Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Trump delivers fascist diatribe in year-end speech
In 1933, analyzing the first months of Hitler’s regime in Germany, Leon Trotsky wrote in scathing terms about the historical regression taking place in what had once been a center of European culture.
What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of Nazism. (“What is National Socialism?”)
These words come to mind while listening to the speech delivered by Donald Trump Wednesday night. In the course of 18 minutes, the president spewed a toxic mix of blatant lies, racist bigotry against immigrants and barely veiled threats of violence against political opponents.
His remarks demonstrated for all the world to see that the president of the United States is a sociopath actively preparing for mass repression and the establishment of a military-police dictatorship in America. His sole policy proposal was to award a bonus of $1,776 to all US soldiers—a transparent bribe aimed at securing their obedience to Trump’s orders, at home and abroad, no matter how illegal.
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His remarks had a Hitlerian character, with immigrants taking the place of Jews in his fascist demonology. He blamed every social ill of American capitalism—high prices, unemployment, crime, homelessness, the housing shortage, decaying schools and a dysfunctional healthcare system—on immigrants. He singled out Somalis, refugees from a crisis provoked by US military intervention, for particular venom.
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Trump piled lie upon lie: $18 trillion in foreign investment supposedly obtained through tariffs; gasoline at $1.99 a gallon; food prices “falling rapidly”; and negotiations to slash drug prices “by as much as 400, 500 and even 600 percent.” (Since a cut of 100 percent would reduce prices to zero, Trump’s figures are simply gibberish.) He operates according to the principle of his mentor Roy Cohn: “You create your own reality.”
Equally significant is what Trump did not say. He made no mention of the impending war against Venezuela or the slaughter of more than 100 people in bomb and missile strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. Nor did he refer to his deployment of troops in American cities or the tens of thousands of immigrants rounded up and held in detention camps, including children.
Media commentary after the speech bemoaned Trump’s easily exposed falsehoods, his vicious and menacing tone, and his obsessive fixation on blaming every problem either on immigrants or on the Biden administration. But there was no attempt by the Democrats to offer a political rebuttal. By Thursday night, the speech had disappeared entirely from the evening news.
The Democratic Party is doing nothing to oppose Trump’s drive toward dictatorship. There have been no calls by any leading Democrats for his removal from office. Indeed, the Democratic Party leadership has explicitly repudiated any suggestion of impeachment. This despite Trump’s repeated violations of the Constitution, including the illegal deployment of the military in Washington D.C. and other US cities.
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Most importantly, the Democrats are doing everything in their power to chloroform the working class and obscure the fact that preparations for a presidential dictatorship are advancing by leaps and bounds. Democratic governors claim to oppose Trump’s persecution of immigrants—by filing lawsuits. At the same time, they collaborate with the unions to suppress any organized resistance by the working class to this illegal and unconstitutional regime.
Trump speaks not merely as an individual but as the embodiment of the American capitalist class. He was placed in the White House to serve as the political representative of finance capital and the oligarchy. He is their man.
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The degraded, panic-stricken, even hysterical character of Trump’s speech is not merely a reflection of his personal instability or increasing incapacity. It is an expression of the mounting fears within the ruling class as a whole, which faces convulsions in world financial markets, the rise of China, and growing resistance in the working class at home to its policies of austerity and militarism.
The physiology of the fascist cabal in the White House is a modern manifestation of what Trotsky described in 1933 as the “cultural excrement” vomited up by a capitalist society in terminal crisis.
The task of the working class is to raise its opposition to the Trump administration and the capitalist system it defends to the level demanded by history: the building of a mass revolutionary movement to establish a workers’ government, committed to socialist policies and the expropriation of the oligarchy. This is inseparable from the fight to unify the working class internationally in a common struggle against imperialism, dictatorship and war.
2. Canada complicit as Trump escalates toward war on Venezuela
The defining feature of the Canadian government’s response to the Trump administration’s escalating campaign of aggression and war against Venezuela is its quiet complicity.
Over the past three months, Washington has acted with brazen criminality—indiscriminately massacring dozens of people in air strikes on defenseless boats, seizing oil tankers, and imposing a de facto blockade on Venezuela’s oil exports. These acts of military violence and economic warfare are flagrant violations of international law and constitute war crimes.
For decades, the Canadian ruling class has portrayed itself as a staunch proponent and defender of international law. Yet the Liberal government under former central banker Mark Carney has greeted the criminal acts of Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth with a diplomatic shrug.
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The Canadian ruing class shares the goal of ousting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and plundering the country’s natural resources. It worked closely with the White House toward that end under the first Trump administration and that of the Democrat Joe Biden.
The coming US war against Venezuela is aimed at placing the world’s largest oil reserves under direct imperialist control. At the same time, the campaign against Venezuela is aimed at denying strategic rivals such as Russia and China access to the hemisphere.
International law, which Ottawa claims to champion, is treated as irrelevant when aims that the Canadian ruling class support—such as these—are pursued by the United States.
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At no point has the Canadian government questioned or criticized, let alone publicly condemned, Washington’s illegal military actions and threats of war. It has not demanded clarification, suspended or even threatened to suspend its cooperation with the US in drug interdiction operations in the Caribbean. And it has studiously avoided declaring whether it condones or opposes the killing of people at sea without due process.
The last public expression of Ottawa’s position came in November at the conclusion of a G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in Ontario. Asked whether US strikes on boats in the Caribbean violated international law, Canada’s foreign minister Anita Anand responded that while Canada concerns itself with its own compliance, the legality of US actions is a matter for American officials to decide.
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Canada’s posture exposes the real content of its claims to uphold a “rules-based international order.” Ottawa invokes international law selectively. When it comes to the enemies of US and Canadian imperialism, it cries from the rooftops, demanding that the perpetrators of both real and concocted war crimes be “held to account.” But when Washington carries out killings, blockades and plots illegal invasions, international law is of no account. Far from a neutral framework, Canada invokes international law as an instrument of imperialist coercion.
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The Canadian government’s readiness to defend Trump’s criminality is rooted in Canada’s long-standing economic and military collaboration with the United States in the Caribbean. Since emerging as an imperialist power in its own right at the turn of the 20th century, Canada has viewed Latin America as a key area of interest, though it has always played second fiddle to its much more powerful American imperialist ally to the south.
Canada’s foreign direct investment in the region is now estimated to be in the order of C$100 billion, concentrated in mining, energy and financial services. Since joining the Organization of American States in 1990, its military-security presence in the region has also expanded significantly.
In 2004, Canada and the US invaded Haiti in conjunction with a fascist rebellion led by former Haitian army officers and Tontons Macoutes to overthrow the country’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Since 2006, Canada has participated in Operation Caribbe, a US-led naval and aerial surveillance mission presented as a counter-narcotics effort, but long used to assert imperialist control over the Caribbean Sea region. Under this operation, Canadian warships, patrol aircraft and personnel conduct “find and track” missions and pass intelligence to US Coast Guard forces that carry out interceptions.
