Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. “Anti-Communism Week”: The White House declares war on socialism
In a society where workers die daily in preventable industrial disasters, and where the richest 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, the claim to defend “freedom” and “prosperity earned through hard work” is an insult to the intelligence and experience of the broad mass of the population. Trump’s “freedom” is the freedom of the oligarchy to plunder society, destroy the planet and kill with impunity.
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The oligarchs as a whole are responding hysterically to the election of the mild social-democrat Mamdani, who in the days since the election has hastened to reassure them.
Ahab spoke of Moby Dick as a “pasteboard mask,” behind which stood an “inscrutable malice. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.” What the ruling class fears in the election is not Mamdani, who is no great whale, but the shifts in consciousness underlying his rapid rise—the spectre of revolution and expropriation.
Their hysteria arises from the fact that opposition to capitalism is rapidly growing internationally, expressed in different forms—the massive “No Kings” demonstrations on October 18, the overwhelming opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the “Gen Z” protests that are presently sweeping across Africa and polls showing that 67 percent of young people in the US have a positive or neutral view of socialism, compared to just 40 percent for capitalism.
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The oligarchs have run amok. They are terrified of socialism because they understand that the emergence of a genuine socialist movement in the working class is the principal threat to their wealth and power.
For the ruling class, the real “crimes of communism” are not the actions of the Stalinist regimes but the legacy of the 1917 Russian Revolution itself. It was the October Revolution that demonstrated, for the first time in history, the capacity of the working class to take power. Every major gain won by workers in the 20th century was won through mass struggles inspired by the Russian Revolution. It is this legacy that the ruling class is determined to destroy—through austerity, war, dictatorship and political repression.
The experiences now unfolding in the United States and around the world are discrediting the politics that have passed off as “left” for decades—the upper-middle class politics of race and gender and the dead-end reformism of the Democratic Socialists of America, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and now Mamdani—the politics of tinkering around the edges of a historically bankrupt social and economic system.
What is required is the building of a revolutionary leadership in the working class, rooted in the Marxist program of Trotskyism. The Socialist Equality Party fights to unite workers and youth internationally in the struggle for socialism—for the expropriation of the oligarchs, the transfer of power to the working class and the democratic reorganization of economic life to serve human need, not private profit.
2. United States: Three-day strike begins for nurses at University Medical Center in New Orleans
On the picket line, nurses spoke angrily about the political situation in the United States, in particular president Trump’s attacks on food stamps and Medicaid.
3. Wall Street rises but underlying contradictions intensify
As Wall Street resumes its upward momentum, at least for now, three major issues are emerging that could bring significant turmoil to the US and global financial markets. These are: when the artificial intelligence (AI) bubble will burst and what will be the consequences; the increasing role of private credit in financing riskier debt, outside the regulations that apply to banks; and the possibility of a liquidity crunch in the short-term repurchase or repo market, which plays a key role in financing trades in the US Treasury market.
4. Five South Korean workers killed, 3 three more presumed dead, in two industrial accidents
Over a two-day period in South Korea last week, up to eight workers have lost their lives in separate industrial accidents. These deaths highlight the continued disregard for workplace safety in the country and internationally as workers’ lives are sacrificed for profit.
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The government of Democrat Lee Jae-myung immediately went into the damage control that typically follows such accidents. Lee ordered officials to “mobilize all available equipment and personnel” while Prime Minister Kim Min-seok visited the site of the tower collapse on Saturday to pose for pictures in a hardhat before meeting with family members of the deceased workers.
Labor Minister Kim Yeong-hun, a former head of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), claimed the government “will proactively seek a compulsory investigation, including search and seizure, to thoroughly determine the cause of the accident.” In reality, any such “investigation” will be little more than a cover-up while the conditions that led to the tower collapse and other deadly accidents remain in place so as not to impact the profits of big business.
Lee appointed Kim, who led the KCTU from 2010 to 2012, to his position to give the impression that a “worker” was heading the Labor Ministry. The KCTU, while falsely posturing as “militant,” has always backed the ruling Democratic Party, one of the two parties of big business in South Korea. The unions have not called any strikes to defend workers’ lives or sought to organize opposition to Lee’s administration.
The integration of the KCTU leadership with that of the government underscores the trade unions’ role as defenders of the capitalist system in opposition to the interests of the working class.
