Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: October 13-19
- 25 years ago:
UK rail privatization leads to fatal Hatfield crash
50 years ago:
South Africa invades Angola with US backing
75 years ago:
Imperialist forces capture Pyongyang, North Korea
100 years ago:
Syrian rebels take neighborhoods in Damascus from French
2. Half a million march in London to mark two years of Gaza genocide
With plans advanced for the transformation of Gaza into a US protectorate and amid scenes of desperate Palestinians returning to homes in ruins, platform speakers doubled down on their politically bankrupt appeals to the Starmer government to finally end its collusion with Israel.
3. Newsom’s “historic” housing reform is a handout to real estate capital
Governor Gavin Newsom’s signing of Senate Bill 79 (SB 79) on October 10 was hailed across the political establishment and corporate media as a “historic reform” that will finally tackle California’s housing crisis.
The Los Angeles Times praised it as “one of the most ambitious state-imposed housing efforts in recent memory,” a supposedly bold strike against exclusionary zoning and local obstruction. In the breathless coverage that followed, Newsom was presented as a pragmatic progressive fulfilling his long-stated promise to “build more homes faster” and to “put housing near jobs and transit.”
SB 79 represents not a social reform but a calculated concession to the construction and financial industries that dominate California politics. Behind the technocratic rhetoric of “density,” “climate efficiency,” and “transit-oriented development” lies a naked transfer of power and profit to corporate developers and hedge fund-backed real estate trusts served by the Democratic Party machine.
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The law overrides local zoning in eight of California’s largest counties—those with at least fifteen passenger-rail stations—allowing private developers to build up to nine-story residential projects directly adjacent to subway or commuter-rail stops, seven stories within a quarter-mile, and six within a half-mile. It takes effect in July 2026 and is advertised as a measure to promote “smart growth” and reduce automobile dependence.
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The law follows Newsom’s June 2025 enactment of Assembly Bill 130 and Senate Bill 131 which prepared the regulatory and legal environment for SB 79 by weakening environmental oversight and streamlining development approvals. The bills gutted the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), stripping away decades of environmental protections and public oversight.
A devastating assault on workers was delivered by Newsom a few days later through the 2025-26 California budget, which imposed deep cuts to essential social services.
The combined effect of these initiatives is to strip cities of much of their traditional zoning authority in favor of a state-level framework that grants “by-right” construction privileges to developers in transit-rich corridors—precisely those areas where land values are highest and profits greatest.
The primary beneficiaries of SB 79 are not the millions of Californians who face crushing rents and homelessness, but real estate capital and its financial backers. The bill offers them legal certainty to pursue high-density, high-yield projects under the pretext of environmental necessity. It doesn’t guarantee affordability, but instead gives investors a green light to saturate transit hubs with luxury apartments and high-end condominiums marketed to upper-income professionals.
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The legislation includes no enforceable requirement that developers allocate substantial proportions of units to low-income tenants. Nor does it establish rent caps, displacement protections, or public ownership mandates. “Density” becomes a synonym for profitability, not social need. Absent massive public investment and democratic control, the new housing stock will be priced far beyond the reach of most workers.
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Already, similar “up-zoning” schemes in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland have unleashed waves of gentrification and displacement. Once height limits are lifted, land speculation accelerates, property taxes rise, and working-class residents are driven out. Transit hubs such as MacArthur BART in Oakland or Boyle Heights stations in Los Angeles stand as cautionary tales: “transit-oriented development” becomes the spearhead of urban “cleansing” of low-income people.
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Newsom’s measure is being promoted as a necessary assertion of state authority over parochial local governments. But the question is not whether power is centralized, it is in whose interests that power is wielded. SB 79 does not empower working people to plan their communities; it consolidates control in a state apparatus entirely subordinated to capital.
California state agencies coordinate the interests of developers, banks, and construction conglomerates. When Newsom overrides local zoning, he is not expanding democratic participation but disarming local opposition to real estate profiteering.
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The entire discourse around the “housing crisis” has been reframed to exclude the real culprit: capitalist speculation in land and housing. California has millions of vacant units. The crisis is not one of physical shortage but of ownership and profit.
The “Yes In My Back Yard” (YIMBY) movement, heavily cited in media praise for SB 79, personifies this distortion. YIMBY groups posture as progressive advocates for more housing but in practice function as a lobby for real estate interests. Their alliance with Democratic politicians reflects the convergence of a professional-managerial layer with speculative capital. For them, “up-zoning” is not a tool for social equality but a strategy to boost returns and property values.
SB 79 rests on the false claim that increasing total housing units will automatically make rents affordable. This pseudo-economic argument ignores the dynamics of capitalist property markets. Without social ownership and strict regulation, new supply gravitates to the most profitable sectors—luxury and upper-middle income housing—leaving working-class families priced out.
