opposition to austerity and neocolonial aggression is growing rapidly. But it is politically stifled, misdirected and derailed by the pro-capitalist trade unions. With the complicity of the social-democratic NDP and nationalist formations such as Québec Solidaire, the union bureaucracies have isolated and sabotaged strike after strike, while supporting the right-wing federal Liberal government.
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War, austerity, chauvinism and authoritarianism: this is what Quebec independence really has in store for the working class.
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As the collapse of the world capitalist order brings a new period of revolutionary struggles to the fore, the workers and youth of Quebec must definitively reject the poison of Quebec nationalism and the deadly trap that the independence project represents.
Instead, they must adopt a socialist-internationalist perspective that corresponds to the integrated character of the world economy. Politically, this means the fight to unite all workers in Canada—French-speaking, English-speaking, immigrant and indigenous—in a common struggle, alongside their class brothers and sisters in the rest of North America and overseas, against bankrupt capitalism and for socialism.
Approximately 51,000 teachers in the Canadian province of Alberta are in the third week of strike action after taking to picket lines on October 6. In June 2025, 95 percent of teachers voted in favor of strike action. The job action affects around 750,000 students in 2,500 public schools across the province. The teachers are demanding better working conditions, smaller class sizes, support for students with additional needs, and increased salaries.
The walkout by Alberta educators is part of a growing wave of working class struggles across Canada. In recent months, Air Canada flight attendants, Canada Post workers, Ontario college support staff, and public sector employees across British Columbia have engaged in strikes against years of austerity, wage stagnation, and deteriorating conditions.
With teachers making clear their determination to fight for their demands, the government of far-right United Conservative Party (UCP) Premier Danielle Smith has pledged to pass back-to-work legislation to outlaw the strike if a settlement is not reached before the provincial legislature resumes business on Monday, October 27.
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School divisions in Alberta fall into three categories: public, Catholic and francophone. All are considered public education and fall under provincial funding and oversight. The teachers in all three categories are members of the same union. The two organizations involved in the bargaining process are the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) union and the Teachers’ Employer Bargaining Association (TEBA). TEBA represents the provincial government as well as the local school boards.
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The combination of high stress, heavy workloads and insufficient compensation has led to high burnout levels. The retention rates are dropping, and an increasing number of teachers are considering exiting the profession, moving to a different province or retiring early. Exit interviews with teachers leaving their positions reveal that they retain a strong commitment to teaching and care about their students; but the work conditions make it too difficult to continue psychologically, emotionally and physically.
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The World Socialist Web Site recently interviewed an Alberta teacher with 11 years of teaching experience. Asked about his experiences, he said: “I am a trained teacher, and I am part of the ATA. When I got into the profession, I was told at the time there was a 60 percent attrition rate within the first five years. And things haven’t gotten better. I struggled: huge classes, lots of complex behaviors, not enough funding, not enough support. I had a grade 8. I had like 34 students per class, which is just way too many. The 60-hour work weeks, the time you must put in after work on your own, the extracurriculars, the expectations, the parents—it’s just unmanageable. And the money isn’t that great. I think I’m making only slightly more money now than I made 10 years ago, which, you know, with inflation, everything is crazy.”
12. Australian Labor PM fawns on fascist Trump at the White House
Just three days after millions of people took to the streets of the United States in “No Kings” demonstrations against the fascistic Trump administration’s drive toward dictatorship, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese lauded Trump at a White House meeting yesterday.
Albanese not only hailed and solidarized himself with Trump. He declared that the Labor government was taking the 70-year post-World War II alliance with US imperialism to “the next level” by signing a critical minerals agreement aimed at preparing for a US-led war against China.
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The centerpiece of the stage-managed event was the signing of a “framework on critical minerals and rare earths.” Under the deal, the two governments said they would invest in or subsidize up to $US8.5 billion in new mines and processing plants. They would also offer guaranteed “price-floors or similar measures” for new producers and block mine sales on “national security” grounds. All these moves are directed against China.
