Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: November 3-9
- 25 years ago:
Bush-Gore election provokes crisis
50 years ago:
Morocco's monarchy orchestrates “liberation” march in Sahara
75 years ago:
Battle of Pakchon marks the conclusion of China’s “First Phase Offensive” in the Korean War
100 years ago:
Plot to assassinate Benito Mussolini foiled
2. Trump’s US Labor Department whitewashes UAW election fraud that installed Shawn Fain
The US Department of Labor (DOL) has issued a 36-page document defending one of the most undemocratic union elections in US history: The 2022–23 vote for top UAW officers. Its October 31 “Supplemental Statement of Reasons” dismisses the complaint of Will Lehman, a socialist Mack Trucks worker and candidate for UAW president in 2022, who documented mass disenfranchisement in the government-supervised election that installed Shawn Fain.
The report was released only after a federal judge in Michigan repeatedly ordered both the Biden and Trump administrations to reply. It justifies every abuse committed by the UAW bureaucracy. It portrays an election in which fewer than 9 percent of 1.1 million members voted as the product of “reasonable efforts” by the UAW to ensure the right to vote and support candidates of their choice. That 91 percent of the members were effectively excluded did not overturn the DOL’s conclusion that “no violations occurred that may have affected the outcome of the election.”
Lehman’s complaint exposed how the UAW deliberately failed to inform members of the election, refused to update mailing lists and allowed tens of thousands of ballots to go undelivered. The DOL’s response repeats, almost word-for-word, the defenses offered by the bureaucracy itself.
In a statement responding to the DOL’s decision, Will Lehman said:
This report proves that the government, the UAW bureaucracy, and the corporations are part of one system of control. The Department of Labor admits that my reports were true—that tens of thousands never received ballots and that only 1 in 10 workers voted—yet declares this meaningless because it supposedly did not affect the outcome. UAW members and retirees will recognize this as a violation of logic and common sense that serves to ratify violations of their rights.
3. Writers Against the War on Gaza proposes a boycott of the New York Times
Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) has proposed a boycott/divest/unsubscribe campaign against the New York Times on the basis of that newspaper’s “manufacturing consent for war, for exploitation, for genocide.” Several hundred writers, scholars and public figures have expressed support for the effort, pledging not to write for the Times Opinion section “in a collective effort to hold the paper accountable for its role in the genocide in Gaza,” according to one media report. The signatories include nearly 150 past Times contributors.
The broader list of 300 includes the names of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, journalists Chris Hedges and Dave Zirin, filmmaker Elia Suleiman, physician and author Gabor Maté, activist Greta Thunberg, novelists Mary Gaitskill and Sally Rooney, artist Nan Goldin and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the Democratic congresswoman from Michigan.
WAWOG, as part of its indictment, focuses specifically on a filthy December 2023 article published by the Times, “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” in which the newspaper passed on various wild allegations about rape and sexual violence during the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. The piece, WAWOG notes, was
bylined by a Times reporter with a long history of fabrication (Jeffrey Gettleman); a filmmaker who served in the IOF’s intelligence division and works for Israeli state media (Anat Schwartz); and a 24-year-old food blogger (Schwartz’s nephew by marriage, Adam Sella). Schwartz had never reported for the Times—or, in fact, for any newspaper—before being recruited by Gettleman himself to help produce evidence of “widespread sexual assault.”
The article and the associated claims about sexual assault and other outrages have been exposed by investigators. Cited by WAWOG, Intercept reporters Ryan Grim, Jeremy Scahill and Daniel Boguslaw, in the course of debunking the Times article, observed that Anat Schwartz was not primarily responsible for the fraud:
She may harbor animosity toward Palestinians, lack the experience with investigative journalism, and feel conflicting pressures between being a supporter of Israel’s war effort and a Times reporter, but Schwartz did not commission herself and Sella to report one of the most consequential stories of the war. Senior leadership at the New York Times did.
*****
The exposure and discrediting of the New York Times is an important task of political and intellectual hygiene, indispensable to the development of socialist consciousness. The Times, the “paper of record,” plays a significant role in shaping public opinion in the US. It hypocritically, deceitfully postures as the voice of civilization, democracy and liberal moderation while functioning in practice as an instrument of American imperialist propaganda, often as the obvious conduit for CIA and Pentagon—or Mossad—disinformation (e.g., the December 2023 article on alleged October 7 sexual violence).
Speaking generally for the Democratic Party, the newspaper is most vigorous at present in attempting to smother opposition to Donald Trump and prevent it from challenging the domination of the corporate-financial oligarchy and the two-party system.
Such a critique of the Times is not the perspective, however, of WAWOG. It argues that
The New York Times is a failed institution that serves only the powerful and the morally lazy. By refusing to name the perpetrator—the Israeli occupation forces—of the deadliest war on journalists in history, the editorial board of Times has shown that they do not even serve their own profession. By shaping its coverage in accordance with Israeli state dictates and Zionist threats, the executives of the Times have become not only complicit in, but accountable for, the slaughter of Gaza.
