Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Alan Gelfand: A fighter for socialism and historical truth
Alan Gelfand, whose lawsuit against the US government led to the exposure of high-level agents of the FBI and Soviet secret police in the Socialist Workers Party, died Wednesday, October 29, in Los Angeles. He was 76 years old.
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The lawsuit filed by Alan in July 1979, which became known as the Gelfand Case, arose out of his expulsion from the SWP in January of that year as a consequence of his efforts to obtain answers to questions he had raised about evidence that the longstanding leader of that organization, Joseph Hansen, had met secretly with the Soviet secret police [the GPU] in 1938 and with the FBI in the aftermath of Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. Gelfand had also sought an explanation of Hansen’s and the SWP’s fervent defense of Sylvia Franklin (née Callen, party name Caldwell), the personal secretary of party founder James P. Cannon, despite overwhelming evidence that she had been an agent of the GPU.
[Visitors to this blog are strongly encouraged to visit the World Socialist Web Site and read David North's entire article about the legacy of Alan Gelfand. Special note should be taken of the insidious role played by Peter Camejo when Gelfand's search for the truth about the assassination of Leon Trotsky was being denied.]
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In the aftermath of his death, a review of Alan’s involvement in socialist politics inevitably places the greatest emphasis on his central role in the case that bears his name. However, it must be emphasized that his contribution to the fight for socialism did not end with the Gelfand case. Throughout the nearly four decades that remained of his life, Alan fought indefatigably for the building of the Trotskyist movement. While his daily political activity was centered in Los Angeles, where he continued to practice law, Alan’s remarkable objectivity and judgment was an intellectual resource of immeasurable importance to the Socialist Equality Party. Alan was elected by the most recent national congress of the SEP to serve on its control commission, which is responsible for conducting internal party investigations.
He was an avid contributor to the World Socialist Web Site. Well over 100 articles are credited to Alan. Under the pen name Alan Gilman, he wrote on a wide range of subjects, and especially on matters relating to sports, of which his knowledge was nothing less than encyclopedic.
The penultimate article written by Alan, dated May 9, was headlined, “Trump proposes to reopen Alcatraz and America’s Guantanamo.” Alan denounced the plan as “repulsive and revealing.”
It would serve to normalize the construction of similar concentration like prisons throughout the country. And it is a demonstration of the fundamentally sadistic preoccupation with brutal repression as the solution to the crisis of American capitalism, shared not just by Trump but by the entire ruling class.
In his political and professional legal work, Alan displayed exceptional objectivity and analytical skills. But his formidable intellectual powers were refracted through a profoundly humane personality. As a public defender, Alan would fight passionately for the acquittal of all those who were wrongly accused. However, he was no less determined to uphold the democratic rights of those defendants who confronted an overwhelming array of incriminating facts. Alan maintained a deeply empathetic attitude, viewing them not as “monsters” but as victims of a hostile and oppressive society, caught up in a social tragedy.
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Just a few weeks before his death, Alan wrote to Joseph Kishore, the national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party:
Politically it is a very intense and exciting period. My only regret is that I may have to check out in the midst of carrying out man’s greatest achievement, the world socialist revolution, but it is comforting to know that you and so many others will be carrying out that task.
In his final words to a comrade and close friend, Alan said: “It’s hard to say goodbye. But I have joy in my heart and a smile on my face, and confidence in the movement and in my comrades.”
Alan Gelfand will never be forgotten. His place in this history of the Fourth International and the hearts of his comrades is secure.
2. This week in history: November 10-16
- 25 years ago:
Deadliest rail disaster in Austrian history kills 158
50 years ago:
“Canberra Coup” ousts Labor from power in Australia
75 years ago:
Missouri Supreme Court weakens racial segregation in schools
100 years ago:
3. Proxy war for Sudan by regional powers has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis
More than 80,000 people have fled el-Fasher, the capital of the Darfur region in western Sudan, and the surrounding areas since the city fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the parties in Sudan’s brutal civil war, on October 26 after an 18-month siege.
Most are fleeing on foot to Tawila, 60 kms to the north east. They have told of mass rape, abductions and streets lined with corpses. Satellite imagery shows streets awash with blood and strewn with bodies and earth markings indicative of mass graves. Many of the city’s 250,000 residents remain unaccounted for.
The UN Human Rights Office said that RSF militia—born out of the notorious Janjaweed that devastated Darfur 20 years ago—carried out atrocities in el-Fasher, including “summary executions” of civilians trying to flee their attacks, “with indications of ethnic motivations for killings”, while Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said the “risk of further large-scale, ethnically motivated violations and atrocities in el-Fasher is mounting by the day”.
This has plunged the people of el-Fasher city and the refugees who have fled the city, many of whom are living out in the open, into a catastrophic situation, with the IPC global hunger watchdog declaring a famine. The UN and international aid agencies have warned that Sudan is in the midst of one of the most severe humanitarian crises in the world and that 14 million children need vital assistance to survive, with health and livelihood conditions continuing to deteriorate.
Since the fighting started in April 2023, 40,000 people have been killed and at least 12.6 million have been displaced in what the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) has called the world’s largest displacement crisis. Of these, around 3.3 million have taken refuge in neighboring countries including Chad, South Sudan and Egypt, overwhelming their slim resources. The vast majority remain inside Sudan, many in internally displaced people (IDP) camps.
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The war between two former allies and military chiefs, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, leader of the Sovereign Council, head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and de facto ruler of the country, and his deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, leader of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), began when vicious fighting broke out in April 2023. The intensely bitter conflict has been characterised on both sides as war crimes, including targeting civilians and blocking humanitarian aid.