These recent accidents also expose the Lee administration’s fraudulent claims that it is working to reduce workplace deaths. Workplace deaths are routinely underreported in the media. According to the Labor Ministry’s statistics, deaths from industrial accidents regularly top 2 thousand annually. Lee claimed in July that workplace deaths were “unacceptable” and amounted to “murder through willful negligence.” Yet absolutely nothing has been done.
5. Cobar mine explosion: The lessons from the Beaconsfield and Grosvenor disasters
It is now 15 days since an explosion killed two workers and left a third seriously injured at Polymetals Resources’ Endeavor silver, zinc and lead mine in Cobar, far west New South Wales (NSW).
Little is yet known about what caused the deaths of 59-year-old Ambrose Patrick McMullen and 24-year-old Holly Clarke and left Mackenzie Stirling, also 24, with possible permanent hearing damage.
Despite the uncertainty, Polymetals is rapidly proceeding towards a full reopening of the mine, with the blessing of the NSW Resources Regulator, the state mining safety body, which has left it up to the company to decide when it is safe to resume blasting operations.
The unions that cover the mining sector, the Australian Workers Union (AWU) and the Mining and Energy Union (MEU), have said nothing about the reopening, tacitly endorsing the company’s move to herd workers back into a deathtrap.
To understand the complicity of the trade unions and government safety regulators in this dangerous reopening operation and the ongoing safety issues in the mining industry more broadly, and what workers can and must do to oppose this, it is helpful to review two of Australia’s previous mining disasters.
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On April 25, 2006, mining-induced seismic activity triggered a rock-fall at Beaconsfield Gold Mine in Tasmania, trapping three workers almost 1 kilometer underground. Fourteen other miners who had been working at a lower level narrowly escaped.
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On May 6, 2020, a methane gas explosion at Anglo American’s Grosvenor underground coal mine in central Queensland left five workers with horrendous burns and other injuries.
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The Beaconsfield and Grosvenor disasters are just two among many that demonstrate that mining workers cannot entrust their health and lives to management, governments, so-called safety regulators, or the unions. The purpose of official inquiries is not just to whitewash their role but to cover up the underlying cause of all industrial accidents—the profit system and its subordination of lives of working people to profits of the super-wealthy few.
The deaths of Ambrose McMullen and Holly Clarke must not be allowed to be swept under the rug as so many have been in the past!
6. United States: Postal worker killed by mail sorting machine at Detroit area facility
A 36-year-old US Postal Service worker was killed at the Detroit Network Distribution Center (DNDC) in Allen Park, Michigan on Saturday, November 8. According to social media posts by his coworkers and friends, the worker was Nicholas (Nick) Acker of Trenton, Michigan.
Acker’s fiancé, Stephanie Jaszcz, told a local news outlet that she went to the distribution center when he did not come home from work and waited three hours before getting any help.
Firefighters found the young worker’s body stuck in a mail sorting machine. Authorities estimated he had been dead for six to eight hours before his body was found. No cause of death has been released as of this writing, but police have reported it as “accidental” and an investigation is ongoing.
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Acker was a mechanic at the postal facility who previously spent nine years in the US Air Force before working at the USPS. The two had just gotten engaged 10 days before his death and would have celebrated his 37th birthday in December. A memorial service will be held on Thursday and the funeral on Friday.
USPS released a statement indicating that the facility was up and running on Monday: “The United States Postal Service is deeply saddened by the loss of our employee at the Detroit Network Distribution Center (NDC) in Allen Park, MI. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family. The NDC is fully operational, at this time.”
Jaszcz was outraged by the statement, telling WDIV, “‘The mail’s still moving’? Gross. ‘Sorry about the loss, but the mail’s still moving.’ They couldn’t even say his name or acknowledge that he was an Air Force veteran. A man gone. A veteran. A husband. A human being. And all you can think of is mail keeps moving? Inhumane. It’s gross.”
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Just one week before Acker’s death, a notice on the USPS site, titled “No piece of mail is worth a body part,” urged workers to “be safe when operating equipment.” It cited an incident at an unnamed postal facility where a postal worker’s arm was caught and mangled in a conveyor belt at a reject mail chute.
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While USPS management attempts to shift blame for such injuries to workers, the fact that this statement was posted just before Acker’s death only underscores how prevalent such dangers are.
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Workers must not allow Acker’s death to be swept under the rug. Over the summer, the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee launched an inquiry into working conditions, to “expose conditions at USPS to the workers of the world and to arm postal workers with crucial information which they need to organize a fight.” We urge workers to join the committee and submit information about conditions in their facility.
