Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. UPS plane crash: The latest in capitalism’s string of industrial disasters
There is a staggering contradiction at the heart of this disaster. Worldport’s facilities are among the most advanced in the world, with the ability to handle 370 flights and process more than 2 million packages a day. This is a remarkable feat of computation, planning, human skill and global coordination. UPS and its rivals are also rapidly introducing new systems in their warehouses based on the latest advances in automation and artificial intelligence.
This advanced logistics system, however, is subordinated to the ruthless pursuit of profit, powered by highly exploited workers. The plane that crashed outside Louisville was part of an aging fleet. The MD-11 model, which has the second-worst safety record of all commercial aircraft, was 34 years old and had reportedly undergone major repairs, including a cracked fuel tank as recently as September.
This is the third UPS crash in the past 12 years. UPS pilots have repeatedly demanded fatigue protections equal to those for passenger crews, only to be met with stonewalling by corporate management and federal regulators.
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New technologies that could and should be used to ease the burden of labor and improve safety are of interest to the oligarchy only to the extent that they can be used to ramp up exploitation. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, 1.1 million jobs have been cut so far this year, the highest level since 2020. Artificial intelligence and automation are being used as weapons to eliminate entire sections of the workforce and drive millions into poverty.
This is why, alongside staggering technological advances, American infrastructure is underfunded, decaying and unsafe.
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Friday marks seven months since the death of autoworker Ronald Adams Sr., who was crushed to death by a gantry while performing maintenance at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Complex near Detroit. With management and the UAW bureaucracy maintaining a guilty silence, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) launched an investigation into the accident, with preliminary findings presented at a July 27 meeting.
Since that meeting, hundreds have been killed internationally, including, most recently, 16 garment workers in a fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh; two coal miners in Australia; and 23 workers in an explosion at a retail site in Hermosillo, Mexico. These disasters underscore the global character of the industrial slaughterhouse.
The UPS air disaster occurred in the midst of the ongoing government shutdown, now the longest in American history. The Trump administration is using starvation as a weapon against federal workers and the poor. Particularly cruel is its refusal to release food stamp funding for 42 million people, immediately plunging a large portion of the country into food insecurity.
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The United States is a government of, by, and for the oligarchy, headed by would-be dictator Donald Trump. His administration represents the seamless integration of the capitalist elite and the state. The elimination of the Chemical Safety Board next year, along with deep cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other regulatory agencies, demonstrates this policy in practice. Trump’s new head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), David Keeling, is the former UPS safety chief.
As far as the ruling class is concerned, corporate entities receive total impunity. On Thursday, a judge dropped criminal charges against Boeing over its massive safety scandal, in which hundreds died because management concealed known issues with its aircraft. Boeing, a major defense contractor that is battling 3,000 striking workers at its fighter jet plants in St. Louis, is being lavished by Trump with tens of billions of dollars in new contracts.
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The union bureaucracy, concerned only with maintaining its privileges and access to power, is a full partner in this process. Mass automation-led layoffs began at UPS almost as soon as the ink was dry on the 2023 contract signed by the Teamsters bureaucracy. The union has said almost nothing about these cuts and issued only a muted statement on the disaster. But Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien has been far more vocal in his support for Trump, using “America First” rhetoric to blame corporate job cuts on foreign workers.
The Socialist Equality Party calls for workers in logistics, transportation, manufacturing, and every industry to take up the fight for control over production through the building of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). These committees must form the basis for a counter-offensive by the working class, transferring power from the trade union bureaucracies to the shop floor. They must unite workers internationally in a common struggle against the social counterrevolution being waged by the capitalist oligarchy.
Disasters like Tuesday’s crash are not accidents, but the outcome of a system that subordinates every aspect of life to private profit. The colossal cost to society of capitalist enrichment, built up through the labor of the working class, is incompatible with even the most basic requirements of safety, health or democratic rights.
The immense technological capacity of modern society stands in irreconcilable conflict with the private ownership of production by a parasitic elite. It is also incompatible with democracy—the real reason behind Trump’s rise.
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The immense technological capacity of modern society stands in irreconcilable conflict with the private ownership of production by a parasitic elite. It is also incompatible with democracy—the real reason behind Trump’s rise.
The operation of the logistics and transportation networks must be organized for public need, not private profit. To guarantee safe working conditions, modern equipment and humane scheduling, workers must fight for:
The expropriation of the corporate oligarchy, using its trillions in wealth to fund rapid improvements in living standards;
The nationalization of the banks and the major logistics, manufacturing and aerospace corporations, to be run as public utilities;
Democratic control by the working class over production, including exclusive authority on all issues of safety.
