Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Trump announces resumption of US nuclear weapons testing
On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced the resumption of US nuclear weapons testing, in the latest move by the United States to remove all remaining guardrails restricting its preparations for World War III. All countries in the world have officially banned nuclear testing, and the move makes the United States the only country in the world to allow the practice.
Nuclear testing, beyond scattering deadly radiation into the atmosphere and contaminating groundwater, is universally understood as a massively escalatory act, expanding the possibility of nuclear war, whether through miscalculation or deliberate provocation.
In 1963, one year after the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned all nuclear testing except those conducted underground.
In 1992, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, President George H.W. Bush declared a unilateral ban on nuclear testing.In the decades before testing was banned, over 2,000 nuclear detonations were conducted, more than half of which were carried out by the United States. These tests sickened communities both inside the American West and throughout the South Pacific and rendered entire areas uninhabitable.
Trump made his announcement just before he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping for talks in South Korea on the ongoing US-China trade war. Trump was using the US nuclear arsenal as a means to secure the predatory interests of US imperialism on the world stage, dangling over the head of humanity the threat of extermination through nuclear warfare.
The United States has the world’s largest nuclear program, spending twice as much on nuclear weapons as Russia and China combined. The US is also the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons, exterminating the defenseless populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to threaten the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War.
In reporting Trump’s announcement, the US media has failed to present any historical context or antecedents to it. But, far from being a spur-of-the-moment improvisation, US military planners have been actively discussing the resumption of nuclear testing since at least 2020.
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Trump’s own post announcing the move clearly placed it in the context of a years-long buildup of the US nuclear arsenal. He wrote, “The United States has more nuclear weapons than any other country. This was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons, during my first term in office.”
He added, “I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”
Trump’s post, however, only told part of the story. The nuclear buildup that he bragged about was, in fact, initiated under the Obama administration and continued in Trump’s first term, Biden’s term and now in the second Trump term. This nuclear buildup, which the vast majority of the American population is not aware of, has continued with complete bipartisan support, at a cost of more than $1 trillion.
One year ago, the New York Times published an extensive feature story about the secret plan dedicated to “making America nuclear again” through the creation of a “modern arsenal for a volatile new nuclear age.”
“If you don’t live where the submarines are welded or the missile silos are dug, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t know it’s happening,” the Times wrote. “The federal government has said little about the plan in public, outside of congressional hearings and strategy papers, or the vast amount being spent. There has been no significant debate. The billion-dollar programs move under the radar.”
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As part of the ongoing US nuclear buildup, the Trump administration has sought to eliminate all restrictions on the use of nuclear weapons. Most prominently, the United States withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in August 2019, again under Trump.
In response to Trump’s announcement in October 2018 that the US would withdraw from the treaty, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Russia would embark on the development of a new series of nuclear delivery mechanisms, including an underwater drone known as the Poseidon and a new long-range cruise missile known as the Burevestnik.
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Earlier this month, Trump confirmed he was considering sending Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine. Responding to Trump’s threat, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev observed, “It’s impossible to distinguish a nuclear Tomahawk missile from a conventional one in flight.” Tomahawk missiles have long had the ability to deliver nuclear warheads.
Between the deployment of short-range nuclear weapons on the borders of Russia and China, the lobbing of NATO-supplied long-range weapons into Russian cities, and the resumption of nuclear testing, the whole world will be on a nuclear hair trigger.
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The brinksmanship of the United States, while calculated to bring about the submission of Russia and China, can trigger a massive escalatory spiral, with incalculable consequences.The rise of imperialist militarism is inextricably connected to the escalating assault on the working class in the United States. Trump’s announcement that the US will resume nuclear testing comes just days before the administration is scheduled to end funding for food stamps, cutting tens of millions of Americans off of a vital lifeline just ahead of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.
There is a direct connection between the two. In a statement published this month, the Democratic Party-aligned Brookings Institution, speaking for a policy supported by both the Democratic and Republican parties, called for “a whole-of-society strategy of resilience that leverages all the public and private tools at its disposal: total defense for an age of total war.”
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The ruling class ties the assault on the working class at home with military escalation abroad. The working class must respond by uniting the defense of its social and economic rights with the struggle against imperialist war. The “No Kings” rally earlier this month showed that there is mass opposition to the Trump administration’s policies of dictatorship and austerity. This opposition must be developed as a movement of the working class, in which the fight against imperialist war is connected to the fight against capitalism and for socialism.
2. United Kingdom: Andrew stripped of his royal titles: a toxic representative of a toxic institution
The royal family is trying to disentangle itself from a pedophile sex scandal, but the crisis is not containable. Andrew has lived a playboy life that led him into friendship with the billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein’s pimping for the super-rich involved everyone from Donald Trump in the US to the British monarchy.
However, Andrew is only the most nakedly venal of the parasitic royal family.
The monarchy has long been cultivated as a pillar of the capitalist order. The overthrow and execution of Charles I in 1649 marked the birth of bourgeois rule out of feudalism. The Restoration in 1660 created a constitutional monarchy to safeguard that rule through a political compromise between the old feudal aristocracy and the new bourgeoisie, solidified by the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 and the passing of the Bill of Rights the next year.
Over the centuries, the monarchy served the bourgeois state well. It offered a nominally unpolitical and unifying head of state, shrouded and sanctified by “history” and “tradition”, during the bloody growth of the British Empire. Later it provided a tool of global realpolitik in relations with US and other imperialisms, and newly independent Commonwealth states, as the Empire and Britain’s economic supremacy waned.
Particularly in the person of Elizabeth II, the monarchy gave bourgeois rule an appearance of stability and continuity. But the fall of British capitalism’s international position saw a reckless embrace of the naked speculation of financial parasitism. The royals themselves courted this layer.
Elizabeth responded with an attempt to cut the royal retinue down to a more manageable size, but this only made those lower down the pecking order more rapacious and reckless in seeking independent revenue streams from a global financial oligarchy who far outstrip them in wealth. The hitherto most damaging impact of this process, excluding the bitter break-up and divorce of Charles and the late princess Diana, was the fallout with her son, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. This has now been eclipsed by Andrew’s public disgrace.
The immediate trigger for the downfall of Andrew was the publication of Nobody’s Girl, the memoirs of Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre who tragically committed suicide in April before its release.
Giuffre was procured by Epstein when she was 17 and working at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort. She said he paid her $15,000 for servicing Andrew. Giuffre was photographed with the prince in 2001, when she was 17.
Andrew denied the allegations made, but every effort to defuse the situation only made it worse. A 2019 interview with BBC journalist Emily Maitlis, intended to clear his name, was a car crash. Giuffre wrote that it would help her legal team “build an ironclad case” against Andrew.
Andrew agreed an out-of-court settlement in 2022, paying Giuffre $12 million—reportedly with bridging loans from other royals including his mother. He also donated $2 million to Giuffre’s charity for the victims of sex trafficking. This temporarily kept him off the stand over details of his interactions with Giuffre.
During the Maitlis interview, Andrew claimed photographs of Epstein and himself together in 2010 were taken when he went to break off relations in person. However, a 2011 email, now identified as being from Andrew, reassured Epstein they were “in this together,” and concluded, “We’ll play some more soon!!!!”
Giuffre saw the settlement as “acknowledgement that I and many other women had been victimized and a tacit pledge to never deny it again.” But she agreed only to a year’s silence, so Elizabeth’s platinum jubilee celebrations would not be “tarnished” further.