SB 79 also serves an important political function. It allows the Democratic Party to posture as the defender of reform and progress while pursuing policies indistinguishable from those of the Republicans in substance. Newsom, whose presidential ambitions are widely known, seeks to polish his national credentials as a “problem-solver” willing to confront bureaucracy and NIMBYism.
As Trump advances his dictatorial plans, the real alignment of forces must be laid bare: the state, the banks, the developers on one side with Democrats and Republicans; the working class on the other.
4. Oppose the University of Michigan disciplinary charges against pro-Palestinian protesters!
5. Right-wing billionaire Babiš wins parliamentary election in the Czech Republic
After four years in opposition, right-wing billionaire Andrej Babiš and his party ANO have emerged as the winners of the Czech parliamentary elections held October 3–4. ANO secured just under 35 percent of the vote, well ahead of the previously governing right-wing coalition Spolu, led by Prime Minister Petr Fiala, which managed only 23 percent.
The result once again highlights the deep and persistent political crisis in the Czech Republic. Babiš’s victory stems largely from the extreme unpopularity of Fiala’s government.
Immediately after taking office in November 2021, the coalition announced its austerity program titled “Getting the Czech Republic in Shape.” It cut around €4 billion last year, with another €5 billion in cuts planned this year.
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How far to the right the Prague government had shifted was also evident when, last month, the coalition party KDU-ČSL organised a memorial mass for the US fascist Charlie Kirk, celebrated by Prague’s Cardinal Dominik Duka. Fiala called the assassination of Kirk an “atrocious crime,” without mentioning or criticising Kirk’s fascist views.
Even the nominally “left” or “progressive” forces offered no alternative. While the Pirate Party—whose slate also included Greens—entered parliament, the Social Democrats (ČSSD) and Communists (KSČM), running together under the banner Stačilo! (“Enough!”), once again failed to cross the 5 percent threshold for parliamentary representation, leaving both parties on the verge of political extinction.
Babiš capitalized on widespread hostility to the right-wing government and the absence of a political alternative. During the campaign, he promised an end to arms deliveries to Ukraine, lower taxes and cheaper energy. The funds being spent on Ukraine, he said, should instead “go to our own people.”
Often dubbed the “Czech Trump,” Babiš—whose Agrofert conglomerate makes him one of the country’s richest men, with a fortune of $4.3 billion (Forbes)—railed against migrants, denounced Brussels’ “bureaucracy” and “control mania,” warned of a potential war with Russia and promised higher pensions. “The defense of bread prices has triumphed over the defense of the country,” commented one Fiala supporter bitterly after the result.
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The 71-year-old billionaire had been a member of the Stalinist Communist Party of Czechoslovakia until its fall in 1989. The son of a senior diplomat, he spent part of his childhood in Paris and Geneva. Like other Stalinist officials, he used capitalist restoration to enrich himself, seizing vast formerly state-owned assets. His Agrofert group owns companies in the agricultural, chemical, food and media sectors.
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Babiš is deeply implicated in corruption and criminal scandals. In the “Stork’s Nest” case he was charged with subsidy fraud involving the construction of a luxury resort. Prague’s city court twice acquitted him, but both verdicts were overturned by the appeals court. A retrial would require parliament to lift his immunity—unlikely under current majorities.
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However, the return of ANO to power is unlikely to bring major changes to Czech policy on the war against Russia or its relationship with the EU—despite Babiš’ campaign rhetoric. He is well aware of the country’s dependence on the EU. “No observer believes he will take the Czechs out of the EU, not least because the billionaire has major business interests within the bloc through his Agrofert empire,” commented the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the election.
And the election pledge to stop weapons deliveries to Ukraine was quickly watered down. Party vice-chair Karel Havlíček, a possible prime ministerial candidate, said on election night that ANO merely wanted to ensure that “the financing and procurement of ammunition were properly carried out.”
6. Missouri governor launches attack on SNAP recipients under guise of “nutrition reform”
Kehoe’s SNAP order serves as a cost-cutting measure for the state that stigmatizes the poor and funnels federal dollars toward “Missouri-grown” agribusiness, extending his broader drive against democratic and social rights.
7. Millet: Life on the Land—A radical depiction of rural transition
Millet’s art captures a vanishing peasantry and a newly emergent class of rural landless laborers—impoverished by capitalism and condemned to an endless cycle of back-breaking toil. He elevated agricultural labor to a near-sacred status, dignifying and monumentalizing sawyers and wood gatherers, shepherdesses and milkmaids—figures long ignored, sentimentalized, or ridiculed in art.
Born into a farming family in Normandy, Millet’s journey from provincial obscurity to the Parisian art world was shaped by a succession of artistic mentors. In 1849, amid political upheaval, he left the capital for Barbizon, a rural village fifty miles away, joining an artists’ colony that included Théodore Rousseau and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.