In October, with US airstrikes off Venezuela’s coast in full swing, a Department of National Defense spokesperson claimed that Canada’s interdiction operations under Operation Caribbe were “separate and distinct” from US airstrikes on purported smugglers.
Since then, the government has said nothing about whether Canadian intelligence, surveillance data or other military assets have contributed to the deadly strikes. It has not suspended or even paused its participation in Operation Caribbe. In the context of an illegal campaign of lethal violence, the continued provision of intelligence and operational support to the US constitutes facilitation of criminal acts.
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Canada played a central role in the Lima Group, the US-aligned regional formation established in 2017 to isolate Venezuela diplomatically and legitimize regime change. Ottawa acted as an organizer and enforcer, pressing Latin American governments to reject Venezuelan elections, impose sanctions and coordinate political and economic pressure against the Maduro government.
This role assumed its most blatant form in 2019 when Canada rushed to recognize Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s “interim president” following a US-orchestrated coup attempt. Canadian diplomats worked behind the scenes to unify the right-wing opposition and line up international recognition for an unconstitutional seizure of power, lending pseudo-legal legitimacy to an operation that threatened civil war and was considered a potential pretext for US military intervention.
Although the coup failed, Canada never repudiated it. Liberal governments under Justin Trudeau and now Mark Carney have continued to treat regime change in Venezuela as legitimate, escalating sanctions and diplomatic pressure in close coordination with Washington.
Global Affairs Canada publicly congratulated US-backed opposition leader María Corina Machado on being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, praising her “courage and resilience” and declaring support for her vision of Venezuela’s future. Machado is a far-right politician who has openly advocated for a US invasion to impose regime change. Ottawa’s endorsement, issued as Washington escalates military operations and tightens its blockade, underscores Canada’s active participation in the campaign to engineer the violent overthrow of the Maduro regime under the cover of democratic rhetoric.
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Large sections of the Canadian population are revolted by the spectacle of US forces carrying out killings on the high seas and imposing blockades in open violation of international law. Carney was elected while posturing as an “Elbows Up” opponent of Trump’s threat to annex Canada as the 51st state.
Moreover, in the eyes of wide sections of the population, Canada’s claims to uphold international law and human rights have already been seriously discredited by Ottawa’s full-throated support for Israel as it has mounted its genocidal assault on the Gaza Palestinians.
The trade union-backed New Democratic Party (NDP) has mirrored the Carney government’s stance. It has voiced no substantive opposition to the airstrikes or the economic blockade. This silence is in keeping with the NDP’s longstanding integration into the foreign policy consensus of Canadian imperialism, including its support for the US-NATO-instigated war with Russia over Ukraine and for Canada’s integration into Washington’s military-strategic offensive against China.
The same class logic that drives Canada’s policy toward Venezuela has impelled a massive further lurch to the right in ruling-class politics since Carney assumed the reins of government from Justin Trudeau last March. This includes a massive new austerity drive, an intensification of the state assault on the right to strike, the curtailment of refugee rights and the strengthening of the border in collaboration with the Trump administration’s war on immigrants.
At the centre of the Liberal government’s agenda is a massive rearmament drive and the building up of Canada’s military-industrial base to prepare Canadian imperialism for global war.
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Workers must oppose US and Canadian imperialism’s aggression against Venezuela. Such opposition does not imply political support for the Maduro government. The Venezuelan state represents a bourgeois-nationalist faction that has responded to economic collapse and imperialist pressure with repression against workers, restrictions on democratic rights, and offers to Trump to give the US privileged access to the country’s oil wealth.
The struggle against imperialist war demands the unification of the working class in the imperialist centers of North America with workers in the countries targeted for imperialist onslaught, like Venezuela, China and Russia.
3. The centenary of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy
The greatest artistic accomplishments in the 20th century came about as the result of the understanding, or more often the intuition, that “the new art,” as Trotsky suggested, “which will lay out new landmarks, and which will expand the channel of creative art,” could only be created by those who were “at one with their epoch,” the convulsive era ushered in by the Russian Revolution, the first stage of the world revolution. To one varied extent or another, the most serious artists in the 1920s and early 1930s, however they may have interpreted the process, anticipated or often even assumed that society was proceeding to a new and higher stage. Absorbing that atmosphere proved essential to the honest and aesthetically rich treatment of the contradictions of contemporary reality.
This conception of 20th century art animates our view of one of the most titanic works of fiction of the last century.
Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy was published one hundred years ago, on December 17, 1925. The novel—inspired by a 1906 murder case—recounts the early life of Clyde Griffiths, from a lower middle class, religious family, and his subsequent pursuit of the American dream of success and status. When his pregnant, factory worker girlfriend, Roberta Alden, becomes an obstacle in that pursuit, he cold-bloodedly plans her murder. Her eventual death, on a deserted upstate New York lake, is one of the most chilling scenes in American and world literature.
A lengthy novel, at more than 800 pages, An American Tragedy was originally published in two volumes. Despite its size and price, it sold some 50,000 copies in the first year. It received wide critical acclaim and made Dreiser the leading American author of the day. Banned in Boston in 1927, later proscribed by the Nazis for “dealing with low love affairs,” the novel has been adapted several times for the theater and on film.
It is difficult to think of another novel that proceeds as An American Tragedy does. Dreiser painstakingly builds up piece by painful, intensely intimate piece his picture of a society, a town, a factory, several families and a “love triangle” as the terrible disaster looms.
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Dreiser (1871-1945), born in Terre Haute, Indiana, is an immense figure in American literature. While An American Tragedy was his supreme achievement, he was also the author of at least four other brilliant novels of American life, Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), as well as two fascinating, revealing volumes of autobiography, Newspaper Days (originally published as A Book About Myself in 1922, put out under the new title in 1931) and Dawn (1931). An Amateur Laborer (begun in 1904, but not published until decades later) is also a memoir, covering the three years of psychological crisis after the suppression of Sister Carrie, during which Dreiser worked as a rail worker.
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Dreiser corresponded with notable figures such as Eugene V. Debs, Diego Rivera, John Barrymore, John Ford, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, John Steinbeck, Paul Robeson, Edgar Lee Masters, Edmund Wilson, James T. Farrell, H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, Emma Goldman, H. G. Wells, Max Eastman, Sergei Eisenstein, Edward G. Robinson, William Randolph Hearst and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as countless readers, lovers and friends.
