Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. Palestinians released by Israel suffered mistreatment, abuse and torture

The 1,726 detainees returned to Gaza appeared emaciated, bruised and scarred from tight cuffing, wearing grey prison uniforms, with shaven heads and overgrown beards and their faces making plain the suffering they had endured.

2. Trump, Hegseth step up military murders in Latin America

US military forces struck two small boats off the Pacific coast of Colombia Wednesday, killing at least five people. The strikes were the eighth and ninth since President Trump issued orders September 2 for a campaign of military violence against alleged drug traffickers that is both illegal and unconstitutional.

While Trump claims that the strikes are justified because the United States is at war with drug cartels based in Latin America, the White House has not sought a declaration of war from Congress, or even a congressional resolution authorizing military operations, as in Afghanistan and Iraq.The strikes are in flagrant violation of international law. The US government has offered no evidence against the people it is annihilating, and even their names are unknown. And the military assaults are taking place in international waters, where ships of any nationality supposedly have “freedom of navigation,” a right that Washington claims to be defending in the South China Sea. 

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The attacks in the eastern Pacific represent an ominous escalation of the US military campaign against small boats in the Caribbean, which has been aimed at ratcheting up political and military pressure on the regime of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Last week Trump announced that he had authorized CIA covert operations against the Maduro government, which has been a target of both Democratic and Republican administrations in Washington.

 

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Trump gloated over the boat killings. Asked by a reporter why he didn’t seek a declaration of war from Congress, he replied, “I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK, we’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be like dead, OK.?” 

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Like Hitler and Goebbels, Trump and his accomplices believe that the bigger the lie, and the more often it is repeated, the better for them. They aim not to convince but to stupefy the public, and to intimidate anyone who might raise objections to this murderous international piracy.

Trump claimed “extraordinary historic achievements” by the Homeland Security task force, which he said was now operational in all 50 states. He pointed to sweeping anti-immigrant raids carried out by heavily armed federal agents, backed up by the mobilization of National Guard troops in Washington DC, Memphis and other cities. He reiterated threats to deploy troops in Chicago and Portland, Oregon, but said he would hold back from sending troops to San Francisco because of pleas from Silicon Valley billionaires. 

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Asked directly about a Pentagon memo leaked to social media detailing the establishment of a National Guard response force, trained in suppressing “civil unrest,” to be deployed in all 50 states by April 2026, Hegseth indirectly confirmed the plans. “I’m not going to answer on something that may be in the planning process,” he said. “But we definitely do have multiple layers of National Guard response forces whether it’s in each state, whether it’s regionally … whether it’s Washington DC.”

The statements of Trump and Hegseth demonstrate that the same methods of lawless violence, being carried out against the population of Latin America, are being implemented domestically within the United States. 

3. In Australian tour, US journalist Chris Hedges denounces media complicity in Gaza genocide

American journalist Chris Hedges delivered a speech in Sydney on Monday, titled, “The Betrayal of Palestinian journalists.” As part of his Australian speaking tour, Hedges had been booked to give this talk at the National Press Club in Canberra, but the event was abruptly called off in a blatant act of political censorship. 

Just as remarkable as the Press Club’s refusal to let the Pulitzer Prize winner speak is the fact that the cancellation received virtually no coverage in the Australian media.

The suppression of Hedges is part of a broader campaign by the corporate press and the entire political establishment to justify and cover up the monstrous crimes being carried out by the Israeli regime with the full support of world imperialism, including the Australian Labor government.

4. Mamdani placates billionaires with plan to retain NYPD chief

Zohran Mamdani announced Wednesday that he intends to keep Jessica Tisch on as commissioner of the New York Police Department. The move to retain Tisch, a member of the 43rd richest family in the United States, and currently serving under the corrupt, pro-Trump mayor Eric Adams, illuminates the real class interests Mamdani will serve if elected mayor on November 4. 