It split Sudan, with the RSF, based in the Darfur region, seizing the west of the country, and the SAF taking the eastern part of the country, including the Red Sea Port Sudan. But al-Burhan’s forces recaptured Khartoum in March this year with Egyptian, Turkish, Iranian and other outside backing. Al-Burhan appointed Kamil Idris to head a government, the first civilian prime minister since the resignation of Abdalla Hamdok and the collapse of the Transitional Government in 2022, put in place by the preemptive military coup backed by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE after months-long mass demonstrations against longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in a bid to draw Sudan into their axis.
Both rival military factions, composed of sub-ethnic groups with competing economic interests, have the backing of various local militias and constantly shifting support from outside forces. Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Eritrea and Iran have backed al-Burhan and the SAF, while the UAE and Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group have supported Dagalo and the RSF, mobilising regional allies in Libya, Chad and South Sudan, although more recently Russia has supported al-Burhan.
These Arab and African states are using Sudan’s conflict to gain power, influence and access to resources, gold, minerals and agricultural land in the war-torn country. As the gateway to the Sahara, the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, Sudan’s location, bordering on seven countries and its 800-kilometre coastline along the Red Sea that carries around 15 percent of world trade by volume, gives it enormous geostrategic importance.
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The UN and aid agencies launched a $6 billion appeal for humanitarian aid in February. As of last month the UN agencies had raised just $1.13 billion, leaving millions without food, water, shelter, or medical care.
Now with the capture of el-Fasher and the SAF’s withdrawal from el-Fasher, the RSF controls all of Darfur’s regional capitals and has direct access to trans-Saharan trade routes and the ability to impose blockades and extract resources.
This creates a de facto partition of the country, some 14 years after South Sudan seceded from Sudan, with the RSF under Dagalo controlling the west and south, and the SAF under al-Burhan, controlling the center and east of the country, including the capital Khartoum which it recaptured from the RSF last March, the riverine breadbasket and Port Sudan. Such a division would be unstable, with the foreign backers of the two military forces competing to entrench their position and influence in the region, leading to further fragmentation along ethnic and tribal lines as has happened in Libya and Somalia.
4. United States: Ford extends layoffs at Dearborn Truck and Rouge EV Center
On October 23, UAW Local 600 DTP Unit Chairman Nick Kottalis told the 500 remaining REV-C workers they would be “laid off indefinitely,” then abruptly retracted the statement. It is clear the UAW bureaucracy had advance notice of layoffs and concealed this information, while Ford executives and Wall Street analysts debated whether to abandon the company’s flagship electric pickup project.
The same day that workers received notice that both plants would be idled this week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Ford is in “active discussions” about scrapping the F-150 Lightning entirely. The Journal called the Lightning “money-losing” and noted that the company has already racked up multibillion-dollar EV losses. Neither Ford nor the UAW has provided workers a word of explanation.
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Ford once presented the Lightning as a “modern Model T” and the foundation of a new era of American EV manufacturing. The UAW bureaucracy paraded it as proof that union jobs would be secured for a generation. Yet in October, Ford sold roughly 1,500 Lightnings, compared to about 66,000 gas-powered F-Series trucks, and has lost more than $13 billion on EVs since 2023. The company, with the assistance of the UAW bureaucracy, is now imposing the costs on the backs of workers.
Ford’s reversal mirrors similar moves across the industry. General Motors will reduce Detroit’s Factory Zero electric vehicle plant to one shift in January 2026, eliminating about 1,200 jobs. GM is also pausing battery cell output for six months at its Ultium plants in Warren, Ohio, and Spring Hill, Tennessee, affecting another 2,100 workers through temporary and indefinite layoffs. Dana Thermal Products is permanently closing its Auburn Hills, Michigan, EV component plant, opened only recently to build battery cooling plates, destroying roughly 200 jobs amid what the company called “lower-than-expected EV volumes.”
The shift from Biden’s EV incentives to Trump’s tariff nationalism is tactical. Both serve the same class objective: restructuring the auto industry against workers while preparing for geopolitical confrontation with China. Biden promoted EVs and battery production to secure industrial supply chains and catch up with China in critical technologies and minerals essential for the military. He collaborated with the UAW bureaucracy to impose labor concessions and automation, and both hailed the sellout of the 2023 auto strike as a victory that paved the way for a “just transition to EVs.”
Trump scrapped EV credits and imposed tariffs, claiming the EV transition benefited China. The objective is to force production to the United States under lower labor costs and intensified automation, while escalating trade war. In practice, both strategies produce layoffs, job insecurity and speedup.
The US Labor Department under both administrations opposed the lawsuit by socialist Mack Trucks worker and UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman and upheld the fraudulent 2022-23 UAW election, which installed Shawn Fain despite tens of thousands of autoworkers never receiving ballots. The aim was to ensure a leadership aligned with state-corporate restructuring.
Workers are discovering that “reshoring” does not mean restoring secure jobs. It means relocating production only to eliminate labor through automation once it arrives.
Automakers cannot raise vehicle prices further without collapsing demand, so they are demanding massive cost reductions from suppliers, which produce more than 70 percent of vehicle content. This is driving a new wave of robotics and artificial intelligence across the supply chain.
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On November 6, as Ford workers received layoff notices, Shawn Fain held a town hall. Instead of opposing cuts, he boasted about the “success” of Trump’s “targeted tariffs” and said the UAW was working with the administration on revising the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to shift production to the US.
During the town hall event, rank-and-file workers posted dozens of comments denouncing the UAW bureaucracy for doing nothing to fight job cuts or bring laid off workers back to work. Unhinged, Fain lashed out at a worker at the Warren Stamping Plant who had been laid off for more than a year, saying, “Get real, the union doesn’t lay people off.”
