Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. “Health care is a universal right”: Kaiser Permanente nurses speak out on third day of strike
This strike is not an isolated labor dispute. It is the tip of the iceberg, a harbinger of mass working-class struggles that are coming into open collision with the corporate and political establishment.
2. Despite “ceasefire,” Israel continues massacres and aid restriction in Gaza
Following the announcement of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas over the weekend, Israeli forces have continued to kill Palestinians throughout Gaza and restrict the entry of food.
The events since the beginning of the “ceasefire” have made clear that the agreement merely marks a new phase in the ongoing US-Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza and war throughout the Middle East.
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Israel also carried out a series of airstrikes throughout Lebanon on Thursday, killing at least one person. In a statement, Lebanon’s president condemned the attack, calling it a “grave violation” of a ceasefire signed by Israel in November.
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump threatened further attacks against Gaza. Citing allegations of summary executions by Hamas, Trump threatened, “If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them.” He clarified, “Somebody will go in. It’s not going to be us.”
Earlier this week, Trump demanded that Hamas disarm, saying, “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them. ... And it will happen quickly and perhaps violently.”
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In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal made clear that the aim of the “ceasefire” was merely to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas and could be the prelude to renewed mass military operations by Israel throughout Gaza. “This is why the agreement freed all the living hostages up front and kept Israeli forces at the ready in Gaza’s other half,” The newspaper wrote.
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Officials in Gaza said that dozens of bodies they received from Israel showed signs of torture and summary mass executions.
On Tuesday evening, Unite published a press release announcing that around 2,000 Stagecoach and Metroline drivers had accepted a revised pay offer of 12 percent over two years, ending the pay dispute in Greater Manchester which was launched through a joint strike with their colleagues at First Bus last month. This comes as hundreds of workers employed by Transport for Greater Manchester, also represented by Unite, as well as Unison, begin their own series of walkouts.
The Unite leadership had already assumed veto powers over the right of workers at Stagecoach and Metroline to meet and agree the deal before strike action was suspended less than a day before walkouts on October 10, 11 and 13. This was to foist on drivers at the seven garages an agreement drawn up behind closed doors between union officials, the bus companies, and Labour Mayor Andy Burnham.
The Unite statement hails a “vastly improved offer,” but provides no information on the voting figures among members to accept. General Secretary Sharon Graham declared, “This is an excellent, well-deserved win for our members at Stagecoach and Metroline who took on their employers in the fight for better pay and won. It proves the power of a union.”
The deals struck are not the result of the fight bus workers sought to wage, but of the collusion of the Unite apparatus with the private operators and Burnham to protect Greater Manchester’s franchise arrangements with three of the largest and most profitable bus companies in the UK under the umbrella of the Bee Network. Sabotage by the union bureaucracy ensured that after the first joint strike on September 19–22, there was no further collective action.
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That act of sabotage succeeded in peeling away the 110 First Bus drivers at the Rochdale garage from the ongoing fight. The accepted revised offer was based on a headline figure of 20 percent over two years, dressing up a pay uplift which is split over four stages. This did not meet the basic criteria of pay parity for the lowest-paid bus drivers in the region, as Unite’s press release declaring an “exceptional pay award” acknowledged.
Unite then doubled down on its collaboration with Burnham, Stagecoach and Metroline executives to table this latest revised offer, under conditions in which more than 90 percent of workers still engaged in the dispute were due to walk out, bringing into focus the discontent of the rank-and-file with these manoeuvres.
The “exceptional offer” trumpeted by Unite is 5.9 percent backdated to April 2025 and 5.9 percent from April 2026. This is only a little over the present RPI inflation rate at 4.6 percent and will be rapidly eaten up by debts workers have incurred including the rise in essential household bills for energy, water, and council tax above official inflation figures.
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Stagecoach reported pre-operating profits of £51 million for last year, up from £33 million the year before. Metroline’s parent company, Singapore-based ComfortDelGro, recorded a £60 million operating profit from its UK and European bus operations in the first half of 2025—boosted by new Greater Manchester contracts worth £422 million over five years.