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It is no accident that policing has become a major issue in the campaign, although presented in the distorted form of law-and-order hysteria amid historically low crime rates. During the debate, both Cuomo and Sliwa demanded an increase in the massive 33,000 member police force and attacked Mamdani for his previous calls, long since repudiated, to defund the police. The core issue for the ruling class, however, is not public safety but preparations to contain the explosive social conditions over the next four years under conditions of mass anger over Trump’s advancing dictatorship and growing social inequality. With the Tisch announcement, Mamdani is signaling that he is fully committed to the NYPD’s essential class function, the defense of the profit system.  

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However, perhaps the clearest indication of the political role that Mamdani will play comes out in his response to Trump.

The day before Wednesday’s debate, Trump unleashed the ICE Gestapo in a violent crackdown on immigrant vendors in downtown Manhattan. Masked ICE agents in military fatigues, joined by ATF, FBI and other federal forces, rampaged through Canal Street, abducting at least 13 people, including four US citizens.

Agents used batons and pepper spray against vendors, backed by military-grade armored trucks. Crowds quickly formed and, by that evening, hundreds gathered outside the federal building in lower Manhattan to protest the Gestapo raid.

Trump’s actions in the heart of Manhattan were intended to send a message—a preview of what is to come, particularly if Mamdani wins the election. Trump and administration officials have denounced the Democratic candidate in hysterical terms, threatening federal intervention in the city if he were to become mayor.

Wednesday’s debate opened with the candidates asked to address the ICE raid and Trump’s threats against the city. “Look, Donald Trump ran on three promises,” Mamdani said. “He ran on creating the single largest deportation force in American history. He ran on going after his political enemies. And he ran on lowering the cost of living. If he wants to talk to me about the third piece of that agenda, I will always be ready and willing. But if he wants to talk about how to pursue the first and second piece of that agenda at the expense of New Yorkers, I will fight him every single step of the way.”

Mamdani’s pledge to work with Trump on affordability, even as the president is erecting a police state, is an extraordinary admission of political bankruptcy. In both debates, Mamdani refused to use the terms dictatorship, authoritarianism or fascism. He made no mention of the No King’s protests last weekend, at which more than 100,000 took to the streets in New York City alone, let alone calling for a mass mobilization of workers to repel Trump.

Mamdani’s political function throughout the campaign has been to appeal to the large numbers of workers and young people who are bitterly opposed to both Trump and the Democratic Party establishment, and to contain that opposition within the two capitalist parties. His marked shift to the right since the primary reflects the fundamental class position of his candidacy and the Democratic Party. For those looking for a viable means of opposing dictatorship and inequality, it will not be found in Zohran Mamdani. He is laying a political trap.

5. Netherlands: Culture or cannons? The Van Gogh Museum’s survival at stake

The future of Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum—home to the world’s most comprehensive collection of works by Dutch master Vincent van Gogh—now hangs precariously in the balance. The Dutch government’s plans to slash annual funding for arts and culture threaten one of humanity’s most vital cultural institutions. At stake is not only the preservation of van Gogh’s masterpieces but the broader principle that art belongs to the public, not to a privileged few.

Next to the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is the second most visited museum in the Netherlands and among the most popular in the world. It attracts over 1.7 million visitors annually, reaching a record 2.6 million visits in 2017. For millions, the museum is more than a tourist destination; it is a rare encounter with art that speaks to suffering, empathy and the dignity of ordinary life—a confrontation with the human condition and with nature rendered in trembling lines and blazing color.

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To finance urgent maintenance, climate control upgrades and security improvements, the museum recently requested a modest increase in its annual subsidy—from €8.5 million [$US9.9 million] to €11 million, a rise of just €2.5 million. To put this in perspective, the rise represents barely 0.01 percent of the Netherlands’ total defense spending, or more precisely about 0.00015 percent of the Netherlands’ 1.7 trillion GDP. Allocating €2.5 million would barely register on the national accounts. The Van Gogh Museum laid out a “Masterplan 2028,” a three-year renovation set to begin in 2028, during which the museum further anticipates significant revenue losses due to partial closures.

