Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Summary execution in the West Bank: Trump’s “peace” deal in practice
On Thursday, Israeli forces carried out a summary execution of two unarmed Palestinians in the West Bank after they had surrendered, in an event recorded live on video.
The victims, Yusef ‘Asa’sah, 39, and al-Muntaser bel-lah ‘Abdallah, 26, were shown in the video lifting their shirts to prove they had no weapons and lying on the ground in surrender. Israeli forces directed them to enter a building, had them lie on the ground then shot them multiple times in a hail of automatic rifle fire.
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The shooting occurred as part of an ongoing assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. “Everyone saw that they were posing no threat to the Israeli forces,” said Shai Parnes of Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, “yet the soldiers decided to shoot them and kill them on the spot.”
The summary execution, a war crime under international law, was openly defended by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who declared, “The [Israeli] fighters acted exactly as expected of them – terrorists should die.”
The incident is the first time since the beginning of the genocide in Palestine on October 7, 2023 that footage has been released showing Israeli forces carrying out a summary execution using small arms. But eyewitness accounts and direct physical evidence point to the existence of dozens or hundreds of such murders.
In April 2024, nearly 300 bodies were discovered in a series of mass graves near Nazer Hospital in Southern Gaza. Many of the dead were handcuffed and showed signs of being shot at close range.
The victims of these executions are just part of the more than 60,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli bullets and bombs since the start of the Gaza genocide nearly two years ago, and the tens of thousands more who have died from hunger, disease and deprivation.
The fact that Israeli forces are not only executing unarmed Palestinians with TV cameras rolling, but that the cabinet of the Israeli government is defending these actions, exposes the fact that the “peace” deal signed by Israel and Hamas is nothing more than an enabling act for genocide throughout all of Palestine. Israel is in fact accelerating its plan to annex Gaza and the West Bank.
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Earlier this month, Trump’s “peace” deal was given the imprimatur of the UN Security Council, which voted on November 17 to pass a resolution “welcoming the historic Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity” and praising the “constructive role played by the United States of America.”
This shameful resolution was passed with the vote not only of the imperialist powers—France, the UK, the United States—but with the votes of the Arab bourgeois regimes of Algeria and Pakistan, and with the endorsement of the Palestinian Authority.
As Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, declared “Not a single member of the Council had the courage, principle, or respect for international law to vote against this US-Israel colonial outrage.”
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Since the declaration of the “ceasefire” on October 10, Israel has violated its terms over 500 times, killing 350 Palestinians and wounding about 900 others. It has carried out near-daily attacks throughout Lebanon, and this week carried out an airstrike in Syria that killed 13 people.
The “peace” plan has, moreover, enabled Israel to turn its attention to the West Bank as part of a systematic project to annex the whole of Palestine into “greater Israel.” The attacks on Lebanon and Syria are, moreover, preparatory to a war against Iran.
In September, Netanyahu announced a plan to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank, effectively cutting the Palestinian territory in half. The settlement plan, in the words of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, aims to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state.”
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The events since the announcement of the so-called Gaza “ceasefire” have thoroughly exposed those who have promoted Trump’s “peace” plan—including the corporate media, the Democratic and Republican parties, the imperialist powers of Europe, and the bourgeois regimes of the Arab world.
In the United States, it was launched by the Biden administration and the Democratic Party, and it is now being “completed” under Trump and the Republicans. This bipartisan unity was embodied in the grotesque display last week by Mamdani. A not insignificant factor in Mamdani’s election was popular opposition to the genocide. Now, he pledges a “partnership” with its chief architect.
The genocide in Palestine is part of a far broader imperialist war, stretching from the Middle East to Ukraine to the Asia-Pacific. Stopping it requires the mobilization of the international working class, the only force capable of halting the war machine.
2. Trump threatens to denaturalize and deport US citizens after D.C. National Guard shooting
Following the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard soldiers on Wednesday, on Thursday night, US President Donald Trump published a staggering statement announcing that his government would “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country,” “end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country,” “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility,” and “deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
Trump further pledged to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and declared that “only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation.” Trump’s call for “reverse migration” comes just over a month after the Department of Homeland Security posted “Remigrate” on X.
“Remigration” — interchangeable with “reverse migration” in fascist discourse — is a central demand of Great Replacement theorists, white nationalist movements in Europe and the United States, and racists advocating the forced removal of ethnic, religious, and immigrant populations deemed undesirable. Once the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, and especially after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, the Schutzstaffel (SS) began aggressively pressuring German Jews to emigrate.
Drawing directly from the same ideological architecture that animated ethnic purges in the 20th century and also underpins contemporary fascist movements, only hours before Trump announced that “only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director Joseph Edlow declared that the agency would begin intensified screening of migrants from 19 countries classified as “high-risk.”
The list includes Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.
The directive took effect immediately, covering all pending and future immigration requests filed on or after November 27, and was issued without public legislative approval. Nearly every country named is either presently under U.S. sanction, military occupation, or targeted in active war planning.
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Trump and the billionaires he represents know that refugees and immigrants are not responsible for collapsing infrastructure, overcrowded hospitals, or homelessness, American capitalism is. As David North, citing Oxfam, outlined in his recent London lecture inequality in America has been skyrocketing for decades.
The wealthiest 0.1% own 12.6% of U.S. assets.
From 1989–2022, the top percentile gained 101 times more wealth than the median household
40% of the U.S. population, including nearly half of all children, is poor or low-income
The US is one of the richest societies in history, yet for the working class life expectancy falls as COVID-19 runs rampant, tens of millions cannot afford housing or medical care, and workers labor longer for less. As millions struggle to survive, Trump’s cabinet and top appointees exceed $60 billion in net worth. Sixteen rank among the 813 billionaires in a nation of 341 million people.
Trump’s attacks on immigrants are aimed at obscuring this reality and dividing the working class from their brothers and sisters in the US and internationally. They serve not only as a spearhead for attacks on the democratic rights of the entire working class, but also serve to shield his, and the Democrats, responsibility for decades of imperialist war which created the so-called “migrant crisis.” During America’s multi-decade “global war on terror,” over 37 million people have been forced to leave their homes due to imperialist violence.
Among those that were forced to migrate to the United States appears to have the suspected shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29. Lakanwal is currently facing multiple charges, including murder, after he shot Sarah Beckstrom, 20, of Summersville, West Virginia and Andrew Wolfe, 24 on Wednesday. Beckstrom died on Thursday from her injuries while Wolf remains hospitalized and in critical condition as of this writing.