These well-resourced, globally organized transnationals profit from the labor of transport workers around the globe through the same type of outsourcing arrangements First Bus, Stagecoach, and Metroline enjoy with the Greater Manchester Labour authority. But for the Unite apparatus, it is never an issue of challenging the grip they exercise over public services or organizing a unified fight by the working class against the corporate oligarchy.
In the hands of the Unite bureaucracy, the strikes were only a bargaining chip with the mayor and private operators to demonstrate its role as partner in policing opposition among bus drivers. Graham has insisted that Unite have a seat at the table of Greater Manchester’s franchising model, rather than mobilizing opposition against this managed form of privatization which has ensured the race to the bottom has continued for the past two years—at the expense of pay, terms, and conditions.
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Unite presents as good coin the standard fob off to “look into” matters. The “historical issues”—ill health caused by lack of basic amenities, exhaustion caused by denial of sufficient rest periods, and inferior retirement schemes—are all issues Graham and the Unite leadership have paid lip service to for years while allowing them to fester.
The bus companies will seek to claw back the concessions they have made on pay through cost-cutting at workers’ expense, with industrial action off the agenda for the next two years.
We encourage bus drivers to speak out against the sabotage of their unified struggle against the private operators and what the “excellent” pay deals mean for them. The unity of bus workers across depots and companies can only be established by forming rank-and-file committees, independent from the union’s bureaucratic apparatus, which will champion workers conditions, safety and dignity.
4. French social-democrats back Macron to install minority Lecornu government
The failure of the censure motions against Lecornu exposes LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s perspective of a “citizens revolution” channeled through parliament. It vindicates the position of the Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES). Stopping attacks on the working class and the consolidation of the police state requires building a movement in the working class for a general strike to bring down Macron, independently of the NFP bureaucracies, in an international struggle for workers’ power and socialist revolution.
Responsibility for Lecornu’s installation lies above all with Mélenchon. The PS is serving as a tool of the capitalist oligarchy—backing a government despised for imposing policies of austerity and militarism by police-state repression of mass protests. But this is what the PS has done for over four decades, and why it collapsed to 1 percent of the vote as Mélenchon got 22 percent in the 2022 presidential elections. LFI, by forming an electoral front with the PS and backing its candidates in the 2024 legislative elections, again put it in a position to play a decisive role in official politics.
5. UAW president hails Trump, praises Stellantis move to cut jobs in Canada
On the eve of the mass “No Kings” protests against the aspiring dictator Donald Trump, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain issued another tribute to the fascist in the White House, hailing the announcement by Stellantis that it will shift more production from Canada to the US because of Trump’s tariffs.
On Tuesday, Stellantis said it was scrapping plans to reopen its plant in Brampton, Ontario, where 3,000 were laid off when the plant was closed in 2024. Instead of building the new Jeep Compass in Brampton, the company is moving production of the model to its factory in Belvidere, Illinois. The decision, part of a planned investment of $13 billion over four years at US plants, followed “very productive talks with the Trump administration,” Stellantis Antonio Filosa said.
In a statement posted on the UAW website, Fain declared, “A year ago, Stellantis was on a fast-track to moving their US operations out of the country. Their decision today proves that targeted auto tariffs can, in fact, bring back thousands of good union jobs to the US.” He continued, “Wall Street and supposed industry experts said this was impossible. But race to the bottom created by free trade is finally coming to an end.”
Fain is functioning as a scab, gloating over the destruction of the jobs of workers in Canada to secure an additional flow of dues to the bloated coffers of the UAW apparatus.
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Far from defending jobs, all the UAW’s “Buy American” campaigns and demonization of foreign autoworkers has produced one disaster after another. The UAW admits 65 Big Three plants have closed over the last 20 years.
The real source of this job slaughter was not “unfair trade,” as Fain claims. It is capitalism, a system that the subordinates basic human needs to private profit, and a system the UAW bureaucracy fully supports.
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The claim that jobs can be protected by building a tariff wall is a lie. There is no such thing as an “American,” “Canadian” or any other national car. The auto industry is globally integrated and every vehicle is the product of the collective, interconnected labor of workers around the world and made up of components that criss-cross borders many times.