In another demonstration of utter contempt, Fain claimed that autoworkers had been really “lucky” for the last 15 years since the 2008-09 recession. “Back in the day,” he said, “in the 1990s and after that, we ran in a cyclical nature in this industry, and every three to four years, we’d have downturns and there would be layoffs. We’ve been blessed to have these profitable years, for 15 years, where our members have done well.”
This decade and a half may have been good for Fain and the rest of the UAW bureaucracy, but it has been a disaster for workers. The years since the massive concessions Fain backed during the 2009 Obama-UAW restructuring of the industry have been defined by halved wages, gutted pensions and the creation of a vast tier of disposable temporary workers now being thrown into unemployment.
The town hall confirmed what workers increasingly recognize: The UAW bureaucracy speaks for the corporations and the government, not for the workers.
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The global assault on jobs marks the beginning of a new stage of struggle. The task is to organize, unify across borders and prepare a conscious fight for the expropriation of the oligarchs and for socialism.
Technology like AI and automation must be used to shorten the workweek and raise living standards, not destroy livelihoods. The auto and logistics industries must be reorganized as publicly owned and democratically controlled enterprises serving human need, not private profit.
5. Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi defies Turkish state’s intervention on its program
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi, which was officially established in August in Turkey, received a letter from the Supreme Court of Appeals Prosecutor’s Office demanding that it change its program. It categorically rejected this political intervention.
6. Vaccines, infections and chronic diseases: A new understanding
The long-standing division between infectious (communicable) and non-communicable (chronic) diseases is collapsing under the weight of new epidemiological evidence. Mounting data reveal that viral pathogens are not transient threats but durable drivers of chronic conditions—chief among them, cardiovascular disease (CVD).
This reorientation is underscored by a comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis led by Dr. Kosuke Kawai and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association in October 2025. The researchers reviewed 155 studies and demonstrated consistent, significant associations between viral infections and later cardiovascular events. Acute infections such as influenza and SARS-CoV-2 were linked to sharply elevated short-term risks—up to a four-fold increase in myocardial infarction (heart attack) and a five-fold rise in stroke within the first month after infection. Long-term infections including HIV, hepatitis C, and herpes zoster were likewise associated with higher levels of risk for coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke.
The authors conclude that viral infections “represent underrecognized and potentially preventable contributors” to global CVD burden. This emerging scientific consensus effectively reframes chronic disease as, in many cases, the delayed consequence—or sequela—of infection.
Yet this paradigm shift stands in sharp contrast to the federal public health policy announced by right-wing anti-science quack Robert F. Kennedy Jr., placed in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services by Donald Trump. Kennedy publicly vows to combat chronic disease while simultaneously advancing anti-vaccine positions, dismantling vaccine-advisory structures, and reducing investment in immunization and other methods of prevention of infectious disease. By separating vaccination and infection surveillance from chronic-disease prevention, Kennedy repudiates the very scientific linkage now being illuminated between infection and non-communicable illness—with profound implications for public health.
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Beyond cardiovascular pathology, a wide spectrum of cancers, autoimmune conditions, and neurological disorders are now understood to be initiated or accelerated by infectious agents. A 2020 Lancet Global Health modeling study estimated that 130 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) from non-communicable diseases—8.4 percent of the total global NCD burden—are attributable to infection, acknowledging this as a conservative lower bound.
A wide range of research, coupled with the 2025 UCLA findings on viral infections and CVD, underscores a single, powerful conclusion: many so-called “non-communicable” diseases are conditions derived from the long-term health effects of communicable diseases.
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The intersection between chronic disease, infectious triggers, and patient outcomes is profoundly shaped by socioeconomic stratification, producing deep and enduring inequities in morbidity and mortality. Long before the pandemic, individuals in low-income communities were already facing cardiovascular hospitalization rates two to three times higher than those in affluent areas, alongside markedly greater burdens of diabetes, hypertension, and chronic respiratory disease. By contrast, residents of higher-income neighborhoods not only experience lower baseline disease prevalence but also have greater access to preventive care and post-acute follow-up.
When COVID-19 struck, these preexisting inequities translated into a disproportionate toll on lower-income and minority populations. Structural factors—including income inequality, occupational exposure, multigenerational housing and an inadequate social safety net—intensified vulnerability. Between March 2020 and March 2022, excess mortality was highest among populations with the lowest vaccination rates, an empirical reality that directly refutes the anti-vaccine movement’s central narrative. Low vaccine uptake was not the result of “vaccine harm,” but rather of policy failure: the absence of mandated paid leave, inaccessible vaccination sites, and the erosion of trust in public institutions after decades of neglect.
This unequal access to protection has long shaped the pattern of cardiovascular deaths. Even for seasonal influenza, studies have shown that an 18 percent vaccination gap between major demographic groups significantly contributes to disparities in CVD mortality. On a global scale, the same pattern holds: the burden of infection-related NCDs falls most heavily on the Global South, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where inadequate sanitation, limited healthcare infrastructure, and reduced vaccination coverage perpetuate high rates of infection-driven chronic illness.
Vaccines, far from causing harm, offer demonstrable protection against cardiovascular disease triggered by infection. The major UCLA meta-analysis led by Kawai confirmed that viral infections such as SARS-CoV-2, influenza, and herpes zoster substantially elevate cardiovascular risk, underscoring that vaccination can serve as a preventive tool for cardiovascular health as well as infection control. Supporting this conclusion, a 2025 Nature Portfolio study found that pre-infection COVID-19 vaccination reduced the risk of major acute cardiovascular events (MACE) by 30 percent and all-cause mortality by 70 percent in the year following infection.
These findings dismantle the anti-vaccine movement’s claim of “vaccine-induced injury” and reveal the opposite reality: immunization mitigates the cardiovascular consequences of infection, protecting precisely those communities who are most exposed and least defended by the current health system.
