The US military seized a large oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela
on Wednesday, a brazen act of piracy that marks a major escalation in
the Trump administration’s war preparations against the South American
country.
Speaking at the White House, Trump announced the
operation in the language of a gangster: “We’ve just seized a tanker on
the coast of Venezuela, large tanker, very large, largest one ever
seized, actually.” When asked what would happen to the oil, Trump
replied, “Well, we keep it, I guess.”
*****
The seizure comes just one day after Trump told Politico that
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s “days are numbered” and refused to
rule out sending US troops into the country. Trump has also threatened
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, declaring that “Petro is next.” The
administration has authorized CIA covert operations inside Venezuela and
has developed plans for targeting Maduro and seizing control of the
country’s oil fields.
*****
The seizure must be understood in the context of the Trump
administration’s recently published National Security Strategy. The
33-page document, released on December 4, explicitly establishes a goal
of “restoring American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” while
denying “non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or
other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital
assets” in the region.
The seizure of Venezuelan oil makes clear
that Trump’s claim that he is intervening in Latin America to combat
drug smuggling is a transparent fraud. In reality, Trump is seeking to
cement US control over Latin America as a power base for war with China.
The tanker seizure takes place amid a series of drone and missile
strikes against civilian boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that have
killed at least 87 people since September. The administration claims,
without providing public evidence, that the boats are smuggling drugs.
Since September 2, the United States has launched more than 22 such
strikes. These strikes are war crimes under international law.
In
the September 2 strikes that murdered 11 unarmed civilians, Secretary of
War Pete Hegseth issued an explicit verbal order to “kill everybody,”
the Washington Post reported. Survivors of the initial attack,
who waved for rescue not knowing they had been targeted, were
deliberately killed in a second strike—a clear violation of the Geneva
Conventions’ protections for the shipwrecked.
China currently purchases roughly 80 percent of Venezuela’s oil exports.
The seizure of the Skipper, which according to TankerTrackers.com was
carrying approximately 1.1 million barrels of Venezuelan crude, is aimed
at strangling this trade and devastating Venezuela’s economy. US
officials said they expected additional seizures in the coming weeks.
The tanker seizure came on the same day the House of Representatives
passed a record $900 billion defense policy bill by a vote of 312-112.
The legislation massively expands US nuclear weapons spending, including
funding for the so-called “Golden Dome” missile defense system. The
bill includes provisions that would withhold 25 percent of Hegseth’s
travel budget until he discloses all orders authorizing the boat strikes
and releases unedited video of the operations—an absurd triviality that
amounts to a minor inconvenience for a man clearly guilty of carrying
out war crimes.
*****
The Pentagon has deployed more than 15,000 troops, a dozen warships,
including the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, scores of aircraft
and thousands of personnel to the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. This
represents the largest US military mobilization in the Caribbean since
the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
A new report
from the World Inequality Lab, the product of four years of
comprehensive research, finds that economic inequality on a world scale
continues to increase by leaps and bounds, with vast wealth concentrated
in a tiny handful of billionaires and centi-millionaires.
*****
In terms of income, the report finds levels of inequality that defy
comprehension. According to its analysis, “the top 0.1% earn as much as
the entire bottom 50%. This means that a group of people no larger than
the population of Singapore takes in the same income as half of the
world’s population.” At the very summit, “the top one-in-a-million
(about 5,600 people) earn, on average, one-eighth of what the bottom 50%
together receive. In other words, a small concert arena’s worth of
individuals has an annual income comparable to that of billions of
people.”
The brutal oppression of the vast majority of humanity by a handful
of imperialist powers was analyzed more than a century ago by V. I.
Lenin in his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
The World Inequality Report makes clear that while the mechanisms have
evolved, the underlying relations of exploitation have intensified.
As
the report explains, “While colonial powers once extracted resources to
transform deficits into surpluses, today’s advanced economies achieve
similar results through the financial system.” Poorer nations are
compelled to transfer resources outward—via debt service, profit
repatriation, and financial flows—“constrained in their ability to
invest in education, healthcare, and infrastructure.”
It is a
staggering fact that these outflows amount to over 1 percent of world
GDP, “approximately three times more than development aid flowing in the
opposite direction.”
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer within countries as well,
with the report noting that in nearly every region of the world, the top
1 percent is wealthier than the bottom 90 percent combined.
*****
Nowhere in the 200-page document from the World Inequality Lab do the
words “capitalism” or “socialism” appear. But what emerges from the
data presented, however, is the clear and unanswerable case for the
expropriation of the capitalist oligarchy.
Under
the capitalist system, some 56,000 billionaires and centi-millionaires
control the fate of the 8 billion human beings who inhabit this planet.
Their wealth, the product of the collective labor of humanity, must be
confiscated, and the global economy reorganized to serve human needs,
not private profit.
*****
While the inequality report lays out a series of reform proposals,
such as taxing the wealthy and pouring resources into education,
healthcare and other social programs, it is silent on why such policies
have been repudiated by the ruling classes of every capitalist country.
In response to a deepening crisis of the capitalist system, the ruling
elite has launched a war on every social gain won in bitter struggle by
workers in the 20th century.
The report acknowledges that
taxation of the super-rich has collapsed, which “not only undermines tax
justice; it deprives societies of the resources needed for education,
healthcare and climate action.
In other words, the control of
society by the financial oligarchy (another word that does not appear in
the 200-page report) is not merely unfair. It is the principal obstacle
to the functioning of a humane and civilized society, depriving society
of resources for necessary services and funneling them into the pockets
of the wealthy.
The goal of the report appears to be to convince sections of the
ruling elite to make reforms while there is still time. “Progressive
taxation is therefore crucial,” the report says, because it “strengthens
the legitimacy of fiscal systems by ensuring that those with the
greatest means contribute their fair share.”