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Fain spits on the historic ties of the American and Canadian working class. US autoworkers should recall the heroic joint battles US and Canadian autoworkers waged to found the United Auto Workers in the 1930s. This included the wave of sit-down strikes that spanned both sides of the US-Canada border, including the 17-day sit down strike by workers at the Oshawa, Ontario General Motors plant in 1937, inspired by the Flint sit-down. Ontario government officials denounced the UAW as “foreign” agitators.
The 1985 split between the US and Canadian regions of the UAW proved disastrous for workers on both sides of the Detroit River separating Michigan and Ontario. The result of this fratricidal divorce has been hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, wages gutted and hard won rights surrendered.
6. ICE agents mount violent attacks against Chicago workers
Over the past several days, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have carried out increasingly violent and provocative raids throughout the Chicago area.
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There is clearly a political calculation in the White House that a political explosion in Chicago would provide the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, under which Trump would assume the authority to order federal troops into Chicago, regardless of the opposition of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Invoking the Insurrection Act—which the Trump administration has indicated is imminent—would be a critical step in the establishment of an outright presidential dictatorship.
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A dispatch filed by Julie Bosman, Chicago bureau chief for the New York Times, carried the remarkable headline, “Chicagoans Resist I.C.E. Agents,” she continued, “Immigration agents are using aggressive tactics. Residents of the sanctuary city are trying to resist them.”
After describing the openly racist and provocative tactics of the ICE thugs, Bosman writes, “The presence of officers from Border Patrol and ICE has brought forth an intense backlash. Chicagoans are shouting at immigration agents, calling them fascists and Nazis, throwing objects at them and chasing their unmarked S.U.V.s or minivans, honking their horns to warn bystanders of ICE’s presence.”
The response of the Democratic Party to these developments is silence and complicity. While Democrats in Chicago and Illinois are calling on residents to trust the courts and wait for legal remedies, the Trump administration has already made clear that it will defy any ruling that interferes with its operations. At the national level, the Democratic leadership is simply ignoring the unfolding assault on democratic rights.
On Wednesday night, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held a televised CNN “town hall” devoted to appeals for bipartisanship. Their central message was a plea for some Republicans to join with Democrats to pass a continuing resolution and end the government shutdown. Over the course of the event, neither Sanders nor Ocasio-Cortez mentioned the ICE raids in Chicago, the National Guard deployments or Trump’s declared intention to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military against the American people.
The Democrats fear that any genuine opposition to Trump’s drive toward dictatorship would trigger a mass movement of workers and youth that would go far beyond their control.
The Conservative Party conference saw discussions of an alliance with Reform, coupled with criticisms of its “populist” attitude to spending on the one hand and a wholesale adoption of its Trumpian attacks on migrants, the “woke” left and the rule of law, on the other.
8. Massachusetts 13-year-old abducted by ICE and transported to Virginia detention center
The abduction of a 13-year-old boy by armed agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) provoked angry protests October 14 in the city of Everett, Massachusetts. More than 80 residents and city councillors gathered outside Everett City Hall to demand the return of Arthur Berto, who was taken by ICE and transferred to a juvenile immigration facility in Virginia.
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Arthur is a citizen of Brazil who entered the United States in September 2021. His family has a pending asylum application, and family members have been granted permission to work legally in the United States. The family is seeking asylum, and the boy holds no legal status as a minor immigrant except through this pending process.
The official justifications for the boy’s detention, manufactured by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and echoed by local officials, collapse under the slightest scrutiny. This is not a story of protecting “public safety” but a coordinated, yet officially denied, collaboration between local police and federal immigration authorities, where a “standard booking process” functions as a direct pipeline to the federal deportation apparatus.
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In a press release, ICE boasted that “Operation Patriot” resulted in the arrest of what it termed “almost 1,500 illegal aliens” in Massachusetts during the month of May alone. The agency claimed it was targeting the “worst of the worst,” including “murderers, rapists, drug traffickers, [and] child sex predators.”
This is a deliberate lie. A letter sent by the Massachusetts congressional delegation to DHS, citing ICE’s own data, revealed that “almost half of the individuals recently arrested by ICE in Massachusetts have no criminal record whatsoever.”