The working class must insist on its own social rights—to decent jobs, healthcare, and a livable future—and take direct action through these committees to enforce them. Above all, this struggle requires a conscious political break with capitalism and the fight for socialism. The incompatibility of modern society with private profit can be resolved only through the establishment of workers’ power and the socialist reorganization of economic life.
2. Capitalism failing on all 45 indicators of climate progress
The United Nations’ “Emissions Gap Report 2025” shows the planet is on course for 2.8 degrees Celsius of warming above the pre-industrial average by the end of this century based on current policies. If current climate commitments are implemented, temperatures will still rise by 2.3-2.5 degrees.
This is a looming catastrophe for billions around the world. The Earth has not yet passed the 1.5 degree warming mark for a sustained period and already this has led to historic droughts, heatwaves, floods, wildfires, storms and ocean acidification; widespread crop failures, species extinction and the more extensive spread of disease.
Scientists predict that these symptoms will worsen dramatically, in non-linear fashion, as temperatures rise. A 2.5 degree warming scenario would mean devastation for vast swathes of the world’s population.
However, even the UN’s dire figures are rose-tinted. There are uncertainties over tipping points (like the collapse of ice sheets or ocean circulation systems) and feedback loops (like loss of sea ice, thawing permafrost, degraded forests and rainforests) which could make for a substantially worse trajectory than predicted.
Moreover, the projections are based on “overshoot” models which assume temperatures will rise higher than their end-of-decade figure, then be reined in by the removal of massive quantities of carbon from the atmosphere. This relies on technology and methods unproven or potentially harmful at such a scale.
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The “State of Climate Action 2025” report from the World Resources Institute found that the world’s governments are failing on all 45 indicators of progress towards limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees. Of these, 29 indicators are “well off track”, meaning at least a twofold and for most a fourfold acceleration of progress is needed to meet end-of-decade targets.
Five indicators—the carbon intensity of steel production, the share of kilometers traveled by passenger cars, mangrove loss, share of food production lost, and public fossil fuel finance—are heading in the wrong direction.
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he scale of the failure is staggering. If world governments are to meet 1.5 degree-aligned end-of-decade targets, and stay on track through to 2035, these are just some of the steps which must be taken:
- Coal generation must be phased out more than ten times faster, closing 360 average-sized coal-fueled power plants a year.
- Deforestation must be reduced nine times faster.
- Affordable and reliable public transport systems in the world’s heaviest emitting cities must be constructed five times faster, building 1,400 km of light and metro rail and bus routes every year.
- Solar and wind power’s share of electricity generation must be expanded at double the recent rate.
- Consumption of beef, lamb and goat in high-consuming regions must fall five times faster.
- Climate finance must increase by close to $1 trillion each year, equal to roughly two-thirds of public fossil fuel finance in 2023.
The science underlying these reports is unarguable. But their political premise, that they provide advice to a ruling class which will act accordingly based on the science, is fatally flawed.
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The unavoidable conclusion is that only the expropriation of the vast, profit-seeking fortunes of the super-rich can begin to address the climate crisis. Around the globe, the billions wanting to fight for a livable planet cannot console themselves with the illusion of international collaboration to meet climate targets, led by capitalist governments representing the world’s mega corporations.
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Poll after poll shows enormous support (89 percent globally, according to a study by Oxford University) for stronger action to tackle the climate crisis. Yet each year the planet is plunged deeper into catastrophe, because the “green” programs on offer are based on a capitalist system which renders a serious response impossible.
As with all the major issues facing humanity, the climate crisis is a class question; it requires a revolutionary socialist movement of the working class for its solution.
Thousands of flights will be cancelled starting Friday morning, after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a directive Wednesday to reduce flights by 10 percent at 40 major US airports due to a shortage of air traffic controllers.
When the government shutdown began on October 1, the National Airspace System (NAS) was operating with 3,000 fewer air traffic controllers than FAA-staffing targets. Since then, 11,000 workers have been forced to report to control towers as “essential employees” without pay.
The government shutdown is now the longest in US history and many controllers are calling off work to take outside jobs or out of sheer exhaustion. US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy warned Wednesday of “mass chaos” if the government shutdown continued. “You will see mass flight delays. You’ll see mass cancellations, and you may see us close certain parts of the airspace because we just cannot manage it, because we don’t have the air traffic controllers.”
Many air traffic controllers are weighing their options after receiving their first $0 “paycheck” on October 28. Years of inadequate wage increases, coupled with record inflation and cost of living have resulted in large numbers living paycheck to paycheck. Now many controllers are being forced to find other work in order to make ends meet.