Overstatement, that the Times is “accountable” for the Gaza slaughter, here combines with a dangerously false assertion. To argue that the Times is a “failed institution” suggests that its proper role would be to inform and alert the population to imperialist atrocities, for example. But this is not so.
Granted that the newspaper’s editorial board has shifted far to the right, along with the rest of the American political and media establishment, since the Vietnam War era, the Times is performing precisely the role that capitalist society sets out for it and other such publications. Marxists understand as ABC that “All over the world,” in Lenin’s words, “freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake ‘public opinion’ for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.”
*****
So, the newspaper that “exists to serve the interests of U.S. imperialism” can relatively easily be pushed into telling the truth about Gaza and related matters and, moreover, entering into opposition against central features of American imperialist foreign policy. This is unserious, to say the least, and it is difficult to believe that the statement’s authors or signatories believe this themselves. The Times, an experienced, crafty imperialist leopard, will not change its spots, nor does it have the slightest motive or desire to do so.
So, the newspaper that “exists to serve the interests of U.S. imperialism” can relatively easily be pushed into telling the truth about Gaza and related matters and, moreover, entering into opposition against central features of American imperialist foreign policy. This is unserious, to say the least, and it is difficult to believe that the statement’s authors or signatories believe this themselves. The Times, an experienced, crafty imperialist leopard, will not change its spots, nor does it have the slightest motive or desire to do so.
*****
It fails to make such a condemnation. And here one must refer to the inclusion of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as part of the WAWOG coalition and the presence of Tlaib among the statement’s signatories. The DSA and Tlaib are indispensable components of the Democratic Party, one of the two parties of the American ruling elite, indispensable in particular to the current effort to channel mass opposition within the existing political set-up.
Hence the half-politics of the statement. It denounces the Times and its complicity, the crimes of imperialism, in sharp terms, but says nothing about concrete political life in the US, in particular, the pernicious role of the Democrats, who stand behind and loom over the Times. It feebly refers to “accountability” and “failed institutions,” which ought to convince no one. In the end, it proposes another version of discredited, single-issue protest politics.
It is time to say clearly what is. Capitalism is the central question. Homicidal Zionism is an agency of world capitalism. The mass murder in Gaza emerges from the intense crisis of imperialism, its reckless abandonment of any “red lines” and its counterrevolutionary ferocity against the gains and rights of the international working class.
There are angry, serious writers and others who have attached their names to the WAWOG declaration. They and others need to think seriously about these issues. The orientation today must be toward the independent organization and socialist political development of the working class, the only force capable of putting an end to the horrors in Gaza and elsewhere.
4. Trump transforms the US Environmental Protection Agency into a direct instrument of big business
Changes in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), run under the direct control of the president since it was established by Richard Nixon in 1970, will transform the mission of the agency from protecting human health from environmental toxins to directly serving the profit interests of corporate polluters. Field workers and scientists are being terminated by the Trump administration, and the leadership of EPA divisions is being replaced by corporate flunkies.
Earlier this month, President Trump declared that during the federal government shutdown, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought would decide “which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.” Trump added, “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”
*****
In late June, hundreds of EPA scientists submitted an open letter of protest titled a “Declaration of Dissent.” Addressed to Zeldin, the letter centered on “Five Primary Concerns” over policies that “recklessly undermine the EPA mission:”
1. Undermining public trust
2. Ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters
3. Reversing EPA’s progress in America’s most vulnerable communities
4. Dismantling the Office of Research and Development
5. Promoting a culture of fear, forcing staff to choose between their livelihood and the population’s well-being.
*****
The response of Trump to the protest was to retaliate. An investigation was carried out to identify the signatories, including those who signed the letter anonymously. Some 140 employees, including drinking water field workers, were subsequently placed on administrative leave.
The signatories are to be permanently fired. The Trump administration announced a “zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda.”
*****
In a statement distributed to the “Stand Up for Science” demonstrations held in March of this year, titled “The defense of science requires a fight for socialism!”, the Socialist Equality Party wrote:
Modern science and technology have made it possible to wipe out hunger and disease, vanquish ignorance and mysticism, and provide a high standard of living for every human being on the planet. Moreover, the revolutionary developments in transportation and communications, most recently through the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, have shattered the barriers to human interaction and made possible the education and integration of all humanity on a scale never before seen in history.
The fight for science and human progress can only take place through the building of a socialist movement in the working class. Scientists are experiencing the same process of proletarianization now affecting doctors, teachers and other professionals. Scientists must recognize their common interests with all workers facing attacks on their living standards, jobs and democratic rights. No matter your education level or salary, to the oligarchy that rules America, you are as expendable as any other worker.
5. Minneapolis teachers overwhelmingly authorize strike
With 92 percent voting to strike, Minneapolis educators confront a politically engineered budget crisis and a union leadership seeking to suppress their struggle, highlighting the need for rank-and-file committees to defend public education and connect the struggle to the broader fight of the working class.