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The brutal ICE crackdown in Massachusetts, exemplified by the state-sanctioned abduction of a 13-year-old child, is not an “excess” of the Trump administration but a calculated policy of the capitalist state, enforced with the full complicity of the Democratic Party. The events in Everett and across the state prove that the Democrats are both incapable of and unwilling to defend the basic rights of immigrant workers. Their condemnations are a political fraud, designed to conceal their fundamental role in administering the capitalist state.
These savage attacks are aimed at terrorizing and atomizing the most vulnerable sections of the working class, whipping up xenophobia and dividing workers against each other. The goal is to prevent the unification of all workers—immigrant and native-born—in a common struggle against exploitation and inequality.
9. Former Kenyan prime minister Raila Odinga dies aged 80
Few figures have done more to derail and contain the revolutionary strivings of Kenya’s oppressed masses than Raila Odinga. His death on Wednesday ends the long political career of a man who, for more than four decades, served as a central pillar of capitalist rule and imperialist domination in Kenya. Whether as opposition leader, cabinet minister, or prime minister, Odinga played the role of political fixer, channeling mass protests against inequality, corruption, and repression into the dead end of constitutional reform and imperialist-backed “national unity” coalitions.
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Raila Odinga’s political ascent was built on his father’s legacy as the nominal left opposition to Kenyatta and his successor Daniel arap Moi. Educated in Stalinist East Germany as a mechanical engineer, he returned to a Kenya that his father had helped build to join the ranks of the new ruling class, expanding the family’s business empire in energy, construction, and media. By the time of his death, his fortune was estimated at between $1.2 and $3.3 billion, placing him among the richest 0.1 percent of Kenyans—an oligarchic layer of roughly 8,300 individuals who, according to Oxfam, own more wealth than the bottom 99.9 percent combined. This obscene inequality epitomises the class gulf between Odinga and the millions he claimed to represent.
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Odinga’s political career began in the 1980s after his arrest following the failed 1982 coup attempt against Moi’s regime. He spent nearly eight years in detention, during which he was beaten, denied medical care, and subjected to psychological torture that left him with lasting speech difficulties. Upon his release, he re-emerged in the 1990s as a leading figure in the bourgeois opposition to Moi’s dictatorship, the “Second Liberation” movement. Alongside Kenneth Matiba and Charles Rubia, Odinga campaigned for the restoration of multi-party democracy, channeling growing popular anger against the regime into a struggle for limited constitutional reforms within the framework of capitalism.
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The 2007 elections marked the peak of Odinga’s political influence and the most violent crisis of Kenya’s post-independence history. Running as the main opposition candidate against incumbent Kibaki, Odinga appeared poised for victory until widespread electoral fraud secured Kibaki a self-declared win. Odinga called for mass demonstrations, and his supporters, largely drawn from Kenya’s working-class and impoverished layers in the slums and rural areas, poured into the streets.
The regime responded with brutal repression. Ethnic violence, stoked by both ruling factions, engulfed the country, leaving more than 1,300 people dead and over 650,000 displaced. William Ruto, now Kenya’s president but then an ally of Odinga, played a criminal role in fomenting ethnic clashes for which he was later indicted by the International Criminal Court.
Odinga, fearing that the mass opposition might break out of his control and advised by Washington, entered into a US-brokered power-sharing agreement with Kibaki in 2008, becoming prime minister in a “Grand Coalition” government. The imperialist powers hailed the deal as a model of “stability.” It was designed to preserve Kenya’s role as a key regional base for Western military and financial interests.
During his five years as prime minister (2008–2013), Odinga demonstrated his loyalty to imperialism. His government backed US-led military interventions in Somalia under the banner of the “war on terror,” and supported France’s 2011 invasion of Ivory Coast. Domestically, his administration helped push through the 2010 Constitution, drafted under US and British guidance, as a mechanism to contain mass anger and restore confidence in the capitalist order after the post-election bloodshed of 2007.
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In 2013, Odinga lost to Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the country’s first president. As disillusionment with the political establishment deepened, Odinga’s role as a “progressive” alternative was shown to be a fraud. When the 2017 elections were again marred by corruption and saw the killing of over 100 protesters, he briefly postured as leading a “people’s resistance movement.” But in early 2018, he abruptly reconciled with Kenyatta in the so-called “Handshake,” presenting the pact as a step toward “national unity.”