But the response of
the ruling class to the growth of opposition, to the emergence of
socialist consciousness and class struggle, is the turn to dictatorship
and fascism. The reality is that democracy is incompatible with a social
order in which a tiny fraction of the population controls the vast bulk
of wealth and resources.
*****
The oligarchs will not be persuaded to relinquish their wealth
through polite appeals, as proposed by Sanders, Mamdani and their
international counterparts. What is required is a mass political
movement of the international working class to abolish capitalism and
take political power. This means the expropriation of the oligarchy. The
fortunes of the billionaires must be seized, the corporations placed
under democratic control and the global economy reorganized—not for
private gain, but to meet human needs.
The fight for equality is
the fight for socialism. It requires the building of a revolutionary
leadership, rooted in the working class, and armed with a scientific
understanding of the crisis of capitalism. We urge all workers and young
people outraged by the injustice of the present system to join the
Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth
International, the world party of socialist revolution.
Sixty-four years after Tanzania formally cast off the political yoke
of British imperialism, the population was forced to mark Tuesday’s
Independence Day under conditions resembling a state of siege.
Instead
of the usual public celebrations, parades, cultural gatherings and
popular festivities, the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) government unleashed
military-police repression. Armored vehicles and soldiers occupied road
junctions and government buildings, blocking traffic from entering city centers. Tanzania’s state house, the official residence of President
Samia Suluhu Hassan, was heavily fortified.
The government ordered civilians to remain indoors, leaving streets
deserted and shops shuttered. Fuel stations were closed and public
transport suspended. Access to social media was severely restricted,
with users struggling to share content on platforms such as Facebook,
WhatsApp, and Instagram. Police helicopters circled ominously over major
cities.
The immediate pretext for Tuesday’s repression was the announcement of
anti-government protests, organized online by Gen-Z activists to
coincide with Independence Day. The CCM regime criminalized the planned
demonstrations outright, offering the ludicrous claim that it had
cancelled the December 9 celebrations to “save money.”
*****
Today, the CCM’s response exposes the deep fear of the Tanzanian ruling
class over a renewed eruption of anger following the October 29 election
crackdown, one of the bloodiest episodes in post-independence African
history.
President Hassan’s one-candidate race, crowned with the ludicrous
official result of 98 percent, provoked mass anger. During a five-day
internet blackout, and as hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of
workers and youth, poured into the streets of major cities and towns,
security forces launched a nationwide killing spree. Death toll
estimates range from 700 to as many as 3,000. More than 2,000 people
were arrested, and hundreds remain charged with treason, facing the
death penalty.
Footage verified by the BBC and CNN showed bodies lying in the streets
and piled up outside hospitals. Police conducted door-to-door raids,
dragging young men from their homes and executing them.
*****
Imperialist powers are maneuvering amidst the crisis, each seeking to
exploit the collapse of bourgeois rule to its advantage. Seventeen
western governments, including Britain, Germany, France, Canada, and the
EU, issued a joint statement expressing regret over the loss of life
and urging the Tanzanian security forces to exercise “maximum
restraint.”
Such appeals drip with hypocrisy. These are the same
governments arming and financing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, supporting
the Saudi monarchy that saws up journalists in its consulates, backing
Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and providing billions of euros
in weaponry to the Ukrainian regime to deploy the country’s youth
against Russia. Their sudden concern for Tanzanian “fundamental
freedoms” is motivated by the scramble for resources on a continent
where China has made substantial inroads.
US Senator Jim Risch, a hardline anti-China hawk, welcomed a State
Department review of U.S.–Tanzania relations last week, seeking to shift
Tanzania from China’s orbit and disrupt Beijing’s extraction of
minerals across Africa via Dar es Salaam port.
*****
Transnational corporations are plundering Tanzania’s resources, while
the government imposes staggering levels of repression against its own
population. Hassan’s anti-colonial posturing is a fraud. She waves the
nationalist flag, accusing protestors of being pawns of the West and
denouncing Western powers as “colonizers” to justify internal
crackdowns. But her government acts on behalf of these same imperialist
powers.
The CCM regime has long been a tool of imperialism. Julius Nyerere
upheld capitalist social relations and suppressed independent
working-class organization. His African socialism was a form of
bourgeois nationalism that could not transcend the colonial borders or
the economic dependency inherited from imperialism. Nyerere’s project
remained tied to and sustained by Western aid.
Trotsky’s theory of
permanent revolution demonstrated that in belated capitalist countries,
the national bourgeoisie is incapable of resolving the fundamental
tasks of democracy, economic development, or genuine liberation. Its
fear of the working class and subordination to imperialism force it
inevitably toward dictatorship. CCM’s evolution, from Nyerere through
John Pombe Magufuli to Hassan, is confirmation of this historical law.
*****
The youth-led protests, though courageous, cannot succeed without a
revolutionary leadership that unifies the struggles of workers, young
people, and the rural poor into a conscious political movement against
capitalism and imperialism.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein is a visually imaginative work to some
extent, with a number of urgent and disturbing sequences and an overall
gravitas, but its conceptions in the end fail to rise above the
relatively pedestrian and predictable. At its weakest, it may encourage
an attitude toward science that has potentially harmful implications
under present-day conditions.
“Frankenstein,” of course, has an extensive and intensely diverse
history both as a specific artistic work and a complex of imagery, with
its innumerable (generally very loose!) film and television adaptations,
the first coming out in 1910 (made by the Edison Studios). According to
one source, an astonishing total of 433 feature films (including Mel
Brooks’ wonderful Young Frankenstein), 212 short films, 85
television series and 340 television episodes feature some version or
interpretation of the “Frankenstein monster” character.
Also remarkably, Mary Shelley began writing the novel, about an
ambitious scientist who gives the “spark of life” to a creature composed
of various body parts and then regrets his action, when she was 18 and
completed it when she was 19. The work emerged from a personal,
political and artistic hothouse of extraordinary dimensions....
