Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. GM layoffs escalate auto industry’s global job-cutting campaign amid EV policy shift, tariff chaos
General Motors on Wednesday announced a new wave of job cuts at its US electric-vehicle and battery operations, part of a mounting assault on jobs throughout the American and global economy.
2. Hundreds of Michigan high school students walk out to oppose fascist Turning Point USA club
Some 277 students at Royal Oak High School conducted a walkout/sit-in last Wednesday, after news got around that a Turning Point club had been established at their school.
3. The class issues in the New York City mayoral election
There is broad and growing opposition to Trump’s dictatorship, expressed in the outpouring of millions in the October 18 “No Kings” demonstrations. These are the popular moods that Mamdani has appealed to and what has propelled his rise.
The Socialist Equality Party, however, does not call for a vote for Mamdani, or for any of his rivals. Mamdani’s platform and program do not represent a way forward in the fight against oligarchy and dictatorship, but a political trap.\
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In relation to the specific issues in this election, Mamdani, together with the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] as a whole, is seeking deliberately and consciously to channel opposition back into the Democratic Party by promoting the lie that it can be pushed to the left and become a vehicle for advancing the interests of workers. Mamdani’s own campaign, however, exposes this as a political fraud.
Over the past five months, Mamdani has bent over backward to reassure the very billionaires he claims to oppose. Amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza, he has backtracked on his defense of the Palestinians, declaring that Israel has a right to exist and Hamas should lay down its arms.
Bowing to right-wing pressure, last week Mamdani announced that he plans to retain the billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch as commissioner of the New York Police Department. This has been a key demand of big business, symbolizing that, amid explosive social conditions, when it comes to controlling the state’s armed apparatus, a trusted figure will be at the helm.
Mamdani appeals to opposition to the oligarchy, but his program is nothing more than a modest call for a few liberal reforms: A pause on increases for half of the city’s renters, a modest lowering of transportation expenses for some transit riders and an expansion of publicly funded child care, financed by a slight tax increase on the wealthy. Even if enacted, these policies will do nothing to resolve the problems of historic proportions facing the working class.
Even so, Mamdani has come under attack from sections of the Democratic Party establishment. Their favored candidate, Cuomo, has denounced Mamdani’s proposals as a fantasy while launching vicious smears branding Mamdani as an Islamic jihadist. New York’s US Senate delegation has refused to endorse the victor of the party’s primary, while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries withheld an endorsement until last week.
The Democratic Party’s machinations are meant to hold Mamdani in check while promoting gubernatorial candidates like Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and CIA officer Abigail Spanberger in Virginia as the model for the midterms in 2026.
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Mamdani is following the same path of political deception laid down by Bernie Sanders and, more recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—both of whom appeared on stage with Mamdani at the election rally on Sunday.
For nearly a decade, Sanders has served as a lightning rod for opposition, consciously channeling the growing hostility to capitalism back into the dead-end of the Democratic Party. In both 2016 and 2020 he ran for president, received millions of votes based on false promises of a “political revolution,” only to endorse the chosen candidates of Wall Street and the Pentagon, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. On foreign policy, Sanders has repeatedly lined up with American imperialism, backing the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and unlimited funding for Israel.
Mamdani’s fellow DSA member Ocasio-Cortez, too, has presented herself as an opponent of the Democratic Party establishment only to prove herself a faithful defender of the interests of the ruling class. She voted to illegalize a strike by railroad workers in 2022 and backed funding for Israel amid its genocide in Gaza, while urging her supporters to “be adults” and rally behind the war criminal Biden.
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Should Mamdani win, he has already demonstrated in the course of his campaign that there will be very little difference between a mayoralty headed by himself and one headed by Cuomo.
The sentiments driving support for Mamdani among workers and young people—opposition to dictatorship, inequality and war—cannot and will not be realized through the Mamdani campaign, nor within the framework of the Democratic Party. As the Socialist Equality Party wrote following Mamdani’s primary victory in June:
The Socialist Equality Party has insisted that the predominate tendency within the working class, both within the United States and internationally, is toward political radicalization and opposition to capitalism. The New York mayoral election is a confirmation of this assessment. However, we do not mistake the indication for the fulfillment. While the SEP recognizes the significance of Mamdani’s victory, it does not adapt its political program to the illusion that his electoral success will lead to a change in the nature of the state, the class character of the Democratic Party, and the violent and oppressive character of American capitalism.
The developments of the past four months have entirely confirmed this assessment. Trump has violently escalated his conspiracy for dictatorship. Meanwhile, the Democrats have done nothing to stop him, collaborating instead in the destruction of jobs, social programs and democratic rights. Mamdani and the DSA, for their part, have demonstrated the bankruptcy of their entire perspective, working to channel mass opposition back behind the very capitalist establishment responsible for the crisis.