Controllers have been forced to work mandatory overtime for over two years due to an entirely predictable staffing crisis. Workers who have been forced to obtain part-time work have added those hours to 60-hour work weeks on the “rattler” schedule that has controllers working all three shifts in a week, contributing significantly to fatigue.
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This government shutdown is not only a present crisis, but it sharply exposes the worsening conditions of air traffic control that has existed since the PATCO strike of 1981.
The system has never fully recovered and has lurched from crisis to crisis until now. This 2025 federal government shutdown could become a crisis that the aviation system will not recover from, requiring a large number of permanent flight reductions. Such an event would massively impact the economy as well as jobs in the entire aviation industry and adjacent industries such as freight.
Trump has used the government shutdown to carry out the fascistic program outlined in Project 2025: Unilateral presidential control of government funding, mass firings of federal workers, the gutting of essential social programs and the lifting on any restrictions, including occupational safety and environmental protection, that get in the way of the profit interests of the corporate and financial oligarchy.
In the face of this, the Democrats have limited themselves to maneuvers over budget issues and have begged Trump and Congressional Republicans for a “bipartisan” deal to resume funding. Above all, the Democrats and the trade union bureaucracy fear a mass movement of the working class against Trump, that could quickly break free from their control and develop into a fundamental challenge to the capitalist system that both parties defend
Only an independent movement of the working class organized through rank-and-file committees in every workplace, can protect the democratic and social rights of workers and the flying public who controllers serve with their labor.
4. New York Mayor-elect Mamdani appoints transition team of right-wing Democratic Party operatives
At a press conference Wednesday in Queens, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), introduced the five members of his transition team—all veteran Democratic Party operatives who played key roles in implementing pro-capitalist policies against the working class under previous mayoral administrations.
The announcement followed Mamdani’s victory in Tuesday’s election, where he decisively defeated disgraced former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo as well as the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa.
More than 1 million people voted for Mamdani in the highest turnout for a New York City mayoral election since 1969—a clear repudiation of the fascist policies of the Trump administration and an expression of popular anger over the soaring cost of living, especially the unaffordable housing crisis.
Since winning the Democratic primary in June, Mamdani has worked to reassure the corporate and financial elite by meeting with executives and real estate moguls. He issued an apology to the New York Police Department (NYPD) for previously calling to defund it, and pledging to retain Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a veteran of the NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau and heiress to one of the wealthiest families in the United States.
In response to attacks from the Trump administration and sections of the corporate oligarchy, Mamdani is lurching rapidly to the right in the immediate aftermath of the election.
The executive director of the transition team is Elana Leopold, who joined the Mamdani campaign only after his primary victory in June. She has....
...been recognized by Fortune’s “40 Under 40” and City & State’s “Political Consultants Power 50” as a key figure in forging connections between the wealthy and influential. According to City & State, her role in the Mamdani campaign has been to “seek to further” ties with the city’s “wealthiest residents,” drawing on “her time in the private sector.”
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The second member of the transition team is Maria Torres-Springer, who...
... [had worked as the] executive vice president and chief of staff at the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), the city’s official development agency, which is notorious for functioning as a conduit between real estate interests and municipal government....
... [also as ] a member of the administration of Eric Adams as deputy mayor for economic and workforce development, during which her office was implicated in fast-tracking fire safety inspections for the massive 50 Hudson Yards development—at the expense of schools, apartment buildings and a city college—on behalf of the owner, Related Companies, a major donor to the Adams campaign.
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The third member of the committee is Lina Khan, who was appointed by President Joe Biden as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2021 and later elevated to chair in 2024. Both appointments were confirmed with bipartisan support from Senate Democrats and Republicans.
Under Khan’s tenure at the FTC, employee morale declined significantly, according to surveys conducted by other government agencies. Khan also imposed a ban on public statements by staff.
Despite receiving praise from far-right figures—including Vice President JD Vance, who called her “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job,” and fascist adviser Steve Bannon, who declared, “I would be a huge supporter of Lina Khan remaining, and I would love to see her given more power”—she was ultimately replaced under the Trump administration.
Grace Bonilla, the fourth member of Mamdani’s transition team, is currently the CEO of United Way, one of the largest nonprofit organizations in the world. From 2004 to 2014, she held a series of key roles in the Human Resources Administration (HRA) under the Bloomberg administration. She later joined the de Blasio administration, serving first as executive director of the task force on racial equity and inclusion, and then as administrator of the HRA.
The final member of the transition team is Melanie Hartzog, currently president and CEO of New York Foundling, one of the oldest charitable organizations in the city.
Hartzog held a number of prominent positions in the de Blasio administration, but her most pernicious—and arguably criminal—role came after her appointment in October 2020 as deputy mayor for health and human services, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic....