Lakanwal came to the United States in September 2021 after the US military withdrew from Afghanistan. Multiple reports have confirmed that he was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2011, that is while he was still a 15-year-old child, and participated in Zero Unit, paramilitary death squads run by the CIA during the 20-year occupation of the country. In 2018, Rolling Stone described Zero Units as the “CIA’s secret army” trained by “American special-operations soldiers.”
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There is no question that Trump is using Wednesday’s shooting to create conditions for him to invoke the Insurrection Act and rule as a president-dictator. Following the shooting, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that 500 additional troops would be deployed to D.C. on the orders of Trump. A federal judge ruled the deployment illegal just last week, but this did not prevent Democratic D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser from agreeing to joint patrols between Guard units and the Metropolitan Police.
Leon Trotsky warned that capitalism in degeneration transforms the Earth into “a foul prison.” Trump’s anti-immigrant pogrom and military occupations makes that prison visible. Stopping this trajectory will not come through the Democrats who are already cooperating and collaborating with the aspiring dictator. It will come only through the united action of the working class—immigrant and native-born—against the ruling class that fears them both.
3. “Things like this happen everywhere”: Residents of Hermosillo, Mexico speak on Waldo’s explosion
The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke to Hermosillo residents about the November 1 explosion at a Waldo’s convenience store, which killed 24 people and injured at least a dozen more.
Reports indicate that a fire began at an electrical transformer improperly installed inside the store before causing an explosion. The store lacked basic safety measures, such as emergency exits, and had been operating without a civil protection plan since 2021.
The death toll rose to 24 after 81-year-old Marco Segundo Reyes, a Waldo’s worker, succumbed to his injuries on November 7.
The tragedy is still a raw nerve in Hermosillo, the capital of the state of Sonora in northwestern Mexico. At the corner of the block where the explosion happened, residents have set up a memorial to the victims, including signs demanding, “No more tragedies … no more victims.”
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The Waldo’s explosion illustrates to the need to develop a network of rank-and-file committees in Mexico, linking their struggles up with the struggles of workers in the US fighting against industrial slaughterhouses and the fascist, anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration. Central to this will be the development of socialist consciousness throughout the hemisphere, as part of the fight of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) for the United Socialist States of the Americas.
4. Death toll reaches 128 in horrific Hong Kong apartment fire
At least 128 residents are confirmed dead in the fire at Wang Fuk Court, a public housing estate in the Tai Po district of Hong Kong. Approximately 200 people remain missing and unaccounted for as firefighters and recovery teams comb the charred towers.
Local and international reports indicate that the victims range from young children to elderly pensioners, including at least one firefighter, and that the estate—home to roughly 4,600 people—housed predominantly low‑income families and older residents in cramped apartments.
A BBC report said, “Some 2,311 firefighters worked to bring the fire under control after it spread across seven of Wang Fuk Court’s eight apartment blocks.” The Fire Services Department reported that the blaze was fully extinguished at 10:18 a.m. on Friday, after roughly 43 hours of firefighting.
Rescue crews have shifted from active firefighting to systematic search, recovery and support operations. They are moving through the towers flat by flat, forcing open doors to look for victims, recovering bodies and checking any remaining “unresolved” emergency calls from residents, who phoned for help during the blaze.
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Many of the dead and missing lived in the mid‑ to upper floors of the blocks that were most heavily wrapped in scaffolding and polystyrene‑sealed windows, where smoke and flames cut off stairwells and trapped entire households.
The Wang Fuk Court inferno in Hong Kong is the territory’s deadliest residential fire in more than 70 years, a man‑made social crime caused by the capitalist system. A profit‑driven renovation, official negligence and systematic degradation of public housing have exposed the reality facing Hong Kong’s working class.
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Although an official investigation is underway, what is already clear is that this was not a natural disaster but the predictable outcome of a dangerous renovation regime and a gutted safety infrastructure.
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Residents and former security staff have said that the fire alarm system in at least one block had been intentionally disabled months earlier to facilitate contractor access, while multiple survivors report that no alarms sounded, and emergency lighting failed as smoke poured into corridors.
Footage and eyewitness accounts describe flames and burning debris cascading from the exterior works, smashing windows and driving super‑heated gases into the flats, while escape routes were choked by black smoke.
The dense mesh and boarded‑up windows not only accelerated the blaze but also obstructed residents’ attempts to signal for help or reach fresh air, forcing some to crowd onto tiny balconies or attempt desperate climbs along the scaffolding.
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The Labour Department and relevant building authorities have admitted that they conducted at least 16 safety inspections at Wang Fuk Court between July 2024 and November 2025, issuing six improvement notices and initiating three legal actions against the contractor.
Residents had repeatedly complained from 2024 onward about the flammable green mesh and the accumulation of cigarette butts and debris on the construction platforms, but officials insisted that the netting was certified as “flame-retardant” and allowed work to continue with only minor corrective orders.
Even as late as November 20—days before the inferno—the authorities carried out another inspection and issued written warnings but did not halt the works, revoke permits or compel removal of the combustible cladding and foam that turned the estate into a tinderbox.
In their public statements, senior Hong Kong officials have combined rote expressions of sympathy with platitudes about “lessons learned,” while treating the disaster as a regrettable aberration rather than the product of systemic capitalist neglect.
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Survivors and residents have responded with anger and grief, denouncing the catastrophe as preventable and condemning both the contractors and the government. Many of those who escaped report being awakened or alerted not by alarms but by the smell of smoke, the shouts of neighbors or the sight of flames racing up the building outside their windows.
One elderly resident told local media that he would “be dead” except for already being awake. Others trapped in upper floors described pitch‑black corridors, the collapse of power and emergency lighting, and the terror of feeling their doors and metal gates grow hot as the exterior foam boards ignited.
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Rescue and recovery workers, confronting a scene of mass death, have spoken of the extraordinary difficulty of their task. Firefighters have detailed how the combination of exterior scaffolding, burning debris and high internal temperatures forced them to proceed slowly, floor by floor, even as they knew large numbers of people were trapped above.
Emergency service briefings describe apartments gutted down to bare concrete, with entire families found huddled together in bathrooms and corners far from windows, having been unable to reach stairwells in time.
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Non‑governmental groups and local charities have deployed volunteers to Wang Fuk Court’s displaced residents, distributing blankets, heat packs, masks, clothing and portable chargers at shelters and ad hoc collection points.
