Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. US hands off Latin America! Halt Trump’s killing spree!
The sailing of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford into Caribbean waters has dramatically escalated the threat of an imminent US imperialist war against Venezuela and Latin America more broadly.
The US military escalation comes close on the heels of “War Secretary” Peter Hegseth’s latest triumphant announcement of a pair of US missile strikes over the weekend, sinking two small boats and killing six more people. This has brought the death toll from the Trump administration’s criminal murder spree against unarmed civilians off South America’s coasts to at least 76. There have been 20 such attacks since they began on September 2, evenly split between the southern Caribbean waters off Venezuela and the eastern Pacific coast of Colombia.
Having carried out a savage series of what the United Nations has described as “extra-judicial executions” and war crimes, US imperialism is now preparing far greater atrocities.
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US military analysts have described the US Naval force off the northern tip of South America as the largest assembled since the first US Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. It is by far the largest force deployed in the region since the 1989 US invasion of Panama.
The claim that this unprecedented deployment is for the purpose of interdicting cocaine shipments is patently absurd. What is being prepared is a full-scale imperialist war with incalculable consequences.
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That the Trump administration is preparing to drag the American people into yet another war of aggression based upon lies has been clear from the outset of its Caribbean killing spree. The designation of Venezuelan and Colombian fishermen as “enemy combatants” and “narco-terrorists” in no way legalizes their slaughter. And the pretense that Venezuela is a significant source for the flow of drugs to the US is belied by every credible report from both US intelligence and international agencies.
What are the real aims of the would-be dictator Donald Trump and the financial oligarchy that he represents?
To topple the government of Nicolás Maduro and impose a fascist US puppet dictatorship in its place;
To secure unrestrained US corporate control over Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest on the planet, so as to deny them to Washington’s principal strategic rival, China, and prepare for global war;
To stave off economic crisis and financial collapse through outright plunder; and
To impose the shackles of US neo-colonial subjugation not only on Venezuela but the entire Western Hemisphere.
The US escalation was accompanied by a report Tuesday that the British government has ordered a halt to intelligence-sharing with the US on drug trafficking in the Caribbean, where London still controls a few island remnants of its former empire.
The reason given is that the UK does not want to implicate itself in war crimes against the unarmed civilians being blown out of the water by US missiles. But British imperialism has fought shoulder to shoulder with the US in previous criminal wars of mass slaughter, from Korea to the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. If it is expressing qualms this time, it is no doubt due to imperialist interests, rather than any newfound moral scruples. The British ruling class, on the one hand, fears that it will be left out of any carve-up of Venezuela and, on the other, is increasingly at odds with Washington on everything from the Ukraine war to ever-changing American tariffs.
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What is the “Trump Doctrine” or, as it is cynically referred to in the White House, the “Donroe Doctrine”? The seminal Monroe Doctrine was promulgated in 1823 as a warning against any attempt by the reactionary monarchical powers of Europe to recolonize the newly independent republics of Latin America. With the rise of US imperialism, however, it underwent profound changes as the US laid claim to Spain’s colonies in the 1898 Spanish-American War and suppressed the revolutionary strivings of the peoples of those colonies, particularly in Cuba, in order to assert US domination.
In 1904, President Teddy Roosevelt unveiled the so-called “Big Stick” corollary to the doctrine, arrogating to US imperialism the right to exercise “police power” wherever it perceived “wrongdoing or impotence” in the hemisphere. This set the stage for some 50 direct US military interventions.
By the latter half of the 20th century, the doctrine became inextricably intertwined with the Cold War and a global anti-communist crusade that saw US-backed fascist-military dictatorships take power throughout much of South and Central America, murdering, torturing and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of workers, students and other opponents of US domination and military rule.
The “Trump Doctrine” retains all of the counterrevolutionary features that emerged in the 20th century but stripped of any of the hypocritical pretense that Washington is pursuing lofty goals of “freedom” and “democracy.” It consists of nothing more than the gangster insistence that US might makes right and that Washington will seize whatever its military power allows it.
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US imperialism’s foreign policy is an extension of its domestic policy by other means. Washington is preparing to launch a war against Venezuela, even as the Trump administration proclaims its war against US cities and the “enemy within.” It has waged a pitiless police state operation against immigrant workers, including, paradoxically, stripping some 600,000 Venezuelans of Temporary Protection Status, a measure that is deeply unpopular in Venezuela. Meanwhile, it is seeking the deployment of US Army troops to major urban areas to suppress opposition.
Even as Trump justifies a military strike on Venezuela with his absurd claims of the Maduro government orchestrating the flow of migrants driven by Washington’s own brutal economic sanctions and of running drug cartels, so it will inevitably seize upon an armed conflict in South America as the pretext for demanding even greater police state powers within the US itself.
Washington is driven to seek by means of criminal violence solutions to intractable problems rooted in the contradictions of US and global capitalism. There is an appearance of lunacy in the war aims of US imperialism in Latin America. It cannot reverse the rise of China as South America’s premier trading partner with bombs and missiles, outside of an all-out world war. But that, along with drive toward fascist dictatorship, is the road upon which it is marching.
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Workers on both sides of the Rio Grande must grasp the reality that they are the real target of imperialism and must join hands across national borders in a unified struggle against imperialist war and to put an end to the capitalist system which is its source.
Why Fascists Fear Teachers is not a serious work of political analysis. It fails to explain the rise of Trump, the nature of fascism, or the social forces behind authoritarianism. To be blunt, the book is a banal and dishonest work whose main goal is to hide the role of the Democratic Party and union bureaucracies in paving the way for Trump’s fascistic movement. It aims to disarm educators and workers, not prepare them for struggle.
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The author begins with a description of the nonviolent resistance of Norwegian teachers during the Nazi occupation (1940-1945), symbolized by wearing paper clips. Teachers responded to the pro-Nazi Quisling government’s decision to shut down schools by continuing to teach their students, holding classes in private and refusing to join a union controlled by storm troopers.
Despite the bravery and resilience of these teachers, including nearly 500 who were sent to work camps for their resistance, this example deliberately misstates the lessons from the fight against fascism in that period and the nature of tasks teachers face. Today, we are not under a fascist occupation; workers are not defeated and atomized by an army of stormtroopers.
The issue isn’t what to do after fascism, but how to stop the developing conspiracy for dictatorship. There is massive opposition to Trump, as expressed in the October 18 “No Kings” demonstrations across the country. There is enormous popular anger over the deployment of ICE agents and military troops to Chicago and other cities, as well as the withholding of food stamps as Trump builds a White House ballroom for the oligarchy. The burning question is: What political program and organizational forms are necessary to mobilize the working class to drive Trump and his fascist cabal from power?
Instead, Weingarten insists that “resistance” means “keep teaching”—that is, staying on the job. Indeed, preventing strikes and corralling teachers behind “Remember in November” and other campaigns to support the Democratic Party has been Weingarten’s unbroken record. Her book and speaking tour are an attempt to paralyze the growing opposition to dictatorship.
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...Weingarten heads a union capable of launching a nationwide strike of educators against austerity, privatization and the fascistic policies of Trump and his allies. But this is the last thing the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party want. That is because, despite their tactical differences with Trump, they defend the same class interests as he does.
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The book falsely claims the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike was a “clear victory” for educators, citing supposed commitments to hire more teachers and increase pay. In reality, the pseudo-left leaders of the CTU, under the direction of the AFT and Weingarten, surrendered to city demands: 4,000 jobs were lost, 49 schools closed, and contract terms were locked in. This resulted in major attacks on teachers, including a longer school year, weaker job security and increased standardized testing.
In exchange, Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel assisted the CTU bureaucracy in getting its foot into the door to “organize” the poorly paid and highly exploited teachers in the expanding charter schools in the city. Shortly thereafter, the CTU and AFT largely dropped their rhetoric against charters.
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During Trump’s second term, the AFT president has deliberately blocked strikes by educators in Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities in California and Minneapolis, which would have become catalysts for a broader struggle by educators against Trump and his fascist policies.
Asked by a WSWS reporter at a recent Detroit area event why every AFT and National Education Association member was not currently on strike to oppose Trump’s existential threat to public education and all democratic rights, Weingarten replied, “I’m not opposed to a strike. A strike is one of the vehicles that one does. They are normally an economic vehicle against a boss.”