Hartzog’s appointment came shortly after de Blasio, alongside then-Governor Andrew Cuomo at the state level, reopened New York City schools, despite widespread recognition that they were major vectors for COVID-19 transmission. At the time, the city remained an epicenter of the pandemic.
Under Hartzog’s watch, the de Blasio administration launched a campaign of systematic misinformation, claiming that schools were the “safest places in the city” based on deceptively low test positivity rates. There is no doubt that Hartzog played a central role in the deliberate under-testing of children, educators and school staff to sustain this narrative.
These are the figures who will oversee the selection of personnel for the incoming Mamdani administration and ensure it is staffed with officials acceptable to the financial aristocracy.
5. Food pantries see record demand, as government shutdown becomes longest on record
On Thursday, Chief Judge John J. McConnell of the U.S. District Court ordered the administration to resume full payments by Friday, writing that “[W]ithout SNAP funding for the month of November, sixteen million children will be immediately at risk of going hungry. This should never happen in America.”
Trump’s Justice Department immediately signaled it would appeal the ruling, guaranteeing weeks, if not months, of further deprivation.
Millions of people across the United States are turning to food pantries to survive....
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The ongoing shutdown comes amid a wave of layoffs not seen since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis. Private placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported 153,000 job cuts in October 2025, up 175 percent from the same month last year—the highest October total in more than two decades.
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While DOGE-induced cuts have devastated hundreds of thousands of workers and their families, Musk, the world’s richest man and a notorious neo-Nazi, has been showered with new wealth. On Thursday, Tesla shareholders approved a trillion-dollar pay package for the tech mogul that could make him the first-ever trillionaire.
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Workers laid off are finding it increasingly hard to land a new job as hiring has simultaneously collapsed. Employers have announced only 488,000 planned hires so far this year, down 35 percent from this same point in 2024 and the lowest year-to-date total since 2011.
The growing crisis is mirrored in consumer confidence data showing that optimism among low income workers has plunged to its lowest point in years.
Bloomberg, citing the Conference Board, found confidence among households earning under $50,000 has collapsed since mid-2024, even as those making over $200,000 have grown more upbeat thanks to soaring stock prices.
The richest 10 percent of US households now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, fueled by financial gains and asset inflation, while workers slash purchases to survive amid withheld pay and mass layoffs.
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While millions go hungry and jobless, the Democratic Party has responded by begging Trump to negotiate on reopening the government, without placing any limits on his dictatorial powers. Following the mass “No Kings” protests last month, Democratic leaders urged Trump and congressional Republicans to restore Affordable Care Act subsidies, arguing that doing so would prevent “price shocks” and maintain insurance company profits.
Trump has so far rejected Democratic entreaties, labeling the Democrats “radicalized lunatics” and calling on Senate Republicans to abolish the filibuster in order to ram through his budget unilaterally. On social media Thursday he wrote:
“The Democrats will terminate the Filibuster in THE FIRST HOUR, if and when they assume ‘control’ or power. Republicans have what the Democrats want—We should do it, NOW, and have the greatest three years in History!”
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The election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor—a self-described “democratic socialist”—reflects the growing left-wing sentiment among workers and youth, but his party’s role in propping up Trump’s government proves that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Democrats are no vehicle for genuine change.
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Only through the expropriation of the financial aristocracy and the establishment of workers’ power on a world scale can the scourges of war, poverty and hunger be abolished once and for all.
6. Elon Musk, world’s richest man, awarded $1 trillion pay package
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man with a net worth of $461 billion, has been awarded a $1 trillion pay package over ten years, putting the CEO on course to become the world’s first trillionaire.
Commenting on the scale of the payout, which was approved Thursday, consumer advocacy group Public Citizen wrote, “One trillion dollars is unfathomable. A million seconds is about 11 days. A billion seconds is about three decades. A trillion—30,000 years. If Musk works a 40-hour work week with two weeks’ vacation, or about 200,000 hours for 10 years, that’s $50 million an hour.”
Musk’s unprecedented payout came the same week as the Trump administration announced plans to slash food stamp benefits, threatening tens of millions of American families with hunger.
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The prominent endorsement of Musk’s pay package by Schwab Corporation and Morgan Stanley, coupled with behind-the-scenes “yes” votes by other major financial institutions, points to its broader significance. The massive payout for Musk sends a clear message from Wall Street that the sky is the limit for CEO pay and the enrichment of the financial oligarchy.
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The payout would make Musk’s wealth equivalent to the entire market capitalization of Tesla, which currently stands at $1.5 trillion. Musk controls 15 percent of Tesla’s shares, which will increase to nearly 28 percent under the share agreement. The stock will be dispersed in twelve chunks over ten years.