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Andrew embodies the toxic decay of bourgeois rule and its institutions. The revulsion he arouses is natural and welcome, but this crisis cannot be swept aside by the cosmetic airbrushing of titles and stately homes. It is systemic.
Millions of American workers and youth have demonstrated against the authoritarian regime of Trump under the slogan “No Kings.” That is a slogan that must be embraced by the working class in Britain, still confronted by an actual monarchy.
The entire ruling class—pursuing an agenda of social plunder, eviscerating democratic rights and waging trade and military war on a global scale—must be tackled. The monarchy must be overthrown by the working class as part of the struggle for socialism.
3. Pentagon sets January 1 deadline to set up National Guard “riot control” units
A Pentagon internal memo, made public in several news reports Wednesday and Thursday, sets a January 1 deadline for the establishment of “quick reaction” forces of about 500 National Guard soldiers in each of the 50 states which could be deployed within 24 hours’ notice to suppress “civil unrest” in American cities.
The memo follows an executive order issued by President Trump in September, after the occupation of Washington D.C. by thousands of National Guard troops and armed federal agents, ostensibly for the purposes of “fighting crime” and protecting federal agents as they carry out violent raids targeting immigrants for arrest, detention and deportation.
The total number of soldiers in all 50 states and four territories comes to 23,500, with a few states and territories allowed to provide fewer than 500 soldiers because of their small populations, including Guam, the Virgin Islands, Delaware and Alaska.
In each of the states, the Pentagon is sending in personnel to provide training in crowd control, handling of detainees, and use of “non-lethal” weapons such as batons, tasers and launchers for teargas and pepper balls.
A report Thursday on the website of the Washington Post drew out the implications of the training and equipment directives:
The Pentagon has ordered thousands of specialized National Guard personnel to complete civil unrest mission training over the next several months, an indication that the Trump administration’s effort to send uniformed military forces into urban centers—once reserved for extraordinary emergencies—could become the norm…
The mandate, along with the growing presence of federal and immigration enforcement officers, suggests further military deployments within the United States could grow in size and scope.
Workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, members of the United Auto Workers (UAW), voted in favor of strike authorization this week following the posting by management of its so-called “final offer.” The margin was substantially above the minimum two-thirds majority required to authorize a strike under the UAW constitution, the union said, but UAW officials did not release the exact totals.
The union called management’s offer “inadequate” and submitted its own counteroffer in response. However, after more than one year of fruitless negotiations for a first contract since winning union recognition in April 2024, the UAW has set no strike deadline and details of its counterproposal are sketchy. Management’s final offer, posted on online, contained a wage proposal that would leave workers at the end of the four-year deal substantially behind workers at the Detroit automakers. The terms of that contract fell well short of what workers needed to make up for decades of UAW givebacks throughout the auto industry, let alone put them ahead.
The union rejected the proposal, citing weak job security guarantees and the need for improvements in healthcare but has pleaded with management to continue talks. VW’s final offer included significant health insurance premiums and co-pays.
“Job security,” in UAW doublespeak, means lowering labor costs through cuts to wages and working conditions to boost corporate profitability and competitiveness. However, none of the concessions contracts negotiated by the union over the past decades “saved” a single job. This policy instead has left a trail of closed plants and devastated communities in its wake. UAW membership has fallen from a peak of 1.5 million in 1979 to around 375,000 today.
It is therefore significant that the UAW is not demanding wages equal to Ford, GM and Stellantis in the VW negotiations, an enormous cost savings to management that undercuts Big Three workers. Nor has it addressed the status of temporary and contract workers, who earn wages far below those of regular, full-time workers and have no rights under the terms of management’s proposal. The UAW appears ready to accept the permanent sub-tier of casual workers at the plant, who can be pitted against full-time workers.
The union is not even taking the elementary step of demanding the contract expiration align with the Detroit automakers, undermining solidarity and weakening the position of both VW workers and workers at the US-based car companies.
At the same time, Volkswagen has adopted the bulk of the corporatist language contained in the terms of contracts with the Detroit automakers, tying the UAW at the hip to corporate management. Volkswagen has long experience with the IG Metall union in Germany in the running of so-called Works Councils that serve to completely subordinate workers to diktats of management, suppressing worker militancy while working to impose huge cuts to jobs and conditions.
Volkswagen had been stymied from imposing a similar set up in the United States due to laws still on the books against company unions. But in 2014 the UAW offered its services to VW to help set up a works council in exchange for union recognition. It signed an agreement utterly subordinating the union to the company’s drive for profit, declaring it would help in “maintaining and where possible enhancing the cost advantages and other competitive advantages [Volkswagen] enjoys relative to its competitors in the United States and North America.”
However, workers saw no reason to join a union that openly identified itself with corporate management and voted decisively against union recognition at the time. Another attempt by the UAW in 2019 also failed.
While the rhetoric of the UAW may have changed under the administration of UAW President Shawn Fain, the essential pro-corporate and nationalist policy of the UAW apparatus remains the same as under the previous gang of corrupt, company operatives. The UAW under Fain completely identifies its interests with those of corporate management and the American capitalist state.
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Workers need organization. But they need genuine fighting rank-and-file based organizations, not bureaucratized unions wedded to corporate interests. This means building rank-and-file committees to transfer power from the UAW apparatus to the workers on the shop floor. Affiliated with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), these committees will also fight for the global unification of autoworkers.
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Workers should be warned that in Germany the company is currently collaborating with IG Metall in imposing massive cuts of 35,000 out of 120,000 jobs over the next several years. Real wages will be cut by up to 18 percent. This is being deemed a “success” by the union.
This is only a small part of a global jobs bloodbath that is underway in the auto industry as US and European corporations respond to tariffs and challenges of Chinese EV makers by employing AI, automation and other technologies to pump more production out of fewer workers. This week General Motors announced the elimination of 1,200 jobs at its EV plant in Detroit and thousands of temporary layoffs at its Ultium battery plants in Ohio and Tennessee.
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VW has been seriously impacted by a chip shortage sparked by the standoff between the US and China over control of global chip maker Nexperia, based in the Netherlands, but under Chinese ownership. Under pressure from the US, the government of the Netherlands took control of Nexperia. Trump is also insisting that the Netherlands replace the company’s CEO, who is Chinese, as a condition for easing restrictions.
In an effort to placate Trump, Volkswagen even floated the idea of building a US plant for its Audi subsidiary in Chattanooga.
For VW workers to wage a successful fight they must forge links with workers at GM, Ford and Stellantis, as well as VW workers in Germany who are battling relentless corporate attacks on jobs, pay and working conditions. The nationalist and pro-capitalist program of the UAW blocks such a fight. The defense of jobs means rejecting the fratricidal program of the UAW of pitting of American workers against their class brothers in Mexico, Canada, Europe and Asia and the international unification of the working class based on a socialist program. This means building and expanding the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
5. US extracts billion-dollar investments from South Korea under trade “deal”
A major purpose of US president Trump’s visit to Southeast Asia this week was to enforce “deals”—more akin to diktats than agreements freely entered—through which hundreds of billions of dollars are to be pumped into the American economy.
His role as a kind of bagman-enforcer for US imperialism was exemplified in the agreements with Malaysia and South Korea, following the earlier deal with Japan under which it will supply the US with $550 billion in investment funds, in order to avert Trump’s crippling tariff hikes.
Following the agreement with Malaysia, in which it will invest $70 billion in the US over the next 10 years, Trump managed to finalise a commitment by South Korea to supply $350 billion in investment funds to the US.