Spokespeople for these organizations are emphasizing the psychological trauma facing the survivors, particularly children and the elderly, and are calling for increased funding and coordination to provide counseling, legal support and longer‑term housing solutions.
Henry Ford Health acquired the operations of what was Grand Blanc Genesys Hospital in the fall of 2024 through a joint venture with Ascension Michigan. Since that time, conditions at Genesys have deteriorated as management has sought to recoup the costs of the acquisition off the backs of staff and at the expense of patient care.
The great danger is that the strike continues to remain isolated under conditions where Henry Ford Health is continuing normal operations at scores of hospitals, medical centers and clinics across Southeast Michigan. Henry Ford Genesys is one of the few unionized hospitals in the Henry Ford Health system, which reported $9.6 billion in revenues in 2024.
Some 370 hospital support staff, members of American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 3518 have continued to work under a separate contract all during the strike.
About 375 nurses at Henry Ford Rochester Hospital were locked out five days in June of 2025 after they returned an 87 percent vote to strike for three days. The nurses at Henry Ford Rochester are also fighting for safe staffing and have been without a contract since 2022.
While healthcare workers all across the United States have launched strikes and protests against the ruthless cost-cutting by the healthcare conglomerates, their struggles have been rendered ineffective by the trade union apparatuses. In most cases, walkouts have been limited to a few days. In the few instances where open-ended strikes have been launched, such as at Genesys, healthcare workers have been left isolated so that the billion-dollar hospital chains can wear them down and impose defeats. This was the case at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, where workers struck for 301 days in 2021 over staffing before finally being forced to ratify a concessionary contract.
Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien and General Secretary-Treasurer Fred Zuckerman visited the picket line last month. Despite tough sounding talk, O’Brien proposed no concrete action to aid or expand the strike outside.
O’Brien notoriously was invited to speak at the Republican National Convention in 2024, receiving applause from the collective assembly of extreme right-wing and anti-working class politicians.
While elected as a supposed reformer, he showed his true colors with the betrayal the 2023 UPS contract struggle covering 340,000 workers. The Teamsters used a bogus “strike-ready” campaign to strike a militant posture but then blocked a strike and pushed through a contract that met none of drivers’ key demands, especially those regarding casual workers. Since then, tens of thousands of UPS workers have lost their jobs due to automation and other measures.
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Despite threats from Teamsters toadies, several Genesys workers stopped to discuss the issues in their strike with the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).
One veteran nurse told the WSWS, “A lot of people will never cross. They will go find work elsewhere with employers who are ethical and don’t lie to people.”
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She explained, “We are a profession. We have our own licensure. There is a national and worldwide nurse shortage. You need programs to finance and get people into nursing because it is a very difficult profession. We love what we do. It’s not the money or the hours—they suck. It’s not the holidays, weekends and night shifts. Who wants to go in there to hold dead people’s hands? I want to work somewhere I am valued.
“To say it is not a profession, you are not getting an equal amount for loans, is going to make bigger problems. It is going to make it more difficult to get people into the profession. We are one of the few professions AI can’t replace. Someone has to actually be there.”
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On the strikebreaking operation being carried out by Henry Ford, another nurse said, “They paid more for temporary workers the first week than what they offered in their whole contract over three years.” Another nurse said Henry Ford paid $6 million the first week of the strike alone on strikebreakers.
She added, “They don’t have unions at their other hospitals, and they don’t want us to get a good contract.”
The WSWS explained the call for the building of rank-and-file committees to take up the fight to mobilize workers independent of the trade union bureaucracy. We explained that our opposition to the Teamsters leadership was not “anti-union,” pointing to the fact that O’Brien and other bureaucrats like United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain carried out policies detrimental to the interests of workers they claim to represent, by imposing company-friendly contracts to suppressing strike action.
More than 200 millimeters [almost 8 inches] of rainfall have accompanied the terrifying “Ditwah” cyclone currently battering Sri Lanka, unleashing floods, landslides and other calamities. By the evening of November 28, the Disaster Management Centre (DMC) reported at least 69 deaths, with several others missing. Tens of thousands—possibly hundreds of thousands—have been displaced by the ensuing devastation. The disaster is widespread and the worst in living memory.
According to the Department of Meteorology, the storm originated as a low-pressure system over the southwestern Bay of Bengal and Sri Lanka on the 26th. It developed into a deep depression and intensified into Cyclone Ditwah by the 28th, making landfall in Sri Lanka. Similar storms across Southeast Asia in recent days—affecting Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand—have killed hundreds and displaced millions, creating a regional catastrophe.
Since Thursday, Kandy, the capital of the hill country, has been completely cut off, with still no access as of Saturday morning. On Friday, the cyclone hit the war-ravaged northern province.
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Numerous rivers and reservoirs are either already overflowing or dangerously close to doing so, displacing thousands in surrounding low-lying regions.
The highest number of deaths—over 35—has been reported in Badulla district in the Central Province, which is experiencing landslides, hillside collapses and flooding. Fatalities have occurred in the divisional secretariat areas of Badulla, Welimada, Lunugala, Passara, Kandaketiya, Uva Paranagama, Soranathota and Ella.
Many residents in these areas are tea estate workers living in dilapidated line rooms that offer no protection against even moderate rain. On the 27th, a major landslide in Badulla killed 11 people, with several still missing.
The Mahaweli River overflow has devastated Mahiyanganaya Hospital, submerging its lower floor under six feet of water. Expensive equipment and millions of rupees’ worth of medicine have been destroyed. Similar reports are emerging from other areas.
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Electricity is disrupted all over the country. Officially, there have been over 65,000 power outages, only 26,000 of which have been restored. Hundreds of thousands of people are still without electricity. Adverse weather has made repairs extremely difficult. According to the general manager of the Ceylon Electricity Board, the island’s power supply has been disrupted by 25 to 30 percent.
Flooding, landslides and power outage have also severely impacted telecommunications. Phone services have been cut for more than 24 hours in flood-affected areas such as Gampola, Nuwara Eliya, Passara, Kadugannawa and Welimada, as well as much of the Kandy district, where a emergency situation has been declared.
The chairman of the National Water Supply and Drainage Board warned that disruptions at several major pumping stations could lead to a severe shortfall in the distribution of clean drinking water.
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There have been calls for the immediate declaration of a draconian state of emergency by opposition parliamentarians. On the 28th, the main opposition party Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) MP for Kurunegala, J.C. Alawathuwala, made the call in parliament, while MP Ravi Karunanayake of the United National Party voiced support. Former President Chandrika Kumaratunge also joined the call.