The public justification given for the pay package, the largest in history by nearly an order of magnitude, is to align the interests of Musk and Tesla shareholders by incentivizing the CEO to meet sales and share targets.
But this is just a pretense, and the agreement allows Tesla’s board, largely consisting of Musk’s cronies, to award him the shares even if he fails to meet the goals set out. “While it purports to be tied to some very ambitious goals, in fact it gives the board discretion to award him the amount of shares whether he meets those goals or not,” said corporate governance expert Nell Minow, who is chair of ValueEdge Advisors.
Tesla has been facing increasingly stiff global competition from Chinese automakers, and its profits have fallen 9 percent year on year.
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In addition to being the largest shareholder in Tesla, Musk owns major stakes in SpaceX, the space launch monopoly that controls 84 percent of the market for space launch; and X, the social media network previously known as Twitter, which Musk is using to train X’s Grok Large Language Model.
Musk’s pay package is orders of magnitude larger than anything awarded to any chief executive in history. According to the AFL-CIO’s database on executive compensation, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earned just over $79 million in 2024. Apple CEO Tim Cook made about $75 million, and Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol received slightly less than $96 million.
In 1965, a typical CEO made 20 times the pay of an average worker. This figure reached 122 in 2016 and grew to 348 by 2016.
In the past 12 months alone, the 10 richest US billionaires became approximately $700 billion richer. Over this period, their wealth grew by a staggering 40 percent, from $1.79 trillion to $2.5 trillion.
Earlier this week, the Oxfam charity reported that since 2020, the inflation-adjusted wealth of the ten richest men in America has increased six-fold. Elon Musk, whose wealth stood at $33 billion in March 2020, has since surged to $469 billion, a 14-fold increase.
US President Donald Trump, himself a billionaire, has pledged to do everything possible to expand the wealth of this financial oligarchy, which forms the constituency for his effort to transform the United States into a presidential dictatorship.
7. Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition in spiraling crisis
The decision by the National Party to formally abandon any commitment to a “net zero” climate policy at a meeting last Sunday has brought a protracted crisis of the Australian ruling elite’s main conservative political formation to a new level.
Throughout the post-war period, that conservative formation has been based upon a coalition between the rural and regional-based Nationals and the urban Liberal Party. But the social constituency and political foundation of a stable and traditional conservative outfit no longer exists, with a break in the Coalition on the cards and the Liberals facing complete disintegration.
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The Coalition’s former pledge to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050 was always a sham, with no clear policies to reach it. Even on its face the program was a million miles behind what is required to address the existential threat of climate change.
Far more than disputes about climate policy are involved. The issue of “net zero” is something of a symbol, behind which competing agendas are being fought out, in terms of the social orientation and political appeal that the Coalition and its constituent components should make.
The move to abandon “net zero,” both by the Nationals and sections of the Liberal Party, is bound up with a broader shift to the right. In both parties, there are forces watching the rise of far-right elements internationally, including the fascistic President Donald Trump in the US and Nigel Farage’s Reform in the UK, and considering emulating them.
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As the World Socialist Web Site has previously outlined in analyzing the crisis of the Liberals, it is rooted in far-reaching changes to class relations. The party, which emerged and gained an ascendancy under conditions of the post-World War II boom, was based socially upon a relatively broad middle-class constituency, including small business people and professionals. But after decades of social polarization, that constituency no longer exists as the social buffer between the capitalist class and the working class. The conditions, work loads and pay freezes experienced by many sections of professionals including teachers, doctors, nurses and layers of the public service are parallel to those of broad sections of workers.
Whether the divisions in the Liberal Party can be held together next week or not, a realignment in right-wing politics is already taking place. That was made clear by a report yesterday in the Australian that more than 200 members of the Liberal Party in South Australia have quit, citing their hostility to “net zero.”
The report indicated that the resignations accounted for roughly 5 percent of the Liberal membership in South Australia. That itself is a marker of crisis, indicating that the Liberals, nominally a party of government, have just 4,000 members in a state with a population of almost two million.
There is an intensive discussion within sections of the ruling elite, over the need for a far-right formation, in line with the rise of Trump in the US, Farage in the UK and similar forces throughout Europe. There have evidently been questions as to whether that can be carried out through shifting the Coalition to the right, or through the establishment of a new formation.
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With the Coalition meltdown deepening, the bourgeoisie is more dependent on Labor and its affiliated trade union bureaucracy than ever. Since returning to office in 2022, Labor has completely aligned itself with the interests of the capitalist class.