By the time of the 2022 election, Odinga had openly transformed into capitalist political fixer par excellence. Backed by Kenyatta, Kenya’s richest man whose family owns a multi-billion-dollar business empire, he faced Ruto, a former ally who exploited popular anger with a populist “bottom-up” campaign and by presenting himself as an outsider—despite being the sitting deputy president. Ruto’s slim victory reflected widespread hostility to Kenya’s political dynasties, including Odinga.
Once elected, Ruto violently turned against the working class, as the economic crisis facing the country deepened, particularly soaring costs of living intensified by the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, Ruto imposed the first round of an IMF austerity program, sparking mass protests. Odinga once again sought to channel mass discontent. He called intermittent protests against the austerity-driven Finance Bill 2023, only to suspend them when they began to merge with broader strikes by teachers, doctors, and civil servants. Dozens of his supporters were gunned down.
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Nothing could better expose the rottenness of Odinga than his death being used by the current Ruto regime to impose austerity and police-state measures. Barely had the ink dried on Odinga’s death certificate, with the media providing wall-to-wall obituaries hailing his democratic credentials, than Ruto decided to sign into law eight deeply authoritarian and anti-working-class bills.
10. Kenya: Raila Odinga’s funeral turns into another Ruto government massacre
Nothing could more starkly capture the bankruptcy of Odinga’s legacy than the massacre that unfolded at his funeral, carried out by the “broad-based” Kenyan government he helped forge.
11. Trump authorizes CIA regime change operations against Venezuela
US President Donald Trump confirmed on Wednesday that he has authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to carry out lethal, covert operations in Venezuela aimed at overthrowing the government of President Nicolás Maduro. The World Socialist Web Site denounces these criminal plans for the imperialist takeover of Venezula.
When reporters questioned him at the White House about a New York Times report citing several US officials about the authorization, Trump did not equivocate in acknowledging the order. The admission is an extraordinary escalation of US imperialist aggression against Venezuela and beyond.
During the press conference, Trump also boasted that the Pentagon had carried out another deadly attack Tuesday against a speedboat in the southern Caribbean, killing six people. This brings the toll of civilians killed in US military actions against small boats accused—without any evidence—of drug trafficking to at least 27.
Trinidadian media reported that this most recent boat was carrying several passengers from Trinidad and Tobago, with relatives of one victim declaring that he was simply a young, migrant worker returning home.
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Washington’s long history of covert interventions—coups, assassinations, buying off the media, rigging elections, and corrupting unions—now unfolds without even a pretense of seeking plausible deniability.
When asked directly if the CIA had authority “to take out Maduro,” Trump said, “Wouldn’t it be a ridiculous question for me to answer? But I think Venezuela is feeling heat.” This was a clear acknowledgement that the aim of CIA operations is precisely regime-change. Washington has placed a record $50 million bounty on Maduro’s head, accusing him of leading the so-called Cartel of the Suns, a fictitious organization.
The bombings, deployment and threats are not mere posturing, but an open declaration of an imminent imperialist intervention being prepared on the basis of entirely phony pretexts.
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During his press conference Wednesday, Trump callously joked that people “aren’t deciding to even go fishing” in the southern Caribbean, eliciting laughter from officials. The exchange confirms that the White House is being run by gangsters who are deliberately murdering innocent civilians.
Historically, US President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger both publicly denied CIA involvement in the 1973 overthrow of left nationalist Chilean President Salvador Allende. Now a mountain of declassified documents has proven that the CIA and Pentagon orchestrated his removal and the installation of the brutal Pinochet military dictatorship.
Trump’s admission Wednesday forces a clear reckoning: US imperialism has returned to the naked interventionist doctrines of the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, openly invoking the Monroe Doctrine to assert that Washington owns the hemisphere. During that period, the US orchestrated or participated in multiple invasions and coups, including in Mexico (1914), Haiti (1915), Dominican Republic (1916), Nicaragua (1912-1933), Cuba (1906, 1912), and Honduras (1911).