These calls are not made out of genuine concern for disaster victims, but out of fear of social upheaval. The government ministers have said that in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, prices for all essential food items may skyrocket.
Though Dissanayake has not yet declared a state of emergency, he has reportedly decided to place camps for displaced people under military control, according to a report in Lankadeepa.
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Like their counterparts around the world, Sri Lanka’s capitalist rulers have refused to invest in the infrastructure necessary to protect lives. The current Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National Peoples Power (JVP/NPP) government’s election pledges to “balance economic growth and environmental conservation” have been exposed as lies. There is no such national solutions under a capitalist framework for the economic and social crisis.
Obsessed with meeting the IMF’s austerity demands, the JVP/NPP spends not a cent of the tax money wrung from the people to protect human lives—let alone the environment.
That is why even moderate rainfall leads, year after year, to mass deaths and devastation from landslides and floods. The government has ravaged the environment for unregulated development, abandoned people to their fate during disasters, and made no effort to build infrastructure capable of withstanding natural calamities. There are no serious programs to relocate those living in danger zones to safe areas or to allocate the necessary funds for long-term disaster preparedness.
Global warming, driven overwhelmingly by human activity—specifically the unrestrained burning of fossil fuels by giant industries in the advanced capitalist countries—is fueling the rise of extreme weather events. Large-scale deforestation, industrial agriculture, and urbanization intensify the problem, releasing greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.
These are not “natural” disasters in the traditional sense, but the predictable and preventable byproducts of a capitalist system driven by profit, not human need. The only solution lies in replacing this social order with a rational, socialist society committed to safeguarding life and the planet.
7. Australia: Labor-Greens deal to fast-track mining and military project
Yet again the Greens have proven how far they will go, even at the expense of their pretensions to be fighting to avert the climate change catastrophe, in order to shore up the Australian Labor government and deliver the requirements of the corporate ruling class.
After talks on Wednesday night between Greens leaders and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the Greens helped the government ram through both houses of parliament by Friday morning seven “environmental” bills—about 1,500 pages of legislation—that particularly fast-track critical minerals and other war-related projects.
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In all the media coverage, no explanation has been provided as to why the government was so desperate to rush the legislation through parliament before the end of the year. There has been no mention of the most pressing factor—Labor’s critical minerals agreement with Trump.
The Greens tried to justify their role by claiming to have obtained an amendment to prevent the “national interest” power being used to approve new coal and gas projects. But they had no objection to the power being strengthened for war-related purposes.
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The Australian Financial Review, a mouthpiece for the financial elite, voiced appreciation for the part played by the Greens. The newspaper’s political editor Phillip Coorey said their “smart politics” had given the Greens a “significant policy win” that played them “back into relevance.”
What is the record of the government that the Greens are so anxious to prop up? Since taking office in 2022, the Albanese government has approved at least 31 new coal, oil and gas developments, which add up to a cumulative carbon emissions total of 6.5 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent over their lifetimes. Most recently, Labor approved an extension until 2070 of the giant North West Shelf (NWS) gas project, operated by Woodside Energy Group Ltd.
This makes a mockery of Labor’s claims to be seeking “net zero” emissions by 2050. In September, the government released its totally inadequate 2035 target of a 62-70 percent reduction in domestic greenhouse gas emissions relative to 2005 levels. That does not even count the much larger impact of Australian capitalism’s coal and gas exports, which by some measures make it the second-largest climate polluter by total carbon emissions per capita, second only to Russia.
This month’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil, like the previous international gatherings of government representatives, confirmed the failure of global capitalism to even approach the measures necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. UN reports show the planet is on course to heat by 2.6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
According to scientific studies, this would expose billions of people to one or more of extreme heat and regular life-threatening heatwaves, regular droughts and wildfires, coastal and riverine flooding, far more frequent extreme storms, newly prevalent diseases, food shortages and price shocks, with the damage overwhelming affecting the poorest people of the planet.
On November 17, 24-year-old worker Jack McGrath was killed at BlueScope’s Port Kembla steelworks after he was hit by a steel beam that fell while being lifted by a crane. McGrath, who was employed as a rigger by contractor Ventia, was apparently working on a major $1.15 billion project to reline the steelworks’ No.6 blast furnace.
Work was temporarily halted in the area where McGrath had been working, to allow SafeWork New South Wales (NSW) inspectors to investigate the scene. However, BlueScope kept the rest of the large industrial complex operating. Employees and contractors, while forced to continue working, were told by the company not to speak to anyone about the incident.
At a moving funeral service yesterday in Kembla Grange, more than 700 people gathered to mourn McGrath’s passing. Family and friends, still clearly shocked and traumatized by his sudden death, remembered the young man as generous, loving and fiercely loyal.
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McGrath’s death is part of a broader trend of workplace tragedy. An average of 191 workers are killed on the job each year in Australia, more that one every two days, according to Safe Work Australia. Last year, 37 construction workers were killed at work, 20 percent of all workplace fatalities in the country. Only two industries, “transport, postal and warehousing” and “agriculture, forestry and fishing,” claimed more lives.
This is by no means an Australian phenomenon. The scourge of workplace deaths and serious injuries is on the rise globally, as corporations impose productivity increases and speed-ups to sate the demands of their financial backers. These are not accidents, but examples of social murder perpetrated by an economic system, capitalism, under which everything, including workers’ health and lives, is subordinated to profit.
The very organizations that purport to defend workers’ safety in fact serve to cover over the threats. Investigations by SafeWork NSW and equivalent bodies in other states are invariably dragged out over several years, allowing anger to subside before a ruling is made that is invariably a whitewash. Recommendations may be handed down, but are rarely implemented or enforced, and the company escapes with a token fine, amounting to a tiny fraction of the profits made in the intervening period.
These cover-ups would not be possible without the complicity of the trade union bureaucracies.
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World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to local residents about McGrath’s death and the broader issue of workplace safety.
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Lorraine, a young customer service worker, said McGrath’s death was “very tragic to society as a whole, and especially to his parents, family and friends.” At just 24 years old, “he had his whole life ahead of him, but lost his life to work.”
“The big corporations should put more money into ensuring that the workers are healthy and safe, because we all know they get lots of money. Companies just see people as numbers and don’t really take into account what the employees are saying.”
9. Cook Islands PM condemns New Zealand’s “coercion”
Earlier in November, it was revealed that New Zealand’s National Party-led government had suspended two aid payments amounting to $NZ29.8 million since February to the Cook Islands. The aid boosts the Cook Islands budget for core sectors including education, tourism and health. Following the withdrawal of the first aid payment in June, Brown said the punitive decision would “harm the country’s most vulnerable citizens.”