The amount had been set down in July, but South Korea insisted it could not meet the US demand it be provided in cash—as is the case with Japan—because such a large outflow would destabilise its currency, the won. Korean authorities pointed out the amount was equivalent to 80 percent of the country’s foreign currency reserves and such a movement could set off a financial crisis.
Under the agreement, $200 billion will be supplied over the course of 10 years, with no annual amount to exceed $20 billion, with a further $150 billion to be invested in shipbuilding operations in the US.
In return the US has agreed to reduce the tariff on South Korean imports into the US from 25 percent to 15 percent. The Korean fear was if the higher level remained it would devastate the auto industry.
The making of the so-called agreement was accompanied by a display of grovelling by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in which he presented Trump with a replica of a golden crown excavated from an ancient royal tomb to which Trump replied: “I’d like to wear it right now.”
On October 28, Wole Soyinka, world-renowned Nigerian poet, author, playwright and professor and the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, revealed that the US government had revoked a visa previously issued to him.
The revocation of Soyinka’s US visa is not an isolated incident but part of a sweeping drive by the Trump administration to criminalize political dissent and equate opposition to the US government with “terrorism.” It comes amid a wave of visa cancellations and detentions targeting journalists, academics, artists and students who have spoken against the genocide in Gaza or criticized the administration and its reactionary policies.
A gifted writer and intellectual, Soyinka, born July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta, Nigeria, has taught at universities around the world, including Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Yale. In 1966, while Chair of Drama at the University of Ibadan, Soyinka was arrested and imprisoned for 22 months, held in solitary confinement by the Nigerian federal military government under General Yakubu Gowon.
In Tuesday’s press conference, Soyinka, a gifted political satirist, explained how the US government revoked his visa. He began by reading “the first line of a rather curious love letter I received from an embassy.”
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Soyinka ended the press conference referring back to the letter sent to him by the US consulate’s office, “We request you bring your visa to the US consulate general Lagos for physical cancellation…”
With a smile Soyinka said, “I like people who have a sense of humor and this is one of the most humorous sentences or requests I’ve had in all my life. That I should bring my passport to the consulate to have it stamped on a page, canceled. Would any of you like to volunteer in my place for me because I’m a little bit busy and rushed …”
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The persecution of Soyinka, a 91-year-old teacher and artist, for his opinions exposes the immense fragility of the American state and of the capitalist system as a whole. Under capitalism, democratic rights for all, citizens or not, are being systematically destroyed while fascists and Nazi sympathizers are rewarded with government power, and figures like Elon Musk receive multi-billion dollar bonuses.
The persecution of Soyinka, a 91-year-old teacher and artist, for his opinions exposes the immense fragility of the American state and of the capitalist system as a whole. Under capitalism, democratic rights for all, citizens or not, are being systematically destroyed while fascists and Nazi sympathizers are rewarded with government power, and figures like Elon Musk receive multi-billion dollar bonuses.
7. Trump, Xi agree to fragile truce in US-China economic war
The long-awaited and closely watched summit between US President Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping took place yesterday in a reception hall on the Gimhae military airbase near Busan in South Korea. While Trump hailed the meeting as “amazing” and gave it a “12 out of 10,” the outcome was no more than a fragile, one-year truce in the bitter economic war involving the world’s two largest economies.
The meeting was overshadowed by Trump’s highly provocative announcement, as he flew into the Gimhae base, that the US would immediately recommence “nuclear testing” in a move that threatens to dramatically escalate the nuclear arms race. Specifically naming Russia and China, he tweeted: “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”
As the media scrambled to make sense of the comment—neither Russia nor China have tested nuclear weapons since the 1990s—Trump met with Xi. In front of the cameras, it was all handshakes and smiles. Trump offered effusive praise for Xi as “a well-respected great leader” but a “tough negotiator” whom it was a “great honor” to meet. Xi obliquely chided Trump suggesting while the two nations “do not always see eye to eye,” that “dialogue is better than confrontation.”
Behind closed doors, the exchanges were undoubtedly far more confrontational, even fiery. However, if Trump thought he could use his nuclear gambit to bully China to make concessions, he proved to be wrong. The summit—the first in Trump’s second term—which many thought would last hours, ended after 100 minutes. Clearly not much more was agreed beyond what had been already mapped out by US and Chinese negotiators in Malaysia last Sunday.
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Significantly the markets got no immediate boost from what was reported from the meeting amid widespread concern that the “truce” between the two countries, which together account for more than 40 percent of world GDP and a third of world trade, will not last.
Just to cite one of many commentators, Ja Ian Chong, a professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, told the New York Times: “Maybe I’m jaded because I’ve seen this movie too many times, but these are issues that are relatively easy to roll back and also to accuse the other side of bad faith.”
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Any rejoicing about the easing of trade tensions ignores the obvious fact that the US is continuing to escalate war preparations above all against China and none of the geo-political issues that could spark a conflict have been resolved. Asked about the most dangerous potential flashpoint in Asia, Taiwan, Trump simply brushed it aside, declaring it had not been discussed.
Trump said that the two leaders had discussed “working together” to end the war in Ukraine, but substantial differences over the conflict remain. Trump said he would travel to China in April and Xi would visit the United States sometime after that, but such plans could easily evaporate if tensions flare again.
Moreover, the elephant in the room—the announcement of renewed US nuclear testing—has barely been mentioned in the international media coverage of the Xi-Trump summit even though it is a profoundly destabilizing factor internationally. It is clear proof that for all the talk of an easing of economic tensions, the “truce” is just a temporary pause, as US imperialism prepares for all-out war, above all against China which it regards as the chief threat to its global domination.
8. The Dutch snap election 2025: A mirror of Europe’s stalemate parliamentary politics
The Netherlands went to the polls on October 29, 2025 in a snap parliamentary election that lays bare the deep crisis of bourgeois democracy and the political stalemate produced by capitalist rule across Europe. Far from expressing the urgent interests of the masses, the vote represents a further stage in the reshuffling of power among factions of the ruling elite as they grapple with mounting social, economic and geopolitical turmoil.
Two fundamental truths emerged in the recent Dutch elections: the ruling class in the Netherlands has nothing progressive to offer but war and social misery, and the Dutch working class remains leaderless without its own political vanguard party rooted in its interests and in the history of the international socialist movement.
What is unfolding in the election outcome is not “a renewal of liberal democracy” but a managed reconfiguration of a ruling elite desperate to stabilize a collapsing bourgeois order. The election results underscore the inability of capitalist rule to secure legitimacy through parliamentary means, resorting instead to authoritarian mechanisms. Beneath the rhetoric of “governability,” the ruling class is galvanizing behind an aggressive program of militarization, austerity, authoritarianism and war—policies shaped by EU diktats, NATO rearmament and the deepening social crisis confronting the working class.
The caretaker regime—remaining in place until the new government is formed—led by Dick Schoof, a former intelligence and counterterrorism chief, stands as a clear expression of this turn. Sustained with royal sanction after Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) withdrew from the governing coalition in June, Schoof’s dwindling caretaker government held just 32 of 150 parliamentary seats by August, making it unprecedentedly undemocratic even by the standards of bourgeois parliamentarism. His appointment as unelected prime minister of the heretofore most far-right government in post-war Dutch history represents the direct rule of the security state, with power consolidated in the hands of unelected intelligence officials, EU and NATO strategists, bankers and affiliated think tanks.
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The Netherlands mirrors a broader international and European crisis: the hollowing out of democratic forms, the fusion of state and security apparatuses, and the ruling class’s desperate efforts to maintain control amid a deepening breakdown of bourgeois democracy.