*****
Although adapting to modern moods and attitudes, del Toro sees himself
as Shelley’s “representative in 2025,” aligning his view of monsters as
mirrors of human imperfection, morality and emotion with her view of
Victor [Frankenstein, the scientist,] as a Miltonian Satan (Paradise Lost) or a Prometheus
defying the Gods. The filmmaker highlights the novel’s brutal
tenderness, using neo-Gothic visuals and practical effects to try and
bring forward its terror without straying into stereotypical horror
territory.
*****
Del Toro creates a new ending, setting forgiveness and redemption at
the center of things, in place of Shelley’s bleaker, unresolved
conclusion. He alters relationships and characters such as Elizabeth,
and chooses to root scientific interest in personal/childhood trauma
rather than humanity’s insatiable quest for knowledge—and yet the
director insists these changes honor the essence of Shelley’s
narratives. This is questionable.
Del Toro is free to interpret Frankenstein as
he likes, but the suggestion that he has established some sort of
continuity with Shelley’s most pressing concerns deserves to be
challenged.
*****
[A] love of and fascination with knowledge is largely absent in del
Toro’s work. Victor’s pursuit of science tends to be vengeful, bitter
and violent in the new film.
Mary Shelley did convey fears about the uncontrolled or arrogant use
of new technologies, and the possibility of their employment without
proper consideration for their broader consequences, but that is a
legitimate matter, which also finds expression in films such as Oppenheimer.
She
urges the Enlightenment scientist not to delude himself about the scope
and consequences of his activity, and insists Victor owes a moral duty
to his “offspring,” the sentient being he creates. Del Toro, however,
shifts the main “sin” to emotional denial—the chilly, even sadistic
refusal of grief and love—and focuses on cycles of trauma and
dysfunctional parent‑child bonds.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is fundamentally a cautionary tale
about the responsibilities of scientific creation and the existential
isolation of both genius and outcast.
*****
Shelley was well aware of, and genuinely interested in, the
cutting‑edge experiments of her time, including galvanism and attempts
to resuscitate the dead or apparently dead, and she weaves these ideas
into Victor’s studies. Her depiction of Victor’s early excitement about
“unfolding the mysteries of creation” reflects contemporary optimism
that science could transform human life, showing that curiosity itself
is not the problem.
The historical and intellectual setting in which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein is
a dense one. She was associated not only with Percy Shelley, an early
socialist in all but name, but the troublemaking Lord Byron and other
intellectuals of a radical bent.
In their essay, “Shelley and
Socialism,” Edward and Eleanor Marx-Aveling (Marx’s daughter) explain
that Percy Shelley “was the child of the French Revolution,” but came to
maturity during the period of the furious response of the European
ruling classes to the threat represented by that event:
Throughout
Europe in the earlier part of this century reaction was in full swing.
In England there were trials for blasphemy, trials for treason,
suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, misery everywhere.
Fear
of revolution pervaded the British ruling class, now facing a new
menace, nascent working class revolt. The first trials of the so-called
Luddites, textile workers hostile to the introduction of machinery that
would destroy their conditions, occurred in 1812, leading to severe
sentences, including hanging. Byron made his famous maiden speech to the
House of Lords that February defending starving textile workers who
smashed machinery and condemning the death penalty they faced.
*****
Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft (who died after
giving birth to her), the author of a history of the French Revolution
and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin, a semi-anarchist political thinker, author of the novel The Adventures of Caleb Williams and an associate of Tom Paine and other radicals.
Mary
met Percy Shelley when she was 16 and he was 21—and married. They
eloped to France, shocking contemporaries (and Godwin) by first living
together unmarried. They faced immense pressures, both because of their
unconventional lives and, more significantly, their subversive views.
On
top of everything else, Mary knew personal tragedy, losing her first
child in 1815. She also had to contend with Shelley’s dalliances with
other women, associated with his belief in “free love,” an idea to which
she also subscribed. It has been suggested that the criticism of
Victor’s egoism in the novel is in part directed toward Percy Shelley’s
own failings, although the two were obviously deeply in love.
The summer of 1816, when Mary began Frankenstein while
living in Switzerland, was notorious for its cold, the apparent result
of volcanic eruptions in Asia. The temperatures resulted in crop
failures and famine across the globe, also provoking social unrest and
food riots.
These are some of the “hothouse” circumstances referred to above. The
burning social questions, although they find indirect expression in the
book, are strongly felt as aspects of its emotional and intellectual
weight.
*****
Of course, it would not be possible to include all this in a film
interpretation of a single, short novel. But the most serious artists
would have done more to bring to bear the intellectual, political and
psychological circumstances that informed the writing of Frankenstein.
After all, there are many Gothic novels, but very few continue to be
read and appreciated. There is an urgency and commitment about Shelley’s
work that is unique. Why could the filmmaker not have done more to
reproduce that and take the viewer through such an experience?
As part of a Socialist Equality Party Summer School lecture series focusing on critical events related to the historic Security and the Fourth International investigation that uncovered subversion within the international Trotskyist movement, John Burton, a lead attorney for Alan Gelfand, lectures on Gelfand's successful trial in
March of 1983.
Parts one and two of the lecture “The
Gelfand Case: 1978-1982” are here and here.
Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers has announced that the Albanese Labor
government will axe its household energy bill rebates of $300 a year on
December 31. This will further shift the burden of escalating energy
costs onto working-class families, while protecting corporate profits
and meeting financial market demands for fiscal “discipline.”
*****
In recent weeks, the government has increasingly outlined an
austerity agenda. It has demanded across-the-board cuts of 5 percent
from all federal public sector departments and agencies, the slashing of
budgets for chronically underfunded public hospital budgets and deeper
cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and the
government’s main science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
On energy bills, and
across the board, it is the working class that is paying the price.