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters, leader of the right-wing populist NZ First party in the ruling coalition, blocked the payments after Brown signed strategic deals with China in February without “consulting” Wellington. Peters claimed prior approval was required under the terms of the Cook Islands’ constitutional position as one of New Zealand’s semi-dependent “Realm” countries.
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Peters’ diplomatic bullying is part of increasingly belligerent attempts by Wellington to maintain its neo-colonial domination over the impoverished Cook Islands. New Zealand’s ruling establishment responded with outrage over the agreement with Beijing which covered economic development, including fisheries, infrastructure and undersea minerals, as well as strengthening diplomatic relations. The documents contained no military clauses.
In his television interview Brown declared: “The withholding and the pausing of financial assistance, development assistance, we don’t feel that that is a useful tool to try and coerce, if you like, a country into changing its policies—it certainly is not going to work with us.” By using its cash reserves the government had, Brown said, ensured the funding cut would not affect the delivery of public services, while GDP growth rate meant it was “well placed” for the coming years.
The dispute is an expression of the sharp geopolitical tensions created by the advanced US-led preparations for war against China. New Zealand and Australia—both imperialist allies of the US—are seeking to block China’s growing economic and diplomatic influence in the Pacific and are presenting Beijing in increasingly hysterical terms as a military threat. While using aid to pressure Pacific states, they are militarizing the region and forcing them to cut economic and diplomatic ties with Beijing.
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The Cooks—a tiny state with fewer than 20,000 people—is heavily dependent on outside aid. It has been diplomatic partners with China for almost 30 years, signing agreements to develop local infrastructure, and has diplomatic relationships with 70 different countries.
According to Brown, the Cook Islands government fulfilled its obligations to consult with New Zealand regarding the content of any diplomatic and economic deals and has followed “established protocol” in its talks with China. “I would not expect any of the countries that we discuss our bilateral relations with… to have them share those documents with a third country, and the reciprocal arrangement would also exist,” he said.
Brown assured the Cook Islands parliament his government is taking steps to mend the rift. Officials and ministers had “engaged consistently with New Zealand across every formal channel that is available to us,” he declared.
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New Zealand, along with Australia, regards the southwest Pacific as its “backyard.” Prime Minister Christopher Luxon declared recently that New Zealand’s funding would remain “paused” until the Cook Islands government took unspecified steps to restore “trust.” The opposition Labour Party has joined in the denunciations of the Brown government, expressing only mild concern that Peters’ hard-nosed approach could be counter-productive.
New Zealand’s universally anti-China media plays a grimy role demonizing the Cook Islands over its purported “treachery.” On November 24, the New Zealand Herald published an inflammatory “special investigation” alleging that the Cook Islands flag has been flown by over 100 oil tankers “accused of illicitly trading Russian and Iranian oil.” It claims the operation is run by a private shipping registry owned by Maritime Cook Islands (MCI) which was set up in 2000 by “government insiders” and delivers “modest fees” to the Cooks’ government.
According to the Herald, the flagged “shadow fleet” enables “pariah countries” Russia and Iran to generate “huge revenues.” It also gives end users, notably China and India, a secure flow of energy at cheap rates while evading unilateral sanctions imposed by the US and Europe. Allegedly, nearly half of the flagged tanker fleet of 150 vessels has been formally sanctioned by the US, United Kingdom or the European Union.
Brown has refused to comment on the Herald story. Peters declared that New Zealand’s support for Ukraine in the war with Russia was being deliberately undercut by the Cook Islands: “This is a completely unacceptable and untenable foreign policy divergence,” he fumed. The flag registry is just one of “a range of actions and statements” by the Cook Islands, Peters said, that have “damaged its free association relationship with New Zealand and the trust that underpins it.”
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Whatever truth is in the Herald article, the flag operation is likely similar to those run, among others, by Vanuatu and the Marshall Islands, the sale of “passports of convenience” by Tonga, Nauru and Vanuatu, or the tax havens and offshore financial centers in Fiji, Niue and Samoa, all desperate attempts to attract foreign capital.
Ultimate responsibility for the proliferation of such ventures—many blacklisted by capitalist overseers and financial institutions such as the EU and OECD—lies with the imperialist powers. For the past century they have kept the fragile Pacific micro-states in conditions of poverty, economic backwardness and oppression, while exploiting them for cheap labour and now, for geo-strategic ends in the escalating US-led confrontation with China.
10. Rebellion begins against IG Metall union at Bosch in Germany
In the face of sharp attacks on jobs and wages in the automotive and supplier industries, a rebellion is developing against the IG Metall union and its works council apparatus who are busy enforcing those attacks. This process is already well under way at Bosch Automotive Steering GmbH in Schwäbisch Gmünd, in the state of Baden-Württemberg. The founding of a new trade union organization there, in opposition to IG Metall, is imminent.
In a works meeting on November 22 last year, Bosch management in Schwäbisch Gmünd informed the 3,450 employees that by 2030 a total of 1,900 jobs would go, mainly in the production of steering systems.
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Bosch declares that the company aims to become competitive again through the job cuts. In order to reduce costs, production of steering systems for commercial vehicles is being relocated to Hungary–with the support of IG Metall.
Resistance to this policy and to the role of IG Metall, which millions of workers are currently experiencing first hand, has already erupted at Bosch in Schwäbisch Gmünd. The then deputy chair of the works council, Hüseyin Ekinci, refused to sign a confidentiality agreement and informed the workforce at a works meeting about the secret talks and plans of IG Metall, the works council and management. He was then voted out at the instigation of the works council, chaired by Claudio Bellomo.
Bosch works council rep Mustafa Simsek also opposed this. He accused some works council members of having learned of the downsizing plans from management months beforehand and having kept them secret. He reports that management had already met with works council members on November 5 and 12, 2024, and thus days before the downsizing plans were announced on November 22, including to discuss “the closure of plant II.” His questions at a works meeting as to the reasons for the secrecy were not answered by the official keepers of secrets.
Simsek said he was preparing the founding of a new trade union organization in order to be able once again represent the interests of the workforce. The new organization was already in the process of being founded and was to be active nationwide, he said. “We are thinking big and we intend to act big.” Around 200 employees were already involved; he expected many more: “We are going to see a rush. The movement has become an ‘avalanche’ that can no longer be stopped.”