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International commentary stressed that the real test lies not in vote counts but in coalition formation. The negotiations are confined to parties committed to war budgets, austerity, and authoritarian rule, demonstrating that Dutch parliamentary elections, three in five years, function as a management tool for big capital and pandemic-to-war profiteering.
Though an exact demographic breakdown of voting patterns is not yet available, early exit poll data indicates that young workers and first-time voters have primarily driven D66’s unexpected ascent. It is believed that the Generation Z’s (born 1997–2012) vote offset the far right’s earlier anticipated advantage, reducing the PVV’s seats by a third from 37 in 2023. D66 polled strongest in industrial urban centres such as in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht, while the PVV’s base remained mostly older and rural. The pattern reflects a broader European and international trend: youth voting for “progressive” but essentially right-wing parties—political jackals in sheepskin—in the absence of any genuine alternative.
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Dutch media and international commentary noted that the triad of housing, healthcare and immigration dominated voter priorities. In the weeks leading up to the elections, over 56 percent of voters ranked housing as their top concern, above immigration at 42 percent—the latter a campaign primarily stoked by the far right in recent years, scapegoating immigrant workers and refugees for the unraveling social crisis.
Ballooning rents, chronic shortages in affordable housing and the link between exaggerated claims of migrant inflows and housing pressure were emphasized by the media, with scant reports from investigative journalists attempting to negate the anti-immigrant narrative—proving that immigrant workers, especially from Eastern Europe, who are chronically underpaid and lack rudimentary labor protection, are in fact disproportionately burdened by higher rents and exploitation by private landlords and businesses alike, while paying millions in taxes in return for meager incomes.
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The Netherlands also remains a chief frontline state in NATO’s military build-up against Russia and in support of Israel’s war and occupation in Gaza. The outgoing cabinet increased defence spending beyond 2 percent of GDP and expanded arms exports despite mass anti-war “Red Line” protests. D66 and GroenLinks–PvdA fully embrace NATO’s European security agenda, demonstrating that rhetoric aside, militarism and alignment with European imperialist strategic priorities are bipartisan.
The coalition arithmetic, in whichever constellation, guarantees that no major shift in political orientation will occur. Whether a “centrist” D66–CDA–GL–PvdA–VVD “big tent” government, or a far-right coalition led by a PVV–BBB–CDA–JA21 bloc, both would deepen migration crackdowns, militarism, and severe austerity. Whatever emerges in the coming months will mean tighter borders, restricted social spending, and stepped-up militarization. D66’s “progressive” sheen, rooted largely in an affluent, “queer-friendly” and “alternative-lifestyle” upper-middle-class milieu, offers no serious opposition to the far-right agenda; it merely repackages and softens it.
The far right’s continued presence is therefore not an aberration but a symptom of the decay of the entire political order. The ruling class, confronted by growing discontent among workers and youth, increasingly relies on authoritarian and fascistic forces to contain political radicalization. The PVV functions both as battering ram and safety valve. Its possible exclusion from government would not mean its defeat but its continued role in pushing all parties rightward. Meanwhile, though the youth and urban vote has demonstrated a counter-force, it is one contained within the parliamentary system and tied to fragile coalition arithmetic.
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The Dutch working class and youth should not spend a wink of confidence on parties and satellites tied up in myriad strings to a rotten nation system. It must build its own independent organs of political organization and struggle: rank-and-file committees in workplaces, schools and urban neighborhoods with immigrant communities, linking the fight against austerity, housing, healthcare and education cuts to the broader struggle against imperialist war and racism. Immigrants and refugees must be defended, not scapegoated; the unity of Dutch and immigrant workers and youth is the fundamental precondition for genuine social transformation.
Whatever its final configuration, the October 29 election will not restore “stability.” Rather, it marks another stage in the disintegration of a political order that no longer commands legitimacy and will claim any expression of social, cultural and human dignity. As seen in France, Germany and Britain, as the ruling establishment is decomposing, the vacuum is being filled by political reaction. The answer cannot be a return to the old or new “progressive” parties of capitalism, but the building of a politically independent socialist movement rooted in internationalism, with the working class as its driving revolutionary force.
9. Germany: Berlin state executive massively expands police powers
The General Security and Order Act (ASOG) “reform” by the Berlin state government, a coalition of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD), is part of a frontal assault on fundamental democratic rights.
The ruling coalition in Berlin is presenting this assault as a necessary modernization of the police in the name of public safety. “The dangers are growing,” claimed Burkard Dregger, the CDU’s domestic policy spokesman, “coming from within the country as well as from abroad.” Therefore, said Interior Senator (state minister) Iris Spranger (SPD), Berlin was “relying on technological modernization because the police must not be weaker than the criminals.”
In reality, the new police and public order law is not designed to protect the population, but to enable its comprehensive surveillance and repression. It represents a step toward a police state.
The ASOG amendment, which runs to over 700 pages, was presented to the House of Representatives (state assembly) by the relevant interior department in mid-July this year. On 18 December, the members of parliament are to vote on the final version, which is scheduled to come into force in January 2026.
Regardless of the exact wording of the final version, the new police and public order law represents an expansion of state powers directed against the working class: every person may be video-monitored at any time and in any public place, and mobile phone communications may be intercepted. Images from video surveillance can be compared with and stored alongside photographs available online.
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For the first time, artificial intelligence (AI) is to be used to analyze video data to supposedly identify “conspicuous behavior patterns.” These include pacing back and forth in front of an object, prolonged observation, running or moving hastily in unusual areas, “suspicious” gatherings, or sitting or lying down for longer periods in unusual locations.
As already practiced in Mannheim (since 2018), Hamburg (since 2023) and Frankfurt (since the summer of 2025), the AI program will be fed with all available image material: from surveillance cameras, public events or gatherings, footage of vulnerable buildings and objects, to images from helicopters and drones.
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For the first time, police officers in Berlin will have the legal right to use “deadly force,” i.e., to deliberately kill. Yet the police are already potentially deadly with their firearms, tasers and painful holds.
Nationwide, at least 44 people died in police operations last year, 22 of them from gunfire. Most deaths occurred in North Rhine-Westphalia (7), Berlin and Bavaria (5 each), and Hesse (3). The majority of those killed suffered from mental health conditions. The real number is likely higher, as official data are incomplete or lacking altogether.
In addition, the use of real-time AI image analysis will “upgrade” police operations. Whereas firearms were previously restricted to immediate, observable threats (including subjective misjudgements), algorithmic analysis may now prompt officers to use force, including firearms. Traditional “eyewitness assessment” is thus supplanted—or overridden—by a supposedly objective algorithm.
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The bill also massively expands digital surveillance.
With judicial approval, the police will gain access to all end-to-end communications and emails. With court authorization, the authorities may deploy “state trojans,” snooping software, to extract or monitor all communication data, stored files, running applications and non-public social-media content from IT systems in real time.
All regular and incidental communication partners of the target person—the so-called “bystander-catch”—will also fall within the surveillance radius. What only a few years ago seemed like a dystopian science-fiction scenario is now declared an official tool for “prevention.”
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The build-up of police state structures serves only one purpose: the state government is preparing for class war against the working class.
While Berlin’s public schools are deteriorating, social services are being shut down, and brutal cuts are taking place at hospitals, universities and public infrastructure, the coalition ruling Berlin is pouring millions into expanding the machinery of repression.