6. More doubt on claims of Iran’s involvement in antisemitic incidents in Australia
In the two months since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and ASIO, the domestic spy agency, claimed that Iran had been involved in antisemitic incidents in Australia, no evidence whatsoever has been produced to support their assertion.
Instead, everything that has emerged since has undermined the claim, indicating that it was politically motivated and that the story came largely or solely from Israel’s spy agency Mossad, which is notorious for disinformation and dirty tricks, including assassination and sabotage.
7. Trump, Xi agree to trade deal, but the US-led confrontation with China continues
US President Trump’s much anticipated summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping last week in South Korea finished with nothing more than an uncertain one-year truce in an economic war that has been dramatically escalated by Trump since returning to office this year. While the meeting might temporarily halt the fighting over trade, the US-led economic war and military build-up against China is certain to continue.
*****
Alongside large tariffs, the White House has sought to cripple hi-tech Chinese industries by restricting the sale of advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment to China because of “national security.” China responded in kind by limiting the sale of rare earths required across a broad range of industries, including auto, electronics and defence.
Last month, in the lead-up to the summit, the Trump administration provocatively upped the ante once again—restricting semi-conductor sales not only to nominated Chinese corporations but any company in which they held a majority stake. According to one estimate, it expanded the scope of the bans from about 1,300 China-related entities to more than 20,000.
Clearly angered by what it regarded as a breach of previous agreements, China extended its restrictions on the export of rare earths. It also established its own licensing requirements for the export of equipment for mining and processing rare earths, specifically banning exports with applications in sensitive areas like military operations. China has a virtual global monopoly in both the mining and processing of these essential materials.
Trump exploded, threatening to impose an additional 100 percent tariffs on China and call off the summit before shelving the extra tariffs. But as he was about to sit down with Xi, Trump, in gangster fashion, tweeted that he had ordered the restarting of US nuclear testing, specifically naming China and Russia as responsible. The resumption of nuclear testing, halted by all three countries in the 1990s, was not only a crude attempt to bludgeon concessions from Xi but also demonstrates that Trump’s economic warfare is intimately connected to advanced US-led preparations for military conflict with nuclear-armed China.
*****
The global markets and corporate elites collectively breathed a sigh of relief that the summit had averted an immediate rupture between the world’s two largest economies. But no one is under any illusion that the truce is anything but temporary and could blow up at any time. The detail of what was agreed to is not even clear, as no joint press conference took place and a signed agreement is yet to be reached.
*****
The response of the Democratic Party has been to criticise Trump for not being aggressive enough and caving in to Xi. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote on Twitter, “Don’t believe his bullshit. Trump folded on China.” Journalist John Harwood, summing up the critique by the Democratic-aligned critics, declared that “Xi wiped the floor with Trump.”
The Democratic Party-aligned New York Times accused Trump of compromising American national security by backing off from extending the ban on US advanced technology exports to Chinese majority-owned entities. Journalist Ana Swason declared that “the move appeared to be one of the first concessions the United States had made on national security-related technology controls as part of a trade negotiation.”
The response of the Democrats demonstrates that the entire US political establishment, whatever their tactical differences, regards China as the chief threat to the global economic and military supremacy of US imperialism. For more than a decade, beginning with the “pivot to Asia” by the Obama administration, Washington has engaged in an escalating diplomatic and economic offensive and military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific region in order to debilitate and ultimately subordinate China to its US economic and strategic interests.
*****
The only social force capable of halting the plunge towards a global war and a nuclear catastrophe is the international working class. The International Committee of the Fourth International calls for the building of a unified, antiwar movement of workers in the US, China and around the world based on a revolutionary, socialist program to abolish capitalism and its reactionary division of the world into rival nation-states.
8. Germany: Mass layoffs, trade war and war—What is to be done?
The crisis in the German and European automotive and supplier industries is assuming catastrophic proportions. Not a day passes without new disastrous news. The major manufacturers—Volkswagen, Mercedes, Bosch, ZF, Porsche, Ford, Audi, etc.—are announcing ever more extensive job cuts, often running to four or five figures. At the same time, hundreds of posts are being eliminated every day in countless medium-sized companies.
A study by the EY consultancy shows that more than 50,000 jobs in the automotive industry in Germany were destroyed within a year.
*****
On top of this come the ever sharper effects of the global tariff and trade war. Although the import tariffs of 25 percent on vehicles and vehicle parts from the EU, which the Trump administration announced in the spring, were later reduced to 15 percent, they still lie well above the previous level of 2.5 percent. Volkswagen, Europe’s largest car manufacturer, reported a 37 percent decline in operating profits in the first quarter of 2025 and cites the US tariffs as a key factor.
Last week the crisis intensified again. The Dutch government, under pressure from the US, took control of the chip manufacturer Nexperia, which belongs to the Chinese electronics group Wingtech, and removed the Chinese chief executive. In response, the Chinese government imposed an export stop on the world’s largest supplier of simple semiconductor chips.