Confidently, Simsek declared: “Many people’s patience has run out. Now the employees are organizing themselves.” IG Metall had distanced itself from people’s concerns, “When a trade union loses its voice, the workers must raise their own.” The new “employees’ association” was “a warning call to the entire republic.” “What is happening here is a wake-up call for all employees in Germany: we must once again take our interests into our own hands,” he stressed. The association was to be open to everyone: “Origin, religion, political stance—that does not matter.”
Simsek has stood up to the apparatus and has therefore won support among workers. The response to his initiative shows the enormous anger over IG Metall’s role as a company police. This self-organization of workers and rebellion against the apparatus are to be welcomed. But what is decisive is that it is really carried out by rank-and-file and does not become a new bureaucratic apparatus. It must be democratic, accountable and international in orientation.
It must be uncompromising. Jobs and wages, the livelihood of the working masses, must not become bargaining chips in order to secure the competitiveness, that is, the profits, of the company.
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Simsek and his associates want to defend jobs “without compromise.” “We will not allow jobs here to be cut or relocated abroad quietly and secretly. We stand for the people here on the ground—and we do so resolutely,” says Simsek. But for “the people on the ground,” unity with people all over the world is absolutely essential. Jobs in commercial vehicle production, for example, cannot be defended without fellow workers in Hungary.
Workers—not only at Bosch—face challenges that go far beyond the previous forms of so-called representation within the framework of “social partnership.” Globalization and the ability to relocate production to another corner of the earth at short notice have pulled the rug from under the unions’ feet. Under these conditions, their nationalist perspective—that of strengthening the competitiveness of their “own” company, because, according to trade union logic, only then can jobs be preserved—turns into the justification of boundless attacks. In global competition, the workforce in Germany is competing with that in Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, China, Vietnam and so on. Thus, wages and working conditions in the poorest country become the worldwide benchmark.
On this basis, the unions agree to job cuts, wage reductions and worse working conditions. They play one site off against another, divide workers from their colleagues in other countries and boycott every serious resistance. And not only that. In the escalating international trade war, the unions also stand at the side of “their own” government.
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The attempt to replace IG Metall while leaving the social framework untouched is therefore doomed to fail. Simsek says: “The works council was not elected to act as a puppet of the employer. Its task is to represent the interests of the workforce.”
That is not entirely correct. Even though works councils are not obliged to approve every dirty trick of the companies, their class collaboration is enshrined in law. Works councils were legally anchored by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) government under Friedrich Ebert after the November Revolution of 1918 as a response to the formation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, modeled on the revolutionary soviets. The Works Constitution Act, which came into force in November 1952 and was fundamentally revised in January 1972, further anchored the class collaboration of the works councils.
The law obliges management and works council to “work together in a spirit of mutual trust” and to maintain confidentiality. It forbids the works council from calling for industrial action. Instead, it is required, once a month, “to negotiate contentious issues with a serious will to reach agreement and to make proposals for the settlement of differences of opinion.” (§ 74 para. 2 Works Constitution Act)
This legally regulated class collaboration is directed against the workers and against the defense of their interests through “measures of industrial struggle.”
The newly developing liberation of the workforce from the straitjacket of the unions is therefore a tremendous step forward. What is now necessary is a further bold step: firstly, the building of independent action committees that connect and unite the working masses across all sites, companies, sectors and national borders, so that they can successfully confront shareholders, banks and corporate owners.
Secondly, the defense of workers’ interests requires a perspective that goes beyond capitalism, that is, beyond private ownership of the means of production and the nation state system: workers’ interests before profit interests, international unity rather than national division.
11. UK Labour government’s war on migrant workers threatens health and social care
The Labour government has opened a new front in its assault on the working class, with dire consequences for many of the people who hold Britain’s overstretched health and social care services together.
On November 20, Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood unveiled a proposed brutal restructuring of immigration rules under the Orwellian title “A fairer pathway to settlement.” The measures are in fact designed to trap migrant workers in a state of prolonged insecurity.
The message could not be clearer: work, pay taxes, fill the gaps left by a collapsing system, but do not expect permanent rights, stability or family life in return. It marks a decisive escalation of Labour’s nationalist, anti-immigrant agenda which mirrors that of right-wing and far-right governments across Europe and the United States.
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The aim is to establish a permanently insecure workforce using citizenship, salary and passport exceptions to divide workers whose employment in the UK reflects the international character of the working class itself. The class bias on migration could not be starker with the wealthy able to glide through comparatively easily: high-earners and “entrepreneurs” earning over £125,140 can obtain ILR in just three years.
The infamous “hostile environment” pioneered by the Tories pales in comparison. So vicious is Labour’s policy that the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned ahead of the announcement that up to 50,000 migrant nurses could leave the UK under the restrictions.
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This assault comes when the social care system is on the brink. Britain has 130,000 care vacancies and two million elderly people are living with unmet care needs.
Hospitals discharges of many medically fit patients—who require a carer—are routinely delayed because not enough carers exist to support them at home, adding to the NHS gridlock. Patients routinely wait on trolleys in corridors, ambulances queue at A&E bays, and wards overflow.
There is no serious opposition in Westminster to the anti-migrant crusade and its consequences, only competition over which party who can penalize them more efficiently.
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As for the trade union leaders in the sector, they have responded only with statements of concern, moral indignation and sternly worded press releases. Unison called the proposals “devastating”, the RCN a “betrayal”. But the union bureaucracy proposes nothing practically beyond appeals to the very government carrying out the assault.
Their role is not to lead resistance but to contain and divert it into the safe, harmless channels of “consultation” and parliamentary debate. The bureaucracy performed the same function during the NHS strike wave in 2022-3, dispersing the movement into fragmented, limited stoppages before helping shut them down and foist de facto pay cuts on their members.
The defense of migrant health and care workers cannot be entrusted to the union partners of the Labour Party. It must be led from below by rank-and-file health and care workers organizing independently of the union bureaucracy, linking migrant and non-migrant staff, uniting NHS and private-sector carers, demanding rights not as privileges but as inalienable.
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This is the perspective advanced by NHS FightBack in opposition to the Starmer government’s hostile environment and its complicit allies in the trade union bureaucracy.
12. United Kingdom: Reject CWU’s Royal Mail letter writing stunt
The Communication Workers Union’s (CWU) letter-writing campaign urging postal workers to contact their Member of Parliament (MP) for urgent action to “Protect Postal Services” is a political fraud from top to bottom. It claims Royal Mail workers can “Have your Say”, when in fact it is based on adding a signature to a pre-written email tightly scripted by CWU general secretary Dave Ward and deputy Martin Walsh.