On the social front, the Labor government is carrying out massive attacks on the working class, aimed at returning it to the conditions that existed in the 1930s. That goes hand in hand with its transformation of Australia into a frontline state for war with China and major attacks on democratic rights.
That is an agenda that sets it on a collision course with the working class.
8. Germany’s Christian Democrats whip up hatred against Syrian refugees
Since Chancellor Friedrich Merz (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) declared immigrants to be a problem for Germany’s “urban environment,” the agitation against refugees by the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) has taken ever more repulsive forms. Even Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, a right-wing CDU politician and loyal follower of Merz, has not been spared.
After visiting the uninhabitable fields of ruins that stretch for kilometers on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus, the foreign minister stated the obvious: he had personally never seen such a great extent of destruction. In the short term, refugees could not return here, “Hardly any people can truly live here in dignity,” said Wadephul.
Within the CDU/CSU this triggered a storm of indignation. Leading party figures reaffirmed their determination to deport Syrian refugees living in Germany back to this uninhabitable hell as quickly as possible.
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Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) announced that his ministry was negotiating with the regime in Damascus about agreements “that will enable returns to Syria.” This mandate arose from the coalition agreement and would be implemented accordingly. The Interior Ministry has already decided not to allow “exploratory trips” by refugees to Syria. If they visit their former homeland to assess the situation, they risk not being allowed to return to Germany.
Chancellor Merz also spoke out in favor of a rapid return of Syrian refugees. The civil war in Syria was over, he said. “There are now absolutely no more reasons for asylum in Germany, and therefore we can begin with returns.” He was counting on a large proportion of refugees returning to Syria of their own accord and taking part in reconstruction. “Those in Germany who then refuse to return to the country, we can of course continue to deport in the future,” he added.
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For the 950,000 people from Syria currently living in Germany, the CDU/CSU agitation means existential insecurity and physical danger. A relatively high proportion of them, a total of 226,000, are employed and have a regular income; they pay taxes and social insurance contributions.
In some areas, their deportation would have severe consequences. For example, around 7,000 Syrian doctors work in Germany, most of them in hospitals. Including naturalized Syrians, the number is up to 15,000. A further 80,000 Syrians work in so-called shortage occupations—posts that are particularly difficult to fill.
However, the agitation is not aimed solely at refugees and immigrants but also serves domestic political goals. It strengthens the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and shifts the axis of the entire official political establishment ever further to the right.
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Workers must not allow themselves to be divided. They must unconditionally defend refugees and immigrants against deportation and right-wing incitement. Only in this way can they defend their own democratic and social rights.
9. 23 killed in convenience store explosion in Hermosillo, Mexico
On Saturday, November 1, an explosion [and fire] at a low-cost retailer in downtown Hermosillo, capital of the state of Sonora in northwestern Mexico, killed 23 people and injured 15 more. Children were among the dead and injured.
Many of the victims were shopping at the Waldo’s outlet for supplies for El Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) festivities.
As of this writing, three victims remain hospitalized: 81-year-old Marcos Segundos Reyes, afflicted with third-degree burns on 90 percent of his body; 20-year-old María Isabel Morales Bracamontes, who has been transferred to a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, for specialist care; and 16-year-old Danna Valeria, who was passing outside the store when the explosion occurred. Their families have expressed gratitude at the outpouring of popular support, including blood donations.
Sonoran Attorney General Gustavo Rómulo Salas Chávez told the media that, based on the initial investigation, most of the deceased died due to “inhalation of toxic gases.”
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The fire has retraumatized Hermosillans who experienced or remember the June 5, 2009, ABC Day Care Center fire, which killed 49 children and injured dozens more, along with several adults. That fire began in an adjacent part of the improperly converted warehouse containing government financial documents before spreading to the day care.
That tragedy was the result of rank corruption. The facility lacked fire extinguishers and emergency exits but was nevertheless allowed to operate and receive federal funds. It was co-owned by the wives of two state officials from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI), one of whom was also the cousin of Margarita Zavala, wife of then-President Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, PAN).
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Hermosillans, with parents of ABC victims playing a leading role, are demanding action to ensure that such a catastrophe cannot happen again.
The June 5 Movement (El Movimiento de Cinco de Junio), an association of ABC survivors and victims’ parents, issued an emotional statement calling for a protest on November 5.
“To the families of the victims of the Waldo’s store fire, we say that you are not alone, just as we have never been. We want you to know that we know exactly what you are going through, that our thoughts and hearts have been with you since the first minute we learned of the magnitude of the fire. We want you to know that for 16 years we have fought to prevent the repetition of a tragedy similar to the one that of our sons and daughters. … We are sorry, we failed you.”