This development is not limited to Berlin or Germany, but is part of a worldwide authoritarian shift to the right. Everywhere, governments respond to growing social inequality, mass protests against poverty, soaring rents, the genocide in Gaza, militarization and war with intensified surveillance, intimidation and criminalization.
*****
Against the escalation of state repression and surveillance, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) calls on all workers, students and opponents of war to unite in an independent and conscious political struggle. Governments are resorting ever more openly to authoritarian and fascistic methods to defend their war policies and the immense wealth of corporations and elites against mounting opposition.
Only a united, international struggle of the working class for socialism can halt this drive toward dictatorship and war.
10. Apocalypse in the Tropics: A limited analysis of religion and politics in Brazil
Petra Costa’s documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics has drawn significant international attention by examining the relationship between a segment of the evangelical movement tied to “dominion theology” and the fascist far right personified by former president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. In the first two weeks after its July 14 premiere on the Netflix streaming platform, the documentary was the seventh most-watched non-English-language title worldwide.
Without a doubt, Apocalypse in the Tropics has attracted such interest by taking up a Brazilian political question that has significant international parallels. Across the world, ruling elites have used various forms of religious fundamentalism—Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist—to promote fascistic movements as part of their turn toward authoritarian forms of rule. That is certainly the case in the United States under President Donald Trump, a close ally of Bolsonaro who counts among his base the same fundamentalist evangelical movements depicted in Apocalypse in the Tropics.
*****
Explaining why she chose to narrate her own films, Costa said in the “20 Minutos” interview that she studied anthropology in the United States, and “in the ’70s, ’80s” it went “through a movement of self-critique … for preaching an objectivity that does not exist.” She continued: “So many ethnographers began to speak in the first person, because they thought that was the most honest way, that … it was above all a point of view. It was not the naked, raw truth. That truth does not exist.”
As a consequence, the documentary offers no objective explanation for the crisis of what she calls Brazil’s “fragile democracy,” ignoring the PT’s political role as a pillar of the bourgeois regime in Brazil since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, and its role in Bolsonaro’s political ascent.
*****
The central figure of Apocalypse in the Tropics is evangelical pastor Silas Malafaia, whom Petra Costa interviews numerous times throughout the documentary. A typical “entrepreneur of faith” who built a profitable media and religious-merchandise empire, Malafaia is one of Brazil’s leading representatives of the neo-Pentecostal movement and the so-called “prosperity gospel.”
The film portrays the political relationships cultivated by Malafaia since the start of the century, when he supported Lula’s presidential bid in 2002, up through his active engagement in Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 election campaign. Malafaia became a close adviser to the former president, backing his coup plots and, as the documentary shows, fervently urging Bolsonaro to call on the Armed Forces to remain in power after his electoral defeat in October 2022.
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Costa characterizes Malafaia and Bolsonaro as representatives of dominionism, or “theology of dominion,” “an ideology that preaches that Christians should control every aspect of society.” As an example, Apocalypse in the Tropics shows Malafaia’s influence over Bolsonaro’s appointment of the evangelical minister André Mendonça to the Supreme Federal Court (STF).
*****
To try to understand this, Costa says she turned to the Bible, particularly the final book of the New Testament. “The Book of Revelation is a key text for the fundamentalist evangelical movement,” she argues. “Here, war leads to peace, war leads to freedom, war is a necessary evil to fight a greater evil.”
In this way, Apocalypse in the Tropics attempts to explain the origins of the acute social and political contradictions in capitalist Brazil as a crisis of narratives.
This false political thesis—anchored in the director’s postmodernist conceptions—is accompanied in the film by a forced correlation between the growth in the number of evangelicals in Brazil and Bolsonaro’s rise to power. In what Costa describes as “one of the greatest religious changes in the history of humanity,” the documentary notes that “over the last 40 years, evangelicals have grown from 5 percent to more than 30 percent [in fact, 27 percent] of Brazil’s population.”
A similar explanation is shared by Lula and the PT, who attribute the growth of the far right to the aggressive use of social networks and to “fake news”—such as the lie spread during the 2018 elections that the PT intended to create “unisex bathrooms,” which is mentioned several times in Apocalypse in the Tropics.
This version of events, which corresponds to the self-indulgent excuses offered by a party that watched its base among workers plummet, reduces the population to a passive mass infinitely manipulable by political and religious charlatans.
*****
Apocalypse in the Tropics features scenes from the anti-communist “crusades” of Billy Graham, the most well known representative of the evangelical fundamentalism promoted by American imperialism in the twentieth century.
The Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985) promoted the American evangelical leader’s fascistic mass rallies. The film shows Graham speaking at Maracanã Stadium in 1974 to “the largest crowd ever gathered in North and South America, and one of the largest in the world,” according to him. His five-day tour brought together about 615,000 people in Rio de Janeiro, and he was welcomed by the military dictator Gen. Ernesto Geisel.
*****
Apocalypse in the Tropics sheds light on one particular aspect of Lula and the PT’s trajectory: their relationship with religion.
In one segment of the film, Lula explains the rise of neo-Pentecostalism in Brazil by emphasizing the limits of the unions and the Catholic Church in solving workers’ problems. According to Lula, an unemployed person:
...comes to the prosperity gospel and there are two words: ‘The problem is the devil and the solution is Jesus.’ It is very simple. ‘You are unemployed because the devil entered your life and the way out is Jesus.’ ... I have a thesis that what led socialism to failure was the denial of religion.
This confessed rejection of socialism and embrace of deceiving workers through religion exposes the deep political corruption of Lula and the PT.
Such a conception goes back to the PT’s very political origins. Founded in 1980, amid a mass social upsurge of the working class that would lead to the overthrow of the military dictatorship, the PT was a product of the convergence between Catholic sectors linked to the Base Ecclesial Communities (CEBS), the “new unionism” represented by Lula, and Pabloite renegades from Trotskyism.
By the late 1970s, there were more than 80,000 CEBS spread across Brazil. These Catholic organizations influenced by liberation theology were embedded in rural movements for agrarian reform and in union and social-reform movements in the cities.
Catholic intellectuals such as Leonardo Boff and Frei Betto, who remain central influences on the PT and the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), systematized an anti-Marxist ideology based on an amalgam of reformist critiques of capitalism and imperialism together with the promotion of religious faith. But perhaps the most influential author associated with liberation theology and the PT was the educator Paulo Freire—one of the favorite targets of Bolsonaro and Malafaia’s “culture war” against supposed left-wing indoctrination in schools. A “Christian socialist,” Freire eclectically assembled diverse anti-Marxist philosophical currents, combining aspects of Hegelian idealism, existentialism, and the Frankfurt School.
The political role played by “liberation theology” in the PT’s genesis was to consciously divert the explosive struggles of the working class and the impoverished masses of Latin America from the path of the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system.
*****
Apocalypse in the Tropics touches on important political problems and draws attention to relevant historical and contemporary figures and episodes. Its explanations of these phenomena are, however, muddled, mistaken, or outright reactionary.
The growing layers of workers and youth who are being radicalized by the deepening social and political crisis, by the advance of fascism and of world war, need a scientific understanding of these political problems. Above all, it is necessary to understand this turn by the ruling classes toward barbarism as a direct product of the crisis of the global capitalist system. Confronting it requires building a revolutionary mass movement of the working class for world socialism.
11. Alan Gelfand: July 28, 1949–October 29, 2025
David North, National Chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US):
Until his final hours, Alan remained fully lucid. Accepting calmly and with dignity his approaching death, Alan expressed satisfaction with the course of his life, to which he had devoted 50 years to the struggle for socialism.