The SEP insists that the fight against war, dictatorship and social inequality cannot proceed through illusions in “progressive” Democrats or appeals to the existing political institutions of American capitalism. It requires the independent political mobilization of the working class, in the United States and internationally, on the basis of a socialist program. The working class—the great social majority—must organize itself as a conscious political force to take power, expropriate the billionaires and reconstruct society on the basis of equality, peace and social need, not private profit.
4. Democrats, Sanders, Jacobin defend Maine’s Graham Platner following Nazi tattoo revelation
Since it was revealed earlier this month that Graham Platner, the Bernie Sanders-endorsed Democratic candidate for Maine’s Senate seat, had a Totenkopf skull and crossbones Nazi tattoo on his chest for nearly two decades while serving as a soldier/mercenary for US imperialism, the pseudo-left and self-proclaimed “progressive” Democrats have lined up in defense of the far-right candidate.
This campaign is being led by Jacobin magazine and joined by figures such as Krystal Ball of Breaking Points. They have pointed to Platner’s posting history on Reddit to claim that his comments, which Platner deleted but had written under the handle “P-Hustle,” show a man with “progressive” and “anti-fascist” views rather than a “secret Nazi.”
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The pseudo-left’s invocation of Platner’s deleted Reddit posts as evidence of his “progressive” credentials is therefore revealing of their own political subordination to US imperialism. Moreover, as his entire record shows—from four tours in the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, to his later employment as a mercenary for Blackwater/Constellis, to his Totenkopf tattoo, the emblem of the Nazi SS—Platner’s actions express the very essence of American militarism and reaction.
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latner’s entire public persona—a “working-class veteran” turned “oyster farmer”—is a political fabrication. As a teenager he attended two private schools, including the $75,000-a-year Hotchkiss School, an elite Connecticut prep school whose alumni included CIA Director Porter Goss, Jonathan Bush (President George H.W. Bush’s brother and investment banker), William Clay Ford Sr. and Jr., Robert Lehman of Lehman Brothers Inc., Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and Clinton adviser Strobe Talbott. His grandfather, Warren Platner, was a world-renowned architect and designer as his New York Times obituary notes, and Platner’s father, Bronson Platner, is a prominent Maine attorney.
Far from an economic conscript forced to sign up for the US military out of desperation, Platner belongs to the upper strata of the American bourgeoisie—a layer whose sons move effortlessly between elite schools, the military and corporate or political office. His “populism” is as phony as his claims to have been unaware that he had a Nazi tattoo on his chest for over 18 years.
The fact is Platner’s pro-imperialist politics are the same today as they were when he was deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. In an August 2025 interview with The American Prospect, Platner expressed support for the ongoing US-NATO war in Ukraine against Russia.
I support the Ukrainians in their fight. They were invaded. They’re resisting with all the means that they can. And I personally think that we should provide them with support.
His statement echoes the propaganda of the Biden and increasingly the Trump administration, which portrays the conflict as an unprovoked act of Russian aggression while concealing the decades-long expansion of NATO and the US effort to dominate Eurasia. Platner’s endorsement of this imperialist war is not an aberration but the culmination of his political trajectory. The same Marine who praised the Indian Wars and fought in Iraq now supports NATO’s drive toward World War III.
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The pseudo-left’s embrace of Platner—by Jacobin, The American Prospect, Ball, Sanders—exposes the unbridgeable gulf between socialism and the politics of the Democratic Party. Their defense of a fascist-sympathizing mercenary confirms that their role is to provide a “left” gloss for US imperialism and the Democratic Party.
5. Severe delays at Newark airport highlight the ongoing crisis of the US air traffic control system
Flights to and from Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, one of the three major airports in the New York City metropolitan area, and one of the busiest in the country, suffered significant delays last Sunday, October 26, due to a severe shortage of air traffic controllers.
This is not a new situation, both at Newark and nationally. There is an already existing acute shortage of air traffic controllers in the US, a legacy of the Reagan administration’s crushing of the PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) strike in 1981, the blacklisting of strikers and subsequent attrition of the workforce. As a result, there are chronic delays and unsafe conditions at many US airports, which have led to multiple near disasters and at least two fatal crashes.
This situation is now being exacerbated by the federal government shutdown. Controllers are classified as “essential” and therefore required to work during the shutdown. Nevertheless, they are not among the limited categories of federal employees, including the military, for whom special arrangements are being made in order to continue paying wages. The controllers suffered their first “payless payday” on Tuesday, October 28.
Due to the understaffing, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that on Sunday the air traffic control center with responsibility for Newark Airport experienced a staffing shortage. As a result, incoming flights were held at the airport of origin for an average of an hour and 22 minutes, while outgoing flights were delayed by an average of 26 minutes. A total of 348 flights were delayed and seven were cancelled at Newark on Friday.