Dreiser had his share of personal failings and foibles, prejudices and backwardness. He was susceptible, like many American intellectuals, to pragmatic quick fixes, philosophical charlatanry and worse. He was given on occasion to extreme impressionism about events and people. His lengthy association with Stalinism, although it can be explained from a historical point of view, did him no credit. Despite knowing better, Dreiser declined, in response to the urging of Eastman in 1933, from publicly coming to the defense of Trotsky’s persecuted “adherents” in the USSR, claiming “the victory of Russia is all-important. I hold with Lincoln: Never swap horses while crossing a stream.”
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In so far as Dreiser was a far more substantial artist and intellectual than the “run of the mill,” his concern with “social problems” and his “sympathy for radical politics” took on a more serious, intense character. He keenly felt the widespread misery and suffering produced by American capitalism during the Depression and wrote movingly about it. Dreiser genuinely stuck his neck out, in defense of the Scottsboro Boys, coal miners in Kentucky and class war prisoners such as Tom Mooney, and brought the wrath of the authorities down upon himself on numerous occasions.
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Dreiser did not lack courage or principle.
Nonetheless, as he acknowledged in a 1932 letter, Dreiser’s “Marxism” was “a very liberal thing.” In a letter the following year, he set out his concern that “the immense gulf between wealth and poverty in America and throughout the world should be narrowed” and that “government should truly emphasize and, in so far as humanly possible, effect the welfare of all of the people—not that of a given class.” This helps explain his accommodation with Stalinism and its national-reformist program.
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In a 1913 letter, Dreiser observed:
The whole test of a book—to me—is—is it true, revealing, at once a picture and a criticism of life. If it measure up in these respects we can dismiss sympathy, decency, even the utmost shame and pain of it all.
In very few circumstances, it must be said, did Dreiser entirely “dismiss sympathy.” A profound compassion for human beings and their countless difficulties in contemporary class society pervades nearly everything he wrote.
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Decades of political and cultural reaction, however, have their consequences. Already in 1991, we argued “that Dreiser is treated like a ‘dead dog’ by the literary establishment in this country. On the whole, the professors, critics and journalists who make up what is called the intelligentsia want no part of Dreiser and no part of An American Tragedy.”
That dismal situation has not apparently changed. There has been no “resurgence” of interest, report various sources, in teaching Dreiser’s works.
His commitment to social truth, to historical and psychological reality, his tireless building up of his characters’ situations and dilemmas, his engagement with towering questions, including many of the essential facts of class society, his relentless critique of American illusions and delusions, his refusal to flatter his readers, all this continues to fly in the face of contemporary academic pettiness and subjectivism, lazy, irrationalist postmodernism and political timidity.
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Dreiser urged a correspondent: “Observe life directly as much as possible and prepare yourself to write by reading the really worth-while things that have been written by others and then look upon your writing as the most important thing in the world—to you—and the petty annoyances that now seem to color your whole life will quite naturally fall into their proper perspective.”
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To return to An American Tragedy. Dreiser created (or discovered) in the book a series of indelible, truthful social types, “types” but also highly individuated, concretely existing men and women—the young man on the make, shallow youths hankering for amusement or even for meaning in their lives, the sensitive young woman factory worker, the religiously infused, impoverished mother (how often we still see her today in the poorest neighborhoods of the US!), the grasping, politically motivated district attorney ready to lie on impulse.
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In a 1931 letter, Dreiser outlined his plan for the novel. The first part, he said, was intended to set forth
such social miseries as might naturally depress, inhibit and frustrate, and therefore exaggerate, the emotions and desires of a very sensitive and almost sensually exotic boy most poorly equipped for the great life struggle which confronts all youth.
In the second portion, the author aimed to show how such an unprepared youth might
be brought face to face with a much more fortunate world which would intensify all his deepest desires for luxury and love, and to show how, in the usual unequal contest between poverty and ignorance and desire and the world’s great toys, he might readily and really through no real willing of his own, find himself defeated and even charged with murder.
And the novel’s final section would reveal how such a youth might be treated
by an ignorant, conventional and revengeful background of rural souls who would … be the last to understand and comprehend the palliatives that might have, but did not, attend the life of such a boy, and therefore judge him far more harshly than would individuals of deeper insight and better mental fortune.
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“It was in 1892, at a time I began work as a newspaper man,” Dreiser wrote in 1934, “that I first began to observe a certain type of crime in the United States. It seemed to spring from the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrowing ambition to be somebody financially and socially. … I was witnessing the upbuilding of the great American fortunes. And once these fortunes and the families which controlled them were established, there began to develop our ‘leisure class,’ the Four Hundred [families] of New York..., plus their imitators in the remainder of the states.”
The reference to the decade of the 1890s is significant. Despite falling prices and profit rates from the mid-1870s to the mid-1890s, American capitalism continued to experience explosive growth. Between the end of the Civil War and 1890, industrial output had risen 296 percent. Steel production in the US surpassed the combined totals of Britain, France and Germany by the end of the century. New technologies in oil, electric power and communications facilitated growth.
The period witnessed a dramatic concentration of wealth, social inequality and widespread poverty. In 1890, the wealthiest one percent of the population owned a quarter of the country’s assets, while 11 million of the nation’s 12 million families earned less than $1,200 per year.
The class struggle erupted in ferocious battles. The fight for the eight-hour day led to the Haymarket Affair in May 1886 and the eventual execution of four anarchists. The Homestead strike of 1892 against Carnegie Steel, the Pullman strike of 1894 and coal miners’ strikes in 1894 and 1898 were particularly intense inflection points. Dreiser lived through this period and absorbed its social drama into “the very marrow of his bones.”
As he describes it in his Newspaper Days, Dreiser discovered the French novelist Balzac while living in Pittsburgh and working as a journalist (two years after the Homestead strike) and subsequently devoured his works. At first dismayed at finding himself in the Pennsylvania city rather than Paris, it dawned on Dreiser that the convulsive conditions of industrial America and “the immense money magnates” of the Andrew Carnegie type also might lend themselves to fictional treatment.
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Dreiser gives artistic, sensual flesh and bone to the mercenary and socially narcissistic ambition to succeed over the bodies of others pursued by the American ruling class in its own delusion that it has arrived, and perhaps even outsmarted history.
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As has been well documented, artistic circles in the pre-World War I period were not generally sympathetic to Marxism and the struggle of Marxists to build parties in the working class. They were far more influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche and various forms of irrationalism and subjectivism.
Nietzscheanism, with its promise of “hyper-revolutionary” “spiritual” transformation (and aristocratic superiority), was more tempting to many artists than facing up to life as it was in a period of rapid transformation, and it was certainly more alluring and apparently “poetic” than looking at the difficult, harsh conditions of the working class.
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Nonetheless, the ferocious struggles of the Russian working class and oppressed, led by the Bolsheviks, their willingness and ability to take on and defeat all enemies, in combination with uprisings in Germany, Italy and Hungary and mass strikes in Britain, North America and elsewhere, cut their way into the consciousness of honest artists.