Weingarten’s evasive statement that she is “not opposed to a strike” against Trump is belied by the fact that the AFT bureaucracy and its counterparts in the NEA (National Education Association) have worked might and main to prevent any such collective action. This has only emboldened Trump to escalate his attack on public education, immigrants and democratic rights.
What does Weingarten propose? She sums this up with a few platitudes:
“Keep teaching. Keep welcoming. Keep advocating. Keep organizing.”
“We fight not only in our classrooms, but in the courts, in Congress, and in the court of public opinion.”
In other words, Weingarten preaches prostration in the face of the fascist president who ignores the law, controls the highest court and, if he permits another election, plans to do so under martial law.
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Weingarten is incapable of presenting a historical and scientific analysis of fascism and goes so far as to declare that an “exact definition of fascism is not important.” It is simply a coalition of people who “oppose diversity and pluralism” and “want to shrink government,” she says, deliberately separating the violent suppression of democratic rights—which is an international phenomenon—from the social and class forces that are employing it to defend their rule.
In his 1934 work, “Whither France?” the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky explained the basic features and causes of fascism:
The bourgeoisie is leading its society to complete bankruptcy. It is capable of assuring the people neither bread nor peace. This is precisely why it cannot any longer tolerate the democratic order. It is forced to smash the workers by the use of physical violence. The discontent of the workers and peasants, however, cannot be brought to an end by the police alone, ... That is why finance capital is obliged to create special armed bands, trained to fight the workers just as certain breeds of dog are trained to hunt game. The historic function of Fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.
Today, American capitalism is facing an acute crisis: a decades-long economic decay and decline, the explosion of corporate, government and other forms of debt, the rise of powerful rivals like China, unprecedented levels of social inequality and mass hostility from ever more economically distressed workers and young people against the corporate and financial oligarchy. The oligarchy’s program of social counterrevolution—the destruction of public education, Social Security, Medicare and other vital social programs—cannot be achieved peacefully.
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Weingarten makes more than half a million dollars a year as AFT president, and is no doubt a multi-millionaire herself. She is therefore desperate to conceal these revolutionary implications from the working class. The antidote to fascism, she claims, is the expansion of unions, which she asserts are “models of democracy.”
To reach this conclusion, Weingarten draws a fundamentally false conclusion from the coincidence of the rise of inequality and extreme right-wing politics over the last four decades and the substantial decline in union membership. She claims that inequality was caused by the decline in union membership, and therefore the expansion of unions would lead to a lessening of inequality and strengthen democracy.
But this turns reality upside down. Union membership fell as a consequence of the bureaucratized unions all but abandoning strikes over the last four decades, in the name of boosting the “competitiveness” and profitability of American capitalism.
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Weingarten’s claim that unions are “models of democracy” would come as a surprise to rank-and-file teachers who are routinely kept in the dark by union bureaucrats cutting backroom deals with city and school officials. Weingarten—who has been president for 17 years—is not even elected by the membership but installed by delegates loyal to the apparatus at the AFT’s biannual national convention.
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Weingarten—who had a reported income of $514,488 last year, or eight times an average teacher—presents herself throughout the book as an ordinary teacher, recalling her days at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, New York. This is highly disingenuous, as this was her only teaching job—a part-time position assigned to her by the union bureaucracy. At the same time, the trained lawyer was already the chief negotiator for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).
Her long career is as a highly paid union bureaucrat, a major national money manager overseeing billions of dollars in pension funds, and, most critically, a US State Department asset.
Weingarten’s political outlook was shaped by the legacy of Max Shachtman and Cold War anticommunism. Shachtman, who abandoned the Fourth International and Trotskyism and became an advocate for US imperialism during the Korean War, Bay of Pigs and Vietnam War, mentored UFT President Albert Shanker and Weingarten’s predecessor, Sandra Feldman. Shanker founded the AFL-CIO-backed Education International to combat socialist-oriented unions around the world. Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America also emerged from this circle, designed to keep opposition movements contained within the Democratic Party.
Weingarten stands squarely in this lineage. In her book, she praises Shanker as her “mentor” and “one of the greatest union leaders and civic leaders of the twentieth century.” Weingarten’s worldview is an updated version of Shachtmanism: American capitalism as the defender of “democracy,” the unions as patriotic institutions, socialism as the enemy.
A member of the Democratic National Committee from 2002 to mid-2025, Weingarten traveled in 2014 to Ukraine to support the US-instigated Maidan coup, implemented primarily by far-right shock troops, including the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party.
In line with the Democratic Party’s preoccupation with war against Russia, Weingarten’s book goes out of its way to repeatedly describe Putin as a fascist. The two primary academic sources in Why Teachers Fear Fascists are Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum, vehement pro-war hawks with deep ties to the US State Department and right-wing extremists. Snyder, with whom Weingarten has worked since 2008, relativizes the Nazis and whitewashes collaborationist crimes in Eastern Europe in his book Bloodlands.
As an ardent Zionist, Weingarten backed the Biden-Trump funding and direction of Netanyahu’s genocide as “Israel’s right to defend itself.” Despite her protests in the book against the attack on free speech and campus protests, Weingarten previously smeared opposition to the genocide as “antisemitic” and allowed teachers to be fired and victimized for speaking up.
Weingarten’s book is a response to the rising radicalization among teachers and students who are coming into direct conflict with the Democratic Party, the union bureaucracy and the capitalist system they defend.
The Democrats long ago abandoned the social reforms associated with the New Deal and Great Society programs, embraced privatization, promoted identity politics and played a central role in driving the growth of inequality under the administrations of Clinton, Obama and Biden. This rightward shift is the outcome of the collapse of American capitalism’s economic and political dominance.
An experienced politician, Weingarten senses the impending and explosive eruption of the class struggle and profound leftward shift within the population. Earlier this year, she resigned her DNC post and recently promoted DSA member Zohran Mamdani, now the mayor of New York. Her book is aimed at putting an “anti-fascist” mask on the Democratic Party, even as it collaborates with Trump’s program of austerity and war.
Furthermore, as a leader of the anticommunist union federation Education International, she is highly aware of and concerned about the growing global class struggle among teachers, alongside a broad movement of workers internationally. This year alone has seen strikes involving 1.2 million educators in Iraq, 51,000 teachers in Alberta, Canada and mass teacher strikes in Kenya, Cameroon, Mongolia and Nigeria. In May, 20,000 Mexican education workers began a sustained strike, and major teachers’ strikes have taken place in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Panama and Israel.
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To mobilize the enormous social strength of the working class, new organizations of struggle, democratically controlled by workers themselves, must be established. Rank-and-file committees in every school, workplace and neighborhood must be built as centers of resistance to Trump’s attack on democratic and social rights.
These committees must abolish the union apparatus and transfer power to the rank and file. They will link up the struggle of educators, parents and students with health care, manufacturing, logistics, service, technology, cultural and other sections of the working class, to prepare collective struggle, including a general strike, to defend immigrants and the right to public education, healthcare, free speech and other social and democratic rights. This is the only way to drive Trump and his fascist cabal from power.
The lessons of history demonstrate that fascism cannot be crushed outside expropriating the oligarchs behind it and redistributing their ill-gotten fortunes to fund universal education, healthcare, and secure employment for all. This requires breaking completely from the two parties of Wall Street and fighting for workers’ power and socialism to end the threat of fascism, dictatorship and war for good.
3. Email dump confirms Epstein’s role as purveyor to Trump and entire US ruling class
A new tranche of more than 20,000 emails obtained from the Jeffrey Epstein estate has further exposed the deep integration of Epstein, a convicted sex trafficker, into the highest levels of the American and international bourgeoisie long after his 2008 conviction.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three emails, which the New York Times prominently reported on Wednesday morning, substantiating Trump’s links to Epstein. The emails prove that Epstein trafficked women in proximity to and with Trump, and that the media, financial and political establishment worked to suppress this information for years.
The most extraordinary of the initial batch of emails released on Tuesday by House Democrats is an April 2, 2011 exchange between Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein wrote:
“i want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there”
Maxwell replied only hours later: “I have been thinking about that…”
The email directly contradicts Maxwell’s claims to Assistant Attorney General Todd Blanche over the summer that Trump was a “perfect gentleman” and “never around the girls.” It shows Epstein explicitly reminding Maxwell that Trump had spent “hours” with a trafficking victim at his residence, believed to be Virginia Giuffre, and that this fact, the “dog that hasn’t barked,” had never been publicly exposed.