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The new understanding of non-communicable diseases as downstream consequences of exposure to infection marks a turning point in medical science comparable to the germ theory revolution. Just as germ theory exposed the microbial origins of acute illness, the new understanding reveals that many chronic diseases—once attributed to “lifestyle” or heredity—are in fact the biological residue of previous infections. This breakthrough erodes the artificial divide between communicable and non-communicable disease and makes it possible to unite prevention strategies into a single public-health continuum.
Yet the very consensus that made these discoveries possible is collapsing under the weight of a historic life-expectancy crisis. In the United States, life expectancy fell from 78.8 years in 2019 to 76.4 years in 2021—the largest two-year decline since World War II and the steepest drop among high-income nations. Although provisional data for 2023 show a modest rebound to about 77 years, the country has still lost over two full years of life expectancy compared with the pre-pandemic baseline. This reversal erased two decades of progress: national longevity has returned to roughly its 2001 level. No other industrialized nation experienced such a sustained decline.
Life expectancy is a critical measure of social health, reflecting not only mortality from infectious disease but also chronic illness, inequality, and access to medical care. The contraction of US lifespan—despite the enormous growth of scientific and medical capacity—reveals a structural failure: the subordination of public health to private profit. It demonstrates that biological outcomes now move in the opposite direction of scientific potential, a defining feature of capitalist decay.
In 1900, the average American lived only 47 years; by 2019—on the eve of the pandemic—it had reached 79. The COVID-19 catastrophe began to reverse this trajectory. The population of the United States, because the first Trump, Biden and second Trump administrations adopted a deliberate policy of mass infection and social neglect, is suffering the consequences. The US now trails every other major industrialized country in public health indices.
Globally, vaccination programs since 1974 have averted 154 million deaths and added 10.2 billion healthy years of life, quantifying one of humanity’s greatest collective achievements. The regression now underway in the US represents not a natural fluctuation but a social catastrophe. The “Missing Americans” analysis shows that even before COVID-19, the US was losing over 620,000 lives per year compared with peer nations—a figure that surged beyond one million annually once the pandemic began. Most of these were working-age adults. Their premature deaths were neither inevitable nor biological; they were the collateral damage of capitalism’s war on public health.
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The defense of life expectancy and the restoration of public health cannot be entrusted to the same political apparatus that presided over its collapse. Only the international working class, organized independently on a socialist program, can secure the material foundations for genuine public health: universal vaccination, equitable healthcare, and the democratic control of science and medicine.
Science itself now stands in conflict with the capitalist order. Its continuation depends on a social transformation that aligns the means of production—and the means of life—with human need rather than private gain. The struggle for public health is therefore inseparable from the struggle for socialism. It is a revolutionary fight for life, longevity, and the future of humanity.
7. Dmitri Shostakovich, at the age of 18, composed his First Symphony 100 years ago
World-famous German conductor Bruno Walter, who was soon after forced from his homeland when Hitler took power, led the Berlin Philharmonic in Shostakovich’s First Symphony in 1927, only a year after its premiere in Leningrad. He was soon followed by Arturo Toscanini and Otto Klemperer. The critical as well as popular verdict on the work was uniformly enthusiastic.
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Shostakovich is remembered by contemporaries who were interviewed many decades later as a student of single-minded determination, even as a young teenager. The resolve was accompanied by highly unusual musical gifts. He was an expert sight-reader and a pianist of great skill, based not merely on technique but above all on serious thought and a conception of what he was playing.
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Shostakovich’s coming of age musically occurred during the early years of the Revolution, which had an enormous impact on culture as well as politics, education and every other sphere of social life. This was the time of the Constructivism of Rodchenko and Tatlin, the Suprematism of Malevich, the Futurism of Mayakovsky and the avant-garde theater of Meyerhold.
Mikhail Druskin, a pianist and musicologist who knew Shostakovich very well in the early 1920s, was quoted on this subject almost 70 years later, in Elizabeth Wilson’s valuable Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994):
The fresh wind of the Revolution revitalized the whole pattern of life, thrown up as it was on the open spaces of the streets and squares. Youth, driven by the force of its tempestuous gusts, avidly reached out for all that was new and futuristic; often their ideas were idealized and illusory, and did not relate to reality. For only a few creators of spiritual values knew how to listen to the true voice of history, the ‘Noise of Time,’ to use Alexander Blok’s expression. One way or another the times held sway over people, and left their imprint on them, the impressionable Shostakovich included. His future as an artist was conditioned and formed by those years. Shostakovich had many diverse and significant sides to him, comparable to the multifarious levels of artistic and cultural life of the time.
Leon Trotsky lucidly summed up the general situation of culture in these first years in The Revolution Betrayed:
While the dictatorship [of the proletariat] had a seething mass-basis and a prospect of world revolution, it had no fear of experiments, searchings, the struggle of schools, for it understood that only in this way could a new cultural epoch be prepared. The popular masses were still quivering in every fiber, and were thinking aloud for the first time in a thousand years. All the best youthful forces of art were touched to the quick.
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Shostakovich’s youthful symphony announces a new musical presence, a distinctive one, not simply derivative of 19th or early 20th century composers such as Tchaikovsky or Mahler. As Nicolai Malko, the Soviet conductor, later recalled, describing Shostakovich’s performance of the work for him on the piano,
I was amazed both by the symphony and by his playing…it was extremely noticeable that this symphony did not have the ‘academic stamp’ that usually characterizes the beginning composer… It was immediately clear that this First Symphony by Shostakovich was the vibrant, individual, and striking work of a composer with an original approach. The style of the symphony was unusual; the orchestration sometimes suggested chamber music in its sound and its instrumental economy…
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The prominent use of the piano stands out. This instrument, on which Shostakovich excelled as a soloist, had been used in orchestral music, of course, but only in concerto form. The piano as a solo instrument contrasting with the orchestra was featured in some of the most famous works of such 19th century masters as Beethoven (his Emperor Concerto, among others) and Brahms. It was never used by Beethoven or Brahms as part of the orchestra, however, nor by any other major composer before the 20th century. Its use here, with particular prominence in the 2nd and 4th movements, underscores the percussive energy characteristic of the work as a whole.