The effects are devastating. Nexperia manufactures half of the world’s standard chips that are found in almost every electrical device and are needed in the automotive industry for window regulators, airbags, LED headlights, engine controllers and much more.*****
IG Metall, which has more than 2 million members and likes to call itself the largest single trade union in the world, is doing nothing to defend jobs. On the contrary, its officials sit on corporate supervisory boards and are well informed at an early stage about all plans for redundancies. On essential points, they share the employers’ and managers’ assessment of the economic situation and help to draw up the rationalization programs, redundancy and closure plans.
In the trade war, the union officials stand unreservedly on the side of the German corporations, are deepening their collaboration with the government and call for a “national industrial policy”—meaning a stronger and more aggressive assertion of German economic interests around the world. To the Trump administration’s economic war and the slogan “America first!” they respond with “Deutschland über alles!”
*****
Many workers are asking what can be done in this situation and are looking for a way to break out of the straitjacket of the trade union apparatus.
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) proposes the following strategy:
1. Build new organizational structures....
2. Link the fight against job cuts to the fight against war....
3. Make internationalism the central strategy....
4. Build action committees as independent organs of struggle and socialist education....
9. Death toll from Trump-Hegseth boat murders reaches 65
In a further act of international piracy, the US military carried out a lethal strike on a small boat in the Caribbean Sea Saturday, killing three men whom Secretary of War Pete Hegseth labeled “narco-terrorists,” without offering any evidence.
*****
According to reports stemming from a military briefing Thursday for members of the House of Representatives, the Pentagon could not even provide the names of those killed, because their identities were not known, despite claims of “exquisite intelligence” by House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The latest strike on a small boat coincided with the arrival of the USS Gerald R. Ford in the Caribbean Sea, off the coast of Venezuela. The largest ship in the US Navy, with a displacement of 100,000 tons and a crew of more than 4,500, the aircraft carrier can deploy nearly 100 warplanes and attack helicopters, three times as many as the entire Venezuelan air force.
The arrival of the aircraft carrier completes the assembling of a flotilla capable of waging war on the South American country, which has been targeted by successive US administrations because it has the world’s largest oil reserves and a government, headed for 15 years by Hugo Chavez and, since 2013, by Nicolas Maduro, which has been at odds with US foreign policy in the region.
*****
The White House and Pentagon have steadily increased the pressure on the Maduro regime over the past three months. On August 7, the State Department doubled to $50 million the bounty offered for the capture or demise of Maduro. On September 2, attacks on small Venezuelan fishing boats began. On October 10, the Norwegian parliament awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Corina Machado, the ultra-right politician and coup plotter selected by Washington as Maduro’s replacement. Also last month, Trump announced that he had authorized CIA covert action inside Venezuela against the country’s government.
While boasting of the great military “success” of blowing small boats out of the water with satellite-guided missiles and bombs, Trump indicated last week that there would be operations on land as well, although he portrayed them as air strikes against “drug labs,” continuing the pretense that the US goal is to shut down drug trafficking rather than carrying out regime change.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) informed Congress last week that Trump had initiated a formal armed conflict with “drug cartels” on September 4, and that this started the 60-day clock running for the president to report on the outcome of this conflict. Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the president “shall terminate” such military operations after 60 days, unless authorized to continue by Congress, but there is no indication that Trump will comply with that requirement on Monday, November 3.
Instead, according to the head of the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, T. Elliot Gaiser, the Trump administration does not regard the boat strikes as “hostilities” covered by the 60-day limit, because there is no danger to US forces.
*****
There has been little criticism of the strikes themselves, and no Democrat has suggested that ordering these killings is grounds for impeachment. Under the Supreme Court’s ruling last year, Trump cannot be prosecuted criminally for any action he takes in his official capacity, such as issuing an order to the Pentagon to carry out remote-controlled murders.
Moreover, the rationale offered by Trump and Hegseth for the boat strikes is virtually identical to that provided by Obama, when the Democratic president ordered drone missile strikes against supposed Al Qaeda supporters—including American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by a drone-fired missile in Yemen in September 2011.
On Saturday, food stamp processing for over 42 million American households came to a halt as the Trump administration enacted one of the cruelest attacks on working people in American history.
The administration’s “hunger plan” is aimed at starving the population into submission. It is part of his attempt to build a fascist dictatorship to police record levels of inequality which are only growing as a result of his policies, while also sending enormous sums to expand the military and prepare for world war.
*****
Meanwhile, federal workers, having already been culled by hundreds of thousands since Trump took office, have now gone more than a month without pay under the shutdown. Nowhere has that been felt harder than in the Washington D.C. region.
The region is home to the largest concentration of federal workers in the United States. About 186,500 federal jobs are based in Washington D.C. alone, making up nearly a quarter of all jobs in the city. Across the broader metro region, about 449,500 federal employees are located in D.C. and the adjoining states.
Washington D.C. was reported to have been in recession as early as the summer, following the Elon Musk-driven “Department of Government Efficiency” mass firings.