As Trotsky suggested in Literature and Revolution, a more favorable relationship now existed in 1923 between the working class and socialism, on the one hand, and the intelligentsia, on the other.
The law of social attraction (towards the ruling class) which, in the last analysis, determines the creative work of the intelligentsia, is now operating to our advantage. One has to keep this fact in mind when shaping a political attitude toward art.
Victor Serge described the process, pointing out that “little by little,” the “literary people” in Russia, those who remained after the revolution, “came around: hunger gripped their stomachs and doubts and reservations ravaged their minds. They condemned the terror, but admired the Bolsheviks’ will to survive. Comparing the Whites with the Reds, they came to the conclusion that the Reds were better–and stronger.”
Writing about an older generation of Russian writers, Aleksandr Voronsky commented in 1923 as well that they
reconcile themselves to the revolution only at the expense of the greatest exertion, but they are reconciling themselves. The disintegration of bourgeois civilization, the indisputability of the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the old intelligentsia’s ideology, the first fresh sprouts of new Russian activity in the soil which has been richly ploughed by the revolution—all this and much more compels these writers, each in his own way, to go along with the Russian Revolution and not against it.
In his comment, Trotsky was referring to a “law” operating in the USSR, but the power and example of the October Revolution, and, as noted, the thrusting forward of workers in many part of the planet, had worldwide implications and ramifications.
Isn’t that the significance, in its own fashion, of Dreiser’s December 1920 letter to American socialist David Karsner, the editor of the New York Call and a regular correspondent? (Interestingly, Karsner’s first wife, Rose Greenberg, after their divorce, married James P. Cannon.)
These sniffy intellectuals give me a pain. They spend their days in sniffing and die sniffing. They are pointless—mere gum on the axles. A man like Lenin or another like Trotsky are worth 8,000,000,000 Wells or Wallings [Fabian socialist novelist H.G. Wells and American liberal journalist William Walling]. They [Lenin and Trotsky] act instead of carefully weighing unimportant thoughts and words all their days. And they have the courage of their convictions, which is more than most penman and parlor reasoners have. I respect them. I wish, and have all along, that I might help in some decisive way.
It is a large and contradictory problem, but, as concretely as possible, by what means did the October Revolution influence artists?
Trotsky provides an important insight in his essay “Art and Politics in Our Epoch” (1938), while discussing Mexican artist Diego Rivera. “In the field of painting, the October Revolution has found her greatest interpreter,” wrote Trotsky, not among the toadies of “Socialist Realism” in the USSR, but in the person of Rivera. The artist “has remained Mexican,” but that which inspired him in his
magnificent frescoes, which lifted him up above the artistic tradition, above contemporary art in a certain sense, above himself, is the mighty blast of the proletarian revolution. Without October, his power of creative penetration into the epic of work, oppression and insurrection, would never have attained such breadth and profundity.
Of course, Rivera, at the time a member of the Fourth International, exemplified this process at a high level, but the truth of Trotsky’s observation is more wide-ranging.
This notion, that the “blast of the proletarian revolution” amplifies or augments the artist’s “power of creative penetration” into the secrets of the social and historical process (“the epic of work, oppression and insurrection”), is key. The revolution cracked open the existing social organism, laying it bare to the most observant and sensitive eyes. It created the basis for a new and more objective, firmer and more piercing vantage-point from which to examine the entirety of human activity.
Further, a revolution demonstrates that life in its critical dimensions is alterable, it holds out the prospect of humanity perfecting itself. It dramatically expands the notion of what is possible in every sphere, encouraging experimentation and innovation. The Soviet artist Vladimir Tatlin contended that a “revolution strengthens the impulse of invention.” The best youthful forces of art were “touched to the quick,” Trotsky wrote. Describing the experience of the Russian Revolution, he insisted that during “those first years, rich in hope and daring,” the popular masses thought “aloud for the first time in a thousand years.”
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As importantly as anything else, the October Revolution buoyed the spirits of those who believed in and fought for human progress, it gave confidence to the progressive elements in society, it encouraged their belief in themselves and others. Wordsworth’s enthusiastic response to the French Revolution in 1789, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!,” was echoed in the best, most advanced circles following October 1917, if not immediately in most cases. Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Ode to Revolution” came out in 1918. Visual artists Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich both prepared texts for a multilingual journal entitled Art International, which unfortunately was never published.
The revolution encouraged optimism and a trust in humanity, and more generally, an interest in life and all aspects of “succulent” reality. It scattered “the clouds of skepticism and of pessimism.” Encountering heartening developments in the objective world, the artists turn outward toward that world, shed some of their self-centeredness, stop shrinking from reality as it is and develop their interest “in the concrete stability and mobility of life.”
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American literature reached its high point to date in the mid-1920s with the publication of An American Tragedy, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith also appeared in 1925, as did John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer. Upton Sinclair’s uneven Oil! was published two years later. The Harlem Renaissance, a number of whose leading figures were strongly drawn to the October Revolution and the Communist International as the antidote to oppression, flourished during this same period, in such works as Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Langston Hughes’ Weary Blues (1926) and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928).
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The last word goes to Dreiser. In April 1927 he described his motives in writing An American Tragedy:
I had long brooded upon the story, for it seemed to me not only to include every phase of our national life—politics, society, religion, business, sex—but it was a story so common to every boy reared in the smaller towns of America. It seemed so truly a story of what life does to the individual—and how impotent the individual is against such forces. My purpose was not to moralize—God forbid—but to give, if possible, a background and a psychology of reality which would somehow explain, if not condone, how such murders happen—and they have happened with surprising frequency in America as long as I can remember.
Friday is likely the last day of work for thousands of GM workers at the Factory Zero plant in Detroit and the Ultium Cells battery plants in Lordstown, Ohio and Spring Hill, Tennessee. GM is cutting shifts and converting large numbers of temporary layoffs into permanent dismissals as part of a coordinated retrenchment across its EV and battery operations.
Two days after Trump boasted about the “greatest economy in the history of our country” and blamed immigrant workers for every social problem in the US, thousands of GM workers are being thrown in the street.
Approximately 1,145 assembly workers at Factory Zero and 600 workers at the Ultium Cells plant in Lordstown are being laid off indefinitely after the holiday break on January 5. An additional 850 workers in Lordstown and 710 in Spring Hill will be temporarily laid off beginning the same day.
A Factory Zero worker described the devastating social impact of the layoffs to the World Socialist Web Site. “You have people losing their livelihood and their families are depending on that. The rug is swept under your feet with very short notice and very little time to prepare. I came from another state and have been here a year.
“They treat their employees like we’re disposable. GM makes billions because their employees help them to get billions. You can’t throw people away like yesterday’s trash. We slaved here for 10 and a half hours, sometimes 12 hours a day, seven days a week, just for them to say, ‘See you later. We may give you a call next year.’ That’s crazy.”