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Nationally, the number of flight delays reached a high of 6,158 last Thursday and has been close to 4,000 a day recently.
Air traffic control is an extremely stressful job. Controllers must maintain intense vigilance at all times to avoid catastrophic accidents in congested airspace. Conditions are made even more difficult by increasingly outdated equipment, lacking upgrades which have been neglected for years. This dangerous conjunction of factors was terrifyingly illustrated last May when a catastrophic failure of both radar and radios at the Philadelphia control facility, which since last year has had responsibility for Newark airspace, suddenly materialized. For 90 seconds air traffic control was completely blind and out of contact with the multitude of planes within its jurisdiction. Miraculously, no serious incidents occurred due to the emergency actions taken by pilots flying in the vicinity.
Control over Newark airspace was transferred to Philadelphia from New York last year due to chronic understaffing at the latter.
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The scale of the deterioration of conditions for current air traffic controllers is illustrated by a few figures. In 1981, on the eve of the PATCO strike, there were approximately 17,000 air traffic controllers in the US who worked around 14,000 flights every day. Today there are about 10,600 certified professional controllers (CPCs) who work about 44,000 flights per day. The number of controllers today has decreased by a staggering 38 percent since the PATCO strike, while daily air traffic has increased 214 percent.
The current air traffic control workers’ union, the National Air Traffic Controller Association (NATCA), was formed by those who scabbed on the PATCO strike eight years after Reagan fired more than 11,000 strikers who refused to surrender. NATCA has done nothing to ameliorate the conditions of the unpaid controllers many of whom have been forced to work mandatory overtime and six-day weeks well before the shutdown.
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Air traffic controllers and other federal workers must take the conduct of this fight into their own hands, by building rank-and-file committees as new centers of organized resistance to the attack on jobs and essential social services. These committees must be controlled by the ranks themselves and operate independently of the federal government employees unions and the Democrats, who are carrying out impotent appeals to the courts and for a “bipartisan agreement” to restore government funding.
There is only one way to stop the drive to dictatorship: the full mobilization of the working class in collective action, including a general strike, to drive Trump and his fascist cabal from power. This industrial counter-offensive must be combined with a political struggle by the working class, which is aimed at establishing workers’ power, expropriating the oligarchy and establishing a socialist society based on meeting human need, not the enrichment of mega-billionaires and millionaires.
The massive social crisis that could be unleashed in two days shows that the social content of Trump’s dictatorship is a war on the working class, imposing the costs of the mounting crisis of US capitalism by throwing conditions back decades.
7. Two workers killed and a third injured in Australian mine explosion
One worker from the Endeavor mine said he didn’t know when or if it would reopen. He said conditions there were not safe, adding, “even if it does open there’s a lot of people who will not go back.”
8. Australia: Queensland Teachers Union trying to rush through sell-out award deal
The union leadership is running roughshod over the democratic rights of teachers.
9. State killing spree continues with Norman Grim execution, Florida’s 15th of the year
Florida stands out nationwide for its execution process, largely due to the extraordinary power vested in the governor, who holds the sole authority to select and set the execution dates for death row inmates.
10. Fed cuts interest rates amid market frenzy
As expected by financial markets, the US Federal Reserve cut its base interest rate by 0.25 percentage points at its meeting on Wednesday but indicated that a further rate cut in December—also widely anticipated—was not a “foregone conclusion.”
Wall Street, which had been looking forward to an assurance that the Fed was on a downward path of cheaper money, helping to propel it to still greater heights, fell when that was not forthcoming.
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In his prepared remarks, Fed chair Jerome Powell said there were “strongly differing views about how to proceed in December. A further reduction in the policy rate at the December meeting is not a foregone conclusion—far from it. Policy is not on a preset course.”
He emphasized this issue in his press conference. “I always say that it’s a fact that we don’t make decisions in advance. But I’m saying something in addition here.”
The “far from it” phrase was described by one economist cited by the Financial Times (FT) as “heavily loaded” and “intended to send a signal.”
Another factor appears to have been the lack of data available to the Fed because of the government shutdown. “What do you do when you’re driving in a fog? You slow down,” Powell said, indicating that there was a “possibility” that the lack of data could influence the debate on what to do in December.
The “strongly differing views” referred to by Powell were reflected in yesterday’s decision. Trump’s latest appointee to the Fed board, Stephen Miran, who backs the president’s demand for major rate cuts, voted for a cut of half a percentage point. But the Kansas City Fed president Jeffrey Schmid called for the rate to remain on hold.
In his prepared remarks, Powell noted that in the near term “risks to inflation are tilted to the upside and risks to employment to the downside—a challenging situation” and there was no “risk-free path” for policy.