Alan’s hatred of injustice and passionate defense of democratic rights and equality found expression not only in his politics, but also in his professional career as a public defender in Los Angeles. Alan’s extraordinary skill as an attorney saved countless defendants from unjust conviction. A passionate opponent of the death penalty, he was proud of the fact that he did not lose a single defendant to the California state executioners.
Only a few months ago, the Socialist Equality Party devoted its international summer school to a study of Security and the Fourth International. Alan’s central role in the fight to expose the conspiracies of Stalinism and imperialism against the Fourth International is recorded in the epic legal and political struggle that bears his name. The Gelfand Case and the man and fighter whose courage and unrelenting commitment to historical truth inspired it are an imperishable part of the history of the Trotskyist movement.
12. US state legislatures seek to destroy the public health apparatus
A recent Associated Press (AP) investigation examining more than 1,000 state bills introduced across the United States in 2024 found that over 420 of them were explicitly anti-science in character, targeting longstanding public health protections. Of these, roughly 350 were directed against vaccination programs, seeking to “bar discrimination against unvaccinated people, create the criminal offense of vaccine harm, require blood banks to test for evidence of vaccinations, and institute a 48-hour vaccine waiting period,” according to the AP’s findings.
In Minnesota, two of these bills have gone so far as to designate the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines—scientifically proven to have saved millions of lives—as “weapons of mass destruction.” Such language lends legal legitimacy to the far-right disinformation campaigns that falsely claim vaccines have caused widespread injury and death, despite exhaustive global reviews confirming their safety and efficacy. These legislative efforts would also impose new regulatory obstacles and bureaucratic red tape, further restricting access to vaccination for working-class and poor populations already struggling to navigate an increasingly fragmented and costly health system. Another 70 bills nationwide target basic public health measures such as water fluoridation and the regulation of raw milk sales, both of which have been critical in preventing disease for decades.
While many of these bills have been introduced for the sole purpose of promoting the fascist credentials of individual legislators, a significant number, at least 30, have already been enacted or adopted in Republican-controlled states in the Midwest, South, and rural West. States such as Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas, and have passed legislation weakening or abolishing vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, ending requirements for water fluoridation, and rolling back regulations on the sale of raw, unpasteurized milk. In sum, these measures constitute a sweeping assault on public health and the scientific gains achieved over more than a century of social struggle, threatening to deepen the crises of preventable disease, mass suffering, and premature death for generations to come.
This legislative assault has been spearheaded by a network of well-financed organizations—including MAHA Action, Stand for Health Freedom (SHF), the National Vaccine Information Center, and the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF)—that have coalesced around Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his anti-public-health campaign which goes by the label “Make America Healthy Again,” a name chosen to curry favor with Trump. These groups function as political instruments for an affluent social layer that seeks to advance its ideological agenda while securing its own material interests within the expanding “wellness” and alternative health industries. As U.S. News has reported, the global wellness market is valued at approximately $1.5 trillion, encompassing $160 billion in dietary supplements and vitamins and $250 billion in so-called natural and organic products—sectors driven largely by influencer-based marketing and social media promotion.
MAHA Action maintains particularly close ties to Kennedy through his longtime publisher, Tony Lyons, who has played a central role in the organization’s political strategy and in disseminating its anti-science propaganda. Kennedy’s former campaign operative, Del Bigtree—head of the notorious anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN)—now directs the MAHA Alliance, which serves as the movement’s principal fundraising and electoral arm, channeling money toward Kennedy’s initiatives and allied candidates. Another key figure, Sayer Ji, co-founder and adviser to Stand for Health Freedom (SHF)—a “health freedom” advocacy center established in 2019—has functioned as a primary legislative mobilizer for MAHA, coordinating state-level lobbying and providing model bills that form the basis of the current wave of anti-science legislation.
These organizations represent only the visible layer of a far broader network of loose alliances and ideological affiliates. What unites this milieu is its social position—a layer of aspiring capitalists and petty-bourgeois self-promoters, economically squeezed between big capital and the working class—that channels its frustrations into “anti-monopoly” rhetoric against “Big Pharma” and federal public health institutions while leaving the capitalist system itself untouched.
The movement’s ideological core is an exaggerated individualism and hostility toward any conception of collective responsibility for public health or the social right to medical care. Within MAHA-aligned circles, basic public health measures—vaccination, masking, or disease surveillance—are recast as forms of “medical tyranny” that infringe on the sovereignty of the individual. MAHA’s program is not a popular revolt against “bureaucracy,” as it claims, but a reactionary project that weaponizes anti-science rhetoric to subordinate social needs to private profit.
*****
In essence, the assault on public health serves a dual purpose—to dismantle collective protections while defending the prerogatives of private enterprise, “entrepreneurialism,” and the market. This orientation was made explicit by Del Bigtree during his remarks at the 2025 Expo West natural products trade show in California—one of the world’s largest gatherings of supplement and “wellness” industry representatives—when he declared, “It blows my mind that I’m going to watch the Republicans carry the supplement industry and the holistic health industry and chiropractors and the acupuncturists into the promised land.” His statement encapsulates the social essence of the movement, the fusion of reactionary politics with the profit interests of business layers tied to the lucrative wellness and alternative health markets.
This anti-science crusade has provoked warnings from leading scientists who see in it not an isolated aberration, but part of a broader reactionary offensive against the Enlightenment foundations of modern society.
*****
In their recent book Science Under Siege, Hotez and Mann observe, “[Robert] Kennedy [Jr.] insists he’s not ‘anti-vaccine,’ but many of his debunked arguments are straight from the anti-vaccine playbook, which he and his nonprofit have helped write.… He conveniently ignores the scientific literature—often vast, and of higher quality—that runs counter to his beliefs.” This passage sums up Kennedy’s methods, which advance demonstrably false claims while rejecting the overwhelming body of established scientific evidence. It illustrates the broader character of the anti-science offensive and its deliberate effort to disguise ideological hostility to public health as legitimate skepticism, thereby sowing confusion and mistrust among wide layers of the population.
*****
These developments—the proliferation of anti-science bills and the broader assault on public health—form one component of a systematic attack on the democratic and social rights of the working class. As fascist Trump ally Steve Bannon openly declared in his October 2025 interview with The Economist, the strategic objective is to “seize the institutions and then purge them,” pursuing what he called a “maximalist strategy with a sense of urgency.” The purge of public institutions is inseparable from the purge of scientific rationality itself, a prerequisite for the authoritarian reorganization of the state along corporate lines. The more than 420 anti-science bills introduced into state legislatures demonstrate the ideological thrust of this purge. They accompany the dismantling of federal health agencies and the imposition of sweeping austerity measures, including nearly $990 billion in proposed Medicaid and other public health reductions contained in the reactionary “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
*****
The fallout from these policies is visible in the accelerating breakdown of the U.S. health system. A recent Lancet analysis concluded that “money, not health, has become the mission,” the inevitable result of decades of market-driven reforms. Although the United States spends roughly 50 percent more on health care than peer nations—about $17,000 per person annually—life expectancy is 4.1 years lower, and retirees in the lowest wealth quintile die nine years earlier than the richest. Meanwhile, the profits of health conglomerates have soared: United Health Group alone reported $32.3 billion in earnings in 2024, largely extracted from publicly funded Medicare Advantage and Medicaid Managed Care programs. According to Stat News, between 2001 and 2022, health-care corporations diverted $2.6 trillion from patient care to shareholder payouts. Nearly one-third of all U.S. health expenditures now go to administration—marketing, billing, denial management—twice the share in Canada’s single-payer system. The result is a health infrastructure organized not around human need but around profit accumulation.