Inflation data released last month showed electricity prices had jumped
already by 37 percent in the past year, primarily driven by the
termination of similar state government rebates.
Scrapping these
temporary band-aids on the soaring prices for domestic electricity and
gas services will intensify the cost-of-living crisis. It means
inflicting even greater economic hardship on working-class households,
which have suffered about an 8 percent fall in real income since Labor
took office in May 2022.
*****
Cynically, Chalmers claimed that the government was replacing the
“temporary” energy bill relief with “ongoing cost of living help.” He
cited changes to the tax system, as well as to Medicare and the
Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, claiming that “people can use that to
help pay their electricity bills.”
Chalmers said the government’s
income tax cuts would give the average taxpayer $50 a week “by one
measure.” This is a fraud. Most of the tax benefits are going to
higher-income households, while doing nothing to alleviate the financial
pressures caused by soaring mortgage interest rates, house prices,
rents and other essentials.
*****
The energy bill crisis itself is rooted in the logic of capitalist markets:
The
corporate-controlled Australian economy remains substantially dependent
on expensive and environmentally disastrous fossil fuels to generate
electricity.
The energy conglomerates reap high profits by
exporting the vast majority of domestically drilled and produced gas,
fuelling matching domestic prices.
Ageing and unreliable coal
electricity generators push up wholesale prices during outages while
energy giants are not investing in renewables fast enough to replace
them, squeezing supply and pushing up costs.
The fallout from
global events such as the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine has
stoked prices and profiteering on world energy markets.
At
the same time, corporations in the Australian domestic energy industry
are extracting extraordinary profits from this crisis. For instance,
Origin Energy’s underlying profit for the 2025 financial year was $1.49
billion, a $307 million increase from the prior year.
AGL
Energy recorded an underlying net profit of $812 million for the 2024
financial year, which was almost triple its 2023 result. Analysis by the
Australia Institute think tank suggests that for every $100 of an AGL
customer’s electricity bill, $35 is profit, while only $12 is spent
generating the electricity.
The profits are even greater for
electricity generators and supply networks. The Institute for Energy
Economics and Financial Analysis, an international NGO, estimated that
electricity networks in Australia made $4.35 billion in “supernormal
profits” in 2023 alone, that is, on top of the “reasonable” profit
levels permitted by the official regulator, the AER.
*****
For working-class households, these profits translate into hundreds
of dollars added to annual bills while governments at all levels, both
Labor and Liberal-National, subsidize corporate returns.
This
assault shows the necessity for the fight for a socialist program,
including public ownership and democratic working-class control of the
energy system, with investment directed to affordable, renewable power
rather than corporate profit and war industries.
With just three weeks remaining before Zohran Mamdani takes office as
mayor of New York City, the democratic socialist is turning ever more
to the oligarchs whom he once made a pretense of fighting against.
Last week, the New York Times reported on a series of
big-ticket fundraising events that Mamdani has held with the corporate
and financial elite in an effort to amass $4 million to fund his
transition activities and inauguration. With the help of the
ultra-wealthy, Mamdani is already well on his way to meet that goal,
having pulled in more than $3 million to date. Mamdani is banking
significantly more than his predecessors, Eric Adams and Bill de Blasio,
who each raised around $2 million.
*****
Last week, on Tuesday evening, Mamdani attended a sold-out Greenwich
Village fundraiser hosted by crypto-billionaire Michael Novogratz, an
heir to the Soros fortune, and the grandson of the founder of Qualcomm.
The next morning, Mamdani was hosted by the oil heiress Leah
Hunt-Hendrix. Then, earlier this week, Mamdani hobnobbed with the
cultural elite at a reception on the Lower East Side, with tickets
starting at $1,000.
Mamdani’s courting of New York City’s rich and
powerful stands in conflict with the image he presents as a political
fighter for the interests of the broad masses of workers. His populist
appeal against business-as-usual politics dominated by the wealthy has
even been a prominent feature of his transition fund-raising appeals.
“Usually,
transitions rely on wealthy donors, special interests, and Super PACs,”
one recent message from the Mamdani camp stated, “but we want to do
this the same way we got here: with you.”
Approximately 30,000
people have responded to Mamdani’s appeals by donating to his transition
activities, which involve sorting through 70,000 applications and
preparing policy initiatives.
Mamdani’s wooing of wealthy donors,
combined with broader appeals to the multitude of lesser means who
supported him, is not merely a matter of political hypocrisy or bad
optics. It underscores a basic continuity with the Democratic
establishment that dominates New York City politics, while
simultaneously attempting to breathe new life into a hated political
setup by feigning to reconcile the irreconcilable—the social needs of
workers with the profit, property, and power of the corporate and
financial oligarchy.
*****
Mamdani’s ever more naked embrace of representatives of big business
is proceeding under the guise that these forces can be bargained with to
alleviate the affordability crisis hammering the working class in New
York.
Mamdani includes President Trump among them, meeting with
the fascist president two weeks ago and declaring a “partnership” in
their supposed common goal of lowering prices for New Yorkers. Since the
meeting, Mamdani has not made any public statements on his social media
accounts criticizing Trump.
This fraud serves only to disorient
and demobilize a struggle against inequality and dictatorship. Finance
capital, the big landlords, and the corporate chiefs whom Mamdani is
appealing to will not accept policies that significantly cut into profit
streams or threaten property rights. Their interests are diametrically
opposed to those of the working class, which is facing an intensifying
social crisis where meeting even the most basic needs is a constant
struggle.
The US Federal Reserve again lowered its interest rate by a quarter
percentage point yesterday—for the third time in a row—to bring it to
the lowest level in three years. But it was a split decision: Two
members of the committee voted against another cut and Trump supporter
Stephen Miran called for a cut of half a percentage point.