With US imperialism achieving the status of world hegemonic power after World War II, the CIA only continued this bloody legacy in Latin America, stretching from the 1954 overthrow of Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz—who sought limited land reforms affecting US corporate interests—to decades of covertly organizing coups that installed murderous military regimes responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands suspected of socialist or anti-imperialist sympathies through the 1990s.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy opened the door for a massive expansion of US militarism globally. After the eruption of the Gulf War, David North explained in a February 1991 lecture:
World history has once again come to the point where it is going to witness a new and horrifying eruption of imperialist wars of plunder and struggle among the imperialist powers themselves for world domination. The working class will now see imperialism as it really is, seeking to subjugate hundreds of millions of people, as it sets the stage for the next round of brutal world conflicts.
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“Today we can say that the workers of America and Europe cannot be free while their capitalist governments enslave the workers of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia,” presciently warned North in 1991, and added:
The re-subjugation of the colonial people, the return to colonialism, would inevitably be accompanied by a drastic decline in the social position of the working class in the United States. The struggle of the American working class, its own interests, are inseparable from those of workers all over the world… The defeat of the American war machine in the Middle East would be a great blow for the liberation of the working class in all parts of the world and, above all, here in the US. We work actively for that defeat by fighting to mobilize the working class against this war…
Today, the military deployments to cities like Washington, Chicago, and Memphis lay the groundwork for a fascistic dictatorship at home, justified with the same fabricated emergencies used as the pretexts for war in Latin America.
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The Chavista administration has itself overseen attacks on living standards far greater than even those under the fascist president of Argentina, Javier Milei. Maduro repeatedly repressed workers’ protests and focused on making appeals to US imperialism, even after Trump broke all diplomatic relations with Venezuela last week.
Maduro represents a section of the national bourgeoisie bound hand-and-foot to the capitalist markets controlled by imperialism and is irreversibly hostile to any mobilization of workers that could turn against its own capitalist interests at home or abroad.
The potential for the unity of workers’ struggles across the hemisphere against all factions of the ruling class is shown by a growing wave of mass protests and strikes in Peru, Ecuador, and Argentina, as well as in the US itself. The brutal and openly murderous neocolonial campaign by Washington will only add tinder to the growing flame of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist sentiment and give rise to revolutionary struggles across the region.
12. Actress Diane Keaton dies at 79
The fact Keaton was involved in some of the meaningful work of the time was not an accident. Her artistic abilities, enthusiastic nonconformism and genuine feeling for life prepared her for that.
13. Boarding school collapse in Indonesia kills 67
On September 29, a school building in East Java, Indonesia collapsed with students inside, resulting in the death of at least 67 people and more than 100 injuries. The circumstances around the accident point to serious lapses in basic safety measures.
The collapse took place at the Al Khoziny Islamic boarding school, located in Sidoarjo, East Java. The Indonesian National Agency for Disaster Countermeasure stated that this was the single deadliest disaster in the country for 2025.
At the time of the collapse, additional levels were being added to the two-story school even while students were praying inside. This involved trucks adding additional concrete. Muhammad Rijalul Qoib, a 13-year-old student who witnessed the incident, stated that one truck “poured the very top part all at once” with the heavy load being placed on the school very quickly.
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The Indonesian National Rescue Agency attempted to recover as many of the trapped students as possible, initially refraining from using heavy excavation tools for fear of setting off a secondary collapse and causing further harm to the those trapped under the rubble. In addition to those killed, 104 were rescued from the debris.
These types of schools, known as pesantren, operate with very little government oversight. They are generally funded by fees from students and possibly a small amount of government funding. Through a lack of funds and cost-cutting measures, pesantrens often require students to assist in construction work, often as punishment. Students and parents confirmed that this was the case at Al Khoziny after the school’s collapse. An engineering expert told BBC Indonesia that the construction was unplanned and did not comply with existing regulations.
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However, in rural areas, construction work not just on pesantrens but more broadly is often conducted without permits. In an archipelago prone to earthquakes, oversight on construction, based on modern safety standards, is vital. Yet the ruling class in Indonesia as well as other countries regularly demonstrates its contempt for such basic measures due to the impact on profits.