The Capital Area Food Bank (CAFB) has organized a series of food distribution events in the Washington D.C. region to meet the colossal need for food facing federal employees in District of Columbia, Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia. A spokesperson for the charity told the World Socialist Web Site that “over 36 percent of the folks in our area, which is about 1.5 million households, are experiencing some level of food insecurity already” before the shutdown occurred.
*****
Some federal workers have not received a full paycheck in three pay periods. Nearly one in six federal workers employed by the Executive Branch alone make less than the national median salary of $62,000 a year.
Nationally, over 1.4 million federal workers out of 2.4 million federal jobs in total nationwide are either furloughed or working without pay during the shutdown. Broken down proportionately, since no exact data on the number of impacted workers exists regionally, that means approximately 125,000 Washington D.C.-region workers are currently without pay.
“My whole life I have planned on a crisis that never happened. It’s now that time,” one worker said at the Beltsville charity. The worker, who had nearly 40 years of government service, stated “here I am today, all these years later, being on the dependent end, something I had never wanted to be.”
11. United States: Government shutdown has devastating impact on workers in Texas
The federal government shutdown, ongoing since October 1, has produced a disaster for workers who have been furloughed. Texas, home of the most reactionary state government in the country, has been hit hard by the shutdown. Governor Greg Abbott, a staunch supporter of the Trump administration, has done nothing to alleviate the hardship being experienced by a significant portion of the population he governs.
There are approximately 130,000 civilian federal employees in Texas, the third largest concentration in the country, behind California and Washington D.C. Another 100,000 military personnel are stationed at the 14 bases located in the state. This does not count the thousands of civilian contractors, who are also out of work.
Food banks throughout the state are preparing for an influx of people seeking assistance, both out-of-work federal employees and recipients of aid programs, such as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). More than 3.5 million Texas residents, about 11 percent of the population, participate in SNAP. The administrator of SNAP in the state, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, has stated that it will not be able to issue benefits for November.
*****
Some workers have begun to resist, albeit in a very limited way. Air traffic controllers have handed out leaflets at over 20 airports. This action, coordinated by the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), will not solve the problem and is intended to divert the discontent that workers feel into harmless channels. Still, the fact that the union called this toothless action, which it has not done during previous shutdowns, expresses an understanding by union officials that anger and opposition are mounting among its members.
While active-duty members of the military did receive paychecks on October 15 because of the reallocation of funds within the Department of Defense, there have been reports of discrepancies in paychecks, and some have apparently been paid less than expected. The National Military Family Association reported that in a survey of 369 military families, 164 reported being underpaid on their previous paycheck. Discrepancies ranged from $148 to around $2,000, with the majority between $600 and $800. About 55 families reported not being paid at all.
Those military families who have undergone a permanent change of station have been especially hard hit. While families are reimbursed for any moves they have to make, these payments have been stopped. One family reported that it was living in a hotel because the housing inspector at the base to which it was moving to had been furloughed, preventing them from moving into base housing.
Governor Abbott has predictably repeated the Trump administration’s line on the shutdown, saying that the quickest way for it to end is for Senate Democrats to approve the legislation that Trump wants. Abbott is fully aware of the grave nature of the situation yet has counseled Texans to call 2-1-1 for information on food, housing and other essential resources.
12. Hundreds killed protesting Tanzanian election fraud
Hundreds of protesters are feared dead after Tanzanian security forces launched a savage crackdown on demonstrations against the fraudulent elections of October 29, 2025. In what many are calling a coronation at gunpoint, President Samia Suluhu Hassan of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the bourgeois nationalist party that has ruled uninterrupted for 64 years, was declared the winner with 98 percent of the vote on Saturday.
The fraudulent vote unleashed three days of mass demonstrations and violent clashes with police. In major cities including Dar es Salaam, Arusha, Mbeya, Mwanza, Tunduma, and Kahama, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, have poured into the streets, defying curfews, teargas and live ammunition from security forces.
Demonstrators have torched police stations, destroyed ballot boxes, and set fire to vehicles, homes, and businesses belonging to CCM officials and their wealthy associates. Portraits of President Hassan, once displayed in every public building, have been burned.
The political reckoning has also targeted Tanzania’s most prominent artists and celebrities. Diamond Platnumz, the most streamed artist in East and Central Africa and one of the top African artists globally, his protégé Zuchu, one of the region’s most streamed female artists, and rapper Bill Nas have all become targets. Protesters have attacked their homes and set fire to their cars and businesses. For years, these artists performed at CCM rallies, praised President Hassan in their songs, and helped to sanitize the regime’s image
The government has responded with savage repression. Opposition party CHADEMA alleges that as many as 800 people have been killed. A diplomatic source told the BBC that deaths could exceed 500. With restrictions to social media, foreign journalists barred from entering and domestic outlets such as The Citizen and Daily News parroting official CCM statements, the full scale of the bloodshed cannot be confirmed.
On Saturday, Hassan, who had remained silent and whose whereabouts were unclear since election day, made a brief appearance in the country’s capital, Dodoma, to collect the winner’s certificate from electoral authorities. Speaking afterwards, she claimed that the result showed Tanzanians had “voted overwhelmingly” for her.