With
two members of the Federal Open Market Committee—Austan Goolsbee of the
Chicago Fed and Jeffrey Schmid of the Kansas City Fed—voting to keep
rates on hold and others leaning in that direction, expectations of a
further cut in January have been lowered.
*****
The so-called dot plot, in which Fed officials project where they
believe interest rates will go over the next 12 months, “laid bare,” in
the words of the Financial Times, “the deep discord among policymakers.”
*****
In his prepared remarks for the press conference following the
meeting, Fed chair Jerome Powell said available indicators suggested
economic activity had been expanding at a moderate pace.
But the
readings on inflation were higher than earlier in the year, reflecting
the impact of tariffs, and the labor market was weakening with job
gains slowing significantly.
*****
Estimates put the loss of manufacturing jobs at 50,000 this year as companies make announcements of significant layoffs.
Attention
has been increasingly directed to what is referred to as a “K-shaped”
economy, as higher income earners with stock holdings benefit from the
share market rise while those on lower incomes fall further behind.
After
dismissing the affordability crisis as a “hoax” and “the greatest ever
con job” fostered by the Democrats, President Trump attempted to address
it at a rally in Pennsylvania this week. This was under conditions
where, according to a poll conducted by Politico, some 46 percent of
voters said the cost of living was the worst they could recall. They
included 37 percent who said they had voted for Trump in the
presidential election.
*****
In his prepared remarks and in comments at his press conference,
Powell said there was a “reasonable base case” that the effects of
tariffs on inflation would be relatively short-lived and would only
result in a one-time shift in the price level.
But Powell said the
same thing regarding the price hike set off by the COVID-19 pandemic,
which led to the largest inflation surge in more than 40 years. The
significant dissent from the decision to cut interest rates indicates
there is concern in the Fed’s governing body this could take place
again.
*****
Wall Street welcomed the rate cut decision, with all major indexes
recording increases. The Dow was up 1 percent, or 500 points, the NASDAQ
rose 0.3 percent, the S&P 500 was up 0.7 percent, just shy of a
record, and the Russell 2000 index of smaller companies gained 1.3
percent to reach a new record.
But in an unexpected decision,
indicating fears of turbulence in financial markets, the Fed announced
that it was resuming purchases of short-term Treasury securities,
starting with $40 billion this month.
In its report of the decision, the Wall Street Journal
said the decision was “a response to recent stretches of volatility in
short-term lending markets that have caught traders’ and policymakers’
attention.”
A settlement reached between the Trump administration and Republican-led
states will bring to an end a Biden-era student loan repayment program
and force more than 7 million people to resume payments in the near
future.
President Joe Biden campaigned on a mass federal student debt loan
forgiveness program, but legislation never advanced in either house of
Congress even though the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate
in 2021-2022.
As a substitute, Biden issued an executive order to
establish the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan for
federal student loans. The program was first implemented in October 2023
as a cheaper alternative to other federal repayment programs. The
program did not eliminate student loan debt, an over $2 trillion
millstone around the neck for over 42 million people in America, but
instead used a new formula to lessen monthly payments based on income.
*****
The ending of the program comes at a time when the majority of
workers, students and their families in America are struggling to
survive. CNBC, reporting on data from the Federal Reserve Bank of
Philadelphia, found “late credit card payments have hit a record high.”
Data showed that in the fourth quarter of 2024, 0.90 percent of credit
card accounts in the US were at least 90 days past due, a 12-year high
and the most since the Fed bank began the report.
The same
report found that 11.12 percent of cardholders were only making the
minimum payment, up from 10.65 percent in 2023 and 9.91 percent in 2022.
College
is increasingly a luxury affordable only to the affluent. Recent
reports indicate that the average cost across all US colleges, per
student, per year, including tuition, housing and food, is over $38,000.
Unsurprisingly, as of this writing, nearly 12 million federal student
loan borrowers are currently behind on their repayments.
*****
While a settlement has been reached to end the program, it is not
clear exactly when loan repayments will begin. Transitioning millions of
people into other repayment plans, under conditions where the Education
Department is being disbanded and is already facing significant
backlogs, will be difficult.
This latest attack on education by
the Trump administration follows an earlier decision by the Education
Department to strip “professional” status from dozens of essential
professions, such as nursing, teaching and social work. The
reclassification imposes new caps on federal borrowing limits and an
“earnings premium” which links graduate’s earning income to federal loan
eligibility. Historically underpaid professions, such as teaching, will
see massive cost increases.
While there is “no money” in
capitalist America for workers to achieve higher education without
taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt, in a robust and
bipartisan 312-112 vote Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted to
advance the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, and with it, over
$900 billion in military spending. A majority of Democrats, 115 in all,
joined 197 of their Republican “colleagues” in passing the war budget.
On the morning of December 3 in Ontario, California, 46-year-old
Union Pacific conductor Steve Crowe, known to coworkers as “Lil Crowe”
or “Baby Crowe,” was killed in a collision. The train he was riding
while backing up collided with a combination vehicle at a private
industrial crossing.
Steve was a second-generation railroader. He
followed in his father’s footsteps and was admired and cared for by
those who worked beside him. They called him “Lil Crowe” as an
affectionate acknowledgment of his youth, his energy and his family
legacy in the trade.
His death was not an unpredictable “accident”
but the result of relentless cuts to safety by US railroads and
corporations across the country.
The operation underway in Ontario was what the industry calls a “shoving
movement,” that is, when a train reverses, pushing rail cars instead of
pulling them. This is, according to every serious rail safety body, the
most dangerous procedure a conductor can be assigned.
*****
Of the 20 conductor fatalities reported to the Federal Railroad
Administration (FRA) from January 2020 to July 2025, 14 occurred during
shoving movements. The danger is completely avoidable with modern
technology, including fully integrated cameras, automated visibility
systems and remote monitoring. But to the extent that they are used at
all, it is to harass rail crews and ramp up exploitation, not make the
job safer.