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United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain and the rest of the UAW bureaucracy have maintained a guilty silence on the massive job cuts. Fain has promoted Trump’s tariffs and sought to divide US workers from their brothers and sisters in Canada, Mexico, China and European countries.
Rank-and-file anger at the UAW is widespread. Workers at both Factory Zero and Lordstown repeatedly said the union “is in bed with management” and has kept them in the dark. Union officials have offered nothing except the possibility of being rehired sometime in the future or being forced to transfer long distances.
History shows that relying on corporate managers, politicians or the union apparatus will not halt corporate restructuring. The 2023 national contract produced nothing but mass layoffs. Closed-door contract talks and patriotic appeals to “protect jobs at home” are the means through which the bureaucracy helps to destroy jobs.
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On Thursday, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees issued a call For a united global movement against layoffs in the auto industry!
It stated:
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) calls on autoworkers around the world to join a unified counteroffensive against the escalating bloodbath of layoffs sweeping the global auto industry.
The defense of the right to a job requires common action on a world scale against the transnational auto companies. This fight requires the building of new organizational structures: rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by workers and based on the independent interests of the working class, not on nationalist collaboration with the capitalist elite.
5. United States: Democrats vote to give Trump $1 trillion for global war
US President Donald Trump signed the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law Thursday, completing the passage of the largest military spending bill in US history—$901 billion, or over $1 trillion when combined with supplemental funding passed earlier this year.
The Senate voted 77-20 on Wednesday to pass the bill. The Democratic leadership, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, voted for the bill. They were joined by Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, both of whom released a video last month calling on military personnel to disobey illegal orders—as Trump was sending the US military on a murder spree off the coast of Latin America.
Citing Trump’s statements about using troops to shoot protesters in America, Slotkin invoked the legacy of the Nuremberg tribunals, which convicted Nazi leaders for war crimes and crimes against peace. But when it came time to vote, this invocation was revealed to be completely meaningless. Slotkin voted to hand Trump the resources to pursue his military adventure against Venezuela.
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Sections of the media have promoted the claim that the NDAA “compels” the release of video footage of the September 2 strike in the Caribbean, in which US forces killed two people clinging to the wreckage of a destroyed boat. This is a fraud. The legislation merely cuts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget by 25 percent unless he releases the footage to congressional committees—a meaningless gesture that Hegseth can easily circumvent.
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The Washington Post—owned by centibillionaire Jeff Bezos—Wednesday published an editorial headlined “Blockading Venezuela is Trump’s best idea yet to squeeze Maduro.” The Post declared that Trump’s blockade of Venezuelan oil shipments is “a more coherent and legally defensible strategy to bring about regime change.”
The Post editorial explicitly endorses regime change—the violent overthrow of a foreign government—as a legitimate aim of US policy. It states: “The best-case scenario remains Maduro retreating to some faraway country, followed by Machado somehow taking charge in Caracas.” María Corina Machado is the leader of the US-backed Venezuelan opposition.
The New York Times, which is aligned with the Democratic Party, this month published a six-part editorial series calling for a major expansion of US military capabilities. It declared that “in the short term, the transformation of the American military may require additional spending, primarily to rebuild our industrial base.” The Times is calling for even greater military spending, framing it as necessary to prepare for war with China.
The Democrats fundamentally agree with Trump’s program of military escalation. Their criticism of the administration is not that it is preparing for a catastrophic war in Latin America, but that it is insufficiently committed to the conflict with Russia in Ukraine, and is threatening to draw down troop levels in Europe. The NDAA includes provisions restricting the Pentagon from reducing US troops in Europe below 76,000—a measure aimed not at opposing Trump’s militarism, but at ensuring that conflict with Russia continues.
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Trump announced Tuesday a “total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into, and out of, Venezuela.” He demanded that Venezuela “return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us”—a statement of intent to rob Venezuela of its oil resources.
The blockade is already having devastating effects. Following the US seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker last week, at least five supertankers originally headed for Venezuela have reversed course. Seven oil tankers at Venezuelan ports have idled for nearly a week. According to the Wall Street Journal, strict enforcement of the blockade would curtail hard-currency inflows, stoking food and fuel shortages while exacerbating inflation, which the IMF estimates will reach nearly 700 percent next year.
Since early September, US forces have killed at least 95 people in 25 separate strikes on boats. On Monday alone the military announced it had struck three more vessels in the eastern Pacific, killing eight people.
In what appears to be another case of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) entrapment, the Intercept reports that FBI agents and informants were intimately involved in a New Year’s bomb plot allegedly orchestrated by a group called the “Turtle Island Liberation Front” (TILF) located in Los Angeles, California.
The TILF appears to be a tiny and relatively new organization. It is unclear how many people are in the group. Prior to last week’s charges the TILF Instagram account had fewer than 1,000 followers and only began posting earlier this year. In one of the few videos on the Instagram account, a person identified as “Mary” states, “Turtle Island Liberation Front is looking for reparations and land back for these indigenous groups...”
According to a Department of Justice criminal complaint, four people, along with an FBI informant and an undercover FBI agent, were planning on testing pipe bombs in the Mojave Desert of Southern California on December 12 in preparation for a New Year’s attack targeting two corporations at five different locations across the United States.
The plot was not aimed at killing anybody. As the complaint notes, the alleged bombers planned to warn any security guards or bystanders before setting off their pipe bombs at midnight on December 31, 2025. The complaint alleges that as of yet planned further attacks in 2026 would be aimed at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles and personnel.
The alleged members of TILF that participated in the bomb plot include Audrey Carroll, Zachary Page, Dante Gaffield and Tina Lai. All four were arrested last week by the FBI while in the Lucerne Valley in the Mojave Desert in western San Bernardino County, California. They are currently facing charges of conspiracy and possession of an unregistered destructive device. If convicted, the accused would face a maximum sentence of five years in prison for conspiracy and up to 10 years for the unregistered destructive device charge.
In the criminal complaint, it is clear that the FBI’s Confidential Human Source (CHS), i.e., informant, played a crucial role in every step of the alleged bomb plot. The affidavit alleges that near the end of November 2025, Carroll provided the CHS with an eight-page handwritten document titled “Operation Midnight Sun” that described the alleged bombing plot. Page was also allegedly present at this same meeting with Carroll and the FBI informant.
The alleged plan called for building pipe bombs, placing them in backpacks and setting off the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) simultaneously at five locations targeting two US corporations across the country at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
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It is unclear from the document how long the FBI informant had been a part of TILF and his specific role. Nothing in the affidavit confirms who first suggested the bomb plot, Carroll or the informant. It is also not clear if the informant participated in planning discussions before November, prompted or steered the plot into a more violent and illegal direction or if some of the bomb-making material and documentation originated with the informant.