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Since the Fed meeting in September, there have been a swath of job cuts in key sections of industry. The employment placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas has said that employers have announced almost a million job cuts so far this year.
Major firms are carrying out a purge. Amazon is to cut 14,000 corporate positions this year, with more to come in 2026, and UPS has already axed 48,000 positions so far this year.
The rate cut will do nothing to halt the job slaughter. Its only impact will be to inflate the stock market as Wall Street demands cheaper money to sustain the ongoing frenzy.
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There were also indications from the Fed in yesterday’s decisions that it is concerned about possible liquidity problems arising in financial markets as it announced the conclusion of its financial asset reduction program from the beginning of December.
Since June 2022, the Fed has reduced its holdings of US Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities—purchased during the period of quantitative easing—in a process known as quantitative tightening.
But the withdrawal of the Fed has the effect of tightening the money markets, in particular, the very-short-term repo market, which plays a decisive role in the highly leveraged mechanisms of the financial system.
The Fed is anxious to avoid the experience of 2019 when an attempt to reduce its asset holdings saw overnight rates, normally at low levels, shoot up to as high as 10 percent.
Pointing to just one of the issues that could set off financial turbulence, Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG US, said: “The biggest issue driving the Fed’s thinking is the fear of a liquidity shock.”
11. New Zealand letter of condolence to the families of those killed in Cobar, Australia mine explosion
Monk, whose son was one of 29 workers killed in the 2010 Pike River disaster in New Zealand, extends condolences to the families of the two people killed in the Endeavour mine explosion on October 28 and urges them to “stay strong and pursue answers and accountability.”
12. Israel massacres 100 Palestinians in a single day in Gaza
The Israeli military massacred over 104 people on Tuesday and Wednesday in a series of attacks throughout the Gaza Strip, demonstrating the complete fraud of the “ceasefire” adopted on October 10. The attacks killed 46 children and 20 women and injured over 200 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
On Tuesday, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that a decision had been made “to immediately carry out forceful strikes in the Gaza Strip,” and that US President Trump was informed “before the action was taken.”
The Israeli military boasted that it carried out a “series of strikes, in which dozens of terror targets and terrorists were struck.”
On Tuesday, Trump declared that if Hamas does not “behave,” then “they’re going to be terminated. Their lives will be terminated.”
US Vice President JD Vance declared, “The ceasefire is holding,” despite “little skirmishes here and there.” He added, “We expect the Israelis are going to respond” when fired upon.
In other words, an essential feature of the “ceasefire” is “little skirmishes” in which a hundred Palestinians are slaughtered within a 24-hour period.
The ongoing Israeli massacres and deliberate restriction of food make it clear that the “peace” agreement was nothing but a cover for the ongoing genocide. Governments in the Middle East and in Europe and all major media publications hailed the agreement as a breakthrough and a major step toward peace. It is no such thing. It merely cements and makes permanent the Israeli occupation of Gaza and gives diplomatic cover for daily massacres and deliberate mass starvation by Israel.
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In addition to the ongoing and escalating bloodbath, Israel continues to restrict food entering Gaza, in violation of the terms of the ceasefire, with far fewer than the 600 aid trucks that Israel promised entering Gaza each day.
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Last week, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor published a series of statistics, based on its own independent investigation, showing the scale of the devastation inflicted on Gaza during two years of genocide. The figures showed that over more than 270,000 people, around 12 percent of the population, have been killed, injured, or detained since October 7, 2023.
The report concluded that “Over more than two years, the Israeli army has killed about 75,190 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including at least 70,248 civilians, representing 90 percent of the total. Among them are 21,310 children, accounting for 30 percent of the fatalities, and 13,987 women, representing 20 percent.”
It added that 45,600 children have become orphans after losing one or both parents in Israeli attacks....
13. Lula kisses Trump’s ring as US prepares war on Latin America
The meeting between the two leaders, which had as its pretext negotiating the excruciating 50 percent tariffs against Brazil decreed by Trump in August, occurred in the context of a historic escalation of US imperialist violence against Latin America.
While Lula kissed Trump’s ring in Malaysia, off the coast of Venezuela—which shares extensive borders with Brazil—the US was mobilizing a naval armada on a scale unprecedented in the region since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Last Friday, “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth announced the deployment of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, to the Caribbean Sea. This military escalation, in preparation for open war against Venezuela, followed Trump’s statements affirming he had authorized CIA operations to overthrow Nicolás Maduro’s regime and threatening a land invasion of the country.
At the same time, the US military has been carrying out a campaign of illegal assassinations in Latin American waters, having already bombed a dozen small civilian vessels, killing nearly 60 people.
The most recent and deadliest of these attacks occurred on Monday. Four vessels were sunk and 14 people killed in three waves of missile fire. Following the macabre ritual adopted by Trump’s fascist administration from the beginning, the deaths—which amount to extrajudicial executions—were trumpeted by Hegseth on social media.