Hundreds responded to this call and marched to the Government Palace, chanting “49+23, how many more?”, “Never again” and “It was not an accident, it was corruption.”
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Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Sonoran Governor Alfonso Durazo, both members of the National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional, MORENA), expressed their condolences for the victims and promised investigations. The corporate leadership of Waldo’s likewise expressed its condolences.
The crocodile tears of these politicians should be viewed with the same skepticism as those of the business owners. MORENA, no less than the PRI and PAN, is committed to the maintenance of private property and the subordination of Mexico to US imperialism, even under fascist President Donald Trump.
It is impossible to secure safe working conditions and public spaces within this framework. While certain of the issues involved are more endemic, or at least more prominent, in “developing” countries like Mexico, conditions in the imperialist centers are regressing due to the decades-long social counterrevolution, which is being rapidly accelerated under Trump and other far-right politicians, as evidenced in the frequency of workplace deaths in America’s own industrial slaughterhouse.
To secure their social rights and living standards, workers on both sides of the border must unite in an international movement for democratic workers’ control over production and economic planning, that is, for socialism.
10. Australia: Sydney rail defects and delays at highest level in a decade
In January, a derailment occurred at Clarendon station in the northwestern outskirts of Sydney, after a train failed to stop at a red signal. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) noted at the time that “wet weather” was thought to be the cause.
The frequency of such safety breaches, referred to as signal passed at danger (SPAD), has increased 25 percent in the last year, with more than four incidents a week on average, according to the ABC. The derailment on the Richmond line was the product of just one SPAD out of 224 in the 2024–2025 financial year, 46 more than in 2023–2024.
The Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator explains that causes and contributing factors for SPADs include driver fatigue, workload, inadequate controls, inadequate maintenance, poor signal placement, poor visibility and trees blocking signals.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of infrastructure failures caused by systemic underfunding over an extended period, both the 2023 and 2025 reviews attempted to pin responsibility for the dire state of the rail network on “severe weather” and workers taking industrial action in 2021–2022 and 2024.
The latter is in line with the relentless campaign, which reached fever pitch late last year, by Sydney Trains, state and federal Labor governments and the corporate media, which have repeatedly vilified rail workers for taking even the most limited industrial action against cuts to real wages and conditions.
Every minor delay or crowded train was seized as an occasion to slander and attack workers in the press, while multiple Fair Work Commission (FWC) and Federal Court cases were aimed at denying their right to take industrial action.
In the face of this outright hostility, the union bureaucracies of the Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RTBU), Electrical Trades Union (ETU) and other “combined rail unions” insisted that the only way forward for workers was plaintive appeals to the very Labor government attacking them.
*****
Under capitalism, public services that are essential to daily life are subordinated to the priorities of profit, not safety or social welfare. What is required is a fight for an alternative: Workers’ governments must be established to implement socialist policies. These include placing all forms of mass transport and other vital amenities, along with the major corporations and banks, under full public ownership and workers’ control.
Only then can society and the economy be reorganized to serve the needs of the working class, including for high-quality public transport, with good wages and conditions for all staff, rather than the profit demands of the wealthy few.
11. A House of Dynamite: Kathryn Bigelow’s film about the danger of nuclear war
Donald Trump’s recent decision to resume nuclear weapons testing, which he blithely announced on his Truth Social platform, marks a dangerous new step toward nuclear catastrophe. Driven by an intractable economic crisis and desperate to maintain its domination over the globe, the American ruling elite is now planning a conflict that policymakers had for decades considered unthinkable.
In this context, the release of director Kathryn Bigelow’s new film A House of Dynamite (2025) on Netflix has objective significance. It is not an entirely praiseworthy effort. In fact, it has quite negative features. The film imagines an ICBM launched by one of America’s “enemies,” presumably North Korea. This is the world turned upside down. The US imperialist military is the most provocative, aggressive, murderous such force on the planet. It has bombed, invaded and destroyed entire nations and regions in recent decades on the basis of blatant lies, resulting in the deaths of millions. The picture of the US as an innocent victim of an “unprovoked” missile attack is fanciful and creates artistic and political problems that never go away throughout the course of the film.
However, if one is prepared to suspend one’s disbelief to an extent, A House of Dynamite has genuine value in evoking the horrifying threat of nuclear warfare and depicting, in a plausibly accurate way, the system through which the United States political-military apparatus would decide whether to use weapons of mass destruction. This system includes the protocol for maintaining continuity of government, involving the evacuation of high-ranking officials to an underground bunker in Raven Rock, Pennsylvania.