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The First Symphony was part of a musical ferment that characterized the 1920s. Classical composers made use of jazz idioms and popular and folk elements without “dumbing down” their compositions. This was the period of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny and much more.
There was also the Viennese musical giant Schoenberg and his Second Viennese School. While Schoenberg declared war on tonality in favor of his twelve-tone system, a lively debate persisted between rival solutions to the question: “whither music” for the 20th century.
This was the atmosphere in which Shostakovich was launched on his five-decade career. He was to become a composer who moved millions, and in the sheer consistency and length of his career he towered over his contemporaries.
He was a genius whose emergence coincided with the heroic early years of the Russian Revolution—more accurately, the very end of that heroic period. This was a period of the flowering of the avant-garde, in close proximity to the struggle for revolutionary social transformation. Many artists and a section of the intelligentsia were won to the cause of the working class.
And yet, Shostakovich was destined to live the bulk of his life, the last 45 years, in the shadow of the monstrous degeneration of the revolution that had aroused the hopes of masses of workers and the oppressed on every continent. This degeneration, which saw the decimation of a generation of revolutionary fighters, also threatened composers like Shostakovich, Prokofiev and others with repression.
This became especially threatening in 1936, as the Stalinist Great Terror began, and also in 1948, when Shostakovich and others were denounced and threatened with ostracism or worse by the bureaucratic ignoramuses for the crime of “formalism.” Although the situation eased greatly after Stalin’s death in 1953 and the “de-Stalinization” that followed, the climate of fear and bureaucratic control persisted until the composer’s death. Apart from whether he fully understood this historical process—and it is clear that he did not—Shostakovich became a symbol of persistence and survival, of the sacrifices of the Soviet people and of what remained of the revolutionary conquests of the past, in the face of Stalinist despotism.
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Shostakovich remained quite active musically in the post-World War II period, and he stands out, along with his close friend Benjamin Britten and not many others, for successfully resisting the dogmas of atonality and serialism during these decades.
He left behind a body of work that is, for quality as well as quantity, without peer for the 20th century. It includes 15 symphonies; 15 string quartets; two piano concertos, two violin concertos and two cello concertos; two piano trios; a piano quintet; two operas; more than two dozen orchestral suites (including his two famous jazz suites and his suite from The Gadfly) and three dozen film scores; and much more besides. Most of his symphonies, concertos and other orchestral music is regularly performed, and his chamber music is widely recorded and often heard.
This year also marks, in addition to 100 years since the beginning of Shostakovich’s public career, a half-century since his death, on August 9, 1975. Dozens of books and thousands of pages have been written about the composer during this period.
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Shostakovich’s First Symphony can be enjoyed on its own merits, but an understanding of the work is deepened when one considers the 50 years of Shostakovich’s life that followed. The composer was a very contradictory figure: a man of tremendous reserve who was nevertheless seen as an international symbol, a figure of musical integrity and originality but nevertheless facing the dictates of a parasitic and reactionary bureaucracy. His music can’t be fully appreciated apart from the October Revolution, which created the circumstances under which it was composed. It flowed from and is completely bound up with the history of the Soviet Union itself.
8. The genocide in Gaza and the threat of a third world war
Der Völkermord in Gaza und die Gefahr eines dritten Weltkriegs ►Mehring Verlag ►Linke Literaturmesse
World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Member, Peter Schwarz, speaking at an event November 2 at an event organized by the publisher Mehring Verlag at the Left Literature Fair in Nuremberg:
"As Katja Rippert mentioned at the beginning, the city of Nuremberg censored the text announcing our meeting and threatened to ban it if we did not delete the phrases “genocide in Gaza” and “war crimes of the German government.” One of the reasons given was that the description of Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide” relativizes historical crimes. This is, to say the least, a strange argument.
The city does not address the question of whether Israel’s actions against the Palestinians constitute genocide. It ignores the facts, the legal opinions, and the statements of renowned human rights organizations and international institutions that prove this. Instead, it declares that this question should not even be asked—let alone answered—because to do so relativizes the Holocaust."
9. Trump intensifies immigration Gestapo terror in Chicago
Mass deportation efforts labeled Operation Midway Blitz have continued in Chicago since September with no end in sight. Homeland Security officials will offer no information on the whereabouts of the more than 3,000 people who have been kidnapped from the metro area in the two months of the “blitz.”
For those still being held in the area, conditions are horrific. Attorneys for some of the hundreds of detainees held in a processing facility in suburban Broadview, Illinois, say their clients are being held under conditions that violate the most basic human rights. The Broadview facility is not a detention center and does not have adequate sleeping or sanitary facilities. Detainees are being held in quarters so close they cannot even lie down on the floor, as there are no beds. They are being denied food, clean water and medical care. These conditions, which amount to a form of torture, are aimed at compelling detainees to sign self-deportation orders.
No politicians, medical staff or clergy have been permitted to enter the facility. Last Wednesday, a federal judge ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to improve conditions in the facility after a group of detainees sued. Calling their treatment “unnecessarily cruel,” Judge Gettleman said, “People shouldn’t be sleeping next to overflowing toilets. They should not be sleeping on top of each other.” He ordered that the facility be cleaned and detainees be given bottled water.