The US imperialist military incursion against Venezuela is already provoking a profound political destabilization of Latin America and threatens to drag the entire region into war.
A week before meeting with Lula, Trump launched a brutal offensive against Colombia’s government. He accused President Gustavo Petro of being an “illegal drug leader,” repeating, with exactly the same purpose, the monstrous lie fabricated to justify military and political intervention against Venezuela.
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Lula’s attachment to the democratic and legal façade of the imperialist order in crisis is highly revealing of the rotten and reactionary kind of bourgeois nationalist politics he defends.
He is fully aware that US imperialism seeks control of Latin America’s strategic resources—in Venezuela’s case, oil—and is fighting to regain its regional hegemony in direct confrontation with China. Lula has no perspective for opposing these aims and seeks only the best accommodation of Brazilian capitalism’s interests to them.
As Lula himself unscrupulously put it:
Any subject you want to discuss and put on the table, we’ll discuss. Whether it’s trade relations, relations with China, relations with Venezuela, there’s no forbidden topic with me. If you want to discuss critical minerals, rare earths; if you want to discuss ethanol, sugar, no problem.
I’m a walking metamorphosis at the negotiating table, you know?... That’s how I learned to negotiate.... If it’s interesting to you, put it on the table, convince me, because convincing me is easy.
Lula, the former trade union bureaucrat, also knows well that the most valuable service he has to offer, whether to imperialism or the national bourgeoisie, is helping to suppress the resistance and independent political organization of the working class.
His first act after meeting with Trump was to address the Brazilian population to assure them that the trade war and criminal political interventions launched against Brazil by Washington were nothing more than a terrible misunderstanding.
Lula declared:
When President Trump published on his portal the letter to Brazil, imposing taxes on Brazilian products, many people went into crisis thinking it was the end of the world. What did we say in the government? Calm down, because the decisions that were made against Brazil are unfounded because they were made with wrong information. And that was obvious.
He then concluded:
I’m convinced that in a few days we’ll have a definitive solution between the United States and Brazil, so that life goes on good and happy.... That’s how I’m returning to Brazil, satisfied and certain that everything will work out for the Brazilian people.
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Lula’s opportunism and pusillanimity are not merely personal political traits. They express the dead end to which the bourgeois nationalist program defended by the PT in Brazil and the Pink Tide governments across Latin America has led.
Far from fulfilling its promise of achieving a new type of “socialism” through the institutions of the bourgeois state and independence from US imperialism, the Pink Tide entered history as a mere episode in the infamous political trajectory of the Latin American bourgeoisie; an interval between the era of CIA-backed military regimes of the 1970s and the resumption of brutal dictatorial methods by local ruling classes and their imperialist sponsors.
To fight against the eruption of imperialist war and the bourgeoisie’s plunge into fascism, the Brazilian and international working class urgently needs to break with nationalist and pro-capitalist parties and programs.
It is necessary to build the independent political leadership of the working class for the coming mass struggles based on the strategy of international socialist revolution, defended exclusively by the International Committee of the Fourth International.
14. Trump meets Japan’s new far-right prime minister
US President Trump held a summit in Tokyo with new far-right Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on Tuesday as part of his tour of Asia this week. Their meeting was aimed at strengthening the US-Japan alliance as the Trump administration prepares for war against China.
Like other leaders seeking to curry Trump’s favor, Takaichi obsequiously praised the fascistic US president and would-be dictator as the two released a joint statement claiming the two countries were entering a “new golden age of the ever-growing US-Japan alliance.”
Takaichi praised Trump’s supposed “unwavering commitment to world peace and stability” and pledged to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize in the future, even as Trump carries out murderous military assaults on fishermen off the coast of Venezuela while threatening war with the country.
The Japanese prime minister also highlighted her alignment and close political relations with former right-wing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Abe was responsible for a significant acceleration of remilitarization during his 2012 to 2020 term in office. Trump has regularly praised his relationship with Abe, who was assassinated in July 2022.
While direct references to China were absent during Trump and Takaichi’s meeting, at least publicly, the threats to China were clear. This was highlighted Tuesday afternoon after the summit when the pair appeared together aboard the USS George Washington aircraft carrier at the Yokosuka naval base, home to the US Seventh Fleet.
“Now we are facing an unprecedentedly severe security environment. Peace cannot be preserved by words alone. It can be protected only when there is unwavering determination and action,” Takaichi stated. Under the banner of “peace,” she is pledging to further remilitarize. “Japan is ready to contribute even more proactively to the peace and stability of the region.”
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Further... Trump and Takaichi agreed to a deal on rare earth minerals after Trump reached an agreement with Malaysia regarding such resources over the weekend. The deals come as China announced new export controls and other restrictions on rare earth and other critical materials earlier this month.