Hassan threatened protestors: “When it comes to the security of Tanzania, there is no debate—we must use all available security avenues to ensure the country remains safe”
She has since vanished from public view, perhaps reflecting on her former counterparts in Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Madagascar, each forced to flee amid mass uprisings.
*****
There is no precedent for protests of this scale in Tanzania’s post-independence history. Over the years there has been small, isolated struggles by the Maasai communities resisting eviction from ancestral lands to expand national parks, by miners and villagers exploited by mining corporations, and by workers and youth angered by the theft of natural gas revenues. Never has there been a unified national eruption of class anger.
*****
Presidential spokesperson Jonas Mbambo of neighboring Malawi, which currently chairs the SADC Organ on Defence and Security Cooperation, said the country is closely monitoring the situation. Landlocked Malawi is feeling the ripple effects of the protests, facing fuel shortages and disrupted trade. The protests have also disrupted the movement of goods to Rwanda, under the three-decade dictatorship of Paul Kagame.
There are growing fears among the ruling classes across East Africa that they could be next. According to Africa Intelligence, Hassan reportedly held separate phone calls with Kenyan President William Ruto and Uganda’s long-time ruler Yoweri Museveni. Ruto last year faced massive Gen Z–led protests against IMF austerity measures that left hundreds dead. Museveni, widely despised after nearly four decades in power, is preparing yet another fraudulent election in January 2026, marked by intimidation and violent repression of the opposition.
*****
The panic gripping East Africa’s ruling circles is well founded. They all preside over societies with some of the world’s youngest populations, facing mass unemployment, hunger, and the absence of any future under capitalism. As the ruling class enriches itself from the misery of millions and enforces austerity through police-state repression, the spectre haunting East Africa’s elites is that a whole new generation is rising that is opposed to the whole post-independence order. The task facing Tanzanian workers and youth is to build their own independent political leadership, armed with a revolutionary and internationalist perspective.
13. UK Labour government announces two former military sites will become asylum seeker detention camps
Asylum seekers in Britain are to be housed within weeks at two former military sites in Inverness, Scotland and East Sussex in England, as the Starmer government enforces a policy to remove them from hotels.
There are no humane facilities to house people arriving in the UK seeking asylum, meaning successive governments have housed them in hotels. From a peak of over 56,000 asylum seekers in hotels at the end of September 2023, there are still 32,000 living in them. This situation has been utilized by far-right to wage a xenophobic campaign aimed at deporting asylum seekers, culminating this summer in a series of often violent demonstrations outside hotels.
Seeking to appeal to the far-right constituency of Reform UK, which has a significant poll lead, the government has ramped up its own anti-immigrant offensive. Last week, The Times reported that the government was to move hundreds of asylum seekers out of hotels and into the Cameron Barracks in Inverness and the Crowborough army training camp in East Sussex. Up to 900 people will be held in the barracks. In a dog whistle to the far-right, the Home Office stated, “We are furious at the level of illegal migrants and asylum hotels,” and claimed that the move will “ease pressure on communities”.
*****
The Starmer government is planning to house up to 10,000 migrants in hovel-like conditions in detention centers created from the former military bases. This is the fate that awaits many fleeing from poverty and societal collapse in countries in the Middle East and Africa devastated by wars backed by British imperialism.
In laying siege to hotels, the far-right and its echo chamber media claim day in day out that asylum seekers are living a life of luxury at tax payers’ expense. This is a pack of lies.
Under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, the Home Office has a statutory duty to provide accommodation for asylum seekers who appear to be destitute. But the government support they receive is the absolute minimum. Asylum seekers are provided financial “support” of about £7.02 per person per day and from this must cover all basic needs like food, clothing, and transport. They do not have any choice in the accommodation they are assigned, or its location.
This can be in multiple occupancy house, a hotel, where they often must share a room, or barracks. Asylum seekers are not allowed to work while waiting for their claim to be processed, which can take months.
The lying claim that asylum hotels are luxurious was repeated by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s spokesperson saying, “Military sites can provide proper security, health and wellbeing standards, and that is what we’re intent on delivering, instead of luxury sites, as we’ve seen over recent years.”
14. Australian rainforests are becoming a net source of carbon emissions
A team of international scientists led by researchers from Australian universities has found the first evidence that woody biomass in tropical rainforests is acting as a long-term source of carbon dioxide. This has global implications.
The study, titled “Aboveground biomass in Australian tropical forests now a net carbon source,” published in the leading scientific journal Nature, found that a critical component of rainforest ecosystems is emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it is absorbing.
*****
Tropical rainforests are the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystems on earth, covering less than 10 percent of the world’s land surface, yet containing over half of the earth’s plant and animal species. One of the most valuable ecosystem services that rainforests provide is carbon sequestration—the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thereby removing its ability to act as a greenhouse gas and contribute to global warming.
A 2021 study led by NASA scientists estimated that from 2000 to 2019 tropical rainforests acted as a net “carbon sink,” absorbing 410 million tonnes more carbon per year than they emitted. That team found that live woody biomass—the roots, wood, bark and leaves of living trees—was responsible for 80 percent of the carbon sequestration effect. The rest came from other components of the ecosystem, such as soil and dead organic matter.
