Nov 4, 2025

Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. Oxfam: 10 US billionaires have had their wealth increase 6-fold since 2020

On Monday, the charity Oxfam published a report on the growth of social inequality in the United States, titled “Unequal: The Rise of a New American Oligarchy.”

The report notes that the “past year has been indelibly shaped by concentrated wealth and power.” It cites data showing that in the past 12 months alone, the 10 richest US billionaires got approximately $700 billion richer. Over this period, their wealth grew by a staggering 40 percent, from $1.79 trillion to $2.5 trillion.

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The domination of the United States by a parasitic oligarchy, whose seat of power is in the White House, is on display for everyone to see.

But the Oxfam report makes clear that, however violent the upward redistribution of wealth being carried out under Trump, it is the product of decades of austerity and pro-corporate policies carried out by both parties. As the report declares, “The story does not begin in 2025.”

Returning to the 10 richest men in America, the Oxfam report noted, “Since 2020, their inflation-adjusted wealth is up 526%.” In other words, from March 2020 through the present, the wealth of these 10 individuals collectively increased six-fold.

A case in point is Elon Musk, whose wealth stood at $33 billion in March 2020, but it has since surged to $469 billion, a 14-fold increase.

Larry Ellison, number two on the list, saw his wealth increase from $54 billion in March 2020 to $323 billion, a six-fold increase. The wealth of Jeff Bezos, number three on the list, increased from $126 billion in March 2020 to $265 billion today.

The increase in wealth is driven by a relentless speculative growth of share values on Wall Street. The Oxfam report noted that “In 2025, the share of assets owned by the top 0.1 percent hit its highest on record since the Federal Reserve began publishing data in 1989 (12.6%), as did their share of the stock market (24%).”

In 1989, the top 0.1 percent of households controlled 8.6 percent of wealth, compared to 13.9 percent today. By contrast, the share of wealth controlled by the bottom 50 percent of American society has fallen from 3.5 percent in 1989 to 2.5 percent today.

In other words, the top 0.1 percent of US households, amounting to just over 100,000 people, control six times more wealth than the 64 million households at the very bottom of society.

In fact, citing figures from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the Oxfam report notes that “The richest 0.0001% control a greater share of wealth than in the Gilded Age, an era of US history defined by extreme inequality.”

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Oxfam noted that “The recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) will reduce the tax bill of the highest-earning 0.1% by an estimated $311,000 in 2027, while the lowest-income households—those making less than $15,000 annually—are expected to face tax increases.”

But as the Oxfam report makes clear, the Trump administration marks an acceleration, at an unprecedented pace, of processes that had been ongoing for decades. “Policymakers have been choosing inequality, and those choices have had bipartisan support,” the study’s author, Rebecca Riddell, told the Guardian. “Policy reforms over the last 40 years, from cuts to taxes and the social safety net to labor issues and beyond, really had the backing of both parties.” 

This assessment is true. But it is here that the report tangles itself up in knots. The study’s author correctly points out that the surge in social inequality has occurred over decades, under both political parties. But the report proceeds to make the following assertion:

Gains made during the Biden administration—such as reductions in poverty, improved wages for low-wage workers, and strong antitrust action that put money back in families’ pockets—demonstrated the real potential for organizing to secure policy change that improves people’s lives.

This is completely contradicted by the report’s own findings. Under the Biden administration, the share of wealth controlled by the financial oligarchy surged at a level only eclipsed by the Trump administration. The combined wealth of the 10 richest individuals in America doubled, from $976 billion in January 2021 to $1,991 billion in January 2025. During this time, labor’s share of national income plunged to an all-time low.

Under Biden, the food insecurity rate for American children increased from 13 percent to 19 percent. By the last year of his administration, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development asserted in its annual report, “The number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2024 was the highest ever recorded.”

In other words, the Biden administration was a disaster for the working class and a bonanza for the financial oligarchy.

The preface of the report is given by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who declares that “an economy that works great for those at the very top and leaves everyone else hanging on by their fingernails … happened through deliberate policy choices.”

Yet she does not explain how a vast share of the increase in social inequality documented in the Oxfam report took place under an administration she endorsed and whose policies she repeatedly, and without exception, defended.

Left unsaid in the main text of the Oxfam report is one word: capitalism. Its essential framework is to argue that the growth of social inequality is merely a policy choice, and that another choice could just as easily be adopted within the present social framework. 