*****
The freight rail industry has been transformed into a plaything of
Wall Street investors over decades of bipartisan deregulation and
financialization. The Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act
of 1976 and the 1980 Staggers Act removed public oversight and unleashed
a frenzy of profit-driven restructuring. Railroads consolidated into a
handful of financial behemoths whose primary objective is not reliable
operation but relentlessly reducing the “operating ratio” demanded by
investors.
This “efficiency revolution” reached a new stage on the
eve of the 21st century. Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) slashed
crews, cut inspection times, lengthened trains to record-breaking
lengths, closed yards and destroyed redundancy. It was first started
during the Clinton administration, but it spread under the Obama
presidency.
Shoving movements became riskier because they are now
conducted with fewer, exhausted workers under punitive attendance
regimes, often in unfamiliar territory due to constant reassignments,
and without needed maintenance or equipment.
Opposition to dangerous working conditions has been growing from below for years. In 2022, railroad workers rejected a government-backed contract
maintaining PSR and similar systems, instead pressing for a national
strike. The pro-company union bureaucracy acted as industrial police,
delaying strike action for weeks until after the midterm elections to
give Congress the chance to ban the strike before it even began.
Such is the real record of the Biden administration, the self-proclaimed “most pro-labor administration in history.”
*****
The industrial slaughterhouse continues under Trump, who is eviscerating
all regulations imposing even the slightest limits on the activities of
corporations. Union Pacific CEO Jim Vena was a recent visitor to the White House,
where he not only secured support for the railroad’s merger with
Norfolk Southern but also advised Trump which cities to send troops into
next.
Steve Crowe’s death is part of a broader and accelerating crisis.
Across the logistics sector, workers are dying under intense
productivity pressure.
At the U.S. Postal Service’s distribution center in Allen Park, Michigan, Air Force veteran Nick Acker died after falling into a mail sort machine; his body was not found for hours. A week later, Russell Scruggs, Jr. died at a facility in Palmetto, Georgia.
Rank-and-file
committees must be formed by workers to assert workers’ control of
safety, investigating and exposing such preventable deaths and asserting
the right to stop production and take other measures when a job is
unsafe. Only by removing the profit motive from safety can these
disasters be ended.
On November 25 current mayor of Washington D.C., Muriel Bowser (Democratic), announced she would not seek a fourth term.
The race for D.C.’s next mayor became crowded from the moment Bowser
made her announcement, with several current members of the D.C. Council
among those joining the primary. Similar to the recent New York City
mayoral election, the winner of the primary, set for June 16, 2026,
would almost certainly be elected mayor in the heavily Democratic city.
Among
the first to declare her candidacy was Democrat Janeese Lewis George,
currently representing Ward 4 in the D.C. Council. George, described in
the bourgeois media as a “democratic socialist,” was a member of the
Metro D.C. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) upon her election in
2020 and was endorsed again by the organization prior to the 2024
elections that won her a second term.
*****
A former D.C. prosecutor who ran in the 2020 council election on a platform of defunding the police, George voted in favor of the draconian SECURE DC crime bill. At a Ward 4 candidates’ forum in April 2024, she pleaded with her right-wing critics,
It
wasn’t that we were against police officers; it was Black people
saying, “We don’t want to be murdered.” The notion…does not mean we
don’t respect and love our officers and support them.
True
to its opportunist ways, the Metro D.C. DSA dutifully scrubbed any
mention of the word “police” from its 2024 George endorsement statement.
George also voted in favor
of providing $1 billion in public funds for the NFL’s Washington
Commanders new stadium, further burnishing her big-business credentials.
George’s pro-capitalist politics have not received a single rebuke from
the Metro D.C. DSA. In the 2024 presidential race, she loyally
campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris even as Harris made clear
she would continue the genocide in Gaza started by Biden.
The role
of the DSA, when all the left-sounding phrases and platitudes are
peeled back, is to herd workers and youth back into the waiting arms of
the Democratic Party. There is no greater warning as to the
organization’s true character than its behavior following the election
of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor-elect of New York City.
*****
For the working class in D.C. and around the world, the task is not to
elect left-talking capitalist politicians but to establish political and
organization independence from all agencies of capitalism and their
pseudo-left defenders.
General Motors workers leaving the Factory Zero plant in Detroit
Wednesday afternoon denounced the layoffs and the complicity of United
Auto Workers in the destruction of their jobs. With the permanent layoff
of 1,140 workers at the assembly plant scheduled for January 5, workers
spoke about the hardships they are facing and expressed support for a
fight to defend their jobs.
The layoffs come as General Motors
recorded $14.9 billion in profit in 2024, raised its shareholder
dividend, and spent $6 billion on stock buybacks. Despite falling EV
sales due to Trump’s elimination of consumer tax credits, Wall Street
still expects GM to make $12–13 billion in 2025. The layoffs are part of
a restructuring operation driven by investor demands for automation,
consolidation and the destruction of thousands of jobs in the global
auto industry.
Supporters of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) distributed the statement “Mobilize to stop GM layoffs at Factory Zero in Detroit—Build Rank-and-File Committees.”
It calls on workers to form independent committees capable of
organizing a real fight, unifying workers across plants and borders and
breaking out of the isolation imposed by the union bureaucracy.
*****
Far from defending workers, the UAW apparatus has not held a single
membership meeting, proposed no fight and is maintaining total silence
as workers confront the destruction of their jobs. Factory Zero sits
less than five miles from Solidarity House, but UAW President Shawn Fain
and Local 22 officials have already sanctioned the layoffs. To oppose
the Factory Zero layoffs would cut across the UAW bureaucracy’s alliance
with Trump and his trade-war agenda. Fain has embraced Trump’s tariffs
and promotes the lie that workers in Canada, Mexico, and other
countries must lose their jobs so workers in the United States can keep
theirs.