The deal, according to a separate statement, stated that the US and Japan plan to “accelerate development of diversified, liquid, and fair markets for critical minerals and rare earths” and to “[achieve] resilience and security of critical minerals and rare earths supply chains, including mining, separation, and processing.”
Significant amounts of rare metals, including nickel and cobalt, lie under the waters in Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone to the southeast of Tokyo near the island of Minami-Torishima. Researchers estimate that the area around the island contains 16 million tons of rare earths, or the third-largest reserve in the world. Mining is set to begin this January.
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While large protests against the government have not yet emerged, demonstrations have taken place. On Monday evening, several hundred protesters gathered in Tokyo to denounce Trump and Takaichi. Hundreds of Japanese and foreign residents in Tokyo also took part in the “No Kings” protests in June and on October 18. This is only the beginning of the mass opposition that is sure to emerge.
15. Pseudo-left ISO promotes Labour and union bureaucracy amid New Zealand’s “mega strike”
The ISO covers up the role of NZ’s union bureaucracy and the opposition Labour Party, which support the National Party-led government’s program of austerity and imperialist war.
On September 24, security forces opened fire on unarmed protestors opposing the Indian central government’s oppressive rule of the region, killing four and wounding more than 150.
17. A political prisoner's hunger strike against isolation in Turkish prisons passes 350 days
Serkan Onur Yılmaz, a political prisoner held at Bolu F-Type Prison, has passed the 350th day of his hunger strike against the new high-security prison model. Yılmaz’s health condition is critical.
Yılmaz demands an end to the increasingly widespread use of severe isolation in Turkey and the inhumane conditions in S, Y, and R type prisons, known as “well-type” prisons. This is a common demand among many political prisoners.
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi-Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party-Fourth International) in Turkey advocates the fundamental right of all individuals detained to be held in conditions consistent with the principles of human dignity and health. The “well-type” prisons, where solitary confinement has been transformed into a systematic form of torture, must be closed and the release of political prisoners must be carried out immediately.
In reports by the Civil Society in the Penal System (CİSST) and the Contemporary Lawyers Association (ÇHD), these prisons are described as “isolation centers” whose architectural structures and operations systematically destroy the social, sensory, and psychological integrity of prisoners.
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The Prison Commission of ÇHD Istanbul Branch confirmed in August that Yilmaz’s hunger strike was the longest underway in Turkey and that his health had reached a critical stage. Attorney Balım İdil Deniz stated that Yılmaz could no longer walk, had developed wounds on his hands and back, and was experiencing increased nerve pain, adding, that Yilmaz’s demands were reasonable “however, the Ministry of Justice remains silent.”
Ali Hasan Akgül, a member of the long-established music group Grup Yorum—which is listened to by millions of people—described the conditions in these prisons at the same press conference: “We are in our cells for 23 hours and have one hour of fresh air. This means being cut off from nature and the world. You don’t feel the wind; if you’re lucky, you see the sun once.” Akgün was released in July after a 144-day hunger strike.
Yılmaz began his hunger strike at Antalya High Security Prison but was transferred to Bolu Type F Prison on the 213th day of his action. Yılmaz continues his hunger strike demanding that he and other prisoners be transferred to prisons that are not “well-type.”
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The origins of solitary confinement practices in Turkey’s prison system date back to the structural transformation initiated after the NATO-backed military coup of September 12, 1980. During this period, a shift was made from the traditional ward system to a new cell-based architecture to prevent collective resistance and solidarity among political prisoners.
This process, which began in the late 1980s with E-type prisons, deepened in the 1990s with H-type prisons; with the introduction of F-type prisons in 2000, the system was transformed into an execution regime based on individual cell isolation.
In response to the hunger strike and death fast launched by more than 800 political prisoners against F-type prisons, the government of Bülent Ecevit, Prime Minister of the social democratic Democratic Left Party (DSP), launched the “Return to Life Operation” on December 19, 2000. Approximately 10,000 security personnel were deployed to 20 different prisons during these operations, in which 30 prisoners were killed and hundreds injured or subjected to severe torture. This operation was not merely a “security intervention” but a turning point that paved the way for the permanent implementation of isolation policies.
Following 2002, during the Justice and Development Party (AKP) governments, this model was expanded and reproduced in the form of S, Y, and R type prisons. These structures are a more severe version of the isolation initiated in F-type prisons, both architecturally and administratively.
These high-security prisons, known as “well-type” prisons, represent the most advanced stage of institutionalization of the isolation regime in Turkey’s prison system. Prisoners spend 23 hours a day in windowless, cramped spaces, seeing the sky for only one hour.
Prison architecture targets the prisoner’s human, cognitive, and emotional capacities by minimizing their social interactions. Constant camera surveillance, the elimination of privacy, and practices such as “roll call” create a surveillance system in which prisoners cannot control their own existence.