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The government alleges that Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF) is an “anti-capitalist, anti-government movement.” To back this claim, the FBI cites posts from the TILF Instagram account, one of which calls for the “working class to rise up” while another states that “direct action is the only way.” It appears only one post on the TILF Instagram references the “working class,” the rest are a mix of radical phraseology, appeals for donations and aborted events.
While the phrase “Turtle Island” originates among some indigenous peoples before European colonization to describe North America, it is only in the last few decades, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, that the term gained political connotations associated with indigenous, decolonization and Native American movements. The movements are oriented to appealing to the US government for tribal recognition, restitution and other agreements within the existing capitalist framework.
In the more recent period, decolonization politics have been cultivated at major universities as a form of middle class identity politics focused on reparations and even reverse migration. This elevation of Native identity above all else is easily adapted into diversity, equity and inclusion frameworks and is attractive to the upper-middle class and professional activists, who reject Marxism and the revolutionary role of the working class.
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There is nothing “left-wing” or anti-capitalist about the alleged actions initiated by TILF. The overthrowing of capitalism and its replacement with socialism will not be accomplished by acts of terrorist violence. Individual acts of terrorism, carried out by one person or by small clandestine groups, provoke intensified state repression and censorship, which is turned against the socialist and working class movement first and foremost.
Under conditions where the Trump administration is widely hated for its unconstitutional and illegal actions, the administration is already trying to use the alleged plot to further attacks on all its opponents.
7. Australia Postal Worker encourages use of Socialism AI
Since its launch on December 12, Socialism AI has been used by workers across different industries and countries to clarify political questions and develop a conscious response to the attacks they face. Grounded in Marxist theory and the historical experiences of the international working class, and drawing on decades of WSWS analysis, the platform is increasingly being taken up as a practical organising tool.
In the interview that follows, an Australian postal worker discusses the relevance of Socialism AI amid the “Amazonification” of postal services and the growing use of AI to intensify exploitation and destroy jobs.
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Postal Worker:
I’m a postal worker from Australia, and over the last five years we have seen postal services around the world transformed into parcel-delivery operations driven by the relentless pursuit of profit. This transformation has had a major impact on the wages, conditions and safety of postal workers internationally.
AI is already being deployed by Australia Post and postal services globally to intensify exploitation and eliminate jobs. Postal operators are following the example set by corporations such as Amazon and UPS, which have introduced AI systems to cut thousands of jobs in order to compete in the cut-throat parcel delivery market.
What we are witnessing is the “Amazonification” of postal services and their conversion into gig-economy-style operations. The result is a race to the bottom, as national postal services compete against one another internationally and against logistics giants like Amazon, UPS and FedEx. Workers everywhere face declining conditions, speed-ups and precarious work.
The same pattern is emerging in every country: cost-cutting, intensified workloads, new technologies rolled out to squeeze labor and eliminate jobs, and privatization where it has not yet occurred.
Under these conditions, the launch of Socialism AI on December 12, 2025 is significant. It offers postal workers something the unions and management never will: clear, accessible political education rooted in Marxist theory, combined with practical guidance for organizing. As the World Socialist Web Site explains, Socialism AI was created to bring the scientific outlook of Marxism to workers worldwide and to serve as “a guide for the building and expansion of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.”
8. Australia: Sunscreen products withdrawn over incorrect safety ratings
Earlier this year the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) halted the sale of 21 sunscreen products in Australia following reports from consumer advocacy group CHOICE that Sun Protection Factor (SPF) ratings on numerous sunscreens were incorrectly labelled.
The SPF number is the ratio of the time it takes for a light‑skinned person to burn while using the sunscreen, compared to the time it takes to burn without it.
CHOICE revealed in June that the SPF ratings of 16 of the 20 sunscreens it tested were well below their labelled claims. This poses serious risks of increased sunburn and melanoma, which is the most dangerous form of skin cancer and responsible for around 75 percent of deaths related to skin cancer.
Two in three Australians are expected to need treatment for various types of skin-related cancers in their lifetimes. According to Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates, over 1,450 people will lose their lives from melanoma this year, proportionally one of the highest rates in the world.
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Manufacturers are not required to get formal TGA pre‑approval before marketing their products. They only have to certify that their sunscreen meets all relevant local standards, by securing evidence from testing organizations to support their products’ SPF and performance claims.
Once these products go on sale, the TGA undertakes what it describes as post‑market surveillance, including reviewing adverse event reports, investigating consumer complaints, auditing manufacturers’ evidence and facilities, and targeted testing when concerns arise.
In other words, the TGA reacts after it receives complaints, rather than preventing problems before products reach consumers. This loose self‑regulatory process is not confined to Australia but is in line with procedures in the United States, the UK and the European Union.
Under these conditions, the manufacturers of sunscreens, pharmaceuticals and other health products, desperate to boost profits and driven by competitive pressures, routinely cut corners. The reliance on private laboratories such as PCR, which are themselves competing for contracts, creates further incentives to deliver favorable results for sponsors, rather than rigorous and transparent science.*****
The false labelling and physical failure of sunscreens—now including Cancer Council’s own children’s product—demonstrate that these issues are not the failure of a few companies or testing facilities but inherent features of a system that promotes self‑regulation, undermining accurate scientific testing and encouraging opaque procedures that prioritise profit over human life and threaten public health.
9. Trump’s border Gestapo target striking workers in Chicago
The provocation by Trump’s fascist Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino was a test to see if the police state measures against immigrants could be deployed against broader sections of the working class.
10. Australian Labor governments exploit Bondi shootings to outlaw anti-genocide protests
Following last Sunday’s terrorist attack at a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australian federal and state Labor governments are rushing to meet demands by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Australian Zionist leaders to crack down on antisemitism. Above all, this is to be the pretext for banning all opposition and protests against the ongoing Israeli crimes and atrocities in Gaza.
As has happened since the genocide began in October 2023, opposition to Zionism and its historic crimes is being falsely conflated with antisemitism, even though many Jews have joined the anti-genocide protests in Australia and around the world, rejecting the lie that the criminal Netanyahu regime represents them.
11. Germany: What next in the school strike against conscription?
Tens of thousands of students have launched a powerful strike against the reintroduction of conscription in Germany, expressing mass opposition to militarism and war. This struggle can succeed only if it is extended to the working class and developed into an international socialist movement against war and capitalism.
12. United States: Postal worker exposes rampant abuse at Illinois post office
After reporting persistent sexual harassment by a supervisor, a female postal worker received thinly veiled death threats and is now being further harassed for continuing to fight to expose the conditions that postal workers face on the job.
13. Germany: Berlin state executive adopts austerity budget and steps up police powers
The two-year budget for 2026–27 continues sweeping cuts to education, health care, social services and culture, while massively expanding the police and security apparatus. The austerity measures expose the role of all the establishment parties and trade unions in enforcing social attacks to finance militarization and the enrichment of the wealthy.