In a media statement, Albanese described the agreement as an historic elevation of the US military alliance, on which Australian governments have relied since World War II. He said it would “deliver a US/Australia secured supply chain for critical minerals and rare earths, required for defense and other advanced technologies. This represents a significant new chapter in the over 70 years of our formal Alliance.”
The “framework” consists of identifying and subsidizing “priority” projects, particularly related to the supply of rare minerals needed for jet engines, military weaponry and other hi-tech equipment, including smart phones and electric vehicles.
Within six months, both governments would take steps to “provide at least $1 billion in financing to projects located in each of the United States and Australia.” In addition, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, would contribute around $US2.2 billion, expected to be matched by $US5 billion in corporate investment.
Albanese said his government already had two projects ready to go. The first was a $US200 million government investment in a “Alco-Sojitz Gallium Recovery Project” in Western Australia. His office said the project would provide up to 10 percent of the total global supply of gallium, an essential input for defense and semiconductor manufacturing.
Secondly, the Labor government would take a $US100 million stake in the Arafura Nolans rare earths mining project in the Northern Territory, which was projected to produce 5 percent of global rare earths. The project, which is backed by billionaire Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting, has already received more than AU$1 billion in government commitments.
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For the past 15 years, the Labor Party—in government and in opposition—has been fully in support of the US-led drive to war against China that Obama initiated with his “pivot to Asia.” Since coming to office, the Trump administration has repeatedly made clear it is accelerating preparations for conflict with the world’s second largest economic power—a fact that is underscored by yesterday’s meeting with the Australian prime minister.
Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR) is calling for a state investigation after police detained a 13-year-old Brazilian child who was then abducted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and transferred 500 miles away to a detention center in Virginia.
Seventh grader Arthur Berto was arrested by Everett Police at a bus stop outside the Albert N. Parlin School after a tip about him reportedly threatening another student, according to the police. The boy’s mother, Joseiele Berto, was told to pick up her son at the police station, but after waiting for more than an hour, she was informed that ICE agents had arrived and taken the boy into federal custody.
LCR sent an open letter to Governor Maura Healey, Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, and Interim Secretary at the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security Susan Terrey. It urges the commonwealth to “take decisive steps to protect youth in custody.”
The letter states:
Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR) is deeply concerned about the role of the Everett Police Department in the recent detention and transfer of a 13-year-old child to ICE custody. This troubling incident underscores a broader pattern of escalating immigration enforcement in Massachusetts and calls for the Commonwealth’s immediate investigation into potential violations of well-established precedent under Lunn v. Commonwealth.
The letter said that while facts were still unfolding, Everett police had violated “legal restrictions.” It stated:
The fact that the boy’s mother was notified that she should come to the police station to take her son home strongly suggests that police at that point were no longer authorized to continue to hold him in custody. Yet when she arrived at the police station, there was an hour-long delay—and then her son was taken by ICE. It appears that Everett police transferred custody of the boy directly to ICE, rather than releasing him as Lunn would require.
A press report on the LCR web site quotes Jillian Lenson, senior staff attorney at LCR: “This chilling incident exposes what may be a dangerous breakdown in legal protections for immigrants in our state—and the fact that it involves a child makes it even more alarming.” Another staff attorney, Brooke Simone, wrote, “This kind of conduct destroys public trust and strikes fear in entire communities. In Massachusetts, it’s not just wrong—it’s unlawful.”
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The Everett events demonstrate the fraudulent character of “sanctuary cities,” promoted by the Democratic Party as a bulwark against federal overreach. These designations are politically worthless, providing a progressive cover for a state apparatus that continues to collude with federal agencies in the persecution of the working class.
While politicians posture, the police, who form the armed core of the capitalist state, continue to function as a pipeline for the federal government’s anti-immigrant terror campaign. This brutal collaboration is not an aberration, but a feature of the nationwide crackdown on the immigrant population.