The new research conducted by Dr Carle’s team however, found that live woody biomass “in Australian tropical forests now loses more carbon to the atmosphere on an annual basis than it absorbs.” Moreover, this “shift” from carbon sink to carbon source likely occurred around 25 years ago, at the turn of the century.
*****
The study found that an increase in tree mortality, without a corresponding increase in growth by surviving trees, was the main driver behind the trend. Tropical rainforests in Australia are experiencing tree mortality rates twice as high as compared to the 1970s. This was the finding of a study published earlier this year using the same monitoring sites as the new research.
The principal drivers of the increased death rates of rainforest trees are increased vapour pressure deficit (an increased atmospheric “demand” for water from plants which can cause water deficits) and increased atmosphere temperature. Both these effects are largely driven by climate change.
In addition, the new paper found that cyclones, which are increasing in severity under climate change (including in northern Queensland), played a significant role in tree mortality. The study found that “the carbon sink capacity of woody AGB was markedly depressed in the 6 years following a cyclone” and that cyclones “increased the mortality rate above background levels by 19 percent.”
The study’s findings “suggest the potential for a similar response to climate change by woody aboveground biomass in moist tropical forests globally, which could culminate in a long-term switch from carbon sinks to carbon sources.”
*****
More research is needed to get a full, global picture of this danger, in particular focusing on rainforests on other continents and investigating the role of other components of the ecosystem, such as the soil. Nevertheless, enough evidence is presented here for the authors to conclude their paper by declaring that “action on climate change must be a key priority if we are to safeguard the carbon sink capacity of tropical forests.”
*****
The warnings issued by scientists will not be heeded by capitalist governments anywhere. Acting in the interests of big business, they defend not the health of the planet but the profit dictates of the capitalist system, which is causing the world to warm to such a degree that one of the most productive ecosystems on the planet is beginning to contribute to the climate crisis itself.
It is ever clearer that this descent into ecological collapse can be halted only with a socialist perspective, taken up by the international working class and principled scientists everywhere in the world.
15. United States: Texas students speak in defense of historian Tom Alter
Support for victimized labor historian and professor Tom Alter is growing among Texas students. Alter, a professor of history at Texas State University and a historian of American labor, particularly in Texas, was summarily fired September 10 for remarks he made at an online event called the “Revolutionary Socialism Conference.” During the event, held September 7, Alter expressed views in opposition to the capitalist system and in favor of socialism.
In violation of his First Amendment rights to free speech, Alter was dismissed from his position without any review or chance to defend himself. The university claimed that he had violated Texas State’s “academic neutrality” and accused him of supporting “overthrowing the United States government.” A lawsuit filed by Alter resulted in a court order for the university to reinstate him—though he is barred from teaching—until a hearing can be held. Alter’s dismissal, however, was upheld by the university on October 13.
Alter’s politically motivated firing was swiftly condemned by graduate students in the Texas State History Department. Joining them were the student newspaper and the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the Labor and Working Class History Association, and the Canadian Committee on Labour History.
*****
Other academics in Texas have also been targeted. Shortly before Alter’s initial dismissal, Melissa McCoul, an English lecturer at Texas A&M, was fired after a video circulated of a conservative student objecting to a lecture that featured content on gender identity. The video provoked virulent attacks from state Republicans that resulted in the additional firing of College of Arts and Sciences Dean Mark Zoran and department head Emily Johansen.
Hundreds of teachers were hounded by Republican officials and right-wing groups for statements and interactions on social media critical of fascist agitator Charlie Kirk, in some cases for simply not being sufficiently mournful of Kirk.
Texas State University has also moved to restrict course material on gender identity and LGBTQ+ subjects, and, according to the Academic Freedom Monitoring Project’s “Free to Think” report, the Trump administration launched 40 attacks on academic freedom in the first half of 2025, ranging from threats to cut funding to attacks on scholars of foreign nationalities.
The attack on Tom Alter must be understood in this broader context as the Trump administration and the Republican Party, with no serious opposition from the Democrats, move to gut academic freedom, purge critical political speech and attack anything related to socialism and the class struggle.
16. Peru’s political establishment lines up behind unelected far-right government
Amid a wave of mass protests against social inequality Peru’s nominal opposition parties are doing everything possible to disarm and block any actions against recently installed President José Jerí’s attempt to solidify a right-wing dictatorship.
Aside from scattered rhetorical protests, their actions fail to challenge the continuation of an illegitimate and repressive regime that took power through the overthrow of the elected President Pedro Castillo in December 2022. The installation of his vice president, Dina Boluarte, was accomplished through brutal repression and homicidal violence.
*****
Peru has seen a wave of strikes driven by growing anger over the killing of transport workers (more than 180 so far this year) by extortionist and politically connected gangs demanding protection money. The transport unions, dominated by bus owners, have attempted to divert this anger into support for repressive legislation, including a so-called “urban terrorism” law, and a harsher police crackdown.