The Dutch state’s response to the museum’s proposal was both severe and disproportionate. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW), under Gouke Moes of the right-wing Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB)—one of the two remaining coalition partners of the current minority caretaker government—publicly rejected the museum’s appeal, insisting it could “manage” with current funding.

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A court case filed by the museum with the state is now set for February 19, 2026, which will determine whether the museum can enforce the 1962 legal agreement [that in return for profits made from visitors, the government pledged to build and permanently maintain a museum, ensuring that van Gogh’s work would remain accessible to the public]. Should the government prevail, it would establish a perilous precedent: priceless works of art could be seized by private collectors, locked away from the public—not because the wealthy “love art” more than workers do, but because they prefer it removed from public life. To deny millions access to beauty, truth, and the memory of human struggle is, in itself, a demonstration of obscene wealth and power. 

During its revolutionary ascent in the seventeenth century, the Dutch bourgeoisie played a contradictory yet historically progressive role in the development of art. Emerging from the constraints of feudalism through the Eighty Years’ War of independence against Spain, it shattered the monopoly of aristocratic patronage. For the first time in modern history, artists gained a measure of independence—however limited—from the dictates of both the church and the crown. The painters of the “Dutch Golden Age,” from Rembrandt to Vermeer, reflected this new confidence and curiosity of a society that dared to see the ordinary world through human eyes.

Yet that historical moment, brilliant but brief, has long since passed. In the era of capitalist decline, the same class that once liberated art from feudal fetters has become its greatest oppressor. What was once liberated is now debased and treated as a financial burden—a mirror of a society in decay, led by a rotten and reckless ruling class.

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Only weeks before the national elections, the caretaker Dutch government allocated billions of euros for fighter jets, surveillance systems, port expansions and other instruments of death. Alongside this vast rearmament comes a flood of war propaganda, designed to condition the public for new wars.

The figures speak for themselves. Annual defense spending now stands at €25 billion—nearly 10,000 times the modest €2.5 million requested by the Van Gogh Museum for urgent renovations spread over three years. Meanwhile, social programs are being shredded: €1.2 billion cut from education, €2.3 billion from healthcare and €200 million from culture and the arts.

A recent report by the Dutch government’s economic policy agency (CPB) examined the election manifestos of the major political parties contesting the October 29 general elections, spanning the far right to the nominal left. The findings are damning: nearly every party proposes slashing healthcare spending to finance massive increases in defense budgets, placing militarization above the basic well-being of the population.

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The struggle to defend the Van Gogh Museum and to preserve its unique collection cannot be separated from the broader fight of the international working class against genocide, war and the systematic destruction of the living conditions of workers and youth. Culture, education and physical wellbeing are not luxuries to be sacrificed for profit and militarism—they are necessities of life. Art and human progress belong to the people and must be defended as such. After all, history reminds us time and again: “Not by bread alone!”

6. More than 100,000 join New Zealand’s biggest strike in more than 40 years

The mass strike by teachers, nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers is part of an international upsurge of the working class against brutal austerity, pay cuts and imperialist war.

7. 500,000 Amazon jobs on chopping block due to automation in next few years

The move marks an accelerating jobs bloodbath, with rapid advances in automation and artificial intelligence being weaponized to eliminate entire sections of the workforce.

8. Australian university union backs Labor’s education restructuring 

As two developments underscore, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has opposed any unified action by university staff and students against the restructuring and job destruction across the country.

9. Class divide in US life expectancy reaches 9 years for elderly

New data on a widening nine-year life expectancy gap between rich and poor retirees demonstrates the devastating impacts of the US' profit-driven healthcare system. 