7. United States: Democrats rally behind Chuck Schumer after vote to end shutdown on Republicans’ terms
On Tuesday, members of the House of Representatives began returning to Washington to vote on a spending package to end the longest government shutdown in US history. On Monday, eight Democratic Party–aligned senators joined 52 Republicans to advance legislation that would fund the entire government through January 30, 2026, and three sectors of the federal government through the end of September 2026.
The legislation would end the shutdown on terms dictated by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers, with no provisions, as had been demanded by the Democrats, to extend tax credits for Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) recipients, who face a doubling or tripling of premiums after January 1.
More than a cave-in, the Democrats’ debacle is a deliberate act to shore up the crisis-ridden and vastly unpopular Trump regime. The Democrats are terrified by the mounting opposition to Trump and his dictatorial agenda, for fear that it will escape politically safe channels and threaten the capitalist system, which they defend no less than the Republicans.
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While neither the House nor the Senate was in session on Tuesday due to Veterans Day, the House is expected to take up the spending bill on Wednesday. Trump has already indicated he will sign the bill once it is passed.
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In elections last Tuesday, millions voted for Democratic Party candidates because they oppose Trump’s drive to establish a dictatorship and his fascistic attacks on immigrants, which portend broader assaults on the entire working class, regardless of citizenship status. In New York, over a million voted to elect a self-described “democratic socialist,” Zohran Mamdani, as mayor.
But the Democrats are not an opposition party. They are a party of capitalism and Wall Street, dedicated to defending corporate wealth and private property above all else. Under conditions in which Trump’s popularity has collapsed, the Democrats extended a helping hand to the hated billionaire conman.
Throughout the entire shutdown, Democrats made no demands to curb Trump’s police-military dictatorship. There were no calls to end troop deployments or abolish the immigration Gestapo. As 42 million people faced hunger due to delayed food stamps, the Democrats made no demand for emergency funding to abolish hunger in the United States. Feeding America estimated in 2022 that it would cost roughly $33 billion to ensure food security for all—about 3.3 percent of the Pentagon’s $1 trillion annual budget, and less than 10 percent of the private fortunes of Elon Musk.
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In a meaningless gesture, Senate Majority Leader John Thune agreed to bring a vote on the ACA subsidies to the Senate floor in December. There is no guarantee—and it is highly unlikely—that any Republicans will support it. Even if the Senate somehow passed it, House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN on Monday he was under no obligation to even bring it up for a vote.
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he vast majority of Democrats in Congress have indicated they still support the party leadership. Asked Monday if Senator Chuck Schumer was effective as the leader of the Democrats in the Senate and should keep his job, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (Democrat-New York) replied, “Yes and yes.”
He praised the “overwhelming majority of Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer” for waging “a valiant fight over the last seven weeks, defeating the partisan Republican spending bill 14 or 15 different times, week after week after week.”
Not a single member of the Democratic Senate caucus has called on Schumer to resign, and fewer than a dozen House Democrats have done so. None of the House Democrats who called for Schumer’s resignation has said the same about House Minority Leader Jeffries, who supports Schumer.
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The Democrats’ shutdown charade has once again exposed the party as a willing partner in Trump’s drive toward dictatorship and its war on the working class. The fight against hunger, inequality and fascism must be organized independently of both capitalist parties and their pseudo-left apologists. Only through the unified, international struggle of the working class can the ruling elite’s program of war, austerity and repression be defeated.
8. Union Pacific one of 24 corporations donating to Trump’s ballroom construction
Union Pacific (UP), the largest railroad company in the United States, is one of 24 companies that have donated to Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom. Union Pacific joins other major corporations like Amazon, Meta and Google in their direct financial contribution to the ballroom, though the exact amount given by UP is unknown.
While Trump demolishes the East Wing to make room for a grand, opulent ballroom, tens of millions are facing hunger in America due to his administration’s cutoff of food stamps. The administration is using the government shutdown to dismantle social services and bring independent agencies under Trump’s direct personal control.
The donation comes after a meeting between Trump and UP CEO Jim Vena to discuss the proposed merger between UP and Norfolk Southern, which Trump has made public statements supporting. At that meeting, Vena also discussed with Trump where next to deploy the National Guard in the United States. According to Trump, he suggested the president send troops to occupy Memphis, St. Louis and Chicago. Court battles have delayed the sending of troops to Chicago so far, although ICE is running rampant throughout the area.
