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