These inhumane practices are far from unique to Turkey and are part of a global trend where ruling classes eliminate fundamental democratic rights to establish dictatorial regimes. “Well-type” prisons are concrete products of the capitalist state apparatus’ authoritarian tendencies, primarily targeting the working class. This structure, developed by the state under the guise of “security” policy, has become an administrative tool for suppressing political opposition and social solidarity. Therefore, the struggle against these inhumane practices in prisons is not merely a human rights issue, but a broader class and political issue.
18. Protests sweep Cameroon after 92-year-old Paul Biya declared president again
Mass protests have erupted across Cameroon after the Constitutional Council announced that Paul Biya, the world’s oldest head of state at ninety-two years and in power since 1982, has secured yet another presidential term. His new seven-year mandate would keep him in office until 2032, when he would be 99 years old.
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The political crisis could fuel the kind of Gen Z mass protests that have erupted in Madagascar, Morocco, Mozambique, Angola and Kenya against soaring food prices, inequality, mass youth unemployment and corruption from the parasitical elite.
For millions, Biya’s “victory” is the continuation of a nightmare that began in 1982, when he first assumed power, before most Cameroonians were born. His installation in power followed the defeat of the international upsurge of working class struggles in the period 1968-75 which allowed the bourgeoisie in both the imperialist centers and the colonial world to stabilize its rule and launch a global offensive against the working class. Keynesian national economic regulations and import substitution policies were replaced with pro-business monetarist policies.
Facing an economic collapse in the late 1980s, Biya’s government imposed International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs that slashed public spending by nearly a fifth, froze wages, and dismantled large parts of the state sector. Public enterprises that once provided employment and basic services were sold off at knock-down prices, beginning in the 1990s and accelerating in the early 2000s, when key utilities such as the national electricity company SONEL were privatized. These measures, deepened unemployment, rural impoverishment, and social decay.
The most recent International Monetary Fund programs, renewed in 2017 and extended through the current 2025 framework, continue austerity, “rationalization” of state-owned firms, and cuts to public investment. The result has been the systematic transfer of wealth from the Cameroonian masses to international creditors and domestic elites.
The political crisis is set to intersect with the two major insurgencies. One is the decade-long insurgency in the Anglophone west by bourgeois separatists. The second is in the Far North, where Islamist Boko Haram has carried out attacks. In both cases, the state has responded with brutal force. The English-speaking regions, once promised autonomy within a federal structure, have been subjected to collective punishment and economic strangulation. Entire towns have been razed, thousands killed, and hundreds of thousands displaced.
Underlying this crisis is the deep social misery produced by decades of capitalist underdevelopment. Cameroon is a social powder keg. Real unemployment and underemployment reach nearly 40 percent, forcing millions into precarious informal work and bare survival. At least 23 percent of the population live on less than US $2.15 a day, and when deprivation in education, health and living conditions are included, the share rises to more than 40 percent. The rural masses face the worst conditions, with over 56 percent counted among the poor in contrast to around 21 percent in urban areas.
On the other end, the rot at the top has become almost surreal. Biya, at 92, spends most of his time in the luxury Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva—with bills for him and his entourage estimated at around $65 million—or discreet locations around the Swiss lakeside city, from where he rules by decree through his proxies. The real machinery of power is handled by a narrow inner circle around the presidency, led by the flamboyant First Lady Chantal Biya and Secretary-General Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, who was granted sweeping presidential authority in 2019.
Cameroon possesses vast natural wealth. Offshore oil and gas fields along the Gulf of Guinea provide a major share of export revenues, while the country’s fertile lands yield cocoa, coffee, bananas, cotton, and palm oil for global markets. Its dense forests supply tropical hardwoods, and beneath the soil lie rich deposits of bauxite, iron ore, cobalt, gold, and diamonds. Hydroelectric rivers, notably the Sanaga and Lom, give Cameroon immense energy potential.
Control over these resources lies in the hands of a few multinational giants that throw crumbs at Biya and his entourage....
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The state survives through repression and imperialist support. Biya’s regime has long relied on French imperialism, which continues to dominate the economy, the CFA franc currency, and the commanding heights of finance and trade.
In recent years Washington has moved aggressively to expand its influence, viewing the aged autocrat as a convenient instrument for securing US strategic interests in Central Africa and the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea. Under the banner of “stability” and “security cooperation,” Washington has deepened military and intelligence ties with Yaoundé, deploying advisers and carrying out joint operations against Anglophone separatist leaders both inside Cameroon and abroad.