Karl Marx 

In reality, however, the persistent growth of social inequality, under Democrats and Republicans alike, is a fundamental feature of the capitalist system. As Karl Marx explained 150 years ago, “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is … at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”

But the social mood in the United States is changing. Last month, the Trump administration’s attack on democratic rights and austerity policies led to protests by millions of people in the “No Kings” demonstrations, which were among the largest in American history. A recent Axios poll found that 67 percent of young people in the US now view the term “socialism” positively or neutrally, compared to just 40 percent for “capitalism.” 

There is mounting opposition among broad sections of the population, including workers and young people, to social inequality and the dictatorship of the financial oligarchy.

The Socialist Equality Party insists that the obscene fortunes of the financial elite must be expropriated. The wealth of the oligarchs is inseparable from their control over the giant corporations, banks and investment funds that dominate every aspect of economic and political life. These institutions must be transformed into publicly owned utilities, democratically controlled by the working class and reorganized to meet human needs, not private profit.

Such a transformation cannot be achieved through appeals to either of the parties of Wall Street. It requires the building of a mass movement of the working class, organized in rank-and-file committees, united internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). The fight against inequality and dictatorship is, in its essence, a fight against capitalism. To end exploitation, poverty and war, the working class must take power and reconstruct economic life on socialist foundations.

2. Lee Miller retrospective: “I didn’t waste a minute of all my life”

Lee Miller 

The Lee Miller retrospective at Tate Britain—the most extensive ever staged in the UK—seeks to shift public perception of Miller (1907–1977) from muse and model to a pioneering photographer who shaped modern visual culture and bore witness to some of the 20th century’s most harrowing events. 

The curators assert: “Yes, she was very beautiful and very well connected, and she had an interesting, exciting life, and lots of other artists painted or photographed her. But she was also a really major artist, and that’s the story we want to tell.” 

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Spanning over five decades of creative output, the exhibition assembles more than 230 vintage and modern photographs—some previously unknown or rarely seen—alongside film, archival material, and personal items. It traces Miller’s evolution from fashion model to Surrealist photographer, war correspondent, and post-war chronicler of artistic and political life. The breadth of material—from early Vogue covers to searing images of liberated concentration camps—reveals a restless, radical eye attuned to both beauty and brutality. Her independent spirit, which she once described as “a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you,” permeates the show.

These experiences, relationships, and creative choices deeply informed Miller’s political orientation. Though never formally affiliated with any party, she was staunchly anti-fascist and deeply humanist. After World War II the MI5 spy agency launched an investigation into her “communist sympathies” and the presence of left-wing artists in her circle.

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Lee Miller lived a life of extraordinary intensity and transformation. Her own reflection, “I didn’t waste a minute all my life… but if I had it over again, I’d be even more free with my ideas, with my body and my affection,” captures both her defiance and her regrets. Her legacy is one of radical creativity, emotional complexity, and a lifelong struggle for artistic freedom.

3. Fatal Cobar explosion part of broader trend of accidents in Australian mines

The Endeavor incident that killed two workers last week is far from an isolated tragedy. It is part of a growing pattern, in Australia and globally, of preventable workplace deaths and injuries.

4. Pike River film whitewashes Labour Party and union’s role in New Zealand mine disaster

The film rewrites history to promote the Labour Party and the union bureaucracy, obscuring their role both in the 2010 mine disaster, which killed 29 people, and in the ongoing cover-up. 

5. New report by The Lancet: More than 3 million Palestinian life-years lost in Gaza genocide

A report published in the British medical journal The Lancet, “Over 3 million life-years lost in Gaza,” provides a scientific indictment of the ethnic cleansing operations of the Israeli military against Palestinians in the enclave territory since October 7, 2023.

Based on the confirmed death toll from the Palestinian Health Ministry as reported on July 31, 2025, The Lancet’s researchers—Sammy Zahran of Colorado State University and Ghassan Abu-Sittah of the American University of Beirut—calculated that the 60,199 Palestinians killed in this period lost on average 51 years each, amounting to over 3 million years of forfeited life.

The overwhelming majority of these losses occurred among civilians, including an estimated 1 million life-years lost among children under 15 years old. The figures presented in this study are staggering and testify to the barbarism pursued by the Israeli regime with the backing of the US and European imperialist powers.

The analytical framework adopted by The Lancet makes clear that these calculations are rooted in the explicit, recorded fatalities linked directly to Israeli military actions, excluding thousands killed indirectly through the systematic destruction of essential infrastructure, food, water supplies, medical facilities and personnel.