The Barbizon School marked a decisive break from academic classicism, pioneering direct observation from nature—en plein air—and focusing on both the beauty and hardship of rural life. This was a radical gesture in an era dominated by history painting, mythological subjects, and elite portraiture, where rural labour was deemed aesthetically and socially inferior.
Millet’s declaration that “It is the treating of the commonplace with the feeling of the sublime that gives to art its true power” encapsulates his ethos. Unlike Romantic predecessors such as Turner and Friedrich, who sought sublimity in nature’s terror or grandeur, Millet found it in the ordinary and overlooked. He resisted sentimentality, insisting: “I want to put strongly and completely all that is necessary, for things weakly said might as well not be said at all.”
8. Autism and the crisis of science: A conversation with Dr. Alycia Halladay
Dr. Alycia Halladay:
"... I think this entire situation has been incredibly confusing for families—and understandably so. On September 22, there was a nationally televised press conference where President Trump said, essentially, “Don’t do it. Don’t take it.” He even added, “If you have to take it, it’ll happen,” which was never explained but was widely interpreted as a warning that Tylenol causes autism.
Then, standing beside him, the FDA Commissioner stated that women should exercise caution and use the lowest possible dose of acetaminophen during pregnancy. That advice, however, was not new—it’s consistent with what ACOG and most obstetricians have said for years: if you’re experiencing pain or fever, talk to your doctor, describe what’s going on, and use the minimum effective dose when advised.
One critical point that often gets lost in public discussion is that acetaminophen reduces fever—and prolonged fever itself is associated with an increased risk of autism. So, in some ways, this is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation if people misunderstand the context. Avoiding fever treatment entirely could raise the risk that the administration claims to be trying to prevent.
That’s why it’s so important for pregnant women to consult their doctors rather than react to headlines. Your physician knows your medical history, understands your risks, and can guide you toward the safest course of action.
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Characterizing autism as a “disease” is problematic on several levels. Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition—not a communicable, fatal illness. When people call it a disease or an epidemic, it implies there’s something to be eradicated, which undermines the lived realities of autistic individuals and, more importantly, is a mischaracterization of autism to begin with. Autism involves complex genetic and environmental contributions and manifests very differently from person to person. Roughly 20 percent of cases are associated with rare genetic syndromes; the rest reflect a combination of factors that are still being studied.
Secretary Kennedy appears to focus on “profound autism”—individuals who are minimally verbal, have significant intellectual disability, and need intensive support. But research and media coverage often treat the entire spectrum as one homogeneous group. That’s misleading. On one end of the spectrum are people who require round‑the‑clock supervision for safety; on the other are individuals with university degrees, jobs, friendships, and largely independent lives, though they may still have specific challenges.
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So, my message to parents is, “Please don’t blame yourselves. Autism isn’t caused by something you did or didn’t do, including vaccination. Timing alone makes that impossible. Autism is nobody’s fault.”
9. Trump’s “Compact” with universities demands ideological submission in exchange for funding
On Wednesday, October 1, Education Department Secretary Linda McMahon and the White House sent a letter to nine universities across the United States demanding that they comply with the Trump administration’s guidelines for education.
The nine universities targeted include Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Vanderbilt University, the University of Arizona, the University of Southern California, the University of Virginia and the University of Texas at Austin.
This is the latest attack by the Trump administration on higher education in an American version of the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung, that is, the synchronization of culture, education and more into the arms of the state as a propaganda tool.
10. Trump orders military paychecks as troops move into cities
The White House announced Sunday that all US soldiers will receive their full paychecks on October 15 despite the federal shutdown, after President Trump instructed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to shift funds within the Pentagon budget.
All other employees of the federal government are either furloughed or working without pay because of the partial shutdown after the new fiscal year began October 1 without congressional passage of a budget.
Trump’s action has two, interrelated and deeply sinister purposes. He wishes to insure against any discontent within the ranks of the military as he deploys thousands of soldiers into American cities in a step-by-step coup. And he wants the paychecks delivered before the October 18 “No Kings” protests, widely expected to be the largest-ever demonstrations against his drive to establish a presidential dictatorship.
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While neither the White House nor the Pentagon acknowledged this explicitly, the full paychecks for soldiers will also apply to National Guard troops who have been federalized for deployment in Washington D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, including troops from Illinois and Texas who are now at a training facility outside Chicago. All federalized National Guard troops are paid out of the Pentagon budget, not the budget of the state from where they come.
The decision to pay the troops on time comes amid increasingly hysterical denunciations of the upcoming October 18 “No Kings” protests by Republican congressional leaders and state governors, with demands that the National Guard be mobilized against the protesters in Washington D.C. and in other cities.