*****
The layoffs at Factory Zero are part of GM’s plan to cut production
by half, triggering mass layoffs at supplier plants including Avancez,
Dana Thermal Products, Autokiniton, and Yanfeng, as well as more than
2,000 job cuts across GM’s Ultium battery operations in Ohio and
Tennessee. This is a coordinated corporate restructuring, backed by Wall
Street and enforced by the UAW.
Autoworker and socialist leader Will Lehman in 2023
In his statement on the layoffs, Mack Trucks worker and IWA-RFC leader Will Lehman declared:
If
our livelihoods are to be protected it is up to shop floor workers
ourselves to take action. I urge workers at Factory Zero to immediately
establish a rank-and-file committee to organize a fight to stop the
layoffs. Workers must demand an immediate membership meeting, led by the
most trusted and militant workers, to map out a strategy to defend
every job. This includes organizing immediate strike action and mass
protests to rally workers throughout the Detroit area to demand no
layoffs, the shortening of the workweek with no loss of pay and
democratic control over production.
He continued:
Instead of fighting to defend our
jobs, Fain has joined the fascist Trump in pitting American workers
against our brothers and sisters in Canada, Mexico and globally… We will
not win just as American workers. We need to reach out to our
co-workers in the US and globally if we’re going to defeat the
transnational corporations.
The fight at Factory Zero
is not simply a local struggle. It is part of an international movement
of autoworkers confronting layoffs, wage cuts, speed-ups and automation
across borders. The only viable strategy is to unify workers, not
divide them, and to build rank-and-file committees independent of the
UAW bureaucracy and its nationalist program, which subordinates workers’
interests to corporate profitability.
Last week Israel was allowed to
continue competing in Eurovision after a general assembly meeting of the
European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in Geneva. The EBU, consisting of 123
public broadcasters from 56 countries, runs the Eurovision Song
Contest. The meeting was called to approve rules that the organization claimed would “reinforce trust and protect neutrality of [the]
Eurovision Song Contest”.
This was a ruse to ensure that there would be no vote on the
participation of Israel, which carries on its genocide of the
Palestinians in Gaza.
*****
Spain’s national broadcaster RTVE, the Dutch AVROTROS, Ireland’s RTE,
and Slovenia’s national broadcaster immediately said they would not
take part in the 2026 contest . On December 10, Icelandic national
broadcaster RÚV 10 joined the boycott.
The decision by the
national broadcasters in the five countries with a combined population
of around 78 million people is in response to mass opposition to
Israel’s genocide and the complicity of the major powers in it.
*****
The Eurovision Song Contest is the most watched live non-sporting event
in the world, regularly pulling in well over 150 million viewers. In
addition to those viewing from the European nations who take part, the
show is also broadcast in the US and Australia. The 2023 edition held in
Liverpool in the UK attracted a viewership of 162 million people,
accounting for 291 million hours watched.
*****
In announcing their boycott, each broadcaster issued statements
explicitly citing the genocide in Gaza, the humanitarian crisis, and the
two-faced claims of the EBU to adhere to “neutrality” in the face of
such crimes.
*****
The boycotts are the culmination of growing outrage at Israel’s
participation in Eurovision, which have escalated over the past two
years. Millions abhor the inclusion of Israel, which allows the
country’s Zionist regime to present itself as a “normal” member of the
“international community” and exploit the event to sanitise its war
crimes.
*****
Eurovision’s claim that it operates based on strict neutrality and that it is a “non-political event” are a transparent fraud.
In
2019, the Icelandic act Hatari was fined by the EBU for displaying the
Palestinian flag. Belarus, an ally of Russia, was excluded in 2021 for
submitting politically charged songs and for suppressing media freedom.
Most
significantly, in 2022, Russia was banned within days of its invasion
of Ukraine on the grounds that its participation would “bring the
competition into disrepute.”
Yet when faced with the genocidal
assault on Gaza waged since October 2023, documented by international
organizations and recognized as a crime against humanity, the EBU has
not only refused to exclude Israel but has actively shielded it from
criticism.
*****
It is highly likely that there will be further boycotts of next year’s contest, given that Israel is a global pariah.
Britain
has seen millions demonstrating in its cities nationally since the
genocide began. The British Broadcasting Corporation is among the state
broadcasters backing Israel’s inclusion, under conditions where a poll
published following the EBU vote found 82 percent of respondents in the
UK believe Israel should be excluded from Eurovision in 2026. Almost
seven in 10 (69 percent) said that if Israel is permitted to take part,
the UK should withdraw from the contest.
The founding of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party is the
latest attempt to trap workers and young people looking for a socialist
leadership within a pro-capitalist “broad left” formation led by
reformist and Stalinist bureaucrats.
The crisis besetting the
party demonstrates that the objective basis for doing so has been
undermined by a deepening economic and social crisis that has not only
rendered impossible new reformist half-measures but drives the
capitalist class and its governments to destroy those implemented in the
past.
As with all past efforts, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in
Spain, the formation of Your Party is intended to fence off those
seeking an alternative to despised right-wing parties like Keir
Starmer’s Labour from a revolutionary socialist opposition to austerity
and war.
The disorientation produced by the inevitable betrayals
of such “broad-left” formations has repeatedly allowed the ruling class
to proceed with its attacks and serve to strengthen the far-right. The
key role in every case has been played by pseudo-left groups, who claim
to represent a revolutionary alternative only to insist that the working
class must accept the leadership of “left reformist” leaders or
political current emerging from the breakup of the old social democratic
and Stalinist parties.
This has led to one disaster after another for the working class. In
2015, Syriza infamously betrayed its 2015 referendum mandate to oppose
European Union and International Monetary Fund-dictated austerity that
inflicted social devastation on Greek workers, leading to the party’s
ignominious collapse.