Cost-cutting measures in construction across Indonesia have resulted in several other collapses, of which the Al Khoziny school has been a particularly deadly example. In the last fifteen years there have been at least seven other significant collapses in Indonesia, such as that of the Kutai Kartanegara Bridge in 2011, which was linked to a lack of maintenance and the poor quality of construction materials. At least 20 people were killed, 40 injured, and another 19 reported missing.
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The problem of underfunding education and infrastructure is long-running and has only worsened in the last year under the presidency of Prabowo Subianto. At the beginning of 2025, the government announced cuts to the budgets for education, infrastructure, and healthcare, amounting to approximately $US19 billion, or 8.5 percent of the state budget. This money was diverted into a new sovereign wealth fund known as Danantara, through which Prabowo effectively seized control of a large portion of Indonesia’s assets.
Beginning in February, these cuts provoked anger in the Indonesian population. A student protest movement, named the “Dark Indonesia” protests, was launched, denouncing the government’s attacks on education and other social services. Furthermore, young people aged 15 to 24 face widespread unemployment, with an official unemployment rate of at least 16 percent, about three times higher than the overall unemployment rate.
A major justification given for the severe reductions to the budgets, was the funding of Prabowo’s “free meal” program for students and pregnant women to supposedly combat malnutrition. The program was a populist pledge Prabowo made during his election campaign. However, the quality of the food has been called into question as thousands of youth have contracted food poisoning from these meals.
In addition, Prabowo has used the program to expand the role of the military in society, deploying troops to schools and other locations to play a role in distributing meals. Under the guise of carrying out a social program, Prabowo is in fact reviving the Suharto dictatorship-era concept of dwifungsi, or dual function, in which the armed forces play both military and civilian roles. This was a key component of propping up Suharto’s New Order regime.
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Ultimately, the underlying cause of the Al Khoziny school collapse, other similar disasters, and the overall decline in social conditions is not unscrupulous or indifferent individuals, but the capitalist system itself that places profit over the lives of the working class.
14. US-China economic war intensifying, not de-escalating
While US President Trump is seeking, at least in public, to de-escalate trade tensions with China ahead of his proposed meeting with President Xi Jinping at the end of the month, the underlying conflict is intensifying and extending.
The trade war jumped back into the headlines last week when Trump threatened an additional 100 percent tariff on all Chinese goods entering the US in response to Beijing’s announcement that it would introduce export controls on rare earths.
The Chinese controls are modeled on the global restrictions the US introduced under the Biden administration on the use of its computer chips and chip technology.
China processes about 90 percent of the rare earth minerals which form vital components in the manufacture of computer chips, heat-resistant magnets used in autos and jet planes, and a wide range of consumer goods.
After Trump’s tariff threat, Wall Street responded with its biggest fall in six months, resulting in more conciliatory remarks by Trump that he did not want to “hurt” China and that Xi had simply had a “bad moment.”
On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had held meetings with senior officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who leads the US negotiating team with China, “about sending a message to the world that the US wants to de-escalate trade tensions with China,” citing “people familiar with the matter.”
However, on the same day in an interview with the Financial Times, Bessent struck a less than conciliatory tone. He said the introduction of rare earth export controls by Xi reflected problems in the Chinese economy.
“This is a sign of how weak their economy is, and they want to pull everybody else down with them.”
Bessent claimed China was in the middle of a recession/depression and “they are trying to export their way out of it. The problem is they’re exacerbating their standing in the world.”
He expanded on these themes on Wednesday at a news conference alongside US trade representative Jamieson Greer, at which he said China was taking on the world with the export control regime.
Clearly seeking to win international support for US retaliatory action, he said: “If China wants to be an unreliable partner to the world, then the world will have to decouple.”
15. More than 100,000 workers prepare to strike in New Zealand
16. Union abruptly terminates strike at MRF Tire factory in Tamil Nadu
An indefinite strike by 800 workers at the Madras Rubber Factory (MRF) plant in Tiruvottiyur, located in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, was brought to an abrupt end by the MRF Employees Union (MEU) on September 30 after 19 days.