The thesis of The Lancet report is unequivocal: Israeli military operations have generated direct, quantifiable social devastation that is not adequately portrayed by death toll numbers alone. By excluding “indirect deaths resulting from the ruin of infrastructure and medical facilities, restriction of food and water, and the loss of medical personnel that support life,” the true impact of the Israeli genocide is far greater than even the horrific numbers calculated in the study.

6. Police massacre in Rio de Janeiro signals generalization of capitalist violence and barbarism

7. Australia: Union calls a belated strike ballot at Western Sydney University

While advocating a “yes” vote on the ballot, the WSU Rank-and-File Committee warns that the NTEU is seeking such a vote only for the purpose of negotiating yet another treacherous deal.

8. US announces expanded maritime task force with the Philippines

Task Force Philippines will place the supervision and control of maritime confrontations between the Philippines and China under the command of a US general.

9. Four decades after PATCO strike, government shutdown worsens continual crisis facing US air traffic controllers

As air traffic controllers take leave to find paying work, slowdowns and ground stops have plagued US airports.

10. United States: “It can’t be fixed within capitalism”: USC nurses’ strike reveals growing revolt against profit-driven healthcare

On October 30, around 1,400 registered nurses staged a one-day strike at Keck Medicine of USC (University of Southern California) facilities, including Keck Hospital of USC, the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, USC Arcadia Hospital and USC Verdugo Hills Hospital in Glendale.

Workers are being pushed to the breaking point. The strike took place amid massive attacks on social programs by the Trump administration, which is using the shutdown to eliminate or cripple programs on which tens of millions rely. Around 42 million Americans are dealing with delays in the distribution of food stamp benefits this month, which the Trump administration is only distributing at a reduced rate following court orders.

The strike encompassed some of the most advanced medical institutions in Southern California. Keck Hospital of USC, a 401-bed acute care facility affiliated with the University of Southern California, boasts cutting-edge research and clinical trials.

The USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, a 60-bed hospital specializing in 13 areas of cancer treatment, reported approximately $2 billion in patient revenue and $121.9 million in net profit in 2023 alone.

Since May 2025, nurses have been locked in contract negotiations with Keck Medicine, following an informational picket in July and a strike authorization vote in August. The central grievance raised by nurses is the severe understaffing that endangers patients and exhausts caregivers.

11. Sri Lankan prime minister opposes international inquiry into war crimes

Amarasuriya’s comments expose the government’s claims to oppose communal politics, want “reconciliation” with minorities, including Tamils, and to “heal the wounds” of war.

12. US citizen shot by ICE in California as Illinois detainees sue over inhumane conditions

Every day, as part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing mass deportation operation, federal immigration police, backed by local cops, violate the constitutional rights of citizens and immigrants alike. In scenes that mirror US-backed dictatorships in Latin America, residents of United States, regardless of immigration status, are being brutalized, shot and disappeared without due process.

According to his lawyers, last Thursday in Ontario, California, US citizen Carlos Jimenez, 25, was shot in the back by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents after he tried to warn them that children would soon be gathering at a nearby school bus stop. Jimenez was on his way to work at a food bank when he came upon ICE agents conducting a traffic stop near the bus stop.

13. United States: Michigan’s 2025 budget duplicity and the assault on public education

The Michigan state budget has exposed the widening chasm between the state’s rhetoric of “equity” and “universal access” and the concrete policies being implemented to satisfy the demands of Wall Street, credit rating agencies, and the corporate elite.

14. Canada: Quebec’s CAQ government implements its class-war “shock therapy” agenda

Key elements in the CAQs class-war agenda include: slashing and privatizing public services; gutting environmental regulations; continued attacks on immigrants; and further coercive measures to suppress working-class opposition.

15. Mehring Verlag at the Left Literature Fair in Nuremberg: Strong turnout for book launch in face of attempt at censorship

Around 120 people packed into the far too small cinema auditorium at the Left Literature Fair in Nuremberg on Sunday, where Mehring Verlag presented two books by the American socialist David North, chairman of the World Socialist Web Site: The Logic of Zionism and Socialism Against War

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It was the only event at the fair to focus on the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the danger of a third world war. The Left Party and other pseudo-left groups support Trump’s “peace plan” for Gaza, declare the genocide to be over and play down the danger of a third world war.