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In a panicked attempt to shield Trump, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee responded to the initial Democratic “leak” by releasing a massive batch of emails, images and documents from the Epstein estate. This had the opposite effect as it provided further proof that Epstein remained in close and constant contact with powerful figures in media, finance, government, academia and foreign policy after serving his work-release sentence in 2009. The emails confirm a criminal ruling class deeply intertwined with Epstein and fully aware of his conduct.
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The American ruling class presides over a justice system built not on law but on class privilege. The Epstein files give a glimpse of a degenerate elite that trafficked children and young women, protected abusers, suppressed evidence, manipulated the press and now openly blocks efforts to uncover the truth.
More revelations from the emails will surface in the coming days. What has emerged so far already indicts the entire financial aristocracy and its political and media servants.
4. Mamdani reassures Wall Street with deputy mayor appointment
New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced Tuesday the first appointments of his incoming administration, including Dean Fuleihan, a Democratic Party insider, as his first deputy mayor. The unusually early appointment—just a week after Mamdani’s election victory—of the long-time operative sends a clear signal that his incoming administration will operate well within the limits acceptable to the political establishment.
Fuleihan, who is 74 years old, has been involved in Democratic politics in New York for five decades. Most recently, he was appointed by Governor Kathy Hochul to the New York Financial Control Board, which was created amid the city’s near bankruptcy in 1975 to enforce budgetary discipline on behalf of finance capital.
Mamdani tapped Fuleihan to return to the role he held from 2018 to 2021 under Mayor Bill de Blasio. Prior to that, Fuleihan was de Blasio’s budget director, where he was responsible for negotiating contracts with the city’s 300,000-strong municipal workforce.
Fuleihan worked with the union bureaucrats to set pattern contracts with around two percent annual wage increases, together with cuts to benefits, including setting the stage for the privatization of health care for city retirees. Resolving these contracts—all of which had been expired for years—on terms advantageous to the city without provoking mass worker resistance was one of the principal tasks facing the de Blasio administration.
Fuleihan has also held several positions in the state Assembly, rising to become the right-hand man of former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Silver was the embodiment of the Democratic Party establishment in Albany, a capitalist power broker known as one of the “three men in a room” (alongside the governor and State Senate Majority Leader) who controlled state government. Ultimately, Silver died in prison in 2022, while serving a six-and-a-half-year term for taking $4 million in bribes.
Speaking of Fuleihan to City and State, Kathy Wylde, the CEO of the business association Partnership for New York City, quipped, “He knows where all the bodies are buried. Let’s put it that way.”
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By staffing his administration with Democratic Party operatives acceptable to the city’s corporate and financial leaders, Mamdani is underscoring that his incoming administration is not aimed at breaking the stranglehold of the ruling oligarchy, but instead working with them to contain opposition.
The situation facing broad masses of workers in New York City, as elsewhere around the country, is explosive. Social conditions are characterized above all by a deepening social crisis in which the cost of housing, food, transportation, and other necessities is increasingly out of reach. At the same time, the level of wealth of the top layers on Wall Street and in corporate suites is obscene.
Mamdani attracted the largest number of votes in over 50 years, based on his appeal to rein in higher prices and thus deal with the affordability crisis. The broad popular discontent behind Mamdani’s election is what has fueled the vicious attacks on the mayor-elect from the Trump administration.
What those who voted for Mamdani are getting, however, is misdirection, a fresh face that rhetorically speaks to workers’ concerns while behind the scenes preparing an administration staffed by those with a long history of serving the ruling class.
Mamdani’s appointment of Fuleihan is a demonstration that the new mayor will abide by the dictates of the ruling class. His promises of free childcare, free buses and a rent freeze are contingent upon whatever they are willing to accept. He is speaking to the oligarchs to reassure them, not to mobilize a struggle against them.
5. Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War
ITV, a British TV terrestrial channel, has screened a 75-minute documentary presenting first-hand accounts of the Israel-Hamas war by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) veterans and reservists who have served in the conflict.
Their testimonies are first-hand accounts of war crimes perpetrated by the self-proclaimed “the most moral army in the world”, flatly contradicting the IDF’s insistence that it operates in accordance with international law and takes measures to minimize civilian harm in its genocidal assault on Gaza.
Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s war, produced by Matan Cohen and directed by the award-winning British Iranian filmmaker Ben Zand, presents valuable evidence of Israel’s crimes. But it is nevertheless limited. Showing film of the October 7 attack, it accepts the narrative of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that this supposedly entirely unforeseen event was the cause of the now two-year long war of annihilation, failing to mention he had been given numerous warnings that attack was imminent, and he had stood down the security forces.
The documentary provides no historical context to the plight of the Palestinians in general and that of Gaza in particular, who have for decades suffered wars, ethnic cleansing and dispossession at the hands of the Zionist state. It does not explain that since taking office in December 2022, Netanyahu’s far-right government, aided and abetted by gangs of fascist settlers, launched one provocation after another aimed at eliciting precisely such a retaliation by the Palestinians that could be used to justify an all-out war on the Palestinians. Much less, does the documentary place the war in the broader context of US imperialism’s plans to reorganize the resource-rich Middle East in its own interests, using Israel as its attack dog to fight “wars on seven fronts”.
In essence, Breaking Ranks presents the war as a just one that got out of hand.
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Crucially, however, it cites the recollections of veteran soldiers and reservists who willingly, even enthusiastically, signed up to serve in the IDF’s genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza after the October 7 attack, amid frenzied calls for bloody revenge.
Some 10,000 Palestinians were killed in the three weeks of October 2023 alone amid a “sense of excitement and satisfaction”. One month later, the scale of destruction had surpassed the saturation bombing of Dresden by Britain’s Royal Air Force in World War II.
However, their views changed as the war proceeded, particularly after Israel broke the ceasefire agreed in January this year. They recount the “indiscriminate bombardment, instances where Palestinian civilians were used as human shields, and an operational culture that some soldiers characterized as ‘no innocents in Gaza.’” They question the decisions made by their commanders and reveal the hidden realities of a war largely shielded from public view internationally and especially within Israel where filthy propaganda is ubiquitous.
While some spoke to camera directly, some chose to obscure their faces. They all spoke of the way the official code of conduct concerning civilians was disregarded.
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The documentary also gives a voice to the Palestinians, which is important given the lack of on-the-ground reporting by the international media. Israel banned foreign journalists from entering Gaza independently since October 2023 and the IDF has killed at least 250 journalists, reporters and cameramen.
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Matan Cohen, the producer who interviews the soldiers, explains, “The ability to expose the reality of what happened on the ground in this horrific situation is what journalism is for. These testimonies shine a light on actions and decisions that the world was never meant to see, and they challenge us to confront what really happens in conflict when accountability is lost.”
Their testimonies confirm countless reports of the savagery of the Israeli forces. Notably, former IDF chief Herzi Halevi recently acknowledged that more than 200,000 Palestinians had been killed or injured, saying, “We took the gloves off” and that “not once” had legal advice constrained their military decisions in Gaza.
The soldiers’ statements also testify to the impunity with which the IDF operates, despite constant claims that allegations of criminality are always investigated.
The IDF’s military advocate Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi has brought no prosecutions against soldiers for killing civilians in Gaza, even after high-profile attacks that have prompted international outrage and were clearly in breach of international humanitarian law, including the killing of hundreds of medical and health care workers and 562 aid workers, according to the UN Human Rights Office, not to mention tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
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Just last week, there was uproar after Tomer-Yerushalmi, the IDF’s top lawyer, revealed that it was she who leaked the infamous video in August 2024 of soldiers raping a blindfolded Palestinian detainee and causing serious injuries. She became the target of a right-wing campaign of vilification, arrest and possible prosecution.
6. Stop the sabotage of the University of California strike: For rank-and-file control of the fight
After 17 months of stalled negotiations, tens of thousands of University of California (UC) employees are preparing for a historic two-day strike on November 17–18. More than 86,000 workers across hospitals, laboratories and campuses were originally set to walk out, including 21,000 healthcare, research and technical professionals in the University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) union, 40,000 service and patient care technical workers in American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 3299 and 25,000 nurses in the California Nurses Association (CNA).
The planned strike is the largest coordinated work stoppage in UC history, part of a growing nationwide rebellion of healthcare and public sector workers. From the mass walkouts of hospital staff in New Orleans and across Minnesota and Wisconsin, to strikes by nurses in Grand Blanc, Michigan, and the five-day Kaiser Permanente walkout earlier this year, workers are rising up against a system that subordinates healthcare to profit.
Everywhere, the conditions are the same. Healthcare workers confront chronic understaffing, collapsing real wages and impossible workloads that drive thousands out of the profession each year. At UC, AFSCME reports real wage losses of nearly 10 percent in recent years, alongside massive staff turnover and a growing exodus from the university’s medical centers. Thousands are forced to commute hours to work because housing near UC campuses is unaffordable.
These struggles are not isolated or local. They express the growing recognition that the crisis in healthcare is rooted in the entire structure of American capitalism. Workers increasingly sense that the deterioration of hospitals, schools and public services is inseparable from the looting of society by the financial oligarchy and the diversion of trillions into war and corporate profits. They are striving to build a movement against inequality itself, a movement for the social right to healthcare and a livable existence.
The University of California system epitomizes these contradictions. It is not merely an employer but a central institution of the corporate-controlled political establishment. UC is bound by billions of dollars in defense and biotech contracts, deeply tied to Silicon Valley and Wall Street and actively involved in the suppression of social opposition, including the police crackdowns on Gaza protests since 2023. Under the control of the Democratic Party-dominated Board of Regents, UC functions as both a low-wage employer and an instrument of political repression.
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By pulling 21,000 workers off the picket lines, UPTE officials have weakened the position of the remaining 65,000 AFSCME and CNA members still fighting for improved wages and staffing. What was to have been a powerful, united strike of 86,000 workers has been fractured, giving UC management and the Democratic Party the upper hand. Workers must be on guard against any efforts by the AFSCME and CNA leaders to follow suit and prevent the strike altogether.
Dividing the ranks was no accident. For over a year, UPTE deliberately delayed action, extending expired contracts and organizing only token one- or two-day “protest strikes” alongside AFSCME. Each of these isolated actions—in November 2024 and then again in February, April, May and July—was designed not to win anything but to dissipate anger and reinforce illusions in the union apparatus. The leadership repeatedly scheduled walkouts at the least disruptive times precisely to limit their impact.
While the ruling class, through Trump and both corporate parties, eliminates access to healthcare, education and other necessities of life, the unions talk of partnership and mutual understanding. Their “constructive dialogue” takes place as the capitalist state enacts mass deportations, suppresses dissent and funnels billions into war and corporate bailouts.
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The UPTE bureaucracy acts to suppress strikes, isolate workers and keep the movement confined within “labor relations” rather than allowing it to develop into a political struggle. They speak of “shared goals” with UC because they do share them: the defense of corporate profitability and the subordination of workers’ needs to the financial interests that dominate the university.
The same pattern is being repeated across the country. At Kaiser Permanente, the Alliance of Health Care Unions declared “victory” after a five-day strike, yet weeks later workers remain without a satisfactory contract. In every case, the union bureaucracies act to block a broader mobilization, sending workers back to work with empty promises while management imposes new attacks.
AFSCME and CNA have played identical roles at UC. AFSCME’s 40,000 service and patient care workers have gone more than a year without a ratified contract, while the CNA has confined nurses to symbolic protests. All these bureaucracies, including UPTE, are integrated into the AFL-CIO apparatus—a structure bound hand and foot to corporate management and the capitalist state.
If their struggle is not to be defeated, UC workers must take the conduct of the fight into their own hands. Their immediate task is to form rank-and-file committees that are independent, democratic organizations controlled by workers themselves. These committees must reject the secret sellout agreement, demand the release of all contract terms and prepare for a unified, indefinite strike across all UC hospitals, laboratories and campuses.
The significance of these committees goes beyond the fight for a contract. They represent a new form of organization based on the independent initiative of the working class. Their purpose is to link UC workers with healthcare workers at Kaiser, in New Orleans, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and beyond, as well as with autoworkers, teachers, logistics and tech workers and students.
This unity must be built on a political foundation. The fight for safe staffing, living wages and decent conditions is inseparable from the fight for socialism. It requires the expropriation of the healthcare giants, insurance conglomerates and pharmaceutical monopolies; the transformation of healthcare into a public service, not a profit engine. It requires the reorganization of the economy to meet human needs, not private wealth.
7. Day Two of strike, New Orleans nurses confront need to expand their struggle
This is the fifth limited strike in two years since the nurses unionized, and nothing has changed. The strategy of appealing to management to come to the table has led nowhere for the rank and file.
8. Truce between Thailand and Cambodia breaks down
Less than three weeks after US President Trump grandstanded in Malaysia as a “peacemaker” at the signing of a truce between Cambodia and Thailand, the agreement has been suspended, and hostilities have flared again.
Cambodia’s Defense Ministry claimed that Thai soldiers had opened fire near a disputed border village yesterday afternoon, stating that one person had been killed and three wounded. Thailand has disputed the account, saying that Cambodian soldiers had initially fired into Thai territory.
Thai army spokesman Winthai Suvaree said: “Thai forces took cover and fired warning shots in response, following rules of engagement.” He added that the incident lasted about 10 minutes and there were no casualties on the Thai side.
The two countries have repeatedly clashed over their disputed border—the legacy of the colonial domination of South East Asia. Cambodia bases its claims, which Thailand rejects, on a 1907 map drawn by French officials in Indochina to demarcate its colonial possessions from the nominally independent Kingdom of Siam (now Thailand).
Yesterday’s incident took place near a disputed settlement that Thailand claims is part of Ban Nong Ya Kaew village in its Sa Kaeo province. Cambodia says it is part of Prey Chan village in its Banteay Meanchey province. It has been the site of previous clashes.
The peace accord signed on October 26 in Malaysia did nothing to resolve the longstanding border disputes. Rather it simply formalized a ceasefire that followed five days of fierce fighting between Cambodia and Thailand in July involving warplanes, tanks, artillery and rockets. The clashes, which took place along hundreds of kilometers of disputed border, were the most extensive since fighting in 2011.
At least 43 people, including civilians, were killed and hundreds of thousands of civilians on both sides were forced to flee border areas before US, Chinese and Malaysian officials brokered an initial truce. Malaysia was involved as the current chair of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Thailand announced on Monday that it was suspending implementation of the accord after its soldiers were injured by what it claimed was a newly laid landmine. According to the army, one soldier’s right leg was severed in the blast, while another had shrapnel wounds to his leg.
After visiting the wounded soldiers near the border, Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, who heads a fragile minority government, declared: “Today, we consider that the agreement we had in place to move toward peace has ended.” He added belligerently: “Thailand belongs to us. The ground we are standing on right now is Thailand. No one can claim sovereignty over Thai territory.”
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In a statement on Tuesday, the Cambodian government categorically denied Thai allegations that it had laid new landmines in disputed border areas. It said that many landmines stemming from Cambodia’s civil war in the 1970s and 1980s had not been cleared “due to the difficult terrains and the un-demarcated status of the border areas.”
While the heightened tensions may ease, temporarily at least, this week’s events highlight the fragile and limited character of the truce signed last month. The governments in both countries are exploiting reactionary nationalism and patriotism to strengthen their position amid slowing growth and rising social stresses.
*****
The events of this week only further expose the absurdity of Trump’s posturing as a peacemaker. The White House statement last month declared that the Peace Accord was “a historic peace declaration ending border tensions between Thailand and Cambodia,” adding that “this is a landmark achievement for international diplomacy that only President Trump could accomplish.”
Trump himself bragged on social media that “most importantly, signed the Peace Treaty between Thailand and Cambodia. NO WAR! Now, off to Japan!!!”
Trump and the White House are yet to make any statement in response to Thailand’s suspension of the “historic peace declaration” or yesterday’s clash. That is not surprising. Trump has no more concern for the victims of the Thai-Cambodian conflict than for the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, and still being killed, despite the so-called truce brokered in Gaza.
Trump’s trip to Asia was never about peace, but rather was part of his administration’s intensifying preparations for war against China, which US imperialism regards as the chief threat to its global domination.
A chilling new directive issued by the U.S. Department of State has ordered visa officers to consider whether applicants seeking to live permanently in the United States might become a “public charge” based on their health conditions. The cable represents a sweeping and reactionary development of US immigration policy, one that evokes the darkest traditions of eugenics and state-sanctioned discrimination.
“You must consider an applicant’s health,” the directive reads. “Certain medical conditions—including, but not limited to, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, cancers, diabetes, metabolic diseases, neurological diseases, and mental health conditions—can require hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of care. All of these can require expensive, long-term care.”
Under the new guidance, consular officers are instructed to ask whether a visa applicant “has adequate financial resources to cover the costs of such care over his entire expected lifespan without seeking public cash assistance or long-term institutionalization at government expense.”
The policy even extends to the applicant’s dependents whose medical or disability status may be used to judge the applicant’s admissibility. Officers are told to consider whether the applicant might be unable to maintain employment due to caring for sick or disabled family members.
The directive is a declaration that illness, disability, or the mere possibility of future illness can be grounds for exclusion from the United States. It empowers visa officers (state functionaries, not doctors) to speculate on medical costs, employability and longevity, transforming routine health conditions into markers of social unworthiness.
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The State Department’s cable represents a modern revival of the 20th century eugenics doctrines that once shaped US immigration and public health policy and reached their most murderous form in Nazi Germany. By linking health status to immigration eligibility, it resurrects the pseudo-scientific belief that society must be “protected” from those deemed unfit or burdensome, a logic that historically justified sterilization, institutionalization and mass murder.
*****
Trump and his fascistic allies promote social Darwinism, where the strong thrive and the weak perish. The poor, sick and elderly are cast as drains on “public resources,” not victims of inequality.
The new visa guidance fits this reactionary agenda: a society ruled by profit and national chauvinism, where only those deemed “fit” or economically useful are permitted to live and work. The companion side of this policy is war and genocide abroad.
The Democratic Party and the trade unions, meanwhile, have responded to this latest assault with silence. Not a single leading Democrat has raised a serious objection to the State Department’s directive. This silence reflects the party’s own complicity in the bipartisan assault on immigrants and the working class.
*****
The targeting of immigrants with chronic illnesses or disabilities is an assault on the entire working class. The ruling class tests its most reactionary measures on the most vulnerable (immigrants, the poor, the sick) before imposing them on all workers.
The logic of exclusion and disposability will not stop at the border. It reflects a capitalist class preparing for mass impoverishment, intensified class conflict and war. Just as Nazi Germany’s euthanasia programs paved the way for genocide, the Trump administration’s embrace of eugenics foreshadows new forms of social brutality.
10. United States: Three more Chinese researchers at the University of Michigan jailed
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on November 5 that three more Chinese postdoctoral researchers at the University of Michigan (U-Mich) have been arrested, charged with federal crimes and imprisoned. The arrests mark an escalation of the bipartisan campaign to whip up anti-Chinese hysteria and an expansion of the Trump administration’s fascist attacks on scientific inquiry and democratic rights.
The three researchers—Xu Bai, Fengfan Zhang, and Zhiyong Zhang—were all working at the X.Z. Shawn Xu Lab at U-Mich in the Life Sciences Institute, which focuses on animal sensory biology in roundworms and mice. All three have been charged with “smuggling biological materials into the US,” and Zhiyong Zhang has been additionally charged with making false statements to federal agents. These charges carry penalties of up to 25 years in prison.
The three researchers are victims of a frame-up. The arrests are part of a campaign by the Justice Department and FBI to witch-hunt and de-humanize the more than 270,000 Chinese students in the US and lay the groundwork for war against China.
The arrests came just five weeks after another Chinese researcher from the same U-Mich lab, Chengxuan Han, was released from prison, deported and banned from reentry to the US.
*****
Another U-Mich postdoctoral biologist from China, Yunqing Jian, was arrested on June 2 and faces similar charges to those levied against Han. She has been imprisoned on the basis of the sensationalized claim that she was attempting to commit “agroterrorism” by transporting a common fungal pathogen, fusarium graminearum.
Top Trump administration officials such as Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins have attacked Han and Jian and linked them to “agroterrorism.”
*****
Key to these attacks is the complicity of the U-Mich administration, which has not issued any public statement on the latest arrests. According to the DOJ complaint, in the aftermath of Han’s removal, U-Mich opened an internal investigation into the Shawn Xu Laboratory. The university has not made public any information about this investigation, including the extent of DOJ and FBI involvement.
At the time of the Jian and Han arrests in June, the U-Mich administration immediately solidarized itself with the actions of the DOJ and FBI, denouncing “any actions that seek to cause harm or threaten national security,” and pledging continued cooperation with law enforcement. Not only did the university administration do nothing to defend Han and Jian from an obvious frame-up, it used Han’s coerced “no contest” of the charges to open the investigation that led to Bai, F. Zhang and Z. Zhang being pursued and arrested by the same fascistic arms of the state.
*****
The frame-up and jailing of Yunqing Jian, Xu Bai, Fengfan Zhang, and Zhiyong Zhang must be opposed by all students and workers. It is an attack on the democratic rights of the entire population. It is, in particular, part of the drive to silence opposition to war, genocide and the rights of immigrants on college campuses.
The only organization at U-Mich that has waged a political struggle in defense of Han, Jian and all Chinese researchers is the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the youth and student movement of the Socialist Equality Party. The IYSSE has demanded the immediate and unconditional dropping of all charges and denounced the cases as politically motivated frame-ups designed to fuel the bipartisan US war drive against China and impose Trump’s fascistic, war-mongering ideology on college campuses.
11. The artistry and revolutionary spirit of Soviet Armenian poet Yeghishe Charents
Soviet Armenian poet, novelist, essayist and translator Yeghishe Charents is little known outside Armenia and the former USSR, and even in the latter, not universally. Despite his obscurity today, he was hailed during the Soviet era as a great artist. Born in 1897 and executed in 1937, his life spanned the decisive events of the 20th century’s first half. He was a revolutionist, a socialist and a master of the written form.
*****
In 1915, the 18-year-old Charents volunteered for the Armenian regiment fighting under the Russian flag in World War I and was sent into the Armenian city Van shortly after Turkish troops laid waste to it.
Out of this experience came the terrifying and devastating poem “Dantesque Legend.” The 1915-1916 autobiographical work begins with the “souls buoyant” of young soldiers “delighted by the glint of weapons” to whom “everything seemed innocent of finality or death as in a blue and childish dream.” By the end, they have become “dead men burying their consciences.”
*****
But while World War I was devastating for Charents, it did not eradicate his poetic tenderness, which shows itself in “The Incandescent Girl,” from 1917, a love poem to a “glowing madonna-eyed” woman.
There are few details in English about the poet’s life from 1915-1917. Commentators agree, however, that World War I propelled Charents toward socialism. The 1917 Russian Revolution was, in his own words, a “lifesaving, life giving hurricane” that “washed our mountainous land like a running river in spring.”
Charents supported the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October, joined the Communist Party in 1918, volunteered that same year for the Red Army, and served Soviet Russia in the civil war. In 1921, he was part of the Bolshevik force that put down an anti-communist uprising in Armenia, of which he wrote a year later, “What happened in 1921, will nail my soul to the future.”
*****
The late teens and early 20s in Soviet Russia were a harsh, demanding period. In a civil war that spanned the country, the revolutionary government fought off imperialist armies colluding with monarchist and pro-capitalist forces. Hunger was widespread. The state exercised full control over industry and requisitioned agricultural goods.
Charents’ correspondence from this period reveals a man pressed by material want and loneliness. But the revolutionary impulse of 1917 fortified him, as it did an entire generation of artists, who, despite immense difficulties and personal pressures, fought to grasp the revolution through art, and to train their focus on the future.
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Isaac Babel, Sergei Esenin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pilnyak, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Blok and Anna Akhmatova are some of the better-known names of those whose creative powers, despite their complex and shifting attitudes toward the revolution, were unleashed by October 1917. Charents, who often wrote in Armenian, was part of this generation, but his role and prominence were impacted by the fact that his poetry was not always in Russian.
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Charents identified with the futurist movement and artistic currents grouped around Vladimir Mayakovsky and the journal LEF (Left Front of the Arts). In broad strokes, these layers advocated a break with the bourgeois art of the past and the construction of new aesthetics in order to realize and advance the proletarian revolution.
Charents was also hostile to the “proletarian art” current of the time, which characterized LEF and the work of futurists as bourgeois excess dressed up with “ultra-leftism,” inaccessible to the masses and divorced from its class interests. The “proletarian artists” shared, however, one thing with those they criticized; they too were hostile to what they termed “bourgeois art” and characterized the work of previous ages as the ruling classes’ ideological excrescence.
The literary debates of this period were highly political. Leon Trotsky, co-leader of the Russian Revolution and opponent of Joseph Stalin, along with other leading Marxists, criticized those who dismissed past artistic achievements. They insisted that rather than liberating the oppressed masses, the advocates of a wholly “new art,” whether futurists or “proletarian artists,” accommodating themselves to the heritage of Russian backwardness and cultural poverty. Those who advocated a “pock-marked” art, “but our own,” Trotsky argued in 1924, were “imbued to a considerable extent with contempt for the masses.”
“Our bourgeoisie laid its hand on literature, and did this very quickly at the time when it was growing rich,” he also wrote. “The proletariat will be able to prepare the formation of a new, that is, a Socialist culture and literature, not by the laboratory method on the basis of our present-day poverty, want and illiteracy, but by large social, economic, and cultural means. … It is fundamentally incorrect to contrast bourgeois culture and bourgeois art with proletarian culture and proletarian art. The latter will never exist, because the proletarian regime is temporary and transient. The historical significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consists in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture that is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human.”
Despite his differences with the proletarian artists, Charents was, like them, swept along by hostility to art of the past. In a 1922 declaration, he pronounced Armenian poetry to be “tubercular and inescapably doomed to die.”
*****
The oppression of Armenians, the desperate situation the population confronted in World War I, the violent class and political schisms that racked Armenian society—“Nayirian grief” as Charents described it—were an inescapable, immediate reality for him. The beauty of Armenia was a part of his being. Hatred of national oppression mingled with and nourished in him dedication to the socialist revolution.
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In 1924, Charents toured Europe, visiting Turkey, Greece, France, Germany and Italy. He was deeply impacted by his travels across “the boundless kingdom of the gilded bourgeoisie.” “It is necessary,” he wrote in a 1925 letter, “to acknowledge that this corpulent degenerate, the international bourgeoisie, required hundreds of years to develop such a material culture; if we were able to separate that creature, now a parasite, from the body, life would become a paradise…”
While Charents was in Europe, Aleksandr Miasnikyan (Myasnikov), the Soviet-Armenian Bolshevik leader who had secured Charents’ trip abroad and with whom he maintained a correspondence, died in a plane crash. Trotsky, who spoke at Miasnikyan’s memorial, suspected Stalin’s hand.
In response, Charents wrote “The Communards Wall in Paris,” and dedicated it to Miasnikyan. “Paris. Fear and mist. Me. A poet. A Leninist Bolshevik leaning against the wall. Listening to their voices. Their whispers,” he declares.
Charents’ time in Europe transformed his views on art. He broke with futurism, which he now characterized as “turning real workers into lifeless caricatures” with “little connection to man himself.”
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In the mid-to-late 1920s, Soviet society confronted new difficulties. While the 1921 New Economic Policy had improved the country’s overall economic situation, the party-state bureaucracy and inequality were growing. A deep schism had opened inside the Communist Party between Trotsky’s Left Opposition and Stalin. At its core was the most central question of the Russian Revolution—was it the opening shot of the world socialist revolution, which “begins on the national arena, … unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena”—or was it possible to construct socialism within the confines of the Soviet Union? The Stalinist bureaucracy pursued a version of “nationalist socialism,” ultimately sacrificing world revolution and the international working class to protect the interests of the rising bureaucracy.
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In order to secure the bureaucracy’s position, the ruling clique strangled inner-party democracy and persecuted opponents, all the while proclaiming socialism to have been achieved and doubters to be petty-bourgeois agents. In October 1926, Trotsky was driven out of the party’s leading body, the Politburo, as part of Stalin’s efforts to crush the Left Opposition.
For honest artists, the pressures of this era were immense.
In September 1926, Charents, in a moment of lunacy, shot a woman on the street in Yerevan. She had rebuffed his advances. According to friends, he was also debilitated by insomnia and nightmares, which he treated with alcohol. It is difficult to view this episode apart from the confusion and disorientation that Stalinism was introducing into every facet of life.
The poet was sentenced to eight years’ solitary confinement, which was then reduced to three. The authorities released him after just a few months, as the death of his wife in childbirth had precipitated in him another mental breakdown.
Charents’ time in prison yielded a brilliant short memoir, Yerevan’s House of Corrections. The poet navigates cell life, the guards at mealtime, the prison hallways, the “peasants, bums, and former civil servants,” the barbershop, the bravado and craziness of the convicted, his wife’s visits, his hooligan friends, death, the music played by prisoner Meno at “cultural” meetings.*****
The year after his release, Charents was made the head of the fiction department of Bet Hrat. It was a position of stature; one whose existence was only possible because of the Soviet Union’s unprecedented literacy campaign. In Armenia the percentage of the population that could neither read nor write fell from 73.7 percent among 8 to 44-year-olds in 1922 to 6.3 percent in 1934.
Charents’ capacities were remarkable, according to Artur Avagyan, the curator of a recent exhibit of book art from the Charents era. The poet, “like an expert, knew the history of painting, and perceived perfectly the expressive language of individual types and genres of fine arts. … Colleagues recalled that he could give an impromptu lecture on any direction or type of art, holding the listener’s attention for hours.”
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The political atmosphere, however, was becoming ever more repressive. Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party in November 1927, exiled to Central Asia in January 1928 and then banished to the Turkish island of Prinkipo in 1929. His supporters in party organizations, factories, workplaces, the military and universities were hounded, stripped of their positions, arrested and sent to labor camps.
In the arts, “socialist realism” gathered steam, becoming official doctrine in the early 1930s. Art now had to uncritically portray the Soviet Union, hail Stalin a hero, denounce Trotsky and romanticize the country’s allegedly liberated proletariat and peasantry. The history of the Russian Revolution was falsified.
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There were plenty of “convolutions and Aesopian forms” in Charents’ work during the rise of Stalinism. He wrote many poor poems, ones that hailed Stalin and adapted to official dogma. The twists and turns, efforts to accommodate, deluded poetics, were undoubtedly driven by the increasingly oppressive political environment, in which lies about history, principles, basic facts and people abounded. The oxygen was being squeezed out of the room. Charents was, like so many others, fighting for air.
A thorough study of his work may determine that he was pulled at the time in the direction of some sort of nationally themed art. But to characterize him as a nationalist, particularly given that Soviet artists were confronting a grotesque outpouring of Russian nationalism in which to be Soviet increasingly meant to be “Russian” and “Russian” was increasingly defined as exclusively Slavic, would be false.
Charents’ entire body of work testifies to his persistent spirit of internationalism. As one scholar put it, his writing “dialogues with the whole history of poetry”. More than 80 percent of his library was in Russian. Charents viewed the Soviet Union as an arena for “a kind of globalization of literature,” “insisted on the importance of translating from and into the various languages that made it up” and “called for mutual recognition and transparency among the various languages,” notes Marc Nichanian.
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In 1929, Charents authored his most politically consequential poem, “Achilles or Piero”—the hero or the clown. He attempted to publish it in his 1933 Book of the Road. This 47-page poem has never been translated into English, and according to Arnavoudian, is not generally available in Armenian popular anthologies or selected works. During our conversation, the British-Armenian scholar explained its content and significance.
AP: Achilles vs. Piero is a dramatic tract? The poem unfolds as a play, and the author of that play is a dramatist who’s now dead?
EA: Yes, you have the theater Director, and he’s just performed the three acts of a play, the first two of which were written by the Great Author—here the Great Author being Lenin and the theater Director being Stalin.
The Great Author died and wasn’t able to finish the play, and the theater Director writes the third act to complete it. He is challenged by an Elderly Audience Member, who says the theater Director is distorting the reality. He’s hidden the manuscripts from view. He’s refused to let the particular passages be read by people, referring presumably to Lenin’s Last Testament. He’s forging a reality and falsifying the third act, which if the Great Author was there, he wouldn’t have written in that form.
The theater Director whips up mass hysteria against the Elderly Audience Member and anybody who agrees with him. In the midst of this, in a surreal turn, the Director, confident of himself, invites the Hero onto the stage, sure that he will be humiliated in debate. The Hero Achilles leaping from the pages of the first and second acts protests against the theater Director, to back up the Elderly Audience Member, and to say that the Director is distorting the true message that the Great Author was attempting to communicate. He is a surreal apparition, seemingly a character from the Great Author’s unfinished work. That hero is unquestionably Trotsky in the form of the description, including the goatee beard.
It is at the end of Act 3 that the theater Director desperately seeks the audience’s affirmation that his variant follows absolutely and unquestionably upon the Great Author’s first two acts. The theatre Director whips the audience into frenzied applause and acclamation, proclaiming that Act 3 is a work of genius and a most faithful succession to the Great Author’s first two acts.
The core of the dispute revolves around whether the Hero has any role in Act 3. The theater Director claims the Hero has no role whatsoever in the drafts left by the Great Author and that he, the Director, is absolutely sure of this as he worked for many years alongside the Great Author, unlike the Hero.
The Hero is Trotsky, but it is not a very savory sort of representation. Whilst the whole drama clearly represents the Director as Stalin, as a sort of brutal, invidious and unsavory character, there are elements in the Hero’s speech that portray him as egotistical, a petty bourgeois who believes in the dominant role of the individual in history, and who is protesting because he is being written out of history.
In the Hero’s speeches there is also contempt for the masses. He describes them, presumably the working class and the peasantry, as a herd of cattle and accuses the Director of elevating mediocrities. The Director responds, saying, “We’re living in a new age, and it’s the age of the masses.”
“Achilles or Piero” can’t be read as support for Trotsky’s opposition. But it is a courageous criticism of Stalin, a premonition and opposition to the rise of Stalinism and the rise of bureaucratic control of the Soviet Union’s cultural and literary life.
But I think in the end the poem fails artistically because of this false portrayal of Trotsky.
AP: I don’t think we can extract what Charents really thought of Trotsky from such a poem. Do you have any insights into what his attitude was towards the Left Opposition?
EA: It’s sort of a sort of dark area. There may be some evidence somewhere in some archive of what his views were.
Charents included “Achilles or Piero” in his 1933 Book of the Road, which he dedicated to his “priceless little ones” from “their ill-starred father.” As soon as the first copies were printed, they were seized. The Armenian Communist Party removed Charents from his post in Pethrat. The Central Committee declared the work to be a nationalist, “anti-revolutionary, Trotskyite libel against the Communist Party and the Party’s leader, Stalin,” “a fanatically idealistic interpretation of the history of the Armenian people.”
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On December 1, 1933, Charents wrote a letter to a fellow writer and Communist Party member in Moscow, asking her to intercede with Stalin, begging her to save him, and describing the bureaucracy’s assault on Armenia’s past and present artists. It is a tragic document, in which Charents claims that his poem was misinterpreted and actually meant to be a tribute to Stalin.[33]
“There is a dramatic interlude,” he explains, “in which I use symbolic images from the world of theater to artistically show and prove that Comrade Stalin was the objective embodiment of the steady progress of the proletarian world revolution, and that Trotsky inevitably had to perish and, in the eyes of these masses, turn from a fake ‘hero’ into a ridiculous, pitiful figure…”
It is possible that Charents intended, as he claims, to demonstrate that Stalin was the revolution’s true heir and disparage Trotsky as a false hero. Certainly, the depiction of Trotsky as a power-hungry, selfish agent who hated the masses would have fit with the Stalinists’ portrait of the revolutionist. It is not to Charents’ credit that he latched onto this.
Charents may have thought that Trotsky was an egotistical self-promoter, he may have cast Trotsky’s character in this manner because he believed that he had to, or it may have been some combination of the two. Stalinism clearly had a dispiriting and demoralizing impact on such a sensitive artist, as it did on many. And when he has Trotsky denounce the masses, Charents may have been putting into the revolutionist’s mouth his own anger over what he viewed to be the treachery and idiocy of thousands who had previously declared their fealty to Marxism but were now hailing Stalin.
But when the Hero decries the reign of mediocrities, it is not an altogether inaccurate portrayal of the social forces unleashed by Stalin. The petty bourgeois, grasping layers who learned official “Marxism” by rote, recited mantras and did all sorts of dirty work were mediocrities raised to the heights of society. The issue is that, unlike what Charents seems to have implied in the poem, Trotsky did not think that the working masses were these mediocrities or that Stalinism reflected their will. And this is the source of the falsity—in artistic form and political content—of the poem.
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While the young writer was increasingly isolated, it was not as yet total isolation. The Stalinist regime confronted the problem that Charents was one of Soviet Armenia’s most renowned poets and had an international reputation. William Saroyan, the Armenian-American Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist, visited Charents in 1934. “His voice had warmth, and his eyes were direct, swift and intelligent,” he wrote of the poet.
In an indication of Charents’ importance as an artist, two of the country’s leading Russian writers, Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, as well as Arseny Tarkovsky, the father of the future famous film director, translated his work. These relationships were hardly, however, some sort of political fortification, as these artists themselves faced repression.
In 1935, Charents was removed from his position in the state publishing house and again expelled from the Writers Union. Skilled at ordering monstrous crimes and then distancing himself from them when expedient, Stalin publicly feigned concern for the poet.
In 1936, the Great Purges began. The first Moscow Show Trial took place in August. Leading Old Bolsheviks—Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Ivan Smirnov and Vagarshak Ter-Vaganyan (the latter an Armenian), and others—were tried and executed as Trotskyist conspirators.
The same year, Charents was called into meetings with Stalin’s henchman, Lavrenti Beria. He emerged from these deeply shaken. Returning from Tbilisi, Georgia after one such event, Charents declared, “I am not a Judas and will not become one.”
In 1936, the head of the Armenian Communist Party, Aghasi Khanjyan was found shot in his apartment in Tbilisi. Proclaimed a cowardly suicide in the Soviet press, Khanjyan’s death was an execution carried out by Beria personally, in his office, according to later testimony.
Charents wrote a series of works dedicated to the murdered leader, including one the very night of his death.
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After Khanjyan’s death, “Dashnak-Trotskyites” were detained and charged, including an entire generation of Armenian intellectuals and artists. “The names of Charents’ comrades, who were already arrested or imprisoned,” wrote his daughter, “are preserved on tattered handwritten slips of paper.” This was part of a massive purge across the Soviet Union of artists, scientists and thinkers. Thousands were hounded, sent to labor camps, shot.
Charents’ poetry expressed the terror engulfing him and Soviet society. There is “Requiem Afternam,” “The Solemn Carousel,” “Here I Stand Again,” and the bluntly titled, “They Were Beheading Us.” In an unpublished poem written in 1936 or 1937, Charents observes, “Once more, the meal cooked by this master smells of blood.”
The attacks were unrelenting. Charents’ work was dissected line by line for evidence of nationalism and anti-Soviet sympathies. He was accused of operating a secret terrorist group intent on killing a Central Committee secretary and waging a struggle against Stalin and Beria. The Writers Union claimed he was colluding with the Armenian diaspora “to detach Armenia from the Soviet Union.” The basis for this accusation was his 1933-1934 poem “Message,” in which the second letter of each line creates the sentence, “Oh, Armenian people, your only salvation is your collective strength.”
In September 1936, Charents was placed under house arrest. His addiction to morphine and alcohol deepened. He continued writing, however, and devoted himself to new translations of Goethe, Dante and Pushkin.
His final works blend ferocious anger with despair and efforts to honor the revolution. Among them is a tribute to poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who committed suicide in 1930. In another work, “Black Gallows,”[49] Charents mourns the revolution’s murder and his own looming fate. Other works include love poems to his wife and devotions to his daughters.
Charents never bowed to the accusations against him or abandoned socialism. Eight months before his death, he wrote, “For there is no greater torture—and no blacker punishment—than to condemn a man for betraying the idea that was sacred to him, the only work of his whole life. And there is no way of showing, of convincing people that it is not true—that the only sacred thing for me is that which I am accused of sinning against.