Operation Patriot 2.0 is the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s war on immigrant workers in Massachusetts. Its strategic purpose is to terrorize immigrant communities, whip up xenophobia and divide the working class by scapegoating a vulnerable population for the deepening social crisis created by capitalism.
An October 16 press release from ICE stated that 1,400 arrests were made in Massachusetts in the first month of Patriot 2.0 in September. While federal authorities present this as a precision strike against violent criminals, documented cases from across the state show the indiscriminate attack on immigrants. Right-wing politicians justify these police-state roundups by claiming they target dangerous criminals.
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While the Trump administration spearheads the current brutal offensive, its policies are the culmination of a decades-long, bipartisan war on immigrant workers. The groundwork for today’s mass deportations and militarized border was laid by Democratic and Republican administrations alike, demonstrating that both corporate-controlled parties are united in their defense of the capitalist state and its repressive policies.
14. New Zealand: Workers need a socialist perspective to fight pay cuts, austerity and war
Thursday’s historic strike by 110,000 public sector workers across New Zealand reveals the mass opposition that exists in the working class to the National Party-led coalition government’s relentless assault on public services and its promotion of militarism and imperialist war.
The simultaneous strikes by nurses, doctors, and other public healthcare workers and teachers will be the country’s largest day of industrial action since 1979. Some 3.5 percent of the country’s working population, and more than one in five public sector workers, is taking part.
They are supported by the overwhelming majority of the population: A poll by Talbot Mills Research found that 65 percent of people support the strike and only 25 percent oppose it. This reflects deep hostility and anger over the evisceration of public healthcare, education and other vital services by successive governments led by both Labour and the National Party.
The immediate issue in the strike is the attempt by the National-led government to significantly lower wages for educators and healthcare workers. Those taking part have rejected wage offers of just 2 percent a year or less—a major cut under conditions where annual inflation is 3 percent, the cost of food has risen 4.6 percent and electricity more than 11 percent.
Workers are also striking to protest drastically understaffed public hospitals and under-resourced schools—conditions that are putting the health of thousands of people at risk and undermining the right of children to a high-quality education.
The burning question facing workers is: what is the way forward in the struggle against the government? While Thursday’s strike will be a powerful demonstration of the potential power that workers have, a single day’s strike will do nothing to stop the worsening onslaught on basic social rights.
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The New Zealand government—with the full support of the Labour Party—is strengthening its alliance with US imperialism and lashing out at mass opposition to war and to the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Workers want to fight this agenda. The main obstacle they confront is the union bureaucracies, which are seeking to limit the strike as much as possible, to demoralise and divide workers and create the conditions for imposing a sellout.
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Workers must draw fundamental political lessons from decades of bitter experiences with the unions, which long ago ceased to be workers’ organizations and transformed into agents of big business and the state.
The Socialist Equality Group calls for the building of new organizations: rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by workers themselves and independent from and opposed to the union bureaucracy and the capitalist parties, including Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.
These committees should discuss and formulate demands which address the urgent needs of workers—not what the government and the unions claim is “affordable” or “realistic.”
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Defense Minister Judith Collins, in a hysterical and provocative outburst on October 19, denounced Thursday’s strike for supposedly being fixated on the issue of Palestine. In reality, the unions in New Zealand and internationally have refused to call any strike action against the genocide in Gaza; for two years they have enabled the uninterrupted shipment of weapons and other supplies to Israel’s war machine.
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Workers must reject the lie that there is no money for social programs and jobs. The tens of billions of dollars controlled by the corporate and financial elite must be expropriated to fund the vast expansion of schools, hospitals, housing and other vital infrastructure, and eliminate poverty and inequality.
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The money being squandered on military spending must be redirected to meet the urgent needs of working people. Workers must mobilize to stop the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, including through strikes at ports and other actions to shut down supplies and funding for Israel. Workers must demand an end to the alliance with US imperialism and the withdrawal of NZ troops from the Middle East, where they are assisting in the bombing of Yemen, and from Britain, where they are training Ukrainian conscripts for the US-NATO war against Russia.
