The official death toll in the catastrophic fire that engulfed seven
high-rise residential buildings of Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po, Hong Kong
rose to 151 on Monday.
Over 2,000 survivors have lost everything
and are now homeless. Hundreds are housed in converted COVID isolation
shelters on the runway of the old Kai Tak airport.
Fourteen people connected to the engineering company and the
scaffolding subcontractor carrying out renovation work on the exterior
walls at Wang Fuk Court have been arrested on charges of manslaughter in
an ongoing investigation into the causes of the fire.
Investigators
have determined that, among other violations, the contractors used
illegal, highly flammable netting on the bamboo scaffolding that encased
the buildings. The flames spread from the netting to styrofoam boards
covering the windows, which acted as an accelerant spreading the fire
throughout the building. The homes of thousands had been wrapped in
tinder.
Over the weekend, an unmistakable but unremarked change
swept Hong Kong. The green netting that surrounds every construction and
renovation site was being quietly taken down; bales of the stuff lie on
street corners. The skeletons of bamboo scaffolding stand stark
throughout much of the city. It is a tacit admission of the ubiquity of
the use of substandard and illegal materials, and indicates the degree
of failure of government oversight and lax enforcement.
*****
The broad democratic impulses that exist in Hong Kong are certainly
not a product of British colonial rule, nor its re-integration by the
ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) in Beijing, which implemented
modestly expanded direct legislative elections. Rather, they are the
legacy of hard-fought battles by the working class which staged general
strikes and mass protest actions in coordination with workers in
Guangzhou in the first half of the 20th century.
Beijing presides
over the reintegration of Hong Kong with the mainland under the mantra
“one country, two systems.” Under this rubric it has preserved the Basic
Law drawn up with Britain, maintaining a certain political autonomy for
the Special Administrative Region. The fundamental concern for Beijing
is that Hong Kong continue to serve as a connecting point for the free
flow of international finance capital; all other considerations are
subordinate to this.
What Beijing fears most of all is the social
contamination of unrest spilling across the border. The Greater Bay Area
of the Pearl River Delta from the Mainland of Shenzhen and Guangzhou to
the islands of Macau and down the Kowloon peninsula to Hong Kong is a
single economic unit. The spark of working class resistance at any point
could spread the conflagration of revolution throughout Southern China.
*****
While the horrors of the Wang Fuk Court fire are cloaked in the
particularities of bamboo scaffolding and green netting, it is not only a
Hong Kong event. The inferno in Tai Po is a local eruption of a global
crisis. Capitalism is producing catastrophe upon catastrophe for the
working class.
The most obvious and striking parallel is the
Grenfell Tower fire in London, the 2017 conflagration that incinerated
72 people. The green netting of Wang Fuk corresponds to the flammable
cladding of the Grenfell-encased working class housing. Both exemplify
the cramped homes of the expendable.
Engels, writing The Conditions of the Working Class in England
in 1845, coined the phrase “social murder” for the process whereby
capitalism placed hundreds and thousands of workers in conditions that
led to their “too early and unnatural death.” It is precisely apt.
The catastrophes of Wang Fuk Court and Grenfell are spectacular
eruptions of the miserable, and entirely preventable, world housing
crisis. They are not mere excesses, not simply failures of regulation.
They are an inescapable part of capitalism. For capitalism, what is an
act of murder is at the same time a routine cost of doing business. A
mass death toll is intrinsic to the functioning of the system.
Cost-cutting,
assembly line speed ups, real estate swindles and mass
evictions—capitalism is driven to these measures by its own inherent
logic of competition and profit-making. The capitalist who will not
employ these measures will be displaced by one who will, and the stock
exchange will rise.
Around the globe those that construct and tend the glittering
excesses of finance—in Hong Kong, the bank towers of Central Hong Kong
and the mansions of the Peak—these workers live in hovels, in cages.
They gather for the family dinner in homes surrounded by flammable
netting.
Capitalism has urbanized the world, but in a grotesquely unequal and irrational manner.
Around
300 human beings—fathers, grandmothers, infant children, migrant
workers—were incinerated in their homes at Grenfell and Wang Fuk Court.
How many millions more die of disease in the squalor of shantytowns and
slums of the world? The threadbare possessions of evicted tenants are
thrown into the streets in America under the watchful eye of the police.
Even
in its centers of concentrated wealth, capitalism routinely cannot
provide homes to the working class with potable water, or factory
workplaces safe from maