Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Thanksgiving 2025 in America: Misery for workers, unprecedented wealth for the elite
This is an expression of the callousness of the ruling class as a whole, not merely the Trump administration. To cut $8 billion a month from food stamps, the fate of tens of millions is being thrown into turmoil. Meanwhile, the ruling elite is engaged in a massive accumulation of wealth. Ten billionaires increased their wealth by $700 billion this year. Elon Musk received a new $1 trillion pay package at Tesla. Larry Ellison became $100 billion richer in a single day—enough to fund the entire food stamp program for a year.
2. Video of David North’s lecture in Berlin: “Where is America going?”
3. US escalates war threats, branding Venezuelan government a “foreign terrorist organization”
With the largest US armada assembled in Latin American waters since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Trump administration is poised to launch a new criminal war of aggression. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly declared that he has made up his mind on Venezuela but declined to elaborate on his supposed decision. Conflicting reports have suggested anything from a full-scale US war for regime change, to a decapitation operation to kill or capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, air strikes on Venezuelan infrastructure and government targets and even a bargain struck directly between Maduro and Donald Trump at the point of a gun.
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Why this naked US aggression? Under conditions of a deepening US and global capitalist crisis, Washington and America’s ruling oligarchy view control over Latin America’s resources and the imposition of obedient client regimes as central to defending their waning global dominance. Venezuela’s enormous oil reserves, the largest on the planet, make it a prime target.
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This predatory aggression is further driven by Venezuela’s increasing strategic ties with US imperialism’s premier rival, China, which now accounts for 80 percent of the country’s oil exports, thanks in large measure to Washington’s stifling sanctions regime. China is not only buying Venezuelan oil but has taken the badly needed commodity as payment on some $60 billion in loans to the country. It has invested billions directly into Venezuela’s oil sector, while also engaging in the limited sale of arms.
For its part, Russia has forged a “strategic partnership” with Venezuela, selling the country some $14.5 billion worth of arms, including advanced air defense systems such as the S-300VM. Meanwhile, Russia’s state energy giant Rosneft has established joint ventures with Venezuela’s national oil company (PDVSA) in the exploitation of several oil and gas fields. Hundreds of Russian personnel are present in the country.
A US attack on Venezuela would be aimed not at that country alone but at driving China and Russia out of the entire Western Hemisphere. The strategy of reversing the historic decline of US imperialism and the rise of China as South America’s principal trading partner with Tomahawk missiles and smart bombs is patently berserk, but it is driven by the logic of US imperialism’s intractable crisis. A US war would not only destabilize the entire region but would have global ramifications stretching from Ukraine to the South China Sea.
Those among the petty-bourgeois nationalist circles in Latin America who believe that either Beijing or Moscow will come to Venezuela’s defense, however, should consider the recent vote on the UN Security Council ratifying Trump’s colonialist project for completing the Gaza genocide in which both countries abstained. The fate of entire nations and peoples has become bargaining chips in the drive toward a third world war with no crime too terrible to contemplate.
At home, the same US ruling class that is rushing toward a disastrous military adventure in Latin America is implementing police state measures to suppress dissent and protect its profits. The conflation of “narco‑terrorism” with migration and internal “enemies” paves the way for the use of a war to expand military powers, carry out mass detentions and abolish democratic rights. It is the working class that will be forced to pay the price for the US capitalist crisis in blood and social repression as the Trump administration prepares to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and to deploy troops in major US cities.
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The struggle against US aggression cannot be advanced through reliance upon capitalist politicians in the US, bourgeois nationalist regimes like that of Maduro in Venezuela or Washington’s geo-strategic rivals in Beijing and Moscow; it must be rooted in the class struggle and the fight to unite workers across borders against imperialism and capitalist exploitation.
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The working class must demand an immediate end to the threatening US military deployments and covert operations against Venezuela. All warships, aircraft and troops must be withdrawn from the southern Caribbean and the wanton murder of civilians brought to an end now.
The choice is stark: Either workers unite internationally to overthrow the capitalist system that breeds wars and social barbarism, or the ruling classes will drag the world into a new epoch of imperialist carnage.
4. Dozens killed, hundreds missing in Hong Kong inferno
A huge blaze has engulfed a complex of residential high-rise towers in the northern New Territories district of Hong Kong. At the time of posting, the death toll stands at 44 but is almost certain to rise further, as 279 people are still unaccounted for. Currently 68 people are in hospital 25 in a serious condition and another 16 are classified as critical. Some 900 people are in emergency shelters.
The fire began yesterday afternoon local time just before 3pm in one of eight 31-storey towers in the Wang Fuk Court complex in Tai Po, and spread to all but one of the towers as a result of high winds. The buildings, which were undergoing renovations, were all surrounded by bamboo scaffolding and construction netting that likely contributed to the speed at which the blaze spread.
By 6:22 pm, the emergency alert was raised to the highest level—5. There were 128 fire trucks, 57 ambulances and 767 firefighters deployed to the blaze. They battled the inferno in very difficult conditions throughout the night. One firefighter, 37-year-old Ho Wai-ho, has died and another has been injured.
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The fire risk in Hong Kong has been “extreme” for most of the past week because of dry conditions. Red Fire Danger Warning was in force yesterday, according to the Hong Kong Observatory, a government weather service, and remains in place.
The cause of the fire has yet to be determined, but the use of substandard and flammable materials by the company carrying out renovations and repairs contributed to its spread. Three men—two directors and a consultant of the construction company—have been arrested by police on suspicion of manslaughter.
“We have reason to believe that the company’s responsible parties were grossly negligent, which led to this accident and caused the fire to spread uncontrollably, resulting in major casualties,” Eileen Chung, a Hong Kong Police superintendent, told the media.
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The deadly fire points to the dangers of the widespread use of bamboo scaffolding in Hong Kong. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, industry estimates from January suggest that 80 percent of major construction and renovation projects used bamboo scaffolding, which is lighter but above all cheaper than the steel alternative.
In March, the Hong Kong government started to phase out bamboo scaffolding, citing worker safety. Between 2019 and 2024, there were 22 deaths involving bamboo scaffolders. The proposal, however, only applies to public building projects, and then only to 50 percent of such projects from March onwards.
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The fire in the Wang Fuk Court complex is Hong Kong’s deadliest since at least August 1962, when a blaze in the city’s Sham Shui Po district killed 44 people. A fire at the Garley Building on Nathan Road in Kowloon in November 1996 killed 41 people and injured 81.
The Wang Fuk Court complex, which was built in 1983, is government-subsided housing aimed at alleviating the heavy burden of housing costs in Hong Kong, notorious for being one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to live. Even then, applicants have to meet strict requirements and often wait for years before getting an apartment.
Already comparisons are being drawn with the inferno that engulfed the Grenfell Tower, a council housing complex in London, killing 72 people. As in Hong Kong, the working-class residents were living in a death trap after the local Conservative-run authority presided over a cosmetic facelift that cut corners to save money. The building was fitted with combustible cladding that allowed the fire to jump from floor to floor and created enormous difficulties for firefighters.
5. American authoritarianism in Anniversary: It does happen here
Anniversary is a serious film about a serious matter, the emergence and triumph of a totalitarian political movement in the US. Certain chilling scenes and images remain with the viewer despite the film’s too narrow or confused outlook that unfortunately limits its overall impact. Anniversary is one of a number of recent films that address—or attempt to address—the burning question of mass state repression and fascism.
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As noted, there are strong moments here. The buildup of repression and fear within a continuously worsening political climate is authentically presented. It reminds one a little of the Frank Borzage films, Three Comrades (1938, written in part by F. Scott Fitzgerald) and The Mortal Storm (1940), with the latter film sharply depicting the malignant growth and influence of Nazism. Anniversary’s final scene in particular is genuinely disturbing, as the full dimensions of a police state come into view. Lane, Chandler and the other performers are convincing. Their hearts are clearly in their work.
Dylan O’Brien offers one of the strongest performances as Josh Taylor, the frustrated, failing novelist swept up by a right-wing political movement that ultimately makes him feel confident and influential, a semi-cultured petty bourgeois with the fierce need to bully and dominate, including family members. He evolves into a repugnant American “Blackshirt” (almost literally) in front of our eyes before falling victim himself to an act of treachery. Again, such a portrait brings to mind another, more highly developed film character, the Italian fascist functionary and central figure in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) played by Jean-Louis Trintignant.
These are all significant strengths.
Anniversary fails to be more compelling than it is, because it lacks almost any historical or social connections and driving forces. Why has “The Change” emerged in the form it does? Why does it gain mass traction? What are the conditions under which the erstwhile “democratic” state turns toward dictatorship? What are the social and economic forces propelling this repressive movement? Aside from a few oblique references to the Cumberland Corporation, about whose operations we learn next to nothing, there is no indication of financial interests involved. The transformation of the US into a police-state dictatorship, not a small global question one hardly needs to add, comes about more or less seamlessly for almost entirely unexplained reasons.
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All in all, the events surrounding the distribution or non-distribution of even such a blunted work as Anniversary point to the need of filmmakers to be far keener and politically astute and more aggressive in their work, and to genuinely tackle the very advanced crisis situation. A noncommittal or “non-partisan” (in the true sense of the word) stance is the very last thing we need.
6. Australia: Cobar residents oppose rapid reopening of Endeavor mine after fatal explosion
Miners and residents from the remote New South Wales (NSW) community of Cobar spoke with World Socialist Web Site reporters last week, voicing their opposition to Polymetals’ decision to rapidly reopen its Endeavor Mine following the tragic deaths of shift supervisor Ambrose Patrick McMullen, 59, and charge-up operator Holly Clarke, 24, in an underground explosion in the early hours of October 28. The blast left fellow team member Mackenzie Stirling, also 24, with serious injuries, including hearing damage.
Located 685 kilometres west of Sydney, Cobar is a small community of about 3,500 people dominated by the mining industry, which began operations in the 1870s following the discovery of copper in the region. About 40 percent of the local workforce is directly employed in mining, with many others working in related industries servicing the area’s copper, silver, gold, zinc and lead deposits.
Within days of the fatal explosion—and even before separate funerals were held for McMullen and Clarke, or the release of an interim report by the NSW Resources Regulator—Polymetals announced that the Endeavor Mine would reopen on November 5. By November 15, with no opposition from the NSW Labor government, the regulator, or the Australian Workers Union and the Mining and Energy Union, the mine had resumed operating at full production.
Last Saturday afternoon, more than 640 people gathered at the Cobar Memorial Services Club to honour Holly Clarke’s life. The capacity crowd heard speeches from family members and friends.
Immediately after the explosion, the company told Endeavor Mine employees not to speak to the media or even to friends and family about the explosion, the deaths of McMullen and Clarke, or conditions at the mine.
Despite these anti-democratic efforts to silence the working-class community, residents raised concerns about the reopening of the Endeavor Mine before a serious investigation into the tragedy had been conducted.
7. Australia: CSR plasterboard factory workers locked out over pay claim
Workers at the CSR Gyprock factory in Yarraville, Melbourne have effectively been locked out by the company over a pay claim.
After workers began limited work bans on November 14, part of “protected” industrial action, management threatened it would not pay workers who took part. Workers responded by going on strike—the only option left besides accepting the company’s proposed enterprise agreement or working for free.
CSR has offered workers a four-year agreement containing nominal pay increases of 4 percent in each of the first two years, 3.5 percent in the third and 3 percent in the fourth. This would be totally inadequate to keep up with the rising cost of living. The official annual inflation rate is already at 3.8 percent and shows definite signs of rising further, with a 1.3 percent increase recorded in the September quarter alone.
There are around 60 full-time workers at the highly automated manufacturing plant, which supplies plasterboard (drywall) products to the building industry and retail customers.
CSR is the largest plasterboard maker in Australia, and the only brand stocked by major hardware and building products supplier Bunnings. The company is also a key manufacturer of numerous other building products, including insulation, cladding, bricks and rooftops.
CSR was acquired for AU$4.5 billion last year by French multinational Saint-Germain, which employs some 170,000 workers worldwide.
Workers told the World Socialist Web Site that CSR had prepared for the lockout by stockpiling product in advance and hurriedly training casuals to serve as strikebreakers.
8. Trump administration plans to deploy 500 more National Guard soldiers following D.C. shooting
Shortly after 2:00 p.m. in Washington D.C. on Wednesday, a shooter opened fire on two West Virginia National Guard soldiers, critically injuring both of them. The alleged shooter was identified by CNN and CBS News as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old from Afghanistan who came to the United States in 2021 and was a resident of Washington state.
Neither of the soldiers has been identified beyond the fact that they were from West Virginia. Lakanwal and the two soldiers are both currently hospitalized. The shooting took place just two blocks from the White House.
Police claimed 15 shots were exchanged. National Guardsmen and the shooter were both armed. According to police, the shooter ambushed the two Guardsmen and was then taken down by other Guardsmen who heard or witnessed the shooting.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the FBI, US Secret Service, Metropolitan Police and National Guard soldiers swarmed the area, while the Treasury Department and the White House were put into a “lockdown” status. Flights in and out of Reagan International Airport were also temporarily halted.
As of this writing, police have yet to identify a motive in the attack. Initial reports indicate Lakanwal immigrated to the United States in 2021 following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the return to power by the Taliban. After US proxy forces in Afghanistan disintegrated following the US military’s withdrawal, approximately 200,000 people from Afghanistan, many who worked with and for US and allied forces during the 20-year occupation, were allowed to immigrate to the US under Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
Earlier this year, as part of Trump’s mass deportation operation, TPS was terminated for millions of people, including the majority of Afghan-born that came to the US in 2021 and later. In terminating TPS for people from Afghanistan, the Trump administration argued that Afghanistan under Taliban rule was now “safe.” Reports indicate Lakanwal was legally in the United States until September of this year.
The shooting is already being used by the Trump administration to justify further military deployments and attacks on democratic rights. Shortly after the shooting, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth publicly announced that President Trump, currently in Florida, requested additional troops be deployed to D.C.
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On his social media site, Trump characterized the shooter as an “animal” and said he will “pay a very steep price.”
The only reason Guardsmen are in D.C. in the first place is because Trump ordered the troops deployed to the city in August under the pretext of “fighting crime.” In reality, the troops are part of Trump’s ongoing efforts to establish a police military dictatorship. Since returning to the White House earlier this year, Trump has deployed National Guard units alongside federal agents in an effort to normalize heavily armed troops on US streets.
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In response to a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the D.C. deployment, last week U.S. Federal Judge Jia M. Cobb ruled Trump “exceeded the bounds” of his authority and that the Guard were being used for “non-military, crime-deterrence” reasons, in violation of Title 49 of the D.C. Code. While Cobb ruled the deployment illegal, she also issued an administrative stay on her decision for 21 days, allowing the Trump administration to appeal.
9. United States: Tyson eliminates 3,200 jobs with closure of Nebraska beef plant
Last week, Tyson Foods announced it will close its massive beef plant in Lexington, Nebraska, a facility that directly employs roughly 3,000–3,200 workers in a town of about 11,000 people.
The closure is scheduled to take effect on or around January 20, 2026, according to the company’s WARN notice to the Nebraska Department of Labor. Workers have been told that they have no guaranteed transfers, meaning these are essentially permanent job losses.
Built in 1990 and later acquired by Tyson, the plant has been an economic backbone of the city, employing a significant portion of the local workforce. Its ability to slaughter up to 5,000 heads of cattle per day—about 5 percent of total US capacity—turned Lexington into a crucial node in the beef supply chain.
The impact will have devastating consequences for workers and for the community of Lexington, creating a chain reaction in which other small businesses depending on these workers will suffer as well. Workers and their families will be forced to uproot themselves in search of new jobs.
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Slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants are among the most dangerous and deadliest workplaces in the United States. A study published this year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that 81 percent of poultry workers were at high risk of developing musculoskeletal injuries. In 2023, the Economic Policy Institute reported an average of 27 workers a day suffer amputation or hospitalization, according to new OSHA data from 29 states.
In addition, many workers are often immigrants—in some cases, undocumented—because these are the only jobs available to them. They face the dual threat of injuries inside the plant and the danger of being kidnapped and disappeared by ICE on the outside.
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Despite claiming its beef division is under financial pressure, Tyson Foods is still one of the biggest and most profitable meat companies in the world. In 2025, the company brought in $54.4 billion in sales and made more than $2.2 billion in operating income, mostly from its chicken and prepared-foods businesses.
The announcement is inseparable from broader political and economic forces. Although Tyson has not pointed to Trump’s nationalist tariff policy as the cause of the Lexington shutdown, recent shifts in federal trade posture, including moves that would expand access for cheaper imported beef from countries, such as Brazil and Argentina, intersect with a domestic market straining under soaring beef production costs. Retail beef prices have risen sharply, with prices up over 13 percent for ground beef and 16 percent for steaks over the past year.
The plant is non-unionized. However, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), whose members include thousands of meatpacking workers, sought to blame foreign workers by declaring: “This decision also raises serious questions about our national priorities. The Administration and Congress should be working to strengthen these workers and their communities by boosting production here at home. Instead, our leaders are flirting with importing beef from Argentina and unleashing tariffs that cut off foreign markets to American beef, pork, and chicken. Meatpacking workers across this country deserve better.”
The unions have long promoted nationalism, which seeks to tie workers to this or that country and this or that ruling class, and the UFCW’s comment fundamentally reflects this. The issue is not native-born workers versus foreign-born, but the working class versus the capitalist ruling class. That is, workers confronting the dictatorship of capital, which decides at will to destroy jobs, communities and livelihoods across the United States and the world.
10. At least 132 people killed in flooding in Southeast Asia
More than 100 people have been killed in Southeast Asia during a week and a half of intense rains throughout the region. Most of the destruction has taken place in Vietnam and Thailand, though Malaysia has also been affected.
At least 98 people have been killed in Vietnam as of Wednesday, while another 10 remain missing, since heavy rains began on November 16. An 800-kilometer stretch in the central region of the country has been the most heavily affected, with rainfall last week exceeding 1,900 millimeters in some areas. This is approximately equal to the average rainfall for the entire year.
The worst-hit province is Dak Lak where 63 people have been killed. Many of the roads have been blocked, with rescue personnel dropping supplies to stranded survivors from helicopters. Shops and homes have been destroyed or are under mud. Damage to the region, including crops, is estimated at $US545 million. At least 186,000 homes have been damaged and 3.2 million livestock and poultry have been killed. “We’ve never experienced that much rain and such bad flooding,” 45-year-old Pham Thu Huyen, a resident of Khanh Hoa Province, told the media.
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Vietnam is one of the world’s most flood-prone countries and has been particularly hard-hit this year, with major storms striking the country in September and October. This includes Typhoon Kalmeagi, which tore through the region in early November, striking the same central region of Vietnam, killing five.
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More rain is expected at the end of this week as Typhoon Koto, the 15th storm to form in the South China Sea, approaches Vietnam. While its path is currently unpredictable, heavy rains in the central region are expected from November 28 to 30.
While natural disasters like intense rains and typhoons cannot be prevented, they can be planned for. Yet under capitalism, the drive for profits takes priority over all else, including the safety and well-being of a population living in a flood-prone region.
Following its embrace of pro-capitalist reforms in 1986 under its Doi Moi program, the Stalinist regime in Hanoi carried out widespread construction with little regard for the impact on the environment. According to Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies, by 1996 Vietnam’s four major urban districts had lost nearly two-thirds of water bodies, which are important for managing floods.
Furthermore, Vietnam’s system of 7,300 reservoirs and dams throughout the country are outdated and poorly run, making flood management difficult and more dangerous. Many of these reservoirs and dams were built decades ago.
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On top of this, many of the reservoirs are operated individually rather than as part of a single, planned system. Operational procedures are also based on outdated information, without taking into account the new conditions that have developed as a result of climate change. This means flood planning, including the discharge of water, may be carried out without consideration for broader conditions. Uncontrolled spillways are also particularly vulnerable.
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As in Vietnam, poor disaster management is rampant in Thailand, where floods are also common. The Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI), a Bangkok-based think tank, wrote in an article published in January: “Thailand’s flood problems stem from three main issues: centralized policies with poor coordination on the ground, outdated early warning systems, and insufficient funding with misplaced priorities.”
The World Socialist Web Site conducts an interview with a New York City Postal Service worker on safety at her facility.
12. United States: After 4-month delay, Pennsylvania Democrats pass pro-corporate austerity budget
After a 135-day impasse, the Pennsylvania legislature finally passed a $50 billion budget on November 12. The overdue budget offers little to working class residents grappling with inflation, rising rents, foreclosures and job losses while providing substantial benefits to the corporate sector.
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The attacks on working people throughout the state did not stop Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro—widely considered a top prospective candidate for the United States president in 2028—from taking full credit for “staying at the table” and “getting things done.” In a statement to the Inquirer, Shapiro contrasted his approach to the budget with the conduct of national leaders in the federal shutdown last month.
“I think it’s a stark contrast, frankly, with what happened in D.C., where they didn’t stay at the table, they didn’t fight, and they got nothing,” he stated of the congressional Democrats. Shapiro stated of the budget on his social media accounts that “A budget isn’t just a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet—it’s a statement of our values and our commitment to our fellow Pennsylvanians.”
In fact, Shapiro and the Democratic Party are fully complicit in creating an ongoing crisis in the region. Amid growing economic hardships, both state Republicans and Democrats agreed on yet another objective: lowering the corporate net income tax rate.
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As Republicans and Democrats remain unable to find money for programs and services that benefit the working class while simultaneously lowering the corporate tax rate, other potential funding streams were bypassed. Governor Shapiro did not even include his own proposal of a 52 percent tax on skill games, an untaxed form of gambling in the state. Another proposed tax that was omitted from the bill was a tax on online sports betting.
The deliberate removal of possible revenue was presented as part of Josh Shapiro and the state Democrats’ strategy to capitulate to the Republicans and big business. Shapiro claimed that in a divided government, passing a budget requires everyone to “give a little and understand the perspectives of others a little bit better.”
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The role of the Democrats is to provide a facade of opposition to the corporate domination of society. They pay lip service to programs and services that benefit workers, knowing full well that the interests they serve will demand that they be slashed.
A very similar strategy was pursued by the national Democrats in Congress, as they offered Trump an off-ramp from a budget deadlock, a situation in which the vast majority of the population blamed Trump and the Republicans for the shutdown. This followed an election where Democrats had picked up significant victories. Rather than press the advantage, the Democrats decided to give in to Trump and allow the fascist President an opening to continue his assault on living standards and the [US] Constitution.
13. Italy’s general strikes against the 2026 budget of austerity and war
Italy’s proposed 2026 budget law has provoked a wave of opposition that is coalescing into two national general strikes, the first led by the base unions USB, CUB, SGB, Cobas (small ostensibly left and militant formations) on November 28-29, followed by a separate strike called by the much larger CGIL trade union on December 12. The confrontation unfolding in Italy is a political eruption of the working class against a government steering the country into austerity and militarism.
The fascist Meloni government’s draft budget is a declaration of war on the Italian and international working class. Modeled after Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” it is crafted to restructure the economy toward war spending, corporate profit, and authoritarian rule. At its core is the massive diversion of public resources from wages, essential services, and social protections into a multiyear rearmament program aligned with the European Union’s Re-Arm initiative and NATO’s strategic directives.
Tens of billions are stripped from healthcare, education, pensions, and local services to meet military-spending targets dictated by Brussels and Washington. Workers are being compelled to finance a war drive they oppose overwhelmingly.
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The working class has responded with anger and determination. Earlier this month, the base unions’ national assembly of cadres and delegates issued a mandate for a national general strike on November 28–29. On this basis, USB, CUB, and other rank-and-file unions formally proclaimed the November 28 strike across all public and private sectors.
USB and the base unions have framed their strike as a militant, anti-austerity action centered on wage recovery, defense of public services, opposition to war spending, and rejection of the government’s social and economic policies.
USB and CUB issued political indictments of the 2026 budget and the broader war agenda. Both denounce the shift of resources from wages and essential services to rearmament and condemn Italy and the EU for backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They oppose the conversion of industry and research to military purposes, the movement of arms through ports, and the expansion of repressive laws to silence dissent.
The budget, they declare, loots workers’ futures through privatizations, subcontracting, and a planned €22 billion surge in military spending, serving corporate and imperialist interests at the expense of the working class.
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Italy’s unrest is part of an international wave of resistance. Across Europe, workers face the same basic program: slashing social protections, increasing the burden on ordinary people, and diverting massive funds toward militarization.
In Belgium, a general strike was called for November 26 against pension cuts, abolished wage indexation, and benefit reductions, while the government raises military spending to meet NATO’s 2 percent target. In Portugal, a national strike on December 11 opposes draconian labor reforms under a right-wing government backed by the fascistic Chega party, even as Portugal commits to raising military spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2035.
These protests are rooted in a broader crisis: European governments are using the NATO-Russia war as geopolitical cover and economic justification for austerity and rearmament. They are treating the war as an opportunity to accelerate a social counter-revolution, increase police powers, repress dissent, and make workers pay for the warmongering ambitions of their ruling classes.
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The upcoming general strikes follow a major eruption of working-class opposition in Italy earlier in 2025, when mass protests broke out against Italy’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza. In September and October, tens of thousands took to the streets in more than 75 cities. Transport networks were disrupted, schools shut down, and port workers refused to load or unload arms shipments. This movement forced the union bureaucracies to call for mass actions, revealing the explosive potential of rank-and-file mobilization.
The anger has not dissipated. It is flowing into opposition to the 2026 budget and the broader fight against militarism.
What is emerging in Italy is the initial stages of a world revolutionary crisis. Across Europe, right-wing governments are intensifying austerity, militarization, and repression. The ruling classes are preparing for war abroad and class confrontation at home. Workers are beginning to push back.
14. UK Labour’s budget piles on suffering for workers, but not enough to satisfy ruling class
Chancellor Rachel Reeves said that her budget choices were “not austerity, not reckless borrowing, but cutting tax, cutting [National Health Service] waiting lists and cutting the cost of living.” But this was a budget that satisfied neither workers increasingly hostile to the Starmer Labour government, nor a ruling class demanding far more savage austerity than has been imposed so far.
Such is the crisis of the Labour government that there was speculation that if the bond markets responded unfavorably, this could spell the end of Reeves as Chancellor and hasten the end of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s time in Number 10.
Sky News correspondent Beth Rigby said that she was told ahead of the budget by a “cabinet minister” that “this will be a budget for self-preservation and not the country”.
The government is hemmed in on all sides, with rising anger from below, particularly over a cost-of-living crisis pauperizing millions of workers, countered by the financial elite who are insisting on further cuts to public spending to enrich the corporations and banks and increase military spending.
Isolated by the defeats suffered by the European working class, the Soviet Union became increasingly dominated by a conservative bureaucratic caste under Joseph Stalin. This bureaucracy gradually usurped political power from the working class, betraying the revolutionary internationalism that had guided the October Revolution and the Comintern. In place of the global strategy of Permanent Revolution advanced by Lenin and Trotsky, Stalin promulgated the reactionary nationalist doctrine of “Socialism in One Country,” severing the fate of the Soviet workers’ state from the worldwide struggle for socialism.
Stalin’s program meant the subordination of the international working class to the narrow, nationalist interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, which was preoccupied with safeguarding its own privileges. Through its influence over the Communist parties of the Comintern, Stalinism sowed confusion and disorientation within the workers’ movement, leading to a series of historic defeats.
In China, Stalin forced the Chinese Communist Party into the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang, insisting on a “bloc of four classes” that included the national bourgeoisie during the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-1927. Trotsky warned that this would disarm the working class, and the 1927 Shanghai massacre of tens of thousands of communists by the Kuomintang vindicated his warnings.
In South Africa, the Comintern imposed the “Native Republic” thesis on the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), demanding a capitalist stage under a black bourgeoisie before socialism. This subordinated the party to the African National Congress and bound the working class to bourgeois nationalism. It became the basis for the CPSA’s long-running alliance with the ANC, a partnership that continues today as they preside over one of the most unequal societies in the world.
Trotsky opposed this two-stage strategy. In his “Letter to South African Revolutionaries”, he rejected policies that subordinated workers to bourgeois nationalism and warned that Marxism must base itself on the independent mobilization of African workers. He insisted that the party “must champion with all its strength the complete and unconditional right of the blacks to independence,” but emphasized that “only the proletariat, leading the native masses,” could resolve the national and agrarian questions, which pointed directly toward the struggle for a workers’ state rather than a bourgeois stage.
In Germany, the Communist Party refused to form a united front with the Social Democrats against the Nazis, even though until 1932 the combined workers’ organizations were numerically—and, due to their base in the working class, socially—far stronger than Hitler. This sectarian line helped clear the path for the Nazi takeover in 1933. The Soviet bureaucracy then swung to the opposite extreme, ordering Communist parties to form popular fronts with liberal bourgeois forces and abandon any struggle in the colonies so as not to jeopardize Moscow’s diplomatic manoeuvres with imperialism.
Soon after, the British and French sections abandoned agitation for colonial independence, in the name of “anti-fascism” and “defending democracy.” The absurdity of this line was clear in Portugal, where the Communist Party, operating clandestinely under the fascist Estado Novo dictatorship, avoided advocating independence for Angola or Mozambique. By subordinating colonial liberation to the diplomatic interests of imperial powers, Stalinism discredited socialism in the colonies.
When General Francisco Franco launched his fascist coup in 1936 and sparked a three-year civil war, his most decisive forces comprised 80,000 Moroccan colonial troops. But the Popular Front government, dominated by the Stalinists, refused to proclaim Moroccan independence from Spain. As the Trotskyists insisted, a revolutionary appeal to the Moroccan masses could have shattered Franco’s base and opened a joint struggle of Spanish workers and the colonised against imperialism. Instead, Stalin suppressed any such action for fear of upsetting Britain and France, helping seal the defeat of the Spanish Revolution.
Stalin launched the Great Purges of the 1930s, physically exterminating the finest representatives of generations of Marxist intellectuals, that would culminate in the murder of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 by a GPU agent. In the Soviet Union, close to one million people were executed in this counterrevolutionary violence between 1936 and 1939. Across the Comintern, countless militants who had once fought for the October Revolution and pioneers in the founding of Communist Parties in their respective countries were eliminated. Albert Nzula, the CPSA’s first black Secretary General was killed after showing sympathy for Trotsky and voicing criticisms of Stalin.[1]
The Stalinist counterrevolution disoriented millions of left-wing workers. With Trotskyism suppressed inside the Soviet Union and persecuted across Europe, the emerging African working class was left without the revolutionary internationalist perspective necessary to lead the struggle against imperialism.
In this vacuum, a new current began to take shape: Pan Africanism. Its most influential architect, George Padmore, had risen within the Stalinist apparatus. As a trusted Comintern official in Moscow, he had participated in disciplinary commissions tasked with policing ideological loyalty and rooting out alleged “Trotskyists” within the Chinese Communist Party and other sections.
Padmore only broke with the Soviet Bureaucracy in 1934 when it became clear that Stalin had abandoned any genuine interest in anti-colonial struggles and viewed the nationalist movements in Africa, as elsewhere, as bargaining chips in his diplomatic maneuvers with the imperialist powers. His ideas, however, remained firmly rooted in a Stalinist nationalist outlook.
Padmore’s role was only enhanced after the catastrophe in East Africa. Seeking an accommodation with Mussolini as a counterweight to Hitler, the Soviet bureaucracy courted fascist Italy as it launched its colonial war on Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935. Stalin supplied Italy with oil, coal, and wheat, even as opposition erupted across the world: thousands demonstrated in Accra, dockworkers in Cape Town and Durban refused to load Italian ships, and labor militants in Marseilles blocked supplies.
Against Stalin’s policy and the empty sanctions of the League of Nations, Trotskyists called for “independent sanctions of the working class, its own boycotts, strikes, defense funds, mass demonstrations that can aid the battles of Ethiopian peoples.”
The invasion of Ethiopia, which left 760,000 people dead in a country of only six million, became a political watershed for a generation of African intellectuals and workers. The fall of the continent’s only independent state to a fascist power profoundly shaped figures such as Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, and I. T. A. Wallace Johnson, and helped radicalize emerging layers of African labor.
The crisis elevated Padmore’s international stature, enabling him to mentor the nationalists who would later lead newly independent states. Many worked closely with Padmore at the 1945 Pan African Congress in Manchester. After Ghana’s independence, Padmore joined Nkrumah as an adviser and helped shape the political direction of the new regime.
Central to Padmore’s program was the insistence that national liberation would come through an aspiring African elite. In his wartime essay “The White Man’s Duty,” Padmore explained, “These educated or ‘Europeanized’ Africans constitute the intelligentsia of the West African colonies. They represent the vanguard of the national and progressive movements which today are voicing increasingly the political and economic aspirations of the African people. This is a natural development.”
Padmore argued explicitly that the task was to contain Marxism through nationalism. “The only force capable of containing Communism in Asia and Africa,” he wrote, “is dynamic nationalism based upon a socialist program of industrialization.”
On this basis, he appealed to the imperialist powers to grant independence. This outlook became the ideological foundation for the nationalist regimes that would ultimately suppress strikes, block socialist opposition and ensure Africa remained subordinated to imperialism.
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In opposition, Trotsky and his co-thinkers founded the Fourth International in 1938 to uphold and advance the revolutionary strategy of world socialist revolution. The founding manifesto declared: “The Fourth International supports unconditionally the struggle of the colonial and semi colonial peoples for national independence. But it warns that genuine liberation is possible only through the conquest of power by the working class, which alone can break the chains of imperialism and unite the oppressed masses across national boundaries.”
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The rise of Julius Nyerere’s Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) is often presented as an inevitable outcome of Tanganyika’s march to independence. Nationalist, Pan-Africanist, and Stalinist historians claim that the working class was too small and too immature in Tanganyika to lead the struggle for socialism. Tanganyika, it is also claimed, was too underdeveloped to build socialism. From this, they conclude that the working class and peasantry could only play a subordinate role to the petty-bourgeois nationalist intelligentsia. TANU, they insist, was the “natural” and unchallengeable leader of the liberation movement.
This framework inverts the real historical process. It ignores the lessons of Marxism and the October Revolution that only the working class can lead the peasantry and unify the oppressed masses in a revolutionary struggle. It erases the post-war emergence of a modern, militant African working class whose power spanned beyond colonial borders. Above all, it obscures the decisive question of leadership: Stalinism, still falsely equated with socialism, destroyed the Trotskyist leadership capable of forging this class into an independent revolutionary force, even as the Fourth International fought under exceptionally difficult conditions to preserve that perspective.
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Between 1951 and 1955, Tanganyika saw an average of 60 strikes per year involving around 8,000 workers. After 1956, the movement accelerated dramatically. Between 1956 and 1960 the number rose to 146 strikes annually, involving nearly 60,000 workers, with more than 480,000 man hours lost each year. By 1960, on the eve of independence, there were 203 separate labor disputes involving over 89,000 workers.
From one registered union with 381 members in 1951, the movement expanded to 35 unions with 203,000 members by 1961, around 42 percent of Tanganyika’s workforce, one of the largest unionization rates on the continent. The formation of the Tanganyika Federation of Labour (TFL) in 1955 with 17 affiliated trade unions linked together dock, rail, plantation, municipal, and clerical unions. By 1958, sisal workers had established a National Plantation Workers Union with 30,000 members
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These struggles were driving toward working-class unity across East Africa, reflecting a continent-wide upsurge against colonial rule. Yet this international tendency toward unity was broken by nationalist parties, whose Stalinist and Padmore-inspired Pan-Africanist outlooks reinforced colonial divisions and splintered workers along territorial lines.
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The claim that Nyerere “inherited an underdeveloped country”, used to justify his later policies, serves to obscure the real history. Tanganyika emerged from colonial rule with an illiterate population that had faced decades of mistreatment and racism, an economy serving extraction, scarcity of resources and trained manpower. But the decisive fact was that the working class across East Africa was rising, linking struggles across borders and industries, and intersecting with mass discontent among the peasantry. What prevented this force from leading a socialist struggle was not “immaturity,” but the political straitjacket of nationalism and the absence of a revolutionary, internationalist leadership.
As Trotsky had warned, the democratic, economic and social aspirations of workers and peasants could not be resolved through the creation of Tanzanian capitalist state along the borders of colonialism and within the imperialist framework.
16. Turkey: The Böcek family's death by poisoning in Istanbul: A preventable tragedy
The tragic deaths of four members of the Böcek family, including two children, in Istanbul while on holiday from Germany and staying at a hotel in the Fatih district has revealed the deadly consequences of Turkey’s unregulated and profit-driven tourism business and the state’s systematic neglect of its duty to protect public health.
On the morning of November 12 , the Böcek family went to the hospital by taxi suffering from nausea. After undergoing examination and treatment, the family returned to their hotel. However, when they fell ill again repeatedly during the night, an ambulance was called to the hotel to take them back to hospital. Shortly after, the children, Kadir Muhammet (6) and Masal (3), died. Their mother, Çiğdem Böcek, died in intensive care on 14 November, their father, Servet Böcek, died on 17 November after several days of treatment.
Initially, it was assumed that the deaths were caused by food poisoning. However, as the investigation progressed it emerged that the deaths were caused by a disinfestation carried out in the hotel to eradicate bedbugs. According to the state-owned Anadolu Agency, the Forensic Medicine Report stated that “phosphine gas” had been detected in towels, face masks and swab samples taken from various locations in the family’s hotel room. It is believed that the phosphine gas seeped in through the bathroom ventilation system. Two other tourists staying at the same hotel were hospitalized with similar symptoms.
A hotel employee, the owner of the pest control company and his son, and an employee of the pest control company, were arrested. The hotel owner was placed under house arrest, while the receptionist was prohibited from leaving the country. The hotel was temporarily evacuated. However, these measures treat the problem as solely the result of individual mistakes and open the door to new disasters.
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The reduction of public health and safety measures, the abandonment of basic oversight and the widespread use of cheap and unregulated chemicals are leading to preventable deaths. Institutions with oversight authority have been rendered ineffective for years due to budget cuts. Unlicensed pest control companies, meanwhile, are gaining a larger share of the “free market” through social media advertising.
Dr. Afşin İpekci, an Emergency Medicine Specialist from Istanbul University, stated that low-cost chemicals and their easy availability have led to widespread uninformed use, adding that the fundamental problem stems not from a lack of knowledge but from the system encouraging uncontrolled use. According to İpekci, the fact that individuals who are not competent in the risks, effects, and conditions of use of these chemicals have access to them is itself a security issue.
“Being cheap and effective does not mean it is harmless,” says İpekci, emphasizing that the opportunity for early intervention was lost because the necessary information was not shared. These assessments confirm that the disaster that befell the Böcek family was the result of a profit system that disregards human life and health.
17.
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.