The MRF is a tire manufacturing company with ten manufacturing plants spread across India. The MRF workers at various plants, especially in Tamil Nadu, have been striking against an utterly dictatorial management. For the past 25 years, the company has constantly victimized and harassed workers fighting for union recognition, decent pay and working conditions.
The Tiruvottiyur plant workers were making minimal demands: a halt to hiring apprentice workers at slave wages instead of employing permanent workers, and the continuation of the company’s longstanding practice of paying annual health-insurance premiums upfront on behalf of the workers. Workers essentially pay the company back through deductions from their paychecks over the space of six months.
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The strike commenced on September 11 after workers opposed the deliberate practice of MRF management hiring what are termed as apprentice workers under the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government’s National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS). Management then announced a lockout of the striking workers while continuing production using contract and temporary workers.
Under NAPS, a program promoted as being designed to generate “employment for the youth,” the young workers receive what can only be described as slave-wages ranging from Rupees (Rs.) 5,000 to Rs. 9,000 (US$57 to $103) per month. The amount of stipend depends upon a worker’s educational qualification ranging from 5th to 9th grade pass to a college degree. Under NAPS, Indian government compensates the company by up to 25 percent of the monthly stipend with a ceiling of Rs. 1,500 (US$17) per month.
NAPS apprentices are paid far less than what a trainee at MRF used to get. The reported monthly stipend for a MRF trainee was Rs. 16,500 (US$187) for graduates of high school and technical schools and Rs. 18,000 (US$206) for a college graduate.
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It is a wide belief among workers that when permanent workers retire, their place will be filled by NAPS apprentices. “We are opposed to it, because NAPS workers don’t receive proper training,” Ariya said. “They could be badly injured when they engage in production.”
For workers at the Tiruvottiyur and at other MRF plants, the key question facing them is how to take the struggle forward. This is only possible if workers forge new instruments of struggle, rank-and-file committees that they control themselves, to unite workers at all MRF plants. These committees will provide the means for MRF workers to link up with the tens of thousands industrial workers in Tamil Nadu who are facing the same unrelenting attacks by management, the DMK government, the courts, and their accomplices in the union bureaucracy.
This is a lecture by David Rye to the 2025 Summer School of the Socialist Equality Party (US) on the history of the Security and the Fourth International investigation. It helps explain why a "political understanding of the significance of security is inseparable from the fight for Trotskyism. Diminishing the security question is a product of revisionism.
18. How the GPU Murdered Trotsky
The World Socialist Web Site will be publishing sections of a 1981 publication to to accompany Lecture 5-7 of the Socialist Equality Party (US) 2025 Summer School, held between August 2-9, 2025. They document uncovered abundant and long-concealed evidence of GPU penetration of the Trotskyist movement. These revelations exposed how Stalin’s agents orchestrated the murders of Trotsky, his son Leon Sedov, and comrades including Rudolf Klement, Erwin Wolf, and Ignace Reiss, as part of the broader counterrevolution that followed the Moscow Trials.
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.
Here are the 32nd and 33rd sections of a total of 33:
32. The Fight for Trotskyism in Turkey
33. Imperialist War and the Decade of Socialist Revolution
20. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Liberia:
Port workers on go-slow
Nigeria:
University lecturers in two-week strike
South Africa:Students protest at University of Fort Hare, Eastern Cape over conditions
Cement workers on strike over pay in Alberton
Students protest at University of Fort Hare, Eastern Cape over conditions
Cement workers on strike over pay in Alberton
Uganda:
Teachers continue their stoppage over pay and conditions
Europe
Belgium:
Harbor pilots at ports strike over pension reforms
Harbor pilots at ports strike over pension reforms
France:
Public health care workers hold one-day work stoppages against austerity
Public health care workers hold one-day work stoppages against austerity
United Kingdom:
Phlebotomists in Gloucestershire continue longest pay dispute in NHS
Phlebotomists in Gloucestershire continue longest pay dispute in NHS
Birmingham bin strike continues in face of court action
Staff at London school walk out over workload and class sizes due to council cuts
Iran:
Motogen (Tabriz) workers strike over contracts and wages
Iranian protests continue over pensions, wages, conditions
Motogen (Tabriz) workers strike over contracts and wages
Iranian protests continue over pensions, wages, conditions
21. 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.