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Citywide as well as in the suburbs, CBP and ICE thugs, among other federal agents, using unmarked trucks and vans drive up to workers. Armed, masked men with no identification or warrants leap out to wrestle workers to the ground on their job sites, in retail stores and on parking lots, throwing them into vehicles and taking them to detention centers.
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Over the weekend, agents swarmed shopping centers, kidnapping workers from home improvement and warehouse grocery stores. In response to the spontaneous protests against the kidnappings that have coalesced in parking lots and on residential streets, the federal goons have thrown stun grenades and canisters of tear gas. They have also sprayed Mace, a toxic irritant, from their vehicles. One family driving through a retail center parking lot with their infant daughter captured the moment on video when agents sprayed Mace into their car. [Video included.]
Businesses in neighborhoods on the southwest side, where many Spanish-speaking families live, are struggling due to the terror. People are not leaving home, going to work, going shopping or going to school.
In addition to the well publicized street-level interventions by the community, residents and businesses have also organized grocery and meal support and walk children to and from school so parents are not targeted. Thousands of meals have been delivered by restaurants working with residents.
Some residents are facing increasingly desperate conditions, sometimes sleeping rough, in cars, or on their job sites to avoid being picked up traveling to and from work. Homeless immigrants face extreme risk of being targeted while living in tents in parks. The Chicago Parks district, now overseen by Democratic Socialists of America member Carlos Ramirez Rosa, is permitting the Trump Gestapo to use Warren Park as a staging area. It has since become the site of protests.
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While Democrats in Chicago and Illinois are calling on residents to trust the courts and wait for legal remedies, the Trump administration has already made it clear that it will defy rulings that interfere with its operations. At the national level, the Democratic leadership is simply ignoring the unfolding assault on democratic rights.
New organizations of mass struggle are required. No illusions can remain in the Democratic Party when it comes to defending against fascist attacks on the working class.
10. San Diego workers speak out as hunger and homelessness surge
The cutting of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for 42 million people in the United States has propelled vast sections of the working class into desperation, as millions struggle to feed themselves and their children. The ongoing government shutdown is being exploited by the Trump administration to eviscerate what remains of the tattered social safety net in the United States.
On Friday night, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to continue withholding $4 billion in food aid, expressing the ruling class’s deep hostility and disdain toward the masses. After more than a week of cuts, food banks across the country are reeling as they struggle to meet the growing hunger of the population.
In Southern California’s San Diego County, food banks have reported a spike in demand over the past week following the cutoff of federal SNAP (CalFresh) benefits. The county is home to more than 400,000 recipients, whose assistance was abruptly halted at the start of the month.
At a single drive-through event, the nonprofit Feeding San Diego distributed more than 60,000 pounds of food—enough for over 50,000 meals. Staff said turnout was among the largest since the pandemic. Such scenes have become increasingly common across the county, reflecting the devastating impact of the war being waged on the living standards of the working class.
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The food crisis in San Diego is part of a broader social catastrophe gripping the United States. Alongside the slashing of food assistance for 42 million people, skyrocketing living costs—especially in regions with the highest housing prices—are driving growing numbers of families into homelessness. The situation has become so dire that school districts are now intervening to find temporary shelter for their rising populations of homeless students.
The San Diego Unified School District, the second largest in California, has approved the opening of a temporary “safe parking lot” at the now-closed Central Elementary School. Homeless families of district students will be allowed to sleep in their cars overnight at the site. Although planning for such programs dates back years, this one is scheduled to operate for only a year, after which the property will be converted into “affordable housing” for district employees.
Nearly 20,000 students in San Diego County are homeless, up from about 18,000 last year. In the San Diego Unified School District alone, some 8,000 students have experienced homelessness. Even these figures are a vast undercount. Statewide, the official homeless population in California stands at roughly 187,000 people.
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The social crisis in San Diego is not an isolated event, but part of a broader assault on the working class across California, the United States and the world. The fascist Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill” represents one of the greatest attacks on living standards in modern history. The legislation cuts more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and SNAP while handing $3 trillion in tax breaks to the corporate and financial elite.
It has stripped nearly 12 million low-income and disabled workers of medical coverage and 11 million people—including 4 million children—of food assistance, while diverting an additional $300 billion to the military and domestic repression. This brutal redistribution of wealth from the working class to the rich has intensified hunger and homelessness nationwide.
This austerity program is bound up with the massive military buildup in preparation for a new world war and the advanced plans for establishing a presidential dictatorship in the United States. The fascist Trump administration is preparing a military invasion of Venezuela, continuing the genocide against the people of Gaza and engaging in nuclear brinkmanship at levels not seen in decades. At home, the White House is deploying the military for “law enforcement” operations in American cities, shredding basic democratic rights and wielding starvation as a political weapon against the working class.
The Democratic Party is fully complicit in this social catastrophe. Even as the federal government slashes over one trillion dollars in social spending, the Democrat-controlled California legislature has voted to cut billions more from healthcare and other social programs. The 2025–26 fiscal year has also seen the elimination of the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) program, leaving hundreds of thousands of workers—particularly the undocumented—without access to healthcare, housing and other necessities.
California, the world’s fourth-largest economy, has a GDP of $4 trillion and nearly 200 billionaires. There is no shortage of wealth to end this crisis. But the Democratic Party, as the political representative of the capitalist oligarchy, is compelled to plunder the working class in an effort to resolve the deepening crisis of American and global capitalism.
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Only the socialist reorganization of society on a world scale can guarantee food, shelter and healthcare for all. What is urgently required is the building of independent organizations of working class struggle, armed with a socialist program for the conquest of political power. The Socialist Equality Party calls for the formation of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) in every workplace, school, and neighborhood to organize resistance to the fascist austerity program of the Trump White House and its Democratic enablers. Only the international working class, independent of all capitalist parties and armed with a scientific socialist perspective, can end the forced starvation and imperialist war produced by the decaying capitalist system.