The 870-word message is a tissue of distortions designed to bury their responsibility for destroying the postal service and the jobs and conditions of Royal Mail workers, who are presented as humble petitioners. Eleven months after hailing its “groundbreaking agreement” with Royal Mail’s new owner, billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s EP Group, the CWU now claims the issue is persuading EP Group to “honor the agreement” and adopt “a more realistic approach to USO reform”.
The CWU-EP Group Framework Agreement—tied to Labour’s Deed of Undertakings in December which rubber stamped Kretinsky’s £3.6 billion takeover—has from the outset been a restructuring agenda for downgrading the mail service and its Universal Service Obligation (USO) to deliver letters six days a week to addresses across the UK at a fixed price. Its purpose is to facilitate mass job cuts, further automation and gig-economy practices, converting the postal service into a low-wage parcel courier network.
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The CWU now portrays its stage-managed letter-writing campaign as “mobilizing members”—the same workers they delivered bound and gagged to EP Group. It is another PR stunt aimed at shielding Ward and Walsh from rank-and-file anger as they deepen collaboration with the Starmer government, block workplace resistance, and limit the fallout from handing the postal service to a billionaire oligarch.
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The CWU’s letter-writing PR stunt must be rejected. To stop ODM, defend the postal service and win immediate levelling-up for new entrants, the fight must once and for all be taken out of the hands of the unaccountable pro-company union apparatus led by Ward. Power must be transferred through workplace committees to the shop floor where it belongs, and a campaign waged to defend the 130,000-strong workforce and the public service it provides, not to appease EP Group.
This is the fight being taken up by the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC), which also seeks to help Royal Mail workers reach out to resident doctors, refuse and transport workers opposing austerity cuts and profit gouging; and logistics workers such as DPD employees who have taken action against what they describe as a “corporate dictatorship”.
Through the International Worker Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, the PWRFC can coordinate the fight of Royal Mail workers with postal and logistics workers internationally coming under attack by the same hedge funds and equity firms, with postal services being restructured to prioritize profits in preparation for outright privatization in America, Canada and Australia—ripe for plucking by oligarchs like Kretinsky.
[Julius] Nyerere presented the transition to independence in Tanganyika in 1961 as the opening of a new era of “Uhuru na Umoja” (Freedom and Unity). He promised a break with colonial domination and the construction of a society based on self-reliance and equality. Yet the capitalist class foundations of the new state were already clear. TANU embodied the interests of a rising petty-bourgeois elite whose aspiration was the Africanization of state and commercial positions previously monopolized by British colonial officials and expatriate capitalists.
The working class, which had played a central role in the anti-colonial struggle, continued to mobilize after independence. In its first year, workers organized 152 strikes involving approximately 48,000 participants. However, this renewed labor militancy was quickly repressed. Nyerere’s government introduced a battery of laws effectively abolishing the right to strike and extending preventive detention to curb “subversive activities”. The Tanganyika Federation of Labour (TFL) was dissolved and replaced by the National Union of Tanganyika Workers (NUTA), a single, government-controlled union structure.
As for Nyerere’s claim of seeking self-reliance, it too was rapidly exposed. Between 1961 and 1972 an average of 34 percent of its total development budget came from foreign aid. In the 1975 budget, the government expected 55 percent to be raised by foreign aid.
In early 1964, Nyerere faced a new challenge when the Tanganyika Rifles mutinied against their British officers, demanding Africanization and better pay. The uprising rapidly spread from Dar es Salaam to other barracks. Nyerere, caught unprepared, fled the capital and appealed to British imperialism for assistance. British troops were flown in from Kenya and Aden to suppress the mutiny and restore his government, exposing Nyerere’s anti-imperialist rhetoric.
The wave of strikes and the 1964 army mutiny that followed independence convinced Nyerere of the need to consolidate power. In 1965, Tanganyika became a one-party state under TANU, following the model of Nyerere’s mentor Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. This turn reflected a broader pattern across Africa, as postcolonial elites sought to suppress the social forces that had brought them to power through police-state measures. Having secured the state apparatus, the emerging bourgeois leadership turned against the working class and peasantry.
Nyerere’s justification was that the class struggle was alien to Africa. This was codified in his Ujamaa: The Basis of African Socialism, where he insisted, “In our traditional African society we were individuals within a community. We took care of the community, and the community took care of us. We neither needed nor wished to exploit our fellow men. We neither had capitalists nor feudalists.”
This conception underpinned the Arusha Declaration of 1967, often hailed as the high point of Nyerere’s “socialist” project. It declared, “The objective of TANU is to build a socialist state. The people must own the means of production. We reject capitalism, which seeks to build a society of division, and we equally reject feudalism.” The Declaration added that: “In a socialist society it is the government which must control the principal means of production.”
State ownership under a petty-bourgeois bureaucracy left the underlying relations of exploitation intact. The nationalisations that followed merely transferred control of banks, industries, and major farms to the state. Workers did not manage factories, elect planning committees, or determine investment priorities through organs of workers’ power. Instead, a bureaucratic-managerial elite took over the commanding heights of the economy and consolidated its authority through technocratic management, foreign aid, and control of the cooperative and marketing systems that dominated agriculture.
The centerpiece of Nyerere’s economic strategy were village cooperatives, or Ujamaa villages. This was influenced by Maoist ideas of rural collectivization, which the new Tanzanian state looked to for guidance, particularly Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958-1960). Between the late 1960s and late 1970s, around nine million rural people, over ninety percent of the population, were forcibly relocated into these villages. Entire communities were uprooted under threat or force, houses were burned, and food stores destroyed.
Officially, these villages were to promote communal cooperation, modern agricultural techniques, and shared social services. The real aim was to tighten state control over agricultural labor and boost the production of export crops needed for foreign exchange. Capitalist accumulation had to come from the heavy sacrifices of workers and peasants. Lacking large scale industry, the capacity to produce agricultural machinery and inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, as well as sufficient infrastructure and technical skills, the Ujamaa ultimately failed. Production of cash crops actually fell. Between 1967 and 1975, Tanzania achieved an average rate of growth of just 1.4 percent while its population grew by 2.8 percent.
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Nyerere faced even sharper contradictions in foreign policy. While he rejected the Marxist analysis of imperialism, events in the region repeatedly confirmed it. The same powers that could tolerate a poor, aid-dependent Tanzania were determined to hold on to the mineral wealth and strategic levers of the continent.