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The personal role of Trump in regulatory affairs, bound up with his ongoing efforts to build a presidential dictatorship, was a significant factor in the donations for his ballroom. Consumer rights group Public Citizen found that 14 of the 24 corporate donors to the ballroom’s construction are facing some kind of federal regulatory enforcement or have had that enforcement canceled by the Trump administration, including anti-trust and labor rights cases.
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Union Pacific’s contribution to Trump’s equivalent of Versailles is an expression of the direct merging of the ruling class with the state, eliminating the last pretenses of democratic forms of rule. Trump is building a dictatorial government of, by and for the oligarchy.
Only the independent mobilization of the working class in the fight against fascist dictatorship and for workers power, i.e., socialism, can stop the drive towards dictatorship.
9. Australia: Queensland Teachers Union calls off strike
The Queensland Teachers Union (QTU) last Friday cancelled a 24-hour stoppage, scheduled for this Thursday, within hours of announcing it. Instead, it asked teachers to join after-school rallies, in their own time.
The union had only initially called the strike in an attempt to head off teachers’ opposition to a union-state Liberal National Party (LNP) state government deal, which teachers overwhelmingly voted against.
The deal amounted to another real wage cut. It promised a nominal 8 percent pay “increase” over three years, as official inflation resurges to 5.2 percent annually, with housing, electricity and food prices rising far higher. To put the offer into context, rents have increased in Brisbane, the state capital, by as much as 41 percent since 2021.
The sellout deal would also have retained the intolerable working conditions responsible for unprecedented teacher resignations. Record numbers of union members cast their votes on a union-backed ballot, with almost 68 percent rejecting it.
10. Trump meets with former al-Qaeda leader Ahmed al-Sharaa at the White House
US President Donald Trump met Monday at the White House with Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former al-Qaeda leader who led the overthrow of the Syrian government last year. The meeting was a milestone in the long-term relationship of the United States with al-Qaeda-linked forces in Syria.
Commenting on the visit, the Jerusalem Post wrote:
It was a photo few could have imagined even a year ago: the president of the United States shaking hands in the White House with a man who, not long ago, was wanted for terrorism and carried a $10 million bounty on his head.
The visit by al-Sharaa was preceded just days earlier by the announcement from the State Department that it had removed him from its list of international terrorists.
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n 2001, the United States proclaimed the “war on terror,” citing as a pretext to invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. This “war on terror” was cited to erode bedrock constitutional protections against warrantless wiretapping, torture and, under the Obama administration, the extrajudicial killing of American citizens.
In 2003, US General Wesley Clark revealed that the Bush administration planned to launch “seven wars in five years,” including regime-change wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. Ultimately, Bush was able to overthrow only two of those regimes, leaving the rest to subsequent presidencies.
In 2007, US imperialism carried out what journalist Seymour Hersh called a “redirection,” allying with al-Qaeda-linked forces in an effort to reduce the power of Iran in the Middle East. In March 2011, Ahmed al-Sharaa, an al-Qaeda leader in prison in Iraq, was released. He and other Islamist militias then initiated an effort to overthrow the pro-Iranian, pro-Russian Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
Under the Obama administration, the United States set up clandestine ratlines of money and fighters in its years-long effort to overthrow the Syrian government, spending billions on an operation known as “Timber Sycamore.” This effort ultimately proved successful in December 2024 in the context of the broader US-Israeli rampage throughout the Middle East. Underlying these decades of war throughout the Middle East was the struggle by US imperialism to overturn the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Commenting on the meeting with al-Sharaa, Trump said, “He’s a very strong leader. He comes from a very tough place. Tough guy. I like him.” He added, “I get along with the president, the new president in Syria, and we’ll do everything we can to make Syria successful.”
Trump added, “People said he’s had a rough past. ... And I think, frankly, if you didn’t have a rough past, you wouldn’t have a chance.”
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On Sunday night, al-Sharaa met with members of Congress, including Florida Republican Brian Mast. Mast said in a statement, “He and I are two former soldiers and two former enemies. I asked him directly, ‘Why are we no longer enemies?’ His response was that he wishes to ‘liberate from the past and have a noble pursuit for his people and his country and to be a great ally to the United States of America.’”
The Wall Street Journal hailed the visit by al-Sharaa to the White House, proclaiming in an editorial, “Syria Comes to Washington—at Long Last.”
Commenting on the favor with which the new Syrian regime is seen in Israel, the Jerusalem Post wrote, “Israel may quietly welcome parts of this shift. A Syria linked to Washington is far preferable to one beholden to Tehran.”