11. Two Sri Lankan workers die in industrial accidents in one week
During the past week, on Sunday and Wednesday, two workers employed at different factories in Sri Lanka lost their lives at work.
The first death occurred when a machine exploded at a latex rubber processing factory located on the Kiriporuwa Estate at Yatiyanthota, 75 kilometres east of Colombo. The second death was at the Maussakelle Tea Factory in Maskeliya, in the central hill country, where a worker’s head was caught in a tea-rolling machine.
Those who lost their lives were Rajinikantha, a 25-year-old unmarried young man at the rubber products factory, and Krishnan Vijayakumar, a 49-year-old widower with four children employed at the tea factory.
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These two deaths would not have occurred if there had been safety mechanisms to protect workers. They amount to industrial murders. These big companies are only interested in extracting profits, regardless of lives.
The trade union bureaucracies work hand-in-glove with companies, and successive governments are responsible for these crimes committed by the employers. One worker stated: “Without the support of the trade union leaders and the government, the companies wouldn’t be able to behave like this. But the union leaders and the government do nothing about it.”
Plantation workers, who make up one of the most oppressed sections of the Sri Lankan working class, are deprived of both a monthly salary and paid leave.
According to calculations by the Department of Census and Statistics in 2023, a family of four requires a minimum monthly income of 90,000–100,000 rupees to meet basic needs. However, with the cost of living now even higher, the average pay packet of a plantation worker is around 25,000 rupees. They live in 12-by-10-foot barrack-like line rooms, most of them built around 100 years ago and repaired several times.
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The number of workers in Sri Lanka who are injured or killed in industrial accidents is rapidly increasing. According to the latest International Labour Organization statistics, approximately 2,000 non-fatal workplace accidents and 60–80 fatal accidents occur annually in Sri Lanka.
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Deaths in workplaces are rising globally, from the so-called industrialized countries to backward countries. For instance, on October 10, an explosion at the Accurate Energetic Systems (AES) munitions plant in Bucksnort, Tennessee, in the US resulted in the deaths of 16 workers. On October 14, a fire erupted at a garment factory in the Mirpur area of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where 16 workers burned to death.
These deaths, caused by cutting safety measures in the pursuit of profit, are not simply “industrial accidents”—they are murders produced by capitalism.
The Socialist Equality Party urges workers to build workers’ action committees in every factory, estate and other workplace which can take action to save their lives as well as fight for their jobs and wages.
Such committees must halt production under unsafe conditions, demand the full disclosure of all safety data, and bring to justice those responsible for deaths and injuries.
It is essential to establish the international solidarity of the working class in this struggle. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees is fighting to mobilize workers internationally in the struggle against capitalism and for international socialism.
On Friday, the one-year contract covering more than 5,000 operators, conductors and support staff at the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) expired. Despite this, leaders of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 234 instructed members to remain on the job while negotiations continue, postponing any strike action as they seek a new multiyear agreement.
“As we continue to bargain, we’re asking you to please continue to come to work and put money aside” in preparation for a possible strike, said TWU Local 234 President Will Vera in a public statement last week. Vera showed contempt toward the membership, hypocritically declaring after admitting to violating their rights that “a work stoppage cannot be called until we [the officials] call for the strike authorization vote, and you can expect more information to happen next week.”
The contract expiration comes amid a worsening fiscal crisis in Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia region. The state has gone more than 100 days without an approved budget, producing funding uncertainty for county governments, public schools, mass transit and other services.
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Union leaders have provided no explanation for denying members the right to strike. Vera vaguely referred to SEPTA’s “need for dedicated funding,” even as TWU officials claimed that new cash from the state’s Public Transportation Trust Fund gave management flexibility to meet some demands.
This refusal to act follows a series of sellouts across Philadelphia’s public sector.
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The Democratic Party’s pseudo-left hangers-on, such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), have been a critical conduit for the union apparatus to maintain its control over workers’ struggles. Throughout the municipal workers’ strike in July, the Philadelphia chapter of the DSA actively helped reinforce the union leadership’s betrayal, forbidding any of its members and supporters from denouncing the sellout TA. Nationally, the DSA’s publications barely reported on the strike.
Following in its previous practices, the DSA has said nothing about the most recent betrayal at SEPTA, dutifully ignoring the issue and taking its lead from the Democratic Party at the local and state levels.
Negotiations at SEPTA remain active, and TWU Local 234 may soon hold a strike authorization vote. SEPTA workers must draw the lessons from these past experiences and join the Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee to prepare for an independent fight that removes control from the TWU officials seeking to limit and weaken their movement.
They must link their struggle with other sections of the working class. In addition to teachers and municipal employees, they should reach out to hotel workers, including those at Philadelphia’s historic Wyndham Hotel who began striking Saturday for higher pay and manageable workloads. These workers hold major leverage as the city prepares for next year’s 250th anniversary celebrations and the 2026 FIFA World Cup—events that make their unity with transit workers all the more critical.
13. Henry Ford Health says it will impose contract terms on striking nurses at Genesys Hospital
Management at Henry Ford Health has announced it is unilaterally imposing a new contract on 700 nurses and case workers at Genesys Hospital in Grand Blanc, Michigan after declaring an impasse in negotiations.
The workers, members of Teamsters Local 332, have been on strike since September 1 to demand an end to unsafe staffing ratios, overwork and steadily eroding working conditions.
This latest provocation by management—following their strikebreaking efforts, which included the hiring of scab nurses—is an escalation of Henry Ford Health’s attempt to break the will of the nurses.
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Justifying its action, the hospital touted wage increases of up to 8.6 percent, a promise of a more “comprehensive and competitive” benefits package, and the stated intention to maintain previously agreed staffing ratios. The hospital claimed nurses will see an average salary increase of 5.3 percent in the first year under these terms.