In neighboring Congo, the CIA and Brussels orchestrated the overthrow and murder of Patrice Lumumba to secure control over copper, cobalt, and uranium. In Southern Africa, Britain and the US armed and diplomatically protected the white-supremacist regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), turning them into regional gendarmes. In Mozambique and Angola, London and Washington backed Portugal, NATO’s oldest dictatorship, providing military support that enabled Lisbon to wage protracted colonial wars against the newly formed liberation movements.
Nyerere made Tanzania a rear base for these struggles, hosting exiled movements and training camps and opening the country’s limited resources to their support. This further strained an already weak economy and deepened dependence on external financing and military aid. Into this vacuum stepped in the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and China. Though both claimed to stand for socialism, neither the Soviet Union nor China based themselves on the internationalist strategy of October 1917. Each pursued its own nationalist course. Their divergent national interests erupted into open conflict in 1961.
Their rivalry spilled across Africa. For the Soviet bureaucracy, whose industrial base was shielded behind Eastern Europe, the priority was “peaceful coexistence” with Washington. Moscow cultivated conservative African governments, military strongmen, and sections of the nationalist elites as bargaining chips in its diplomatic maneuvers.
China, by contrast, encircled by hostile powers and threatened by the US war in Vietnam, turned to exporting guerrilla warfare as a strategic buffer in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to secure influence with dissident wings of the local bourgeoisie who might soon come to power. The Maoist line openly glorified “progressive” monarchs, tribal chiefs, and nationalist officers. Maoism in Africa, as elsewhere, was not an alternative to Stalinism but a mutation of it.
These global contradictions converged in Zanzibar. British imperialism had long manipulated the islands’ stratified social structure, elevating an Arab landlord class over the overwhelmingly African plantation workers who labored under conditions of extreme exploitation. Independence did not resolve these contradictions. The 1964 revolution, a volcanic uprising of the oppressed, toppled the Arab landowning elite. But while the revolt expressed deep class antagonisms, the absence of a revolutionary proletarian leadership meant that its political direction fell to petty-bourgeois formations, the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) and the radical Umma Party, and paved the way to communal massacres of thousands.
For Nyerere and the Tanzanian elite, the Zanzibar Revolution was an existential threat. The radicalization on the islands risked igniting similar upheavals on the mainland, where workers had already carried out mass strikes before and after independence. The hurried union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar was a pre-emptive act designed to contain a potentially revolutionary situation. This was backed by the US and Britain, who opposed the new Zanzibar regime’s closeness to the Soviet Union and China. They both welcomed the merger, which confirmed Nyerere’s reliability as a bulwark against Moscow and Beijing.
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The global recession of the mid-1970s exposed the fragility of Tanzania’s economic foundations. Falling prices for coffee, cotton, and sisal; soaring oil costs; and the country’s dependence on imported machinery and fuel produced chronic shortages, inflation, and declining living standards. The limited welfare gains associated with Ujamaa could not be sustained. Forced to appeal to the IMF and World Bank, Tanzania entered the tightening grip of global finance capital, which demanded austerity, wage suppression, agricultural commercialization, and deep cuts to social services.
The crisis intensified in 1978 when Uganda’s Idi Amin, facing economic collapse, invaded Tanzania’s Kagera region. Amin, who originally come to power with the tacit backing of London, Tel Aviv, and later Washington, was by the late 1970s heavily armed by the Soviet bureaucracy. Tanzania’s counter invasion, carried out with Chinese-supplied weaponry and the support of Ugandan exile militias, culminated in Amin’s overthrow in April 1979. The war revealed how rival Stalinist bureaucracies in Moscow and Beijing armed competing nationalist factions, deepening political confusion by presenting their geopolitical competition as socialist struggles.
Although Nyerere was able to secure more aid from the West during the 1970s (US$2.7 billion between 1971 and 1981), Tanzania was effectively bankrupt when he stepped down as president in 1985.
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The trajectory of Tanzania under Nyerere stands as a decisive refutation of the petty-bourgeois illusion that national independence, state ownership, or Pan-African sentiment could substitute for proletarian revolution. Confined within the framework of the capitalist state and the world imperialist system, “African Socialism” could only replace colonial administrators with a new African bourgeoisie managing exploitation on behalf of international capital. By suppressing the independent organization of workers and peasants, the TANU/CCM leadership blocked the only social force capable of unifying East Africa on socialist foundations: the working class.
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Since independence, Tanzania’s working class has grown in size and strategic importance. Hundreds of thousands work in mining, manufacturing, commercial agriculture, transport, logistics and tourism—sectors tied directly to global commodity chains. Gold mining alone employs tens of thousands. Manufacturing employs roughly 700,000 workers, much of it linked to processing export crops. Transport and logistics—rail, trucking and port work—bind these export circuits together. Tourism, hospitality and conservation generate foreign exchange and rely on a large, insecure labor force.
Beneath this sits a vast informal economy, representing more than 90 percent of all employment, including millions of smallholder farmers and around 175,000 artisanal miners. Moreover, the port of Dar es Salaam functions as a regional artery, moving goods for Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi and Uganda.
This immense social and economic power, concentrated in the hands of the working class and the rural poor, must be consciously mobilized into a political force capable of confronting the capitalist state and leading the struggle for socialism.
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The working class must advance its own revolutionary answer. A movement rooted in miners, port workers, teachers, nurses, students and the rural poor must form democratically elected committees in workplaces, neighborhoods, schools and universities to coordinate protests, strikes and self-defense against state violence. It must raise the demand for a general strike to bring down the CCM government and reject all appeals to the African Union or imperialist governments, instead calling for solidarity from workers across East Africa and internationally.
A socialist program in Tanzania would place the mines, banks, ports, logistics networks and major industries under workers’ democratic control; abolish repressive laws; cancel foreign debt; and reorganize agriculture on cooperative, mechanized lines under workers’ and peasants’ committees. It would guarantee employment, housing, healthcare and education by directing resources away from foreign corporations and domestic elites toward human need.
The only viable path forward is the fight for the United Socialist States of Africa—a voluntary federation of workers’ states built through the common struggle of workers, youth and rural poor across the continent. This would abolish the colonial borders, pool the continent’s immense resources, plan development rationally and democratically, and finally end the nightmare of poverty, repression, ethnic division and imperialist domination.
This requires constructing a revolutionary party based on Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, a Tanzanian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Only such a leadership can transform the present uprising into a conscious struggle for power and socialism.
14. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Bangladesh:
India:
Australia:
15. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