The convergence of the MAHA movement’s anti-science campaign, the financialization of health care, and the Trump administration’s policies constitutes a grave menace to the working class and the social gains won in public health over the past century. This crisis is not accidental but deliberately manufactured through political action. With Kennedy integrating the MAHA agenda into the state apparatus, the administration is systematically dismantling the foundations of public health while pursuing an austerity program that threatens the elderly, the sick, and the poor.
*****
The assault on science and public health is a fascistic attack on the democratic and social conquests of the working class. Neither of the capitalist parties—the Republicans nor the Democrats—offers any opposition to this onslaught. The defense of science, of health, and of life itself requires the independent political mobilization of the working class. Only through a socialist program, guided by a scientific understanding of society and nature and directed toward human need rather than private profit, can the gains of civilization be preserved and extended.
13. Australia: On-the-spot video report from Cobar, scene of tragic mining incident
In this video, World Socialist Web Site correspondent Michael Coggins speaks from Cobar in far west New South Wales, where two miners were killed and a third injured in an explosion on Tuesday morning.
He explains that the tragic deaths of Holly Clarke and Ambrose Patrick McMullen, which have rocked the small community, are part of a pattern of workplace fatalities, across Australia and worldwide, in which workers pay the ultimate price while corporations amass ever-increasing wealth.
14. Australia: Cobar miners and visitors speak out over the death of Endeavor Mine workers
After initial news reportage, the mainstream media has largely dropped the story, showing little interest in how this tragedy will impact psychologically and economically on the immediate families or the community.
*****
Several miners and their families spoke with World Socialist Web Site reporters about the underground explosion that killed Holly Clarke, 24, and Ambrose Patrick McMullen, 59, early Tuesday at Endeavor Mine just outside Cobar in far west New South Wales (NSW). Another young woman, Mackenzie Stirling, was injured and transported to hospital in Orange.
The small community of Cobar has about 3,500 people, most of them employed directly or indirectly in mining, who are still attempting to deal with the tragedy. After initial news reportage, the mainstream media has largely dropped the story, showing little interest in how this tragedy will impact psychologically and economically on the immediate families or the community.
15. €377 billion for weapons–Germany’s most extensive rearmament programme since Hitler
Speaking to the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung over the weekend, Chancellor Friedrich Merz (Christian Democratic Union—CDU) once again confirmed his goal that Germany should build “the strongest conventional army in Europe.” A few days later, Politico published a Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) procurement list showing what this means in concrete terms: rearmament on a historic scale, surpassing anything seen since Hitler.
According to the list—also reported on by Die Welt—the planned spending across land, air, sea, space and cyber domains total €377 billion [$US436 billion]. This colossal rearmament program includes hundreds of projects, from new tanks and artillery systems to drones, fighter jets, space satellites and cruise missiles.
At its core is the creation of an army capable of waging war against Russia. The Bundeswehr plans to acquire 400 Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of over 2,000 kilometers. These missiles can reach deep into the Russian heartland—the distance from Berlin to Moscow is around 1,600 kilometers. Germany is thus preparing for offensive operations that would form part of a devastating Third World War.
This madness is being financed through a massive increase in military spending. The Merz government—a coalition of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats (SPD), with the support of the Left Party and the Greens—has permanently exempted rearmament from the constitutionally enshrined debt brake, thereby freeing up war credits totaling one trillion euros. While billions flow into weapons, ammunition and satellite systems, social budgets are being frozen, Bürgergeld (basic welfare support) abolished, and pensions and health spending cut. The working class is to bear the cost—as cannon fodder at the front and through social devastation at home.
The main profiteers of this new German war economy are the same corporations that armed Hitler’s military (Wehrmacht) during the Second World War.
*****
The creation of a war economy is not limited to Germany. German imperialism is building a network of military-industrial outposts across Europe.
On October 28, Rheinmetall announced the founding of a joint venture with Bulgaria. The facility in question, scheduled for completion within 14 months, will produce gunpowder and 155-millimetre artillery shells worth over €1 billion. “Bulgaria is moving faster than ever before,” Papperger boasted, adding that the company was creating “one of the best factories in Europe.”
Further east, German arms manufacturers are expanding directly into Ukraine itself. As Handelsblatt reports, new production and development sites for German companies are being established there. “Customer and supplier are becoming partners,” the paper writes. CDU Economics Minister Katherina Reiche declared during a recent visit to Kyiv: “Ukraine is no longer merely a recipient of aid. There is huge potential here for cooperation, synergies and growth.”
Eighty years after the war of extermination against the Soviet Union, German imperialism is once again systematically organizing war in the East—this time under the pretext of “defending democracy”—while pursuing the same imperialist objectives: domination of the continent, control over Ukraine and all Eastern Europe and ultimately the subjugation of Russia.
*****
Behind the militarization of Germany and Europe lie objective driving forces. As in the 1930s, under the pressure of world crisis and imperialist rivalries, all social resources are being mobilized for war. The ruling class is responding to growing international tensions and internal social conflicts with authoritarian and militarist measures.
But the war policy is meeting growing resistance. Millions of workers reject this imperialist madness. The decisive task is to give this resistance conscious political form—independent of all capitalist parties and trade unions that support the war drive.
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) calls for the international mobilization of the working class to prevent the impending catastrophe. The fight against war is inseparable from the fight against capitalism itself.
16. Tanzania’s election fraud triggers mass protests with army deployed (videos included)
The largest anti-government mobilizations since Tanzania’s independence have erupted in the wake of Wednesday’s elections. From Dar es Salaam to Arusha, thousands of workers, youth, and the urban poor have taken to the streets to denounce the vote engineered to secure victory for President Samia Suluhu Hassan and the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution—CCM).
The vote for president, the 400-seat parliament, and lawmakers of the semi-autonomous Zanzibar archipelago was stage-managed to guarantee Hassan’s victory. The government ensured that no genuine opposition could compete. Tundu Lissu, leader of the pro-business CHADEMA (Party for Democracy and Progress) was arrested in April on farcical treason charges. He faces the possibility of a death sentence. The other major challenger, Luhaga Mpina of the ACT-Wazalendo party, was disqualified on legal technicalities.
Hassan’s CCM traces its origins to Julius Nyerere’s Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the petty-bourgeois pan-Africanist movement that led the struggle for independence from Britain in 1961. CCM inherited TANU’s one-party apparatus and has maintained power ever since.
In the end, only sixteen minor and regionally based parties with no national support were permitted to stand against Hassan. Official results are expected in the following days.
The election has become what many protesters have dubbed “the coronation of Hassan.” She came to power initially in 2021 following the sudden death from Covid-19 of COVID-denier President John Magufuli, when she assumed office without an electoral mandate.
In the days leading up to the vote, Hassan unleashed a wave of terror. Over the weekend, dozens were arrested across the country and at least 20 people have been abducted, with 83 abductions confirmed since Hassan assumed power. Humphrey Polepole, a former CCM spokesperson and ambassador to Cuba, disappeared from his home after publicly criticizing Hassan. His family discovered blood stains inside his residence.