The Mehring Verlag event stood in complete contrast; it analysed both theaters of war in Gaza and Ukraine as part of the worldwide development towards war, explained their causes in the deep crisis of capitalism and outlined a socialist perspective in opposition to them.

The City of Nuremberg responded by politically censoring the event: only 30 hours before the fair began, it demanded that the fair management change the event description and threatened to exercise its rights as the owner of the venue to “exclude the book launch from the program of the Left Literature Fair” if this did not happen. Even the posters with the event text, which had been put up in the building as all publishers at the fair do, had to be removed under threat of the event being banned.

The city objected to the description because it accused the German government of “bloody war crimes” and referred to the genocide in Gaza as such. In the city’s view, this was unlawful. This argument amounts to the suppression of any criticism of the government’s war policy.

Supporters of Mehring Verlag responded to the censorship with a political offensive: hundreds of leaflets condemning the censorship were distributed to the fair’s visitors, so that in the end everyone knew about it. Some even extended their stay in Nuremberg by a day in order to be able to attend the event.

On the morning of the event, all the publishers exhibiting at the fair adopted a resolution sharply protesting against the censorship of Mehring Verlag’s event text and calling on the City of Nuremberg to refrain from any future attempts at censorship against book launches at the Left Literature Fair.

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Against this background the event was of central significance. The speaker, Peter Schwarz, a member of the World Socialist Web Site international editorial board, began by explaining that the event was taking place 80 years after the Nuremberg Trials, at which the chief Nazi war criminals were convicted.

That the City of Nuremberg now declared that one may not call the crimes of capitalist governments by their name because this would relativize the Holocaust, Schwarz said,

turns the significance of the Nuremberg Trials on its head. They were meant to ensure that genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes would never be committed again—or that those responsible for such crimes would have to reckon with severe punishment.

Schwarz made clear what the city administration’s argument amounts to: “From being a weapon against war crimes, it transforms the Nuremberg Trials into a general amnesty for them. One may no longer call a crime a crime because in doing so one would relativize another crime.”

In this context, Schwarz presented David North’s first book, The Logic of Zionism: From Nationalist Myth to the Gaza Genocide, which explains the background to the current genocide and demonstrates that the Zionist project has from the outset been based on a reactionary ideology.

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The lecture met with a great response from the audience, with listeners repeatedly applauding at key points in the speech. Afterwards, many visitors came to the Mehring Verlag stand to continue the political discussion and to purchase the two books and other Marxist literature.

The World Socialist Web Site will publish a video recording of the lecture in the coming days. The author of the two books presented, David North, will speak in Berlin on November 18 and in London on November 22 on the topic “Where is America heading? Socialism or barbarism.”

16. United States: Vital community hospital threatened with shutdown in Jersey City, New Jersey

Hudson Regional Health threatens shutdown of Heights University Hospital unless it receives more state assistance.

17. The CPM-K’s “Letter to the Kenyan Left”: An attempt to inherit Odinga’s pro-capitalist legacy

The Stalinist Communist Party Marxist-Kenya (CPM-K) has issued a “Letter to the Broad Kenyan Left: The Death of Raila Odinga and the Future of the Kenyan Left”.

It took the CPM–K five days to issue anything beyond a pitiful tweet from its leader, Booker Omole, lauding Raila Odinga, the long-time opposition leader, former prime minister, and political fixer for Kenya’s ruling elite, as a champion of “Kenya’s bourgeois democratic struggle.” Now, the CPM–K is moving to politically exploit Odinga’s death seeking to launch a new pseudo-left alliance aimed at containing growing social opposition to Kenyan capitalism.

The CPM–K’s letter acknowledges the scale of the crisis engulfing the ruling class. It declares: “The death of Raila Amolo Odinga, long-time opposition figure and symbol of Kenya’s liberal-reformist politics, marks a turning point in the political history of our nation. It brings to an end a political era dominated by charismatic personalities, populist reform agendas, and cyclical pacts with the ruling bourgeoisie.” Odinga’s death, it states, has “shaken the imagination of millions who saw in him the last remaining link between popular struggle and state power.”

Indeed, since coming to power in 2022, the government of President William Ruto has faced the accelerating collapse of the entire post-independence order as he has rammed through International Monetary Fund tax hikes, privatizations and social spending cuts. These measures triggered the eruption of the Gen Z nationwide protests last year, amid soaring inequality. The government responded by deploying the army and gunning down protestors, carrying out abductions and using state-funded goons to attack demonstrators.