On Friday, Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise smeared the demonstrators as “Hamas supporters” and “terrorists” who were carrying out the wishes of Antifa. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer called October 18 a “Hate America” rally, although the previous “No Kings” protests, on June 14, brought an estimated 5 to 11 million people onto the streets in a massive but entirely peaceful show of opposition to Trump.
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Trump has made use of videos generated by fascist provocateurs masquerading as “journalists,” who pick fights with protesters peacefully demonstrating outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Portland. On Wednesday, Trump invited several of these fascists to the White House for his “summit” meeting on the supposed threat of antifa, which does not even exist as an organization.
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Trump has also proposed to send troops to New Orleans, as well as to other cities in California besides Los Angeles. Significantly, billionaire Democrat Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com and owner of Time magazine, issued an appeal for Trump to send troops to San Francisco, claiming the police department was too understaffed to preserve “law and order.”
Under the Posse Comitatus Act, however, the US military cannot be used as a substitute or supplement for local police. The only exception is when the president invokes the Insurrection Act of 1807, based on a total breakdown of local and state authorities, which Trump has openly threatened to do over the past two weeks.
At a meeting with his Cabinet of fascist flatterers on Thursday, Trump repeated the lies that he has voiced with increasing frequency to justify invoking the Insurrection Act. “We’re directly confronting the sinister threat of left-wing domestic terrorism or violence,” he said. “Antifa is out of control in Portland and other places.”
In an appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Vice President JD Vance said that Trump was “still considering” whether to invoke the Insurrection Act, clearly holding it over the heads of Democratic mayors and governors to demand further collaboration with Trump’s drive to military rule.
11. Trump moves to reignite tariff war with China
US President Trump has threatened to impose a 100 percent additional tariff on China, on top of the impost of 40 percent which now applies, to come into effect on November 1. If implemented, they will reignite all-out trade war and end the fragile truce agreed to after the April 2 “liberation day” tariffs of around 145 percent.
The Trump move, which saw the biggest fall on Wall Street since the April events, was announced in a social media post on Friday.
It was delivered in response to a Beijing announcement that it would require companies to obtain a license from its authorities if they were exporting products which contained Chinese rare earth minerals. Rare earths are vital in the production of computer chips and magnets able to function under high temperatures. They are crucial for the auto industry and the military, particularly jet aircraft.
The new Chinese guidelines follow closely those imposed by the US, which stipulate that any company using American chip technology anywhere in the world must do so according to US guidelines.
A statement from the Chinese commerce ministry said that the new measures were to “protect its national security and interests” and prevent the “misuse of rare-earth materials in military and other sensitive sectors.” It said some companies had harmed Chinese security by transferring rare materials and technology for military use.
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Referencing the Chinese domination of rare earth minerals processing—around 90 percent of global production—Trump wrote: “For every element that they have been able to monopolize, we have two. I never thought it would come to this but perhaps, as with all things, the time has come.”
While it is always difficult to discern what exactly may follow Trump’s statements, one very likely interpretation of these remarks is that Trump, along with the anti-China hawks in his administration and his backers in Congress, has drawn the conclusion that it is time to proceed with the all-out economic war against China set out in April.
Trump pulled back from a full-scale offensive after the initial announcements and there was a truce organized as a result of extensive discussions led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer with their Chinese counterparts.
A key motivation for the US side was the adverse reaction on Wall Street which recorded a marked downturn and a sharp fall in the value of the dollar. But the truce has not brought any resolution of the substantive issue advanced from the Chinese side that the US tariffs and export controls be rolled back.
The escalation of the conflict has come on the eve of a scheduled meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ meeting in South Korea at the end of the month.
Whether that meeting goes ahead is now in doubt. Trump initially said while he had planned to meet Xi “now there seems no reason to do so.” In later comments, he said that he had not cancelled the meeting but did not know if it would take place.
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In a statement issued yesterday, the commerce ministry said the US was to blame for the deterioration in relations and that since talks in Madrid last month it had “continuously introduced a series of new restrictions against China.” These included putting more companies on a US trade blacklist.
“China’s position on the tariff wars has been consistent; we do not want to fight, but we are not afraid to fight,” it said.
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One of the factors in determining the development of the present conflict will be the reaction of the US financial markets.
12. Germany: Take action to reject and stop the steelworkers contract!
The IG Metall bargaining committee intends to approve the wage contract it negotiated last week for 60,000 employees employed in metal and steel companies in northern and western Germany. In doing so, the union wants to create the conditions for another wave of job cuts.
The contract has caused outrage and anger among steelworkers. The deal once again reduces real wages. Spread over its entire 15-month term, the increase amounts to a miserly 1.4 percent, according to the employers’ association, Stahl.