By Wednesday morning, tanks and armored vehicles were patrolling major cities, with heavy deployments around Dar es Salaam, the country’s commercial hub and largest metropolis with 8.5 million inhabitants. On the day of the vote, mass anger erupted. According to reports and videos posted on social media, thousands of demonstrators have filled the streets of Kimara and Ubungo neighborhoods of Dar es Salaam. The working-class districts of Magomeni, Kinondoni, and Tandale saw barricades erected, clashes with the police and tyres burned — a common scene in neighboring Kenya, but new to Tanzania. A bus and a petrol station were set ablaze. In Mbeya, polling stations were vandalized and in Arusha, the diplomatic hub and one of Tanzania’s largest cities, protestors set a police station on fire.
*****
The military has been deployed in Dar es Salaam, Dodoma—the country’s capital, Zanzibar island, and several regional centers. Internet access has been disrupted across the country and social media platforms including X, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram have been blocked as protestors mobilised using hashtags such as #SuluhuMustGo, #MO29, and #NoElection.
By Wednesday evening, Tanzania had been brought to a standstill. Major transport operators cancelled all intercity travel for the first time in the country’s history, and ferry routes from Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar were suspended.
Tito Magoti, a human rights activist, reported that at least five people have been killed so far. But a diplomatic source told Reuters that the death toll in Dar es Salaam alone may be as high as ten.
Today, the government ordered all public servants to work from home and deployed troops across the capital. The curfew remains in force and state television have announced that schools would close.
The shockwaves of Tanzania’s protests have not stopped at the colonial borders carved by imperialism. In the south, at the Kyela crossing in Mbeya Region, protesters from neighboring Malawi confronted Tanzanian border security, forcing officials to flee as dozens of youth crossed into Tanzania to join the demonstrations. In the north, Kenyan media reported that security forces blocked groups of young Kenyans at the Namanga crossing who attempted to enter Tanzania in solidarity.
These incidents are deeply significant. Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, backed by US and European imperialism, collaborate to kidnap and extradite opposition figures and activists across their borders, Now workers and youth are beginning to organise cross border opposition. Indeed, the protest is part of a growing wave of youth-led uprisings against the ossified post-independence order that has dominated the African continent. From FRELIMO in Mozambique to the MPLA in Angola, from Paul Biya’s 92-year-old autocracy in Cameroon to Morocco’s King Mohammed VI throne, to the discredited African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, once synonymous with national liberation, and the tribalised capitalist factions of Kenya’s ruling elite, a new generation is turning against these governments. In Madagascar, protestors ousted the president who fled to France as the military took over.
*****
These protests have erupted on the same soil where Julius Nyerere, one of the figures most associated with Pan-Africanism after Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, once sought to chart a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. Nyerere’s project of Ujamaa was presented as a model of African socialism, promising equality, collective ownership, and self-reliance. Beneath his rhetoric, however, Ujamaa remained a pro-capitalist program that sought state-led development based on manoeuvres with imperialism.
Nyerere’s insistence that “social classes do not exist” in Africa has been completely refuted. Serving to mask the real social forces at work in newly independent states, he idealized pre-colonial communal traditions: “In our traditional African society we were individuals within a community. We took care of the community, and the community took care of us. We neither needed nor wished to exploit our fellow men. We neither had capitalists nor feudalists.”
*****
As Trotsky explained in his theory of Permanent Revolution, in all countries the struggle for and defense of democracy cannot be separated from the fight to establish workers’ power and the implementation of socialist policies. And second, the struggle for socialism must be conducted on the basis of an international strategy directed toward the global mobilization of the working class against the world capitalist system.
For decades, pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson sold its popular talcum powder in the US, Canada, the UK, India and globally as an antidote to skin irritation or nappy rash after bathing.
Johnson’s baby powder, with its distinctive aroma redolent of cleanliness and purity, was used by adults as well as children. Mothers sprinkled it liberally on their babies, not knowing that the cloud of white dust could harbour a deadly carcinogen.
Johnson and Johnson (J&J) knew this but sought to cover up the fact that their product was contaminated with asbestos and was allegedly killing its customers, declare the claimants in the legal case.
Three thousand people in the UK are now taking a class action against the multinational on the grounds that they knowingly sold tainted baby powder, which they charge was responsible for either their own cancers or that of relatives. It is the biggest action of its kind in British legal history.
The legal suit in the UK mirrors that pursued against the company in the US, where juries have awarded plaintiffs billions of dollars in compensation. One claimant with terminal mesothelioma in Connecticut was recently awarded $25 million, though this is under appeal.
The UK claim rests on internal company documents and scientific reports, brought by KP Law against J&J and its subsidiary Kenvue Ltd. The companies are denying the claim. However, during court proceedings internal documents were presented revealing that J&J were aware since the 1960s that their product contained asbestos fibres and took measures to conceal this.
*****
The number of those affected by the prolonged use of J&J’s baby powder probably far exceeds the number of claimants in the current litigation. Scientific studies have yet to establish how many. An unknown number of workers who mined the talc would have also succumbed to the deadly effects of asbestos.
Studies show that talc miners have a higher incidence of asbestos related diseases than the general public. In New York, for example, the incidence of mesothelioma in talc miners is five times the rate in the surrounding population.
J&J have piled up the profits at the expense of the misery and suffering of its customers. For 2024, earnings were reported at $14.07 billion, with revenue of $88.82 for the year. According to Forbes, profits for 2025 have reached $21.8 billion. It comes in at number 45 in the ranking of largest US companies on the 2024 Fortune 500 list.
The US-based company was founded in 1886, and mass production of the talcum powder began soon after. It expanded into a pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical technologies corporation, with a global workforce today of 138,000.
*****
The policy of the trade unions is for the complete removal of asbestos, but they have done nothing to mobilize their members to achieve this beyond appeals to successive governments that are dedicated to defending the wealth of the rich.
To put an end to these preventable deaths, workers must take responsibility for their own health and safety, building rank-and-file committees—independent of the union bureaucracy—in workplaces and communities. This must be combined with a struggle to take big pharma out of the hands of the profiteers, to be owned and controlled by the working class under socialism.
18. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Kenya:
Nigeria:
Postal workers in Embu strike to demand unpaid salariesCourt staff in Kaduna on indefinite strike to demand financial autonomy
South Africa:Residents protest outside Durban block of flats after two children fall down lift shaft
Workers at water company in Maluti-a-Phofung Municipality walk out to defend jobs
Khayelitsha waste workers in Cape Town, South Africa protest non-payment of wages
Workers at water company in Maluti-a-Phofung Municipality walk out to defend jobs
Europe
Portugal:
Thousands of public sector workers strike against government cuts, low pay and poor working conditions
Spain:
Petrochemical workers in Bilbao strike over shortfalls in health and safety and pay
Hundreds of engineering workers at auto parts supplier Mahle strike against job cuts
Petrochemical workers in Bilbao strike over shortfalls in health and safety and pay
United Kingdom:
Agency workers brought in to scab on bin strike in Birmingham ballot to join dispute
Museum workers at National Coal Mining Museum in Wakefield, England to continue pay strike until January
Sellafield nuclear workers in Cumbria, England continue walkouts over hazard pay
Teachers at London sixth form college strike to defend pay
Agency workers brought in to scab on bin strike in Birmingham ballot to join dispute
Museum workers at National Coal Mining Museum in Wakefield, England to continue pay strike until January
Sellafield nuclear workers in Cumbria, England continue walkouts over hazard pay
Iran:
Protests continue across over wages, conditions, pensions
Israel:
Workers at Holocaust museum strike over pay deal
Bank Hapoalim suspends cuts after workers strike
Workers at Holocaust museum strike over pay deal
19. 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.