Facing this opposition, Ruto, in close consultation with Washington and the European Union, turned to Odinga, the leader of the bourgeois Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), to stabilize his collapsing rule. Odinga’s entry into government was the final act of a man whose political authority had already evaporated. The protests had completely bypassed him, signalling the rise of a new generation entering political life independently of Kenya’s bankrupt, tribalist parties of the ruling elite.

However, in the absence of a clear program, perspective and political leadership, this mass movement proved inadequate to defeat a ruling elite that is determined to impose the full weight of International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity.

The anger did not subside. Protests erupted again this year, this time targeting the joint Ruto-Odinga “broad based” government, and were met with even greater state violence. On July 7, months before Odinga’s death, security forces opened fire on demonstrators, killing 57 people in one of the bloodiest massacres carried out by the Kenyan bourgeoisie since independence.

The death of Odinga is a political crisis for the Kenyan ruling class. It takes place amid a growing wave of social unrest spreading across the world. From Tanzania, Cameroon, Peru, Nepal and Bangladesh to Madagascar, Morocco, Mozambique and Angola, workers and youth are rising against soaring prices, mass unemployment, and IMF austerity programs.

The same anger is erupting in the imperialist centres. In the US, the “No Kings” protests sparked by Trump’s efforts to install a dictatorship drew millions. Across Europe, millions have joined demonstrations opposing the Western-backed genocide in Gaza. These struggles express the reawakening of the working class under conditions of a deepening crisis of world capitalism.

Amid this intensifying global and domestic crisis, the CPM-K Letter claims, “The death of Raila Odinga opens space for the advance of revolutionary consciousness”. But their rediscovery of Odinga’s “legacy” is an act of political rehabilitation. It conceals the Odinga dynasty’s decades-long service to Kenyan capitalism, whitewashes Stalinism’s complicity in this project, and falsifies the revolutionary tasks posed before the working class. It is on these rotten foundations that the CPM-K seeks to build a “Revolutionary United Front”.

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The CPM-K traces its lineage to the Social Democratic Party (SDP), but like Mwakenya all of its leading figures ultimately found their way into the political establishment. The SDP’s presidential candidates in the 1997 and 2002 general elections—Charity Ngilu (1997) and James Orengo (2002)—and senior party figures like Anyang’ Nyong’o, all went on to join Odinga in power. Ngilu was appointed Minister of Health (2003–2007) in Mwai Kibaki’s administration and Orengo served as Minister for Lands (2008–2013) in Kibaki’s second government, while Nyong’o became Minister for Planning and National Development (2003–2005) and later Minister for Medical Services (2008–2013).

Out of the SPD emerged Booker Omole and Mwandawiro Mghanga, who in 2019 relaunched it as the Communist Party of Kenya (CPK). Mghanga had long been integrated into the Kenyan capitalist state. Elected to parliament in 2002 under the Odinga-backed National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), he later served as Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs in Mwai Kibaki’s government. After losing his seat in 2007, he became chairperson of the SDP, continuing the party’s long record of collaboration with bourgeois governments under the banner of “progressive reform.”

The split between Mghanga and Omole came only in 2022, when Mghanga joined William Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza Alliance in the run up of the presidential elections that year. Until then, there had been no fundamental difference in orientation between them. Omole and his supporters objected to joining Ruto—a politician with a long record of violence against the working class—at a time of soaring food prices, mass youth unemployment, and worsening living conditions that threatened to erupt into social unrest. Omole judged it more effective to suppress opposition and contain social anger from the outside.

In late 2024, Omole founded the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya. The CPM-K’s Congress reaffirmed what was already clear: despite adding “Marxist” to its name, the party has no orientation to the working class. It remains a pro-capitalist organisation rooted in nationalism, representing the interests of sections of the bourgeoisie and middle class, centered on its orientation to capitalist China. It advocates for the preservation of the profit system, calling for a “mixed economic system where the state, private sector, and cooperative sector coexist”. It explains that “[u]ltimately, CPM-K aims to build an independent, nationally integrated, and self-sustaining economy by mobilizing Kenya’s resources.”

Across its successive incarnations, from Mwakenya to the SDP, from the CPK to today’s CPM-K, Kenya’s Stalinist current has performed the historical function of propping up bourgeois nationalism and preventing the emergence of an independent revolutionary movement of the working class. Whether under Kenyatta, Moi, Odinga or Ruto, these organizations have urged workers to subordinate their struggles to supposedly “patriotic” and “progressive” sections of the elite. In every case, the result has been a political disaster for the working class. 