10. New coronavirus wave: “Frankenstein” variant spreading rapidly

It is being consciously accepted that elderly and vulnerable people will fall seriously ill, and that care homes, hospitals, nurseries and schools will be pushed to their limits or even collapse. Workers in public transport, childcare, teaching and nursing are expected to shoulder and make up for all absences despite low pay, while their parents, grandparents and vulnerable relatives fall ill and become care-dependent—at a time when care places are ever fewer and ever more expensive.

The dire consequences of COVID for the working class are the result of a deliberate policy pursued by all political authorities since the start of the pandemic. While serious scientists issued warnings, capitalist governments knowingly allowed the mass infection of society because a shutdown of production would have endangered the profits of major corporations.

11. Ukraine faces financial crisis as winter approaches

Despite billions wasted and hundreds of thousands already killed in the proxy war with Russia, Ukraine and its EU backers remain committed to war. 

12. How the governing Christian Democrats pave the way for the far-right Alternative for Germany

Advocates of direct cooperation with the AfD are now so strong that the CDU's executive committee met for a two-day retreat last weekend to discuss how to deal with the right-wing extremists in the future.

13. The implications of the anti-Trump “No Kings” protests for the European working class

The emergence of left-wing opposition to America’s billionaire fascist president has far-reaching implications for the international class struggle. US workers are increasingly outraged by Trump’s support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, his mass layoffs of government workers and cuts to pension and health care programs, raids by the ICE immigration Gestapo and the illegal deployment of troops in US cities. Protesters denounced Trump’s assertion of absolute executive power and conspiracy to establish a fascistic dictatorship.

What does this mean for workers and youth in Europe?

14. Dmitry Barinov’s “Zinoviev, Trotsky, University”: An important contribution to the history of the Left Opposition

Dmitry Barinov, a young Russian historian at St. Petersburg State University, has written an important account of the Left Opposition in Leningrad—the name of St. Petersburg at the time—in the years 1923-1932. He has conducted an extensive and meticulous archival research, including in local archives in St. Petersburg and the archive of the Russian Secret Service, FSB, the successor organization of the Soviet secret police, the OGPU, that persecuted the oppositionists. On that basis, Barinov has produced the most extensive account yet of the work of the Opposition in Leningrad, its structure, leading figures and activities among students and the working class.  

Despite certain weaknesses, Barinov’s work is the most serious contribution to the history of the Opposition from a Russian historian since the works of Vadim Rogovin, whom Barinov appropriately honors as a “pioneer” in this regard. In addition to a thoroughly researched text, it includes a list of 508 names of Oppositionists in Leningrad, with their dates of birth and death and places of employment, as well as illustrations for dozens of them, many never before seen or published. Along with the publication of the newly discovered documents of the imprisoned Opposition from the early 1930s, and several other smaller but important publications, his book testifies to a renewed interest in the history and politics of Trotskyism in the former Soviet Union.  

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Despite an overall objective approach to this history, a serious and persistent weakness of Barinov’s account is that he emphasizes the generational tensions in the party conflict over fundamental questions of political and international perspectives, which he barely discusses at all. In this, he is clearly influenced by historians such as Alexei Gusev and Alexander Reznik, who are affiliated with the Pabloite movement which, in 1953, broke from the Trotskyist movement, rejecting the conception of world socialist revolution carried out by the working class. For the past three decades, in particular, it has been hallmark of the writings of Pabloite historians on the Opposition to downplay or outright ignore the conflict over socialism in one country as opposed to the theory of permanent revolution, as well as the class orientation of the Bolshevik leadership’s economic policy. In Russia and among-Russian speaking historians, their works have enjoyed significant influence.

This is evident in Barinov’s study. While Barinov points to the role of Zinoviev in suppressing support for Trotsky, he does not discuss or even identify the main political issues that were at the heart of the conflict. Instead, echoing the argumentation of Reznik’s, in particular, presents this early stage of the inner-party struggle as primarily centered on generational tensions and the question of inner-party democracy. (For a discussion of Reznik’s distortion of the origins of the Left Opposition see: Alexander Reznik’s Trotsky and Comrades: A false account of the emergence and politics of the Left Opposition.)  