For the company and union, reaching into the pockets of employees once again in the interests of shareholders—as bitter as this is for each individual employee—remains the lesser evil. With this agreement, the IGM apparatus is attempting to initiate a far-reaching restructuring of the steel industry. The Thyssenkrupp company has announced it will cut almost half of its 27,000 jobs, a total of 11,000. Salzgitter, Arcelor and other corporations are also tightening up their austerity measures.
Industrial action to defend jobs and wages has never been more urgent. The contract reached on September 30 between IG Metall and the employers’ association is expressly intended to prevent such action taking place. Outside of collective bargaining disputes, strikes are prohibited by law in Germany; where a so-called industrial peace obligation prevails. IG Metall officials and their pseudo-left supporters use this argument to reject any call for a strike against job cuts and wage reductions.
13. Jean-Luc Melenchon paralyses the struggle against French President Macron and the far right
The resignation of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu after only 27 days in office and his reappointment Friday evening is not simply another government crisis, such as France has repeatedly experienced over the past three decades. It is a crisis of capitalist rule.
14. Accelerating plans for dictatorship, Macron renames fallen French government under Lecornu
In a display of naked contempt for the French people, President Emmanuel Macron announced late Friday night that he was renaming as prime minister Sébastien Lecornu, who resigned on Monday as his government coalition collapsed. Macron’s week of consultations with France’s parliamentary parties proved to be a lengthy delaying exercise to prolong a fallen government.
Last week, French media were dominated by plans that Macron would make a deal with forces from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front (NFP). While Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI) party kept demanding Macron’s resignation, almost all the other parties in the NFP rushed to negotiate with France’s hated president of the rich. The bourgeois Socialist Party (PS), the Greens and the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) all rushed to the Elysée presidential palace to beg Macron for access to power.
Friday afternoon, however, they were stunned when Macron rejected their advances and denied them the prime ministership, even though the NFP came in first in the last legislative elections in July 2024. “We emerged stunned from the meeting,” Green Party leader Marine Tondelier said as she left the Elysée. “We have had no answer, except that the prime minister named in the coming hours will not be from our political camp.”
At 10 p.m., with no further explanations, the Elysée presidential palace issued a two-line communiqué, stating: “The president of the Republic has named Mr Sebastien Lecornu prime minister and tasked him with forming a government.”
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Class relations are not fundamentally different in Europe and in the United States. The marching orders from financial markets to the French state were laid out in a recent article in the Washington Post, titled “Europe’s high quality of life is getting hard to afford. Just ask France.” Blaming Russia and China, it demanded deep cuts to European quality of life.
Europe, it wrote, “is sandwiched between an aggressive Russian threat and a mercurial US president who is squeezing traditional allies on tariffs and who seems to shift security commitments from one day to the next. … At the same time, France and Germany both face a rising economic challenge from China, which is competing with European manufacturing on big-ticket goods such as German-made electric vehicles and French-made nuclear power plants.”
It concluded, “The cost of Europe’s way of life—health care, affordable education, and an dignified retirement for all through high social spending—is becoming unbearably high.”
The conclusions drawn by the ruling class are not hard to see. If social rights to health care, affordable education and dignified retirement pose a threat to their obscene wealth, then workers should forgo health care, go massively into debt to finance their education, and should not have dignified retirements. From this flows the necessity for a fascistic dictatorship to repress mass opposition to social retrogression and plans for total war against Russia.
15. Secret Five Eyes notes lay bare war plans against China
An article by New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager, published on the website Newsroom on October 9, sheds light on the advanced preparations by the United States and its allies for all-out war against China.
The article is based on handwritten notes taken by a New Zealand Defense Force official during a meeting of the Five Eyes, held at Britain’s Royal Navy Warfighting Centre in Portsmouth from May 13-16 in 2024. The notes were mistakenly left in an op shop (thrift store) and discovered by a member of the public in August 2025, providing a rare glimpse of secret discussions between the imperialist powers’ war planners.
The Five Eyes originated during World War II. For decades, it has been the key mechanism for the coordination of global surveillance and sharing of intelligence between the spy agencies of the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
More than just an intelligence-sharing network, however, the Five Eyes is now playing a central role in the web of military alliances led by US imperialism, which is fomenting wars throughout the world—against Russia, in the Middle East, and especially in the militarization of the Indo-Pacific region against China.
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Newsroom reports that the main focus of discussion, kept secret from the public, “was a network described as a globally integrated, all-domain, command and control system.”
Hager explains:
“A command and control system means computer programs that allow all enemy (red) and friendly (blue) military forces to be tracked and orders to be sent for attacks. All Domain means navy, land, air and space forces; and globally-integrated means intelligence and military actions can be launched and directed anywhere in the world. The meeting notes suggest this system is to be operational in 2027-2030. It is the electronic infrastructure for a superpower confrontation.”