Workers must oppose the anti-China war propaganda from the media and the capitalist parties, and take action to halt the mad preparations to join what would inevitably become a nuclear war against China.
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The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, an initiative of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the world Trotskyist movement, provides the means for workers in New Zealand to unite their struggles with those in Australia, the US and other countries. This is the only way to fight the ruling oligarchy and its criminal plans for war and dictatorship.
Workers must oppose all attempts to divide workers based on nationality and race. Rank-and-file committees must defend immigrant workers, who are being viciously scapegoated for social inequality and unemployment by the government and opposition parties and the unions. Immigrants and refugees must be allowed to live, study and work in New Zealand with full citizenship rights.
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Governments throughout the world are engaged in a social counter-revolution: They are plunging the world into barbarism and war, and destroying all the gains workers have made over more than a century of struggle.
The parties, unions and pseudo-left groups who claim that the capitalist system can be reformed in the interests of workers are lying. It must be abolished and society reorganized along socialist lines. The wealth and resources created by the working class must be taken out of the billionaires’ hands and placed in public ownership, under workers’ democratic control, so they can be used to meet human needs.
The immediate task facing workers is to build the necessary revolutionary leadership to fight for the unification of the international working class based on a socialist program.
14. Australia: Halt the demolition of Melbourne’s 44 public housing towers!
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) calls for an immediate end to the Victorian Labor government’s plans to knock down 44 public housing towers in Melbourne. The destruction of the towers, for which works have already begun, is the greatest assault on public housing in Australia’s history.
At least 10,000 people—from the most disadvantaged sections of the working class including immigrants, low-income families, the elderly and people living with disabilities—will be forced from their homes and communities established over decades.
The purpose of Labor’s scheme is to rid Melbourne’s valuable inner-city suburbs of the poor, to make way for property developers and financiers—who the government represents—to make billions in profits through selling off the prime real estate on which the towers sit. This would come on top of the massive boon for the finance capital that has reaped enormous profits from soaring housing prices while creating unaffordable rents and mortgages for working-class families.
While far advanced, Labor’s plans to demolish the towers can and must be stopped by the working class.
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The Socialist Equality Party advances the following demands:
- Halt the demolition! Hands off public housing! Invest public funds to upgrade and refurbish all public housing.
- Expropriate vacant investment properties that are being hoarded for profit—make these available to the homeless.
- Cap rents and mortgage repayments to 25 percent of a family’s income.
- Allocate billions of dollars for the construction of new high-quality public housing to provide for those currently on waiting lists and everyone in dire need of secure housing.
These demands necessitate a political struggle by the working class against the capitalist profit system and the refashioning of society from top to bottom on socialist lines. The vast resources created by the working class must be used to meet the pressing social needs of the majority, including for decent affordable housing, not the profits of the wealthy few.
15. Australian care workers rally nationally against attack on pay and conditions
The Australian Services Union (ASU) has called a “National Day of Action” this week to oppose big-business attacks on social, community, home care and disability service (SCHADS) workers. The lunchtime demonstrations will be held in Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland, Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory on October 23. Tasmanian workers will protest on October 22.
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To defend their jobs, wages and conditions, SCHADS workers need to recognise that they are in a political struggle against the Labor government, the pro-business FWC and the trade union apparatus.
To take forward their fight, SCHADS workers need to organise independently of the ASU. This means taking matters into their own hands by forming rank-and-file committees in every workplace to democratically discuss what they need, not what the FWC, the government and the unions say is “affordable.”
This should include immediate pay rises of at least 30 percent across the board for SCHADS workers, and a massive increase in funding for the sector to provide high quality care for all those who need it.
These necessary demands are inseparable from the fight for a socialist perspective and a workers’ government that places the banks and major corporations under public ownership and democratic workers’ control and invests billions of dollars in every area of social need.
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
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.