Outside the Congress there are a few critical voices, like the journalist César Hildebrandt or Glatzer Tuesta, lawyer of the NGO Ideele, who has a radio program. However, all their criticisms and are framed a the defense of the Peruvian state and the model of capitalist democracy.
These forces promote a supra-classist and nationalist narrative: that the state belongs to everyone, and that some mafia or corrupt sectors of politics “have captured institutions” and now control key institutions. According to this discourse, new elections could be beneficial as long as the masses who reject capitalist politics and all of the current politicians, “learn to vote.” However, none of the parties seek to impinge on the interests of the corrupt and blood-soaked ruling class.
The nominal left, both in the Peruvian Congress and outside it, has repeatedly defended private property and the sanctity of so-called capitalist democracy. The pseudo-leftist parties, including Together for Peru, People’s Voices, New Peru, the Magisterial Bloc and Socialist Bloc, are dedicated to channeling the overwhelming rejection of millions of Peruvians back into the electoral swamp. It is this “left” that capital, both domestic and foreign, needs.
*****
The deepening political crisis in Peru reflects widespread anger among the working population, driven by numerous intersecting factors that highlight the illegitimacy and corruption of the current regime. One key flashpoint has been the recently issued arbitrary ruling by the Constitutional Court, whose members were appointed by the current Congress. In a blatantly partisan decision, the court annulled the money laundering trial against Keiko Fujimori, leader of the dominant party in Congress, the far-right Popular Force, on the technical pretext that the illegal campaign contributions she received were not contemplated under current legislation. This ruling occurred at the height of the electoral season, sparing Fujimori from facing justice and provoking widespread repudiation across Peru.
The Constitutional Court’s ruling ignited a backlash from reactionary forces, emboldening a counterattack that has even targeted the prosecutor who led the investigation.
Meanwhile, Congress exploited the political turmoil following the removal of President Boluarte by installing José Jerí Oré, a little-known political figure, as head of state and granting a vote of confidence to a new right-wing cabinet led by Prime Minister Ernesto Álvarez. This government openly seeks extraordinary powers to govern by decree on citizen security issues. Álvarez himself slandered protesters killed by undercover police provocateurs as “terrorists,” signaling the government’s commitment to repress dissent. The initial security operations, including a night raid in the port city of Callao that involved notorious reactionary figures, have been widely condemned as a farce and provocation by Peruvian workers and popular sectors.
Perhaps the most ominous development has been the placing of Lima and Callao under a state of emergency on October 22, a political tool used to suspend fundamental constitutional rights and justify mass militarization and police repression.
The resident doctors’ national strike in England planned for November 14–19 must become a rallying point for all National Health Service (NHS) workers against the Starmer government.
50,000 resident doctors in the British Medical Association (BMA) have waged a two-year battle for pay restoration. They have now added the fight to end widespread unemployment facing doctors in the NHS.
This struggle pits them against Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting, frontman for Starmer’s cuts and drive for corporate control and privatization of the NHS.
The NHS workforce and the entire working class must defeat this assault to defend public healthcare, defeat plans to curtail the right to strike, resist jobs cuts and reverse decades of pay erosion and crushing and unsafe workloads.
This is a situation confronting millions of workers in the public and private sectors facing a Starmer government representing the interests of big business and the oligarchy.
The resident doctors action is the first national strike the Starmer government has faced since it took office last July. Streeting has accused them of “holding the country to ransom,” echoing Thatcher’s denunciations of “the enemy within” against the 1984-85 miners’ strike. During the last round of walks out in July, he claimed resident doctors were waging a “war” against the government they could not win.
The Labour government fears this action is the tip of the iceberg, as Streeting warned of a “contagion” of strikes. Imposing a defeat on resident doctors is seen as a deterrent against every other struggle the Starmer government anticipates against its austerity agenda. For months the Starmer government has backed its flagship Labour council in Birmingham conducting a strike breaking operation against 400 bin workers resisting vicious pay cuts of up to a quarter of their wages and slashing jobs as part of a £300 million cuts package.
*****
The cost of restoring resident doctors’ pay—around £1.7 billion—is a fraction of the billions squandered on outsourcing and war. There is always money for war, the City of London, and private profit, but not for health, education, or housing.
The defence of the NHS cannot be achieved within capitalism. Every government—Tory, Labour, or coalition—has pursued pro-market restructuring incompatible with universal, high-quality healthcare. The only way forward is to fight for socialism:
• End all the profit racketeering in the NHS—No more PFIs and Subcos—to restore a universal high quality public health service
• Bring the private health corporations, pharmaceutical giants into public ownership and under workers control
• Redirect the billions spent on war and corporate subsidies to healthcare and social servicesThe struggle of resident doctors is part of an international fight by healthcare workers facing the same conditions—from strikes in Germany, New Zealand, Australia and Sri Lanka to the United States. The global assault by governments and corporations can only be met with a unified, international counter-offensive by the working class.
18. 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.