The NZ official’s notes state that the aim is to “develop a credible and effective combined joint all-domain [command and control] capability for counter-PRC Operations.” PRC stands for the People’s Republic of China.
The handwritten notes make clear that systems are being developed—including what are referred to as Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE)—to seamlessly integrate the activities of all the Five Eyes countries’ militaries to prepare them for “peer-level conflict.”
In other words, the imperialist allies are not preparing for a conflict against a weak, under-developed country such as Afghanistan. Nor are they building up their navies to counter drug trafficking or to provide disaster relief to countries in the Pacific—justifications commonly put forward by governments in Australia and New Zealand. They are readying for war against the main economic rival of US imperialism, i.e., China.
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An incessant propaganda barrage in the corporate media depicts China as an aggressive power, seeking to expand its territory in the South China Sea and across the Pacific, and with plans for an invasion of Taiwan in the near future.
The reality is that the imperialist powers, led by the US, are engaged in a rapid military build-up because, as the Five Eyes meeting notes make clear, they are working to a timetable for launching a war of aggression. The aim is to establish total control over the resources and markets of Asia and to eliminate China as an economic rival to the US by reducing it to colonial status.
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The imperialist powers have embarked on an expanding global war, which is leading inexorably to a clash between nuclear-armed powers. Two years of mass, global protests against the genocide in Gaza have proven that it is useless to appeal to the fascist Trump regime or any of its allies to change course. They are being driven to violently redivide the world, not by subjective whims, but by the objective crisis of capitalism.
The only force powerful enough to stop this unfolding catastrophe is the international working class, mobilized on the basis of a socialist program, to put an end to the capitalist and imperialist system which is the root cause of war.
16. Protests continue after Peru’s right-wing congress sacks Peru’s unelected president
Celebrations that erupted in Lima over last Friday’s sudden ouster of Peru’s unelected President Dina Boluarte have quickly turned into protests against the Congress that sacked her, and also against her replacement, José Jerí, the Congress president.
Demonstrations were called for both Sunday and Wednesday with the demand “que se vayan todos,” or “throw them all out” being directed at both Jerí and the right-wing majority that controls the Congress.
The Peruvian legislators voted to remove Boluarte from office in the early hours of October 10, citing “permanent moral incapacity.” Out of 130 congressmen, 122 voted in favor of her impeachment, while eight abstained.
Boluarte had the distinction of being the most hated president in Peru’s history. She left office with a 93 percent disapproval rating, including 0 percent approval among young people and in southern Peru, known as “deep Peru.”
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José Jerí has taken over as Peru’s president just six months before the 2026 elections, marking the third presidency in the 2021-2026 term, following Pedro Castillo, the elected populist president who was overthrown in a legislative coup, and his successor, Boluarte. In a reflection of the increasing ungovernability of a country that, according to some studies, ranks as the fourth most unequal on the planet, Peru has set a record of eight presidents in ten years, averaging one year and three months—that is 25 percent of the five-year presidential term.
Jerí, a member of the Somos Perú party, comes into office facing charges of rape and graft. His appointment appears aimed at controlling the upcoming elections and quelling ongoing strikes and protests that threaten the power of big banks, mining corporations and businesses.
The rising class struggle has caused unease among the bourgeoisie, prompting Congress members from all parties to sacrifice Boluarte in a bid to win back public support from those who oppose her.
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Recent events have highlighted mounting unrest in Peru, including a two-week strike in September involving 60,000 doctors, nurses and technicians from EsSalud, as well as thirteen 24-hour strikes by urban transport unions in Lima and the seaport of Callao.
These protests in the public transport sector, combined with the EsSalud strike and the so-called “Gen Z” marches of youth, have raised concerns among the bourgeoisie and the corrupt politicians entrenched in Congress.
The bourgeoisie fears that continued large-scale strikes and demonstrations could have dire consequences for its profit interests. The sacrifice of Boluarte appeared to have some of its desired effect, at least with the leadership of the employer-dominated transportation unions, which called off an October 15 strike. The “Gen Z” group, however, said it would go ahead with its protests.
Essentially, power remains in the hands of corrupt, right-wing factions operating through Congress. Boluarte acted primarily as a figurehead in the executive branch. In reality, the effective power lies with two mafia-like parties linked to criminal activities: Fuerza Popular (FP), led by Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of deceased President Alberto Fujimori (in office from 28 July 1990 until 22 November 2000), and Alianza Para el Progreso (APP) founded by César Acuña, who made his fortune from privatization of education, along with their allied parties, such as Renovación Popular, Podemos, Peru Libre, and Avanza País.