Rivalling Syriza’s betrayal was that carried
out by Corbyn during his five years as leader of the Labour Party
between 2015 and 2020. This was hailed by pseudo-left ideologue Chantal
Mouffe as a potentially far more successful example of a new wave of
“left populism” because Corbyn stood “at the head of a great party and
enjoys the support of the trade unions”, provided that he rejected the
“traditional left political frontier… established on the basis of
class”.
Corbyn went on to carry out the worst rout in political history as he
repeatedly betrayed the hundreds of thousands who flocked to the party
and capitulated on all fundamental issues to the Blairite right.
*****
The depth and speed of Your Party’s sink into the mire provides
additional proof of its rotten political foundations. The founding
conference held in Liverpool on November 29-30 followed months of
unprincipled factional warfare between Corbyn and Sultana over control
of financial assets and membership lists that whittled down the 850,000
who signed up as supporters in July to just 55,000 becoming members, and
a forecast attendance of 13,000 ending with between 1,500-2,000 coming
to the Liverpool Arena and Convention Centre.
Politically the dispute between the two is over how left Your Party must posture if it is to have any hope of winning support.
Corbyn, who never wanted to form a party at all, wants only the most
pathetic variant of a reformist program, modeled on the Labour Party
manifestos of 2017 and 2019 which combined some re-nationalizations and
minimal tax rises for the major corporations and super-rich with pledges
to defend British capitalism, including maintaining membership of NATO
and keeping nuclear weapons.
Sultana advances a more full-throated
program, seeking to commit Your Party to nationalizing the entire
economy and running it in the interests of workers, combined with an
anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist foreign policy.
She knows that Corbyn has been substantially discredited due to his
refusal to fight Labour’s right-wing, and that the groundswell of anger
and anti-capitalist sentiment among workers and youth will not be
satisfied with his meager palliatives. However, despite her more
militant rhetoric and insistence that she is not in favor of building a
Labour Party Mark 2, Sultana has never once proposed that Your Party be
based on anything other than the pursuit of social reforms through
parliament.
*****
The pseudo-left parties for the most part have their origins in an
explicit repudiation of the revolutionary internationalist program of
Trotsky and the Fourth International following the Second World War and a
wholesale adaptation to imperialism and to the reformist and Stalinist
parties and trade unions. They are today the most insidious opponents of
revolution, led by a privileged upper middle-class stratum with a
vested interest in defending capitalism.
*****
The development of globalized production during the 1980s had in fact
fatally undermined all parties, trade unions and other organizations rooted in the nation state, destroying any possibility of securing
reforms through limited trade union action and parliamentary reform. In
every country, parties and trade unions committed to the defense of the
capitalist profit system responded by abandoning reforms, demanding
instead endless sacrifices by workers in the name of global
competitiveness and carrying out an endless series of betrayals.
This
did not lead automatically to workers breaking from reformist
illusions, but the turn by millions away from their old bureaucratic
leaderships evidenced the unprecedented objective opportunities to win
workers to a genuine socialist perspective.
As the International Committee of the Fourth International explained as early as 1988, in its perspectives document The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International, the changes in the form of capitalist production had brought with them a change in the form of the class struggle:
It
has long been an elementary proposition of Marxism that the class
struggle is national only as to form, but that it is, in essence, an
international struggle. However, given the new features of capitalist
development, even the form of the class struggle must assume an
international character… Precisely the international character of the
proletariat, a class which owes no allegiance to any capitalist
‘fatherland’, makes it the sole social force that can liberate civilization from the strangulating fetters of the nation state system.
For these fundamental reasons, no struggle against the ruling class in
any country can produce enduring advances for the working class, let
alone prepare its final emancipation, unless it is based on an
international strategy aimed at the worldwide mobilization of the
proletariat against the capitalist system….
*****
Prior to Your Party’s founding conference, the Socialist Equality
Party insisted that the issue facing workers was whether to support a
program and party based on reformist delusions or build one dedicated
to the struggle for socialist revolution. The pseudo-left stand
unambiguously for the promotion of reformist delusions.
The SEP
fights to arm the working class with a revolutionary perspective. We not
only reject entirely the demoralized argument that reformist
consciousness cannot be challenged. We are preparing the most powerful
means of doing so.
On November 22, the SEP hosted a lecture in London delivered by David North, chairperson of the World Socialist Web Site, “Where is America going?: Oligarchy, dictatorship, and the revolutionary crisis of capitalism.”
David North presenting his lecture in London
North
insisted that “a critique of capitalism based on moral outrage, however
justified that outrage may be, cannot provide the foundation for a
revolutionary struggle against it… The violence of oligarchy, the
brazenness of its power-grabs, the descent into authoritarianism—all of
these express the terminal crisis of the capitalist mode of production
itself.”
Stating that the rapidly deteriorating conditions of life
for the great majority of Americans is already producing a growing
sentiment that an alternative to capitalism is necessary, he noted that
the initial beneficiary of this, Mamdani, was already in “full Corbyn”
mode, “assuring the media and Wall Street that nothing he said during
the election campaign should have been taken seriously, and going so far
as to ask for an audience with Trump, and humiliating himself in the
process.”
Mamdani’s treachery “demonstrates again that the central
issue of our time is the crisis of revolutionary leadership… Objective
economic processes create both the necessity and conditions for the
overthrow of capitalism. But the socialist revolution is the outcome of
the conscious intervention of the working class in the historic
process,” led by a revolutionary Marxist party.
Explaining that
the conditions now exist for an extraordinary advance in the political
consciousness of the working class, North announced the launching
December 12 of Socialism AI.
*****
This is our answer to the efforts to corral workers behind Sultana and
Corbyn’s doomed project. We are the sole tendency that not only sets out
to build a revolutionary leadership, but which has, in the rich
political heritage of the World Socialist Web Site and now the essential tool of Socialism AI, the necessary means to do this.
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.