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In its “Letter to the Broad Kenyan Left”, the CPM-K identifies the vacuum left by Odinga’s death as a “moment of historical rupture” in which “the revolutionary party must intervene with ideological clarity and political firmness.” To fill this vacuum and build a new political vehicle to shore up the collapsing authority of the capitalist state, the CPM-K proposes a “Revolutionary United Front” of “workers, peasants, women, youth, [and] progressive intellectuals,” and campaigns for “unity of the exploited classes”.

Beneath this rhetoric lies a familiar Stalinist script, including the characterization of Kenya as a “semi-feudal, neocolonial economy” and the denunciation of certain unnamed elites as a “comprador-bureaucratic bourgeoisie tied to imperialism”. This is the inherited vocabulary of Maoism, devised to rationalize alliances with so-called “patriotic” sections of the bourgeoisie under the banner of the “New Democratic Revolution.”

In 1939, Mao published The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party, where he argued that imperialism had made China a “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” country, whose “basic contradictions” lay “between imperialism and the Chinese nation” and “between feudalism and the great masses of the people.” On this basis, Mao proposed a “national revolution to overthrow foreign imperialist oppression” alongside a “democratic revolution to overthrow feudal landlord oppression.” He divided Chinese society into classes—landlords, bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, and proletariat—insisting that the “national bourgeoisie can become a revolutionary force” distinct from the “comprador big bourgeoisie.”

The Chinese revolution, Mao wrote, had a “twofold task”: first, to complete the “bourgeois-democratic” or “new-democratic” revolution through a coalition with the national bourgeoisie; and second, to “transform it into a socialist revolution when all the necessary conditions are ripe.”

It was on this foundation that the term “bureaucrat capitalism” arose. For Maoist forces like the CPM-K, it is not a category describing the class character of the capitalist state, but a moral condemnation of its corruption. It is a deviation from what is imagined to be the “progressive” function of a capitalist government. Bureaucrat capitalists, like compradors, are portrayed as traitors to the nation and puppets of imperialism, to be replaced by “patriotic” capitalists who will supposedly defend the interests of the “people” to carry out the “national democratic revolution”. Thus, the capitalist state is not to be abolished, but reformed under new leadership.

The implication is that the CPM-K’s call for a “Revolutionary United Front” today is to replace the “bureaucrat capitalists” with more “patriotic” figures loyal to the nation. In reality, the repressive and exploitative character of the Kenyan state is not the product of individual betrayals or of a lack of patriotism, but of irreconcilable class antagonisms rooted in the global imperialist system. There is no progressive national bourgeoisie waiting to complete Kenya’s “unfinished revolution,” nor can any “patriotic” government liberate the working class from IMF austerity or imperialist domination.  

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The only genuine alternative lies in the theory of Permanent Revolution developed by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky warned, “The national bourgeoisie of the colonial and semi-colonial countries, being economically, politically and spiritually dependent upon the imperialist bourgeoisie, is incapable of waging a consistent struggle against imperialism.”

As he had already written in Results and Prospects (1906), “The bourgeoisie of the backward countries is not capable of conducting a revolutionary struggle against imperialism; it is linked to it by a thousand ties.” These historic tasks fall to the working class, which must seize power at the head of the rural poor, expropriate the capitalist class, and reorganize society on a socialist basis. The revolution must be international, linking struggles across Africa with those of the working class in the imperialist centers.

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The way forward lies not in completing a bourgeois democratic revolution, but in overthrowing the bourgeoisie altogether. This requires building a Kenyan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International—a revolutionary leadership committed to international socialism. Only such a party can unify the most advanced layers of workers and youth, and lead the fight for the United Socialist States of Africa. 

18. Workers Struggles: The Americas

Canada:

Montreal transit workers stage partial strikes as contract talks continue

Chile:

Protests over death of Santiago McDonald's worker

Mexico:

Major impact from road blockages by farmers

Peru:

Youth protests against government repression

United States:

Tech workers at Kickstarter crowdfunding platform enter second month on strike 
Strike over safety conditions by group of Pennsylvania Iron workers enters eighth month 
Workers involved in three-day strike at Texas art and entertainment company

Uruguay:

Teachers’ hold two-day strike

19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

 

The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.