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Boluarte’s exit deepens Peru’s institutional instability, with a new president under investigation and widespread public dissatisfaction towards both the executive and legislative branches. The demand for justice for the wave of murders during Boluarte’s administration will continue.
Future struggles will pit José Jerí’s narco-criminal coalition government against the working class, peasants and youth, and the 9.4 million Peruvians living in poverty.
Labor leaders also fear an uprising of the working class and most likely will push for granting Jerí a grace period, as this would allow corrupt elements to solidify their influence in the new government.
For his part, Jerí appears bent on pursuing the so-called “Bukele solution,” aping the hardline repression of El Salvador’s president. On Saturday he joined prison officials on a surprise search of cells at the Ancón 1 prison, after which the inmates were crowded together on the floor with their hands clasped behind their necks in an apparent imitation of similar scenes stated at El Salvador’s infamous CECOT mega-jail.
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The rejection of all parties participating in the upcoming presidential election, scheduled for April 2026, is a positive sign that workers, peasants, and especially the youth are seeking a different kind of leadership. The program proposed by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) aligns with the needs of the oppressed masses in Peru and internationally. It fights for:
1. The political independence for the working class—from all bourgeois parties and the corrupt leaders in trade unions and their pseudo-left satellites.
2. The international working class—objectively, workers around the world are already united and collaborating within supply chains that cross national borders and oceans.
3. A socialist program to bring all of the major banks and corporations under public ownership under an economic plan led by the working class, putting an end to production for profit, which is the root of social inequality, and prioritizing the needs of the working class and the entire population.
To implement these proposals, a Peruvian section of the ICFI must be established.
17. Australian “contempt of court” threat to all protest rights
The judges declared that charges potentially carrying indefinite terms of imprisonment could be laid against anyone who joined a planned anti-genocide march to the Sydney Opera House.
18. Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs rolls out red carpet for fascist demagogue Tommy Robinson
Robinson is a filthy provocateur and instigator of street violence against Muslims and asylum seekers. Israel is a state governed by mass murderers and pogromists, which Robinson looks on with undisguised admiration for doing what he can, as yet only dream of.
19. Sri Lankan government prepares next IMF-dictated budget
Sri Lankan President and Finance Minister Anura Kumara Dissanayake is currently preparing his government’s 2026 budget, which will be presented to parliament on November 7. Last week, a visiting International Monetary Fund (IMF) team declared in no uncertain terms that Sri Lanka’s next budget had to be fully in accord with the bank’s austerity demands.
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Addressing the media on October 9, IMF mission chief Evan Papageorgiou said: “The IMF will monitor both the size and quality of government spending.”
Papageorgiou warned that although the IMF had reached a staff-level agreement to release $US347 million, the fifth installment of its $3 billion bailout loan, IMF Executive Board approval of the tranche was “contingent” on parliament’s passage of the 2026 budget.
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The IMF staff review called on the government to introduce measures to “improve tax compliance, broaden the tax base… and ensure efficient public expenditure.”
In practice, this means extracting more revenue from the working people through new tax increases, slashing state subsidies, “restructuring” or privatising about 400 state owned enterprises (SOE) and imposing other austerity measures.
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During last year’s presidential and general elections, Dissanayake and his Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) falsely promised voters that they would ease the previous government’s austerity measures. Dissanayake quickly dropped these pledges after being elected.
Meeting with the IMF delegation on October 7, Dissanayake said his government regards “IMF support, not merely as external assistance but as an integral element of its comprehensive strategy.”
The IMF, he added, was a “key strategic partner in Sri Lanka’s ongoing journey toward financial stability and economic resilience” and it was “imperative for Sri Lanka to exceed the targets set by the IMF.” This means even more ruthless social assaults.
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Current IMF austerity measures have already devastated the living standards of working people. The World Bank reports that 22 percent of the population now live below the poverty line of 16,397 rupees ($54) per month with another 10 percent hovering just above this figure. More than 55 percent of the population struggles with food insecurity.
Notwithstanding Dissanayake’s demagogic claims of economic recovery—on August 7, he told parliament that the country would exceed its revenue target of 4.5 trillion rupees this year—Sri Lanka, like every other country, confronts a deepening international economic crisis and trade war.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) reported on September 30 that US President Trump’s 20 percent tariffs on Sri Lanka have begun to “bite” into exports. It estimated that the overall effective average tariff rate increase on the island is 17.4 percent—the highest since the Great Depression of the 1930s—potentially causing $634 million in export losses and threatening 16,000 jobs, mainly among female apparel workers.
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The only way the working class can defeat Dissanayake’s IMF-dictated assault on jobs, wages, and working conditions is by breaking from every faction of the capitalist class and fighting for a socialist program that repudiates all foreign loans and nationalizes all the major companies, banks, and plantations, placing them under workers’ democratic control.