The dispute’s prolonged isolation and subordination to Unite’s bankrupt strategy of appealing to the Labour council to be “reasonable” threatens total defeat.
15. US secures military agreement between Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces and jihadist HTS regime
The Kurdish nationalist Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced Thursday that a preliminary agreement had been reached for three divisions to remain affiliated with them within the military structure of the Syrian Army. The announcement came immediately after the US Congress on Wednesday voted to permanently lift sanctions on Syria, pointing to the decisive role of US imperialism.
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The US’s main objective is to bring the region under full domination to block Russia and China from accessing the Middle East’s resources and trade and energy routes. This policy is being built around an anti-Iran axis—Iran being the principal regional ally of Russia and China—and aims to subject Iran to imperialist domination.
The Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf monarchies were part of this orientation. The ongoing genocide in Gaza and the new colonial plans—the crushing of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the bombing of Yemen, the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria and imperialist attack on Iran—are the consequences of this broad strategy.
Prior to the SDF–HTS agreement and the US Congress decision to lift sanctions, it was announced Saturday that an attack on US soldiers in Palmyra, Syria, had killed two US service members, one US interpreter and two Syrian security personnel. These were reported to be the first US troops killed in conflict in Syria since 2020.
Before the attack, alleged to have been carried out by an ISIS operative who had infiltrated Syrian security forces, US forces and a Syrian military convoy had been conducting a joint patrol. On November 10, US President Donald Trump met with al-Sharaa at the White House, after which it was announced that Syria had joined the international coalition fighting ISIS.
Israel’s media sought to justify its own occupation in Syria by interpreting the attack as a sign that the Damascus regime cannot be trusted. In the Jerusalem Post, Seth J. Frantzman wrote that it is in US interests for the SDF to be integrated with Damascus-backed forces. However, in doing so, ISIS-minded individuals or other radicals must not be allowed to derail this integration.
According to reports, Washington asked Israel not to disrupt US plans in Syria. On Monday, US Ambassador to Ankara and Special Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Citing Israeli press, Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Barrack “outlined US ‘red lines,’ stressing Trump’s desire to see stability there and warning that frequent Israeli operations could risk destabilizing the country.”
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The SDF’s agreement process with the HTS regime is being followed closely by the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Ankara, which continues to exercise military control over various parts of northwest Syria, has so far opposed the SDF’s integration into the Syrian Army as a “separate unit.” Türkiye is pushing for the liquidation of the Syrian Kurdish forces without granting them any legal status and has used its influence over HTS to that end.
In Ankara’s negotiations with Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), to get the organization to lay down its arms, the future of the SDF, which sees Öcalan as its leader, plays an important role. Erdoğan and Öcalan have promoted a reactionary “Turkish, Kurdish, Arab” alliance against Israel’s growing influence in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and the Middle East more generally.
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In an interview with the Jerusalem Post on 7 December, SDF leader Abdi did not address Ankara’s allegations about SDG-Israel ties. He said: “President Trump wants to make Syria great again. In doing so, he must support the SDF. The SDF must be included in the global coalition against ISIS, and the SDF must be included in the new government of Syria.” Abdi added, “US help is greatly needed with the decentralization of power in Syria.”
Backing Trump’s plan “to make Syria great again,” Abdi said of the main force behind Syria’s devastation since 2011, US imperialism, “Stability inside Damascus needs the United States to stay here in Northeast Syria.”
Abdi emphasized readiness to work with the US against Iran: “But although Iran is now weaker, it is still trying to rebuild proxy groups. The SDF is ready to work with the United States and other active powers to protect Syria.”
These statements confirm the World Socialist Web Site’s analysis of the bankruptcy of Kurdish nationalism. The Kurdish movement in Syria and elsewhere, like the Turkish bourgeoisie and state, is a reactionary, NATO- and imperialism-aligned movement, and is inherently incapable of furthering the democratic and social aspirations of the Kurdish people.
Workers in the Middle East of all nationalities, faiths and sects must reject having their fate subordinated to the imperialist powers that have wrecked the region for 35 years, or to their reactionary allies such as Türkiye or Israel, and must unite in the struggle for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East on the basis of their independent class interests.
Six pro-Palestinian political prisoners on hunger strike in Britain remain in acute danger of death, as the Labour government washes its hands of their fate.
Held in several prisons, the participants in Palestine Action (PA) protests prior to the group’s proscription by the Labour government are demanding immediate bail, the right to a fair trial, an end to censorship of their communications, the de-proscription of PA and the closing of all UK sites run by Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit.
Remand prisoners, they have not been convicted of any crime and are innocent until proven guilty. If they do not die first, many will spend close to two years locked up before facing trial.
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Death due to lack of food usually occurs after 60-70 days but can come much sooner. Martin Hurson, an Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoner in Long Kesh prison, died after 46 days of his hunger strike in 1981. Prior to December 11, five of the hunger strikers had already been hospitalized.
At a press conference organised by the strikers’ families Thursday, Dr James Smith, a qualified emergency physician and lecturer at University College London, told reporters bluntly, “The hunger strikers are dying.” He added that he was “alarmed by accounts of substandard monitoring and treatment within the prison system.”
The day before, 20-year-old Qesser Zuhrah was taken to hospital on the 46th day of her hunger strike. It took a sustained protest outside HMP Bronzefield in Surrey—including Zarah Sultana, a Your Party Member of Parliament—to secure even this.
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Labour’s response has been sadistic. Justice Secretary David Lammy has stonewalled attempts by lawyers, medical professionals and politicians to even secure a meeting on the situation.
By Thursday almost 900 doctors, nurses, therapists and carers had written to Lammy, Health Secretary Wes Streeting, senior NHS officials and senior prison officials to demand action to save the lives of the hunger strikers. They backed a letter from the strikers’ lawyers who warned the previous week: “without resolution, there is the real and increasingly likely potential that young British citizens will die in prison, having never even been convicted of an offense”.
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Starmer’s Labour Party is less concerned to show a trace of sympathy and concern than even Margaret Thatcher’s government was at the height of British imperialism’s “Dirty War” against the Irish Republican Army. She felt obliged to couple a policy of starving to death 10 IRA prisoners demanding political prisoner status with public statements insisting, “The Government is not the inflexible party in this issue,” as she wrote in a public letter to Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich.
Her government had, she claimed, “repeatedly made clear how much they regret the loss of life through all forms of violence in Northern Ireland”, “introduced important and humane changes in the prison regime last year” and “allowed the three Dublin TDs, the ECHR representatives and the Pope’s representative to visit the Maze” where the prisoners were kept.