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Since 1905, Trotsky had understood that the bourgeois democratic tasks of the revolution in the Russian Empire could only be resolved by the working class. Despite the relative economic backwardness of Russia, he predicted, the working class would be propelled to take state power and establish a proletarian dictatorship. This dictatorship, however, could only survive if the revolution in Russia was extended internationally. Until early 1917, Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, opposed that perspective. While he also recognized that the liberal bourgeoisie in Russia was not a revolutionary class, he did not consider it possible for the working class to take power alone in such a backward country as Russia. Therefore, he proposed a dictatorship of “two classes”, the working class and the peasantry, in what would still be a bourgeois democratic revolution. 

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But Lenin shifted course after the overthrow of the Tsarist regime in the February revolution of 1917: As soon as he returned to Russia in April 1917, he declared that the Bolsheviks now had to prepare for a second, socialist revolution and the seizure of power by the working class. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin opposed this shift. Their main orientation in February-March 1917 was toward cooperating with the bourgeois government of Alexander Kerensky. They were still convinced that the revolution in Russia could not be socialist. As late as September 1917, Zinoviev, in particular, objected against the seizure of power as being “premature.” In Lessons of October, Trotsky characterized the essence of the conflict between these two different tendencies in the party leadership as follows: 

One of these tendencies, the main one, was proletarian and led to the path of world revolution; the other was ‘democratic’, petty-bourgeois, and ultimately subordinated proletarian politics to the demands of a reformist bourgeois society. These two tendencies clashed bitterly over all issues of any substance throughout 1917. It is precisely the revolutionary era, i.e. the era when the party uses its accumulated capital, when these kinds of disagreements must be exposed in action. These two tendencies will reappear in the revolutionary period of all countries to a greater or lesser degree and with one or another deviation.^[1]

Defeated in the inner-party struggle in 1917, this national-reformist wing in the party leadership was strengthened amidst the international isolation of the revolution, the death of Lenin in early 1924 and the consolidation of a privileged bureaucratic caste in Soviet society. The aborted German Revolution in 1923 played a decisive role in this regard. After a 5-year long period, during which Soviet workers and farmers had fought heroically to defend and extend the conquests of the revolution, it was now clear that the revolution, above all in the advanced imperialist countries, would take longer than anticipated. 

This shift underlay the embittered attacks on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and his “Lessons of October”. Exploiting their prestige as long-time collaborators of Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev played a particularly aggressive role in this campaign and sought to lend credibility to the claim that Bolshevism was fundamentally distinct from what they termed “Trotskyism.” In an article for Pravda, the party’s leading newspaper, on November 30, 1924, Zinoviev emphatically denied that there ever had been a “right-wing” in the Bolshevik party. He then went on to accuse Trotsky of a “rightist deviation”, and a long history of expressing “non-Bolshevik moods” and “opportunistic errors.”^[2]

The essentially nationalist-reactionary content of these attacks on Trotsky was revealed by Stalin in his December 1924 declaration that the party had now to orient toward “building socialism in one country.” The central role of Zinoviev and Kamenev in this campaign explains the great hesitancy among Trotsky’s supporters over his decision in 1926 to form a bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev. But the fundamental issues involved in this struggle are also the principal basis for understanding why Trotsky, eventually, decided to form this bloc. 

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Although Barinov dismisses the political basis of the bloc, the empirical material he presents, in fact, demonstrates that Trotsky’s considerations were correct. The formation of the bloc was bound up with the initiation of systematic and highly structured underground work by the Opposition and the recruitment and training of a much larger layer of Oppositionists among workers and youth than had previously been possible. 