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The crisis in Cameroon is the latest example of the failure of bourgeois nationalists in the former colonial countries. Forty years of Biya’s rule have shown that the national bourgeoisie cannot resolve the fundamental problems of the country. They cannot develop the economy in the interests of the masses, end imperialist domination or unify the working people across ethnic and linguistic lines. Every attempt at reform has collapsed into corruption, and every opposition movement that bases itself on capitalist property relations becomes, sooner or later, a tool of imperialism or of one or another faction of the elite.
The masses are ready to fight. Workers, students, and unemployed youth have taken to the streets in defiance of curfews, police repression, and internet shutdowns. But spontaneous revolt, without organization and program, risks exhaustion or defeat. The regime will attempt to crush dissent, while imperialism and its local allies will seek to channel the movement into negotiations, commissions, or another “transitional” trap.
What is needed is the conscious organization of the working class as an independent political force. The Cameroonian proletariat, regardless of language or tribe, is the only class capable of uniting the nation on a socialist basis. The strategic axis that must guide this fight is Leon Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution provides the key.
In semi-colonial countries like Cameroon, the bourgeoisie is too weak, dependent, and cowardly to accomplish even the basic democratic and national tasks: land reform, genuine independence, national unity, and industrial development. These tasks fall to the working class, which must take power in alliance with the rural masses. Only by expropriating the oligarchs, breaking with imperialism, and reorganising the economy on socialist lines can Cameroon emerge from its nightmare. But this fight cannot be won within national borders. The same forces of global capitalism that strangle Cameroon exploit workers everywhere. The struggle in Cameroon must therefore be consciously internationalist, linking up with the workers and oppressed across Africa and the world.
University and College Union (UCU) members at the University of Sheffield (UoS) and Sheffield Hallam University (SHU),have voted in favor of strike action over ongoing job losses.
Balloted separately in September staff at both universities – academic, lecturers, researchers, support and professional services staff – voted for strike action with majorities of 77 and 79 percent respectively. In both instances the ballot turn-out totaled just over 50 percent. This is not because militancy is in short supply. Sheffield university workers are angry, but they evidently have little faith in the UCU leadership to wage a struggle that satisfies their demands.
The UCU has now confirmed four weeks of action at UoS starting November 17 and ending December 12—consisting of four days of strike action per week. No dates have been confirmed at SHU.
This is the second successful strike ballot by workers at UoS since May last year when they voted for 10 days of action against mass redundancies. The membership at SHU walked out in March this year for two days after management delayed a paltry 2.7 percent increase for more than half a year without back pay.
The simultaneous vote for two strikes in one city is the latest manifestation of a protracted nationwide struggle, now approaching a decade, between higher education workers and management over savage job cuts, falling salaries, deteriorating pensions and the precipitous decline of working conditions, especially growing workloads.
Research by the UCU calculates UK universities have announced more than 12,000 job cuts in the last year alone. Additional cost savings announced in the same period amount to a further 3,000 jobs. This is a huge escalation since the union reported in March that 5,000 jobs were threatened. In September the TES (Times Education Education) revealed an astonishing 4,000 UK HE courses have been closed since 2024.
The UCU did not explain how this huge and swift destruction of academic jobs, departments and courses took place under its nose.
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The UCU’s decision follows an established pattern, whereby a successful strike ballot is utilsed to encourage management only to provide a slightly “improved offer” that preserves the essence of the cuts but allows the union bureaucracy to stand down its members.
The basis for a collective struggle against the job cuts and retrenchment not just in Sheffield, but nationwide, unquestionably exists amongst all educators in HE and further education....
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If Higher and Further Education and indeed all the gains won historically by workers are to be successfully defended, this must be conducted in a rebellion against the trade union bureaucracy and the Labour government.
The dead hand of the UCU bureaucracy must be lifted by forming rank-and-file committees in all UK universities and colleges—uniting academic and non-academic staff and students, linking up across the UK and with fellow education workers internationally who face similar attacks. These committees must combine the fight to defend jobs, reverse a decade of de facto pay cuts of university staff with opposition to the Starmer government’s doubling down on the marketisation of education and austerity cuts.
On October 23, the British Medical Association’s (BMA) resident doctors committee confirmed a resumption of national strike action from November 14–19 by its members in England. The walkout is part of their two-year campaign for pay restoration and now also addresses the growing employment crisis facing doctors in the National Health Service (NHS).
The strike covers around 50,000 resident doctors (formerly known as junior doctors) and has been met with a torrent of vitriol from Labour’s Health Secretary Wes Streeting. He has doubled down on the hostility shown during the previous five-day strike in July, which he equated to a “war” against the government that resident doctors could not win.
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Despite this smear campaign, the BMA suspended further stoppages over the summer to enter talks with Streeting that were a dead end. Streeting had already said that negotiations would be limited to non-pay issues, insisting the 5.4 percent pay award for this year was “non-negotiable,” leaving doctors 21 percent worse off in real terms compared to 2008.
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.