20. 16 workers killed in Tennessee explosion: Industrial carnage followed by media cover-up
On the morning of Friday, October 10, a massive explosion obliterated a building at Accurate Energetic Systems (AES), a military explosives plant in rural Tennessee, killing 16 workers in one of the worst industrial disasters in the United States in decades. The blast near the town of Bucksnort, felt more than 20 miles away, left only the charred debris of the building and burned-out vehicles in the parking lot.
“There’s nothing to describe, it’s gone,” said Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis. “More than 300 people have been over every square inch and found no survivors.”
The names of the workers killed have not yet been released. Authorities are identifying victims through DNA testing because no recognizable remains were recovered. Residents told reporters the deaths struck a community already devastated by the 2021 floods that killed 20 people.
The corporate media also decided that “There’s nothing to describe,” but in the sense that they would write as little as possible about the disaster. Within days, national news outlets dropped the story entirely. Sixteen workers were incinerated in a US weapons plant—the largest mass death in an industrial disaster since the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine explosion—and the networks and other corporate media simply moved on.
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This silence exposes the contempt of the corporate media and political establishment for the lives of workers, along with a fear that the unending carnage in the industrial slaughterhouse of American capitalism will fuel mass anger and rebellion. The media blackout coincides with the deliberate downplaying of Trump’s plans to invoke the Insurrection Act and establish military rule to crush opposition.
Accurate Energetic Systems supplies explosives and demolition charges for the US Army and major defense contractors. It has received more than $120 million in recent contracts for TNT and plastic-bonded explosives.
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The Tennessee tragedy confirms warnings made at the July 27 public hearing convened by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) into the death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr. at the Dundee Engine Plant in Michigan. Adams, 63, was killed amid a rush to restart production while basic safety measures were bypassed.
“These tragedies are not accidents,” explained Mack Trucks worker and IWA-RFC leader Will Lehman. “They are the outcome of a system that subordinates human life to profit. That a company is demonstrating it is willing to socially murder more than 20 percent of its workforce is an immense step forward on the class war that’s escalating in the US.
“As we said at the public hearing for Ronald Adams Sr., we insist that workers’ lives matter. For that to happen, we need to build rank-and-file committees in every factory and workplace to put production and safety under the control of workers, not the corporations and their accomplices in the union bureaucracy.”
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The explosion in Tennessee is a warning. Unless the working class intervenes consciously to take control of production, more towns will burn, more workers will die, and more families will identify their loved ones by DNA. The alternative is clear: the international unification of the working class to abolish the profit system and build a socialist society based on human need, not corporate profit.
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International), unanimously adopted this document at its founding congress on June 13–15, 2025. It traces the central historical experiences of the working class and Marxist movement in the 20th and 21st centuries, and establishes the principled foundations for the building of the Trotskyist movement in Turkey and throughout the region.
New sections of the document will be published in coming days. Here are the latest published sections of a total of 33:
28. The Fight for Historical Truth and Socialist Consciousness
29. Globalization and the National Question
30. Globalization and the Trade Unions
On October 3, 2025, a Ukrainian court ruled against a request from the defense that the judge in the case of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk should be removed. Bogdan, then 25 years old, was arrested in April 2024 on charges of “high treason under martial law,” which carry between 15 years and life in prison. Bogdan’s defense lawyers had argued that the judge should be recalled for bias.
Bogdan’s indictment was based primarily on articles that he wrote and translated for or distributed from the World Socialist Web Site, the publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Yet while the prosecution describes the WSWS as an “information agency” of the Kremlin, the WSWS and Bogdan’s Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), have consistently opposed the Russian invasion of Ukraine from an internationalist standpoint, fighting for the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian working class. This line has been publicly documented, including in the articles cited as “evidence” by the prosecution.
Since his arrest, Bogdan has been detained in an overcrowded prison in Nikolaev in southern Ukraine. In virtually all court decisions regarding his arrest and the seizure of his property, the court used language that was almost identical to the requests submitted by the prosecuting body, the Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU). In many instances, entire paragraphs were simply copied and pasted. This is under conditions where, in multiple court sessions, the prosecution has been unable to muster any evidence to substantiate its grave charges, despite calling multiple witnesses.
The recent decision to not dismiss the judge for bias underscores yet again that, within the Ukrainian court system, everything is stacked against Bogdan. A few days earlier, on October 1, the Nikolaev appeals court had ruled against a request by the defense that Bogdan’s imprisonment be changed to house arrest. The same appeals court had also ruled against the same request of the defense in July.
The unlawful detention of Bogdan is the principal basis for his case before the European Court of Human Rights, which recently agreed to hear the case. Bogdan’s lawyers argue that his arrest constituted a violation of Article 5 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which guarantees the right to liberty.
23.
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.