The embrace of Ahmed al-Sharaa by the Trump administration demonstrates the complete fraud of the effort by factions within the pseudo-left, including France’s New Anti-Capitalist Party, the Pabloite International Viewpoint publication and the US-based International Socialist Organization, to present the US-backed regime-change operation in Syria as a “popular revolution.”
In reality, the regime headed by al-Sharaa is a bloody Islamist dictatorship, operating in alliance with US imperialism and in de facto alliance with Israel, which is carrying out a genocide against the population of Gaza. Since al-Sharaa’s coming to power, Syrian soldiers have massacred thousands of members of Syrian religious minorities, including Christians, Druze and Alawites. In a report in October, the New York Times documented “at least five separate episodes of men in military fatigues summarily executing Druse civilians, including groups of unarmed men being marched down the street to their deaths by impromptu firing squads.”
The World Socialist Web Site posts an interview with Brian Goldstone, the author of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (2025), which it reviewed earlier this year and noted how it reveals
the countless trap doors leading to homelessness or the virtually inescapable webs that hold millions of Americans in that condition once they are caught. … The very fabric of Goldstone’s narratives is the thousand and one injustices suffered by the working poor from employers, landlords, and state agencies and their representatives. … Goldstone constructs a damning brief.
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WSWS: A strength of There Is No Place for Us is that it tells compelling stories. The reader learns how homelessness really operates in the US by becoming closely concerned with Michelle, Kala, Celeste and the others. Taken together, their stories cover a great deal of ground. How did you choose your subjects for the book?
BG: When I began this project, my ambition was to represent the full range of people affected by homelessness—to include not just families but individuals, and to capture a diversity of backgrounds and circumstances. But once I started reporting in Atlanta, it became clear that this kind of demographic balancing act would have been artificial.
Although Atlanta is no longer a majority-Black city—it’s now about 47 percent Black—a staggering 93 percent of families experiencing homelessness are Black. That number isn’t incidental; it’s the product of a long history of displacement, exclusion and dispossession. If you visit a food pantry or eviction court in Atlanta, you see immediately how deeply racialized this crisis is there. What appears to be a contemporary housing emergency is, in fact, the cumulative result of an entire history of predatory capitalism. The five families I follow in the book reflect that historical reality.
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WSWS: In Atlanta, as your book shows, as in most large cities perhaps, gentrification is a process that devastates sections of the working class. Could you briefly describe what you saw of that process?
BG: I think the most accurate definition of gentrification comes from the LA Tenants Union, which calls it “the displacement and replacement of the poor for profit.” That’s exactly what I witnessed in Atlanta. Gentrification isn’t simply about changing tastes, new coffee shops or shifting demographics—it’s about how land and housing are transformed into vehicles of wealth extraction. Before an area gentrifies, it first has to become gentrifiable, and that happens at the level of city planning—or more precisely, through the collusion of urban planning and real estate capital.
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BG: One of the more perverse dynamics I try to illuminate in the book is that this is a homelessness crisis born less of poverty than of prosperity. It’s wrong to say that people are “falling” into homelessness. They’re being pushed. They’re casualties of their city’s “success”—victims not of a failing economy but of one that, by most conventional measures, is thriving, just not for them. And when people are pushed out of gentrifying neighborhoods, they often end up in areas that have been hollowed out by what geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment.” These places—where housing is substandard, services are stripped away, and the infrastructure has collapsed—don’t just coexist alongside newly redeveloped neighborhoods. They’re produced by them. They’re two sides of the same process, like a balloon squeezed at one end. That’s the geography of inequality that defines so many American cities today.
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WSWS: One of the most chilling aspects of There Is No Place for Us is the gradual revelation that homelessness and poverty are themselves an industry. From grocery stores that buy food stamps for 50 cents on the dollar to extended-stay hotels that are owned by Wall Street investment firms like Blackstone, low-wage workers appear to be caught in an extortion racket. Can you recount your discovery of how the profit motive plays a role in perpetuating homelessness?
BG: One of the most astonishing discoveries for me in reporting this book was realizing that, at every turn in these families’ journeys, there were entire business models designed to profit from their hardship. We talk a lot about the “housing crisis,” but what we’re really living through is the financialization of housing: the transformation of homes into financial instruments and people’s instability into a source of profit.
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WSWS: In the book, you advocate for a reform policy called social housing. What is social housing, and what changes to the current system would its implementation require?