On July 26, 1937, Charents was imprisoned. According to a death certificate finally issued in 1955, he died November 27. He was 40 years old. The notice listed no cause of death and no grave site. To this date, it is unknown where he is buried. There are different accounts as to how he perished. Some say he was shot, others that he committed suicide, smashing his head against the prison wall, and others that he died due to the destruction of his health.
Charents’ wife was exiled to Siberia for several years. Their daughters were placed in the care of orphanages, then relatives and friends.
*****
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, during which the Stalinists destroyed all that remained of the conquests of the 1917 Russian Revolution, there were further attempts, now coming from the political right, to recast Charents as an Armenian nationalist, as well as a God-fearing anti-communist and even a poetic Freudian.
Today, Charents is widely honored in Armenia. One will find in or near Yerevan today the Arch of Charents, Charents Street, and a magnificent 60-foot-tall monument to the poet. The country’s national museum of literature and art is named after him. Still, his revolutionary, socialist outlook is suppressed. One will find, for instance, little mention of it in the Charents House Museum, which lends its account of his life and work an incomprehensible quality.
Charents is best understood not through the nationalist, Stalinist and anti-communist distortions imposed on him, but through his 1933 poem “Seven Pieces of Advice for Planters to Come,”–a favorite of this writer [Andrea Peters].
Sowers of the future, you who are going
to plant seeds from full hands,
into these fertile furrows that we plowed,
these painted by our sweat, blood, and songs.
O you who will walk with light hearts into
turquoise days that break like cymbals
of sun, may I, your distant brother, be allowed
to send you seven pieces of advice?The first recommendation which I address
from these old bristling, burning days is this:
Let your first handful of seed
pave our fields with illusion and dreams.Spread them like goodness which does not end
toward the birds and winds of our land.
Let their joy be limitless
the way our old suffering had no bounds.Direct your second favor to the north,
the wide Steppes where
in this divided nation
the red hurricane turns to summer rain.And throw the third handful of your seed
toward Mount Ararat. Let it fly
like condensed fever, in delirium
to pierce the snow-beaten mountain’s chest.Plant then a handful of wheat and imagination
bright and honest as your hopes.
Plant them in the old town of Nork
so that the new bud of song begins.And let the fifth toss of your deep treasure
be a gift to our spirit
which in the distant past created song
and its nobler dream.And the sixth handful, planters
address to the bones of the more recent past.
You will suddenly hear sighs and
voices from the depths of your land.Then, only then, after those six,
fill your palms for the seventh time, then
with your open hand sow your future harvest
the endless furrow that stretches ahead.This writer hopes that Charents will be rediscovered—the full body of his work published in Armenian, English and other languages, and a complete history of his life and work researched and written.
The revolution needs its poets.
12. Yeghishe Charents’ selected poetry and prose
The World Socialist Web Site presents a selection of poetry and prose from the pen of Soviet Armenian poet, novelist, essayist, translator and revolutionist Yeghishe Charents (1897-1937).
13. Postal workers once again at a crossroads as Canada Post submits its “transformation plan”
The Carney Liberal government views the downsizing of Canada Post as a test case for its plans to slash public services and the jobs of the workers who administer them.
14. Sri Lanka government’s 2026 budget intensifies IMF austerity
President Dissanayake expressed contempt for the poor and threatened workers who fight for their social rights, as he outlined further pro-business austerity measures.
15. Meeting discusses the way forward for workers after New Zealand’s “mega-strike”
Speakers from the Socialist Equality Group in NZ and the Socialist Equality Party in Australia explained the need for an international movement against austerity and war, and for workers to build rank-and-file committees, independent and opposed to the union bureaucracy and all the capitalist parties.
16. Devastating fire at off-campus University of Massachusetts housing complex displaces 232 residents
The fire was likely caused by multiple explosions from fuel tanks at a nearby construction site, where a new four-story private dorm building was being erected. A construction crane at the site collapsed during the fire, adding an additional element of danger.
Dave struggled for many years with the after-effects of Vietnam. His health was severely compromised by exposure to Agent Orange. He developed MS within a few years of his release from service. Nonetheless, he was not awarded his disability benefits until around 2023, 56 years after his service in Vietnam. As a result, as he became more disabled, and unable to walk, see properly, or work.
Despite these struggles, Dave never abandoned his Trotskyist principles. When in the Workers League (the predecessor to the WSWS), he ran the printing press, among his many other leadership duties. He went to the docks and spoke with dockworkers. He confronted the union bureaucrats who attempted unsuccessfully to expel him from the yards. He spoke to students and youth all across the country, from the ghettos to the universities. He had friends in the arts and theater as well as his old vet comrades.
David struggled mightily against this degenerative disease, availing himself of every experimental treatment offered by the veterans’ hospitals. He believed in science and medicine and was the last living member of an advanced study involving the use of interferon. He was a fighter in every good sense of the word. He joked about having the last laugh on the government by outliving their attempts to deny his disability payments.
18. ICE raids last week in Eugene, Oregon result in kidnapping of more than a dozen people
On Wednesday, November 5, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) kidnapped over a dozen people in Lane County, Oregon, which includes Eugene, the state’s second-largest city. The terror operation was carried out in broad daylight by unidentified and masked ICE agents in unmarked vehicles with civilian plates.
The tactics and naked brutality of the kidnappings are a continuation of the Trump administration’s campaign targeting immigrant workers around the country. They expand upon the attacks already being carried out in major cities, such as last month in Chicago, where ICE gestapo violently raided a flea market, and in Los Angeles, where a TikTok ICE whistleblower was shot and then arrested.
In Cottage Grove, which has a large Guatemalan population, at least eight people were detained, including one woman who was thrown to the ground in the middle of the street by six ICE agents.In a video from lookouteugene-springfield taken by a local organizer, the woman is seen pinned to the ground, crying out while the agents assault her. She was later taken to a local hospital for treatment and then released. According to the organizer, the woman is a legal permanent resident.
Off of Norkenzie Road in Eugene, two men who worked as landscapers were torn from their work vehicle by masked ICE agents. A local resident, who wished to remain anonymous for his safety, described the attack: “Three to four vehicles forced a landscaping crew off the road, jumped out, broke the windows, got the guys out in the street. People were honking and yelling.”He added, “Trump said he was just going to go after the criminals; I don’t think these guys were criminals, I’ve seen them in the neighborhood for quite some time. They’re just working guys like everybody else.”
During the assault, one of the masked agents mockingly waved and blew kisses at the crowd that had gathered in response to the attack.
*****
In an email response to a request for more information from local news station KLCC, Chrissy Cuttita, a public affairs officer for ICE, said only, “ICE is busy conducting routine law enforcement operations across the nation on a daily basis.”
A joint statement from Representative Val Hoyle, Senator Ron Wyden and other state and local Democrats declared, “We are working together with community leaders and local law enforcement to learn more and ensure that all of our constituents are accounted for. Every Oregonian and every person in the United States, regardless of immigration status, is entitled to the full protections guaranteed by the Constitution. We will use all tools at our disposal as representatives of this community to ensure that those protections are upheld for the individuals detained today and for any Oregonian subjected to unjust or unlawful enforcement actions by ICE.”
The statement is a farce, meant to provide political cover for the Democrats’ complicity in the ongoing onslaught against immigrants. It disarms workers to the danger they face, by sowing illusions that Oregon’s status as a “sanctuary” state and the “rule of law” will shield them from the fascistic assaults of ICE. It is an attempt to present the Democratic Party as a “progressive” or “radical” alternative in order to channel genuine opposition to Trump’s fascistic policies back into the straitjacket of the two big business parties.
The brazenness of these attacks, in which federal agents operate with no consideration for due process or constitutional rights, demonstrates the utter contempt of the Trump administration for the lives and livelihoods of workers around the country. Workers and young people feel entirely justified outrage at these police state assaults and disappearances of immigrants and US citizens alike, the deployment of military to US cities and the evisceration of democratic rights.
*****
The path forward for the working class to end the heinous attacks on immigrant and minority workers, to ensure democratic rights, to end the horrors of war and to provide for all aspects of human need, rather than private profit, is through a direct confrontation with the source of these ills—capitalism.
19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