Thatcher’s worshippers in today’s governing Labour Party see no need for such face-saving hypocrisy, rejecting all pleas to intervene and prevent the deaths of young protesters who have not been found guilty of anything. Starmer is more policeman than politician.
The Socialist Equality Party and International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) reiterate our call: “A counteroffensive in defence of democratic and social rights and against war and genocide cannot be left to the heroic self-sacrifice of a few. Their cause is the cause of the entire working class and student youth, which must be mobilized in their defense.”
Postal workers were told to print glossy posters, pose for photographs, and help get #PostalWorkersDay trending.
18. Technology and the working class: Responding to an opponent of Socialism AI
The public launch of Socialism AI on December 12, 2025 has generated a significant response internationally, with thousands of workers and youth engaging with the tool over the past week. The overwhelming sentiment has been one of enthusiasm and intense interest in the various ways to utilize this powerful technology to develop socialist consciousness and elevate the political and organizational level of the international working class.
At the same time, this historic initiative has encountered an angry response from a section of middle class opponents of AI technology.
One of our critics, “Dmitri,” posted a denunciation of Socialism AI in the comments sections of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). His comment merits attention because he utilizes technical jargon that is intended to persuade readers that he is well informed on the subject of AI.
In fact, his criticisms prove precisely the opposite. Dmitri’s remarks, notwithstanding his use of technical jargon, exemplify the widespread lack of understanding of AI and hostility to the Marxist approach to technology within the milieu of middle class radicalism. In order to refute the misrepresentation of how Socialism AI works, we are reposting Dmitri’s criticism, followed by the WSWS’s reply.
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The WSWS:
A system like Socialism AI... utilizing RAG [retrieval-augmented generation] and other advanced techniques to establish a structured hierarchy of ideas, does not merely “blend” tokens, but rather uses its high-dimensional understanding to ground its logic in the specific, auditable archive of the Marxist movement. This model, consciously oriented to Marxist analysis, differs qualitatively from one that treats Marx and Murdoch as equivalent tokens in a corpus.
While commercial platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity are engineered to project bourgeois ideology and corporate bias by default, Socialism AI has been designed to represent the voice of the international working class. By utilizing the most advanced techniques available to contemporary science, it transforms this technology into a powerful pedagogical instrument for revolutionary theoretical clarification. It is not a commercial chatbot for idle chatter, but a consciously constructed weapon of intellectual self-defense for workers and youth worldwide.
Having assembled his shallow observations, the critic concludes by mocking AI users as dupes of linguistic “bullshit.” What an elegant use of metaphor! But no serious researcher confuses linguistic fluency with consciousness. The practical question is not whether a model “thinks,” but whether it can augment human thought. Here the practical, real-world evidence is decisive. AI systems already assist millions of scientists, historians, educators and workers in organizing and deepening their intellectual labor in countless domains. That they can also produce empty verbiage is not proof of fraudulence but of the social conditions and methods under which they are used.
At the philosophical level, the critic’s worldview is plainly idealist. It treats linguistic mediation as contamination, language as illusion, and technology as an alien force rather than a crystallization of human labor. Marxism, by contrast, sees tools as historically evolving mediators of social practice, from the plow and press to the microchip. The political task is never abstinence from technology but its conscious appropriation by the working class. To sneer that “chatbots are bullshit machines” is thus not critique but petty-bourgeois frustration, a cynical gesture of impotent anger before the new productive forces developing under capitalism.
Fundamentally, this criticism reflects a form of romantic anti-capitalism whose critique of the existing social order is of a conservative and even reactionary character. By recoiling from the complex productive forces developed under capitalism, such a view implicitly yearns for a pre-technological past that never existed. It confuses the destructive social relations of capitalism with the technological instruments themselves, leading not to a struggle for their mastery, but to a futile politics of abstention and despair.
The basic issue concerns not mathematical mechanisms but political function. What role can a system like Socialism AI play in the education and self-clarification of the working class? The critic exhibits not only indifference but also hostility to the revolutionary potential of Socialism AI as an instrument that can be used by the working class for education, organization and action. It is a consciously constructed pedagogical instrument, designed to make the accumulated body of Marxist theory and socialist history dynamically accessible to workers and youth across the world. For the first time, a coherent assembly of the vast revolutionary Marxist-Trotskyist tradition can be explored through dialogue. It is self-evident to all those who are politically serious and oriented to the development of socialist consciousness in the working class that this represents a qualitative advance in the ability to accelerate political education and theoretical assimilation.
The historical significance of Socialism AI is sharply revealed when examined in the objective context of its public launch, amid the deepening world capitalist crisis. The working class faces a highly complex economic, geopolitical and social reality, while traditional centers of study and discussion have been thoroughly dismantled by the bourgeoisie. Under these circumstances, a system that can synthesize and connect the insights of Marxist theory with current developments is no mere novelty. It is a means of intellectual counter-attack, of recovering the historical memory of the working-class movement.
Finally, technological development itself is historical, not static. Socialism AI will continually evolve as architectures, retrieval systems and alignment methods improve. Like the printing press or the telegraph, its full social potential will emerge through struggle and conscious direction. This is entirely consistent with Marx’s conception of the productive forces, which he argued become emancipatory only when appropriated consciously by the revolutionary class.
19. Support the fight for socialism in 2026: Donate to the WSWS New Year Fund!
The World Socialist Web Site calls on all of its readers to make as large a donation as possible to the WSWS New Year Fund.
The year 2025 is coming to a close, and 2026 is beginning, under conditions of escalating global crisis.
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In this context, the World Socialist Web Site is absolutely essential. The WSWS not only provides daily commentary and analysis on the essential political issues facing the working class, but actively intervenes in the struggles of workers and youth—the fight by postal and auto workers in the US against mass layoffs and the industrial slaughterhouse in America; the mass protests of young people against the resurgence of fascism and the promotion of the far-right AfD in Germany; the growing anger of workers in Sri Lanka to the humanitarian disaster caused by Cyclone Ditwah; and countless other expressions of opposition.
The WSWS brings into the struggles of workers and young people a historical and political perspective, and fights for a program that targets the problem at its source: the capitalist system.
On December 12, the WSWS launched Socialism AI, a truly historic advance, a tool for education and for action, connecting the daily experiences of the working class to the revolutionary lessons of the past in order to prepare the fight for the future.
At a time when corporations use AI to carry out mass layoffs, wage war and censor dissent, Socialism AI is being used for the opposite purpose: to apply augmented intelligence to the task of educating, organizing and mobilizing the working class.
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In 2026, everything depends on what we do. The fight for socialism requires organization, political perspective. Nothing happens automatically. Capitalism is leading mankind once again to the question of questions: Socialism or barbarism?
Take a stand. Make your donation today. Support the World Socialist Web Site New Year Fund. Support the fight to arm the working class with the perspective and program of world socialist revolution.
20. 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.