BG: Social housing is essentially a public option for housing. It’s a model that takes homes permanently off the speculative market and treats housing as an essential public good. The private market, left to its own devices, will never be incentivized to build or maintain housing that’s affordable to those who need it most. Simply loosening regulations or subsidizing developers won’t change that. Under a social housing system, homes can be owned and operated by municipal governments, nonprofits or limited-equity cooperatives, but rents are tied to income, not to market demand. The idea is to guarantee stability rather than higher and higher profits.
12. Drop all charges against students protesting Israeli troops at University of Michigan!
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the youth section of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), denounces the arrest of three pro-Palestinian protesters, and the violent suppression of a demonstration against the Gaza genocide at the University of Michigan (U-Mich) on October 22. We call on all students, workers and faculty at the university and beyond to mobilize in defense of those arrested and demand the dropping of all charges.
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The charges against the protesters, who have been released from jail, are baseless attacks on free speech and political expression. The University of Michigan is providing a platform and protecting perpetrators of genocide, while attacking those who protest genocidal war crimes and mass murder.
The October 22 arrests are a continuation and escalation of the University of Michigan administration’s assault on democratic rights. The administration brought disciplinary charges against 11 pro-Palestinian protesters in July and seven more in September.
Among the initial 11 charged were four protesters previously charged by Democratic Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel for their participation in anti-genocide demonstrations between September 2024 and January 2025. Those charges were dropped in May.
In the aftermath of Trump’s 2024 election, the university administration has worked to align itself with the fascist demands of the new administration to suppress any and all political opposition to both the foreign and domestic crimes of the ruling class. The establishment of the Office of Student Accountability (OSA) and the overhaul of the Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities (SSRR) have given administrators sweeping powers to bypass due process and retroactively apply new disciplinary standards.
These bureaucratic tools are being weaponized to punish students for anti-war and anti-genocide activism under the guise of maintaining “safety” and “inclusivity.” The administration’s claim that protests are “disruptive” to campus life is a pretext for silencing opposition to US-backed atrocities abroad and suppressing the growing movement of students and workers who reject the university’s complicity in war and repression.
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Students and workers at U-Mich who want to oppose the attack on the pro-Palestinian protesters cannot limit their opposition to appeals to the administration and the Board of Regents, a body composed of members of both ruling class parties, predominantly Democrats, and the financial elite.
The opposition to the attack on democratic rights and the suppression of anti-war sentiment must be independent of the Democratic Party and all other representatives of US imperialism and its financial oligarchy. The Democrats are motivated solely by the need to keep a lid on the massive social opposition that is bubbling up across the country. As shown by their agreement to end the government shutdown on Trump’s terms, they not opponents of Trump, but his accomplices.
The IYSSE fights for the building of an independent anti-war movement led by the international working class and armed with socialist principles, which will spearhead the struggle against the source of war, genocide and dictatorship: the capitalist system.
13. Workers and youth speak out against hunger at Michigan food banks (videos included)
14. Workplace-related deaths in Canada show no signs of decline
A spate of recent workplace-related deaths in Canada makes clear that conditions for workers in the country’s industrial slaughterhouse remain unchanged. With advanced plans for imperialist war unfolding and stepped-up demands for increased corporate profitability from the Liberal government of banker Prime Minister Mark Carney, the working class faces a return to the brutal conditions that prevailed in the sweatshops of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Without exception, the deaths were avoidable. They speak to unsafe working conditions, inadequate safety regulations and a criminal justice system that protects employers whose practices lead to the injury or death of their workers.
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According to the logic of capitalism, workers must remain on the job and slave tirelessly to generate corporate profits and build instruments of death. If a worker dies during the course of their duties, they merely become grist for the mill. So much the better, because they will not become a drain on corporate profits in their retirement.
No better example of this reality exists than the treatment of the world’s entire population by their respective governments during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which is estimated to have needlessly killed 30 million people globally since 2020. Countless workers were thrust into workplaces that became breeding grounds for the disease, infecting them, their children, and the elderly.
In Canada, at least 60,000 people have died of COVID-19. Governments across the country and the political spectrum, from the “left-wing” New Democratic Party (NDP) to the Liberals, Conservatives and Coalition Avenir Quebec, promoted the eugenicist line that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.” The disease was allowed to spread unchecked and the vital public health science of vaccinations and quarantine subjected to attack.
What limited reforms and protective measures remain are being rapidly stripped away, or are at best a complete farce. The Westray Law, federal Bill C-45, was legislated in 2004 to establish criminal liability for organizations in cases of workplace death and injury. It took its name from the Westray coal mine in Nova Scotia, where 26 miners lost their lives in a methane explosion in May 1992.