In no small measure, this was a response to the escalating crack-down on the Opposition by the Stalin leadership. In Leningrad, Stalin sought to effectively topple the Zinovievite leadership of the party organization. Zinoviev would later describe the state of the city in the months leading up to the formation of the bloc with Trotsky as edging on a “civil war.” The editorial boards of the city’s most important party newspapers, Leningradskaia Pravda and Krasnaia Gazeta, were dismissed and then staffed with Stalinist loyalists. A stunning 7,184 party workers from Leningrad were purged and relocated to other cities. (p. 112)

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While Barinov provides an enormous amount of important information on the United Opposition and leading Trotskyists, his own political sympathies and emphasis lie with a third tendency that was involved in the Opposition: The Democratic Centralists. 

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In contrast to Trotsky and similar to Zinoviev, the Democratic Centralists never accepted permanent revolution and focused their criticism of Stalinism on two domestic issues: The erosion of inner-party democracy by the bureaucracy, and its incorrect economic policies. Approaching these issues from a national standpoint, already by 1926 the Democratic Centralists had concluded that the revolution had been conclusively betrayed and that a second party had to be formed. They also developed an early version of the conception of “state capitalism,” describing the bureaucracy as a new ruling class. 

The bloc between the Trotskyists and the Democratic Centralists was, if anything, even more unstable than that with the supporters of Zinoviev. In late 1926, the Democratic Centralists abandoned the bloc because they opposed a tactical retreat but later temporarily rejoined it. 

Barinov emphasizes the role of the Democratic Centralists in Leningrad, even while acknowledging that they were a small minority in the Opposition there. He praises their views as being free of the “party fetishism” that he sees in the positions of Trotsky and Zinoviev. While it is certainly Barinov’s right to sympathize with the Democratic Centralists, it is a serious omission that he does not inform his readers of the well-documented assessment by the Trotskyists of the Democratic Centralists. Given their, at times, ferocious opposition to the party leadership during the civil war, Trotsky was compelled, early on, to evaluate this tendency. 

In his assessment, the Democratic Centralists reflected, on the one hand, petty bourgeois radical layers in the party and, on the other, the insecurity of sections of workers who were afraid of being rapidly betrayed of the hard-won gains of the revolution. Although these two tendencies had a different class basis, they were united in their impressionistic impatience and lack of a strategic internationalist orientation. In a letter from May 1928, Trotsky opposed the Democratic Centralists’ assessment that the revolution had already been betrayed by noting that they are “bent to accept the overture for the opera, that is to say, to assume that all the basic processes in the Party and in the State have already been accomplished; and that Thermidor, of which they heard for the first time from us, is an already accomplished fact.”^[3]

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Despite its weaknesses, Barinov’s book ranks as one of the most important contributions to the history of the Left Opposition. It towers over those of recent Pabloite historians with its sheer wealth of material, based on meticulous and assiduous research, and a sincere commitment to establishing an accurate and precise historical record of the struggle of the Left Opposition. His book is an indication of both the immense wealth of material on the history of the Trotskyist movement that is contained in the Russian archives, and a renewed interest in this history which was fueled, not least of all, by the finding of the seminal documents of the Soviet Trotskyists from the early 1930s. We shall hope that his book finds a wide readership, and helps stimulate further, politically vital research into one of the most complex and important chapters in the history of Marxism and the social revolution. 

15. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East

Africa

Morocco and Tunisia: 

Both rocked by demonstations

Nigeria: 

Health workers in Edo State hold warning strike, but union caves in after governor’s threats

South Africa:

Further protests in Johannesburg by workers on cheap labor scheme demanding permanent jobs

Cement workers on strike over pay in Alberton

 Uganda: 

Union sabotages teachers’ pay strike

Europe

Germany:

Coca Cola workers strike for pay increase

Italy:

Refuse collection workers in national strike for improved pay and conditions

Spain:

Thousands of teachers strike for better pay and working conditions in Cantabria

Turkey:

Sacked textile workers in Tokat demand back pay and reinstatement

United Kingdom:

Striking National Coal Mining Museum workers reject latest pay offer

Support staff at London school walk out to defend jobs

Middle East

Iran:

Protests over pensions and living conditions continue across Iran

16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk! 

The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.