*****
The strongest portion of A House of Dynamite is the final one, in which the president, en route to his underground hiding place, is offered by his adviser a “menu” of possible retaliatory scenarios, all of them clearly involving the deaths of millions or tens of millions of human beings. The utter “insanity” of the situation comes home most sharply and disturbingly at this point. This sequence seems the most heartfelt and sincere.
*****
The fatalistic and passive worship of the accomplished fact (and hence existing institutions), ultimately traceable back to her days in the “postmodern” New York art scene of the 1970s, is a common thread in Bigelow’s films. In Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Bigelow collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency to produce a film, based on falsifications of fact, about the hunting and assassination of Osama bin Laden. It justifies torture and the violation of basic constitutional principles. Similarly, The Hurt Locker (2008), written by an embedded journalist in Iraq, celebrates a “warrior mentality,” accepts without question the second US war on that country and dehumanizes the Iraqi population.
Although Bigelow did not consult the Pentagon while making A House of Dynamite, she nevertheless collaborated with several technical advisers who had worked there. Significantly, the Pentagon has objected that the film underestimates US missile defense capabilities. It claims that tests have shown current interceptors to be 100 percent accurate—an assertion that Laura Grego, an expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, disputes. The Pentagon’s criticism shows the government’s acute sensitivity, in the context of mass opposition to US-sponsored genocide and war, to any suggestion that the American military is fallible.
*****
As usual with Bigelow, the characters are notably thin; none is significantly developed. Moreover, the various government officials are shown as people with heavy responsibilities who are essentially honest and mean well. There is no examination of the state they serve, no hint of social analysis and little historical context to the story.
By drawing attention to and making palpable the threat of nuclear war, A House of Dynamite performs a welcome service. Nevertheless, Bigelow has not abandoned her defense of (and fascination with) the state and its armed forces. The appearance of this film may portend the emergence of more serious, angry and oppositional work from other artists.
12. New Zealand: How the 2017–2023 Labour government attacked public health and education workers
Following the mass strike last month, the Labour Party and the unions are promoting the lie that workers can oppose pay cuts and austerity by electing another Labour-led government.
13. British Library workers strike over poverty pay and declining services
Over 300 workers at the British Library in St Pancras, London are engaged in a two-week strike until November 9 in pursuit of a wage increase.
The strikers are library assistants, conservation and shop workers and security staff. Although management has tried to keep areas of the library open, the strike has crippled its operation.
The members of the Public & Commercial Services Union (PCS) are demanding an above inflation settlement after rejecting a derisory 2.4 percent offer by a 98 percent vote. This amounted to a pay cut with RPI inflation at 4.5 percent.
The Library is run by the British Library Board and is funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The strike takes place in Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Holborn & St Pancras parliamentary constituency.
Staff at the library are among hundreds of thousands of public sector workers under attack by the Labour government. Tens of thousands of resident doctors are to strike from November 14 after being offered just 2.5 percent and educators in the school sector are being offered even less: a 6.5 percent offer spread over three years from 2026-27.
PCS members are also striking against the impact of a devastating cyber-attack—one of the worst in British history—on the library’s systems in October 2023. This led to a major increase in workloads for frontline staff. Over two years later, library services remain crippled. Around 1.6 million people visit the site each year.
At lively pickets attended by hundreds of workers outside staff entrances, strikers spoke to World Socialist Web Site reporters about the dispute.
*****
In fighting for decent pay and conditions, British Library workers must turn to other workers in the culture and wider public sector also under attack. The end of the strike at the British Library coincides with the conclusion of a ballot by the PCS of 130 members working at art institutions Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. These have been offered a below inflation deal of 3 percent.
14. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Kenya:
Nigeria:
Resident doctors continue national strike over lack of pay, funding and conditions
Judicial staff in Osun State, Nigeria continue strike over conditions
South Africa:Workers in Johannesburg protest dire water crisis
Workers at water company in Maluti-a-Phofung Municipality walk out to defend jobs
Workers in Johannesburg protest dire water crisis
Workers at water company in Maluti-a-Phofung Municipality walk out to defend jobs
Europe
Spain:
Tens of thousands of metalworkers strike for more pay and improved working conditions
Senior Health Technicians stop work in protest at government refusal to recognize their professional status
Tens of thousands of metalworkers strike for more pay and improved working conditions
Turkey:
Solar panel factory workers strike for inflation-related pay increase
United Kingdom:
Bus strikes spread to First Bus Cymru in Swansea, Wales
Staff at Transport for Greater Manchester, England strike over pay
Bus strikes spread to First Bus Cymru in Swansea, Wales
Iran:
Kermanshah nurses protest pay, but critical nurses are barred from official Nurses Day ceremony
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.