To date, only three individuals and seven corporations have been convicted under Bill C-45. The maximum fine levied was $1.4 million. In other words, the cost of doing business.
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Social inequality is soaring as the top 10 percent of the population monopolize the country’s wealth and income. The ability to strike, a fundamental right won through bitter struggle, is effectively a dead letter, as illustrated by the federal Liberal government’s outlawing of recent strikes of Air Canada flight attendants, Canada Post, railway and port workers. Long-held preparations for war against Russia and China are set to reduce tens or hundreds of thousands of workers to nothing more than cannon fodder.
In the face of the most severe social crisis since the Great Depression and the Second World War, the trade unions, in partnership with their allies in the NDP, have nothing to offer the working class but further poverty, hardship, and dangerous workplaces carrying the risk of injury and death.
For years, the leadership of the unions has collaborated with the NDP to maintain the big business Liberal party in power as they ran roughshod over workers’ rights and slashed social spending in favor of corporate subsidies and the military.
When workers have rebelled by voting for strike action in numbers unseen for decades, the union leadership has straitjacketed their struggles, keeping them isolated from one another and starving them out on poverty rations. This parasitic social layer does this to maintain their privileges and prop up the capitalist system which affords them a seat at the employers’ table.
Workplace-related deaths will not stop unless workers take their struggles into their own hands. To defend their lives and livelihoods, workers must break with the trade union apparatus and the NDP, which function as instruments of the corporations and the state. Rank-and-file committees, coordinated through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), must be built to wage a conscious political struggle for socialism.
15. The Disappearance of Josef Mengele: An outstanding film about the Nazi war criminal in exile
The film The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, currently showing in German cinemas, is an outstanding work that nevertheless leaves viewers with a feeling of perplexity.
Alongside Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele is the most notorious public face of the Holocaust. Born in 1911 in Günzburg in southern Germany to an industrialist family, he sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths as the “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz. He stood at the ramp when the cattle cars packed with people arrived and decided with a wave of his hand who would go straight to the gas chambers (mainly children, pregnant women, the elderly and those unfit for work), who would suffer a slower death through forced labour, and who would be subjected to the cruel medical experiments carried out by the trained doctor and racial theorist and his team.
The film focuses on the thirty years Mengele spent in exile in Latin America after the defeat of the Nazi regime. Mengele had first hidden in Germany for four years and then fled to Argentina in 1949 via the so-called “rat line.” In Argentina the Nazis did not have to fear persecution under President Juan Perón. Old Nazi networks, the Vatican, the Spanish Franco dictatorship and American secret services helped thousands of German war criminals to flee in this way at the time.
The film shows how Mengele, who initially led a comfortable life thanks to the generous support of his family, sinks deeper and deeper into physical and mental decline. The German authorities refused to issue an arrest warrant for the internationally wanted war criminal until 1959, and Mengele could count on the support of South American governments. Nevertheless, he felt increasingly hounded and repeatedly changed his place of residence and country. His fears where compounded when the Israeli secret service kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960, even though Mengele was already living in Paraguay at the time and could count on the support of the German-born dictator Alfredo Stroessner.
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In 1958, Mengele was able to celebrate his second wedding with Nazi friends at a lavish party, but he ended his life as a bitter, grey-haired old man in a run-down hovel in a poor neighborhood of Sao Paulo. He died in a swimming accident in 1979. However, it took years before his body was conclusively identified.
*****
The film’s screenplay is based on the 2017 novel of the same name by French author Olivier Guez, who spent three years conducting intensive research for the book. Guez is well versed in the subject matter. He also co-wrote the screenplay for the film The People vs. Fritz Bauer, which focuses on the role of the Frankfurt public prosecutor in tracking down Adolf Eichmann. Bauer, who in 1963 initiated the first Auschwitz trial in Germany, bypassed the German government and contacted the Israeli secret service because the Adenauer government was covering up for Eichmann.
Although the film focuses entirely on Mengele as a person, it paints a devastating picture of German society—or rather, its ruling elites. They have as little sense of wrongdoing as Mengele himself.
*****
The film paints an impressive picture of Mengele as an incorrigible Nazi and his entourage, who protect and support him. However, what conclusions should we draw? The film gives no answer, not even a hint. As one reviewer put it: “Kirill Serebrennikov’s film does not provide any easy answers; it stirs, disturbs and asks uncomfortable questions about history, entanglement and responsibility.”