But on the picket line Thursday, nurses denounced the move. One nurse said, “They are declaring an impasse, but legally we have not come to that. We were already working under a system where there are supposed to be staffing ratios, but they are never met. Now they want to remove them completely.”
In addition to the fact that the new contract does not address the number one issue among nurses—mandatory staff-to-patient ratios—the claimed wage increases do not even rise to one-half of the cumulative increase in the cost of living over the last three years, which is 11 percent.
While the hospital previously hired scab nurses at more than $100 an hour to keep operations running, management is refusing to budge from insufficient wage increases, hoping to force nurses back on the job on the hospital’s terms.
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Throughout the strike, the Teamsters leadership has refused to broaden the struggle or mobilize the full power of the workforce to defeat Henry Ford’s offensive. While Teamsters Local 332 President Dan Glass has made public statements condemning management’s “illegal” imposition of contract terms and denouncing their “anti-union stance,” the union apparatus has not called for an expansion of the strike, for mass actions by other sections of the working class including patients, or for active outreach to other sections of health care workers.
From the beginning, the Teamsters bureaucracy has limited its actions to press releases, isolated statements to the media and a stunt rally on the picket line featuring Teamsters International President Sean O’Brien that has left workers on their own while the hospital has escalated its strikebreaking campaign.
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The strike is at a crucial juncture. Either the struggle is expanded into a broader fight uniting healthcare workers across Michigan and the US, or the strike will be defeated. The bankrupt strategy of the Teamsters has been to deliberately demoralize workers. Strikers have observed a reduction in the number of pickets since the early days of the action.
Nevertheless, there is a strong sentiment among rank-and-file workers for determined resistance, along with growing frustration with the lack of a fighting program or strategy from the union.
The WSWS calls for the immediate formation of a rank-and-file committee at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital.
Only such an independent body, democratically controlled by the strikers themselves, can chart a course toward victory by taking the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the Teamsters bureaucracy and linking the fight to a broader movement of healthcare workers, support staff and other workers in the Grand Blanc-Flint area.
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The future of patient safety and working conditions at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital requires a struggle against the control of healthcare by giant hospital chains, insurance conglomerates and pharmaceutical monopolies. The struggle for mandatory staffing ratios—where the well-being of patients and nurses alike are the priority—requires a socialist political program aimed at removing capitalist and financial interests from the healthcare industry.
As the strike approaches its third month, the determination of the workforce in Grand Blanc demonstrates the potential strength of the broader working class—provided it takes up the fight for its own interests, independent of the bureaucracies that seek to contain and betray every genuine struggle.
14. Australian welfare recipients far below the poverty line
Australians relying on welfare payments such as JobSeeker, Youth Allowance and the Parenting Payment are being forced to survive far below the poverty line, facing worsening conditions of deprivation, stress and social exclusion.
This is the stark reality exposed in the “Poverty in Australia 2025” report released last month by the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW). The report reveals not only a growing number of people in poverty, but an alarming increase in how far below the poverty line they are falling—a measure known as the poverty gap.
The findings reflect a deepening social crisis for the working class in Australia, driven by stagnant welfare payments, skyrocketing rents and increasing inequality across health, education and essential services.
The report shows that 3.7 million people, or 14.2 percent of the population, were living in poverty in 2022–23. This includes 757,000 children, many from single-parent households, who are among the most at risk. The report uses the Melbourne Institute’s “poverty line” calculation, based on 50 percent of median household after-tax income: $584 per week for a single adult, or $1,226 a week for a couple with two children.
But the headline poverty rate tells only part of the story. The depth of poverty—how far people are below the poverty line—is worsening sharply. The average shortfall for people living in poverty was $390 per week after housing costs, a figure that has increased by $18 since 2019–20. For families with children living in poverty, this figure was $464. This is not just poverty; it is unyielding hardship.
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Australia’s public systems are amplifying poverty. Underfunding has left schools and hospitals in poorer areas struggling to meet basic needs. Low-income communities are facing overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages, fewer support programs, long hospital wait times, and declining access to bulk-billed General Practitioners.
As a result, children from poor families are falling behind at school, and adults are experiencing deteriorating health due to delayed or unaffordable treatment.
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This all amounts to a decline in living standards, the likes of which has not been seen for decades. Poverty is becoming deeper, more geographically entrenched, and harder to escape.
As more Australians struggle to pay rent, skip meals, or go without health care or medication, Australia’s largest supermarket chains—Coles and Woolworths—have posted combined 2024–25 profits of some $2.5 billion.
This deepening inequality is not accidental. It is the direct result of the pro-business agenda of the ruling class, carried out most aggressively by Labor governments at the state and federal level, which have prioritized budget austerity, tax cuts for the wealthy and military spending over the needs of ordinary people.
Amid a national affordability crisis, this includes the wholesale destruction of public housing, including the Victorian Labor government’s demolition operation to tear down Melbourne’s 44 public housing towers, displacing some 10,000 working-class and poor residents. A similar scheme is underway in Sydney, with the New South Wales Labor government in the process of turfing 3,000 residents out of the Waterloo South housing estate. In both cases, the transparent aim is to vacate lucrative inner-city blocks to hand over to private developers, who will make vast profits from selling newly constructed homes in the prime locations at exorbitant prices.
The struggle for basic social rights, including secure housing, adequate welfare and access to high-quality healthcare and education, is inseparable from a broader political fight. Addressing these crises created by the capitalist system demands the building of a mass movement of the working class, rooted in socialist principles, to reshape society in the interests of the many, not the profit-driven agendas of corporations, banks, and the imperialist war machine.
15. 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.