*****
This is no small thing. At a time when right-wingers and fascists are on the rise again in numerous countries—from the USA to Italy and France to Germany—these questions are important. Both the lead actor, August Diehl, and the director, Kirill Serebrennikov, have emphasised the film’s current relevance.
At a press conference, Diehl explained that Mengele was no exception: “These are people who spring up like mushrooms in a certain system, in war situations, in dictatorships, because they are suddenly needed. A dictatorship needs psychopaths. They suddenly get completely normal jobs, for example as police officers or doctors. And that’s the case everywhere, even today.”
Diehl continued: “I think that in a healthier society, these people would not rise so high. In a sick society, on the other hand, they rise very high. That was also a very important insight for me: these systems still exist in our world. The situation is really terrible at the moment, which may also have something to do with the fact that a certain culture of remembrance is not being cultivated, that we are forgetting these people, forgetting these phenomena, that things are actually repeating themselves ...”
Diehl makes an important point here. Society is indeed sick. The reason, however, is not simply the lack of a culture of remembrance, but the capitalist basis of society. Eighty years after the end of the Second World War, Germany’s ruling class is once again preparing for war against Russia, while historians revise German history to justify fascism. The film deserves a wide audience.
16. United Kingdom: Your Party’s factional warfare: The real issue for workers is reform or revolution
The founding conference of Your Party is scheduled for the weekend of November 29-30, in Liverpool. But it will now take place amid factional infighting that will split it in two and may even prevent it from taking place at all.
16. Transport for Greater Manchester workers strike continues over dismal pay offer
Far from Labour Mayor Andy Burnham’s PR, claiming the Bee Network as an exemplar for public transport, every section of public transport workers in Greater Manchester are revolting against the shoddy pay and conditions that have been enforced by TfGM and the private operators.
Ward took no responsibility last Thursday for the failure of their supposed “reset” with EP Group. Instead, he claimed the three-year pay deal and Framework Agreement with billionaire Daniel Kretinsky was “the foundation of the future” and a break from “what you’ve been experiencing in the last three or four years”.
18. Explosion at perfume warehouse in Turkey: 6 workers, including 2 children, killed
This disaster constitutes an indictment of all the capitalist elites and the state, from workplace owners to local authorities, ministries, and the presidency.
19. Czech Republic: Election winner Babiš forms coalition with far-right parties
The enormous military and war expenditures, paid for through deep social cuts, are fundamentally incompatible with democracy. This is why far-right and fascist forces are being brought into government in the Czech Republic—to crush working-class opposition.
20. UPS temporarily grounds aircraft model involved in deadly Louisville crash
Following the horrific crash of its cargo plane in Louisville, Kentucky, UPS temporarily grounded its fleet of MD-11 aircraft. This model was involved in the disaster that killed at least 14 people, including three crew members. It accounts for about 9 percent of the UPS Airlines fleet, which comprises more than 500 planes.
The crash occurred on November 4 at Worldport, the main UPS hub in Louisville, at 5:15 p.m. local time. During takeoff, the left engine of the Honolulu-bound plane caught fire and immediately detached from the wing. The plane crashed in a dense industrial area near the Muhammad Ali International Airport, causing a huge fire. In addition to the 14 deaths, several people remain unaccounted for. The incident is the deadliest crash in UPS Airlines history.*****
On the grounding of MD-11s, the company said in a statement: “We made this decision proactively at the recommendation of the aircraft manufacturer.” They added: “Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our employees and the communities we serve.”
In fact, the grounding of the MD-11s is a reactive measure aimed at controlling the public relations damage from the disaster.
*****
A day after UPS and FedEx grounded their MD-11s, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued an emergency directive prohibiting flight for these planes until all of them are properly inspected. The agency concluded that “the unsafe condition is likely to exist or develop in other products of the same type design.” It said that flights may resume after “all applicable corrective actions are performed.”
Like the UPS decision to ground the MD-11, the FAA’s order was reactive. It came too late to prevent the Louisville crash and the loss of lives. Moreover, the directive was issued during an ongoing government shutdown during which the FAA has furloughed about 25 percent of its 44,829 employees. The remaining workers are going without pay, including 13,294 air traffic controllers.
*****
More details about the crash and the plane involved will eventually emerge. But whatever new information the investigation uncovers, the fundamental cause of this disaster is the subordination of safety to the interests of profit.
21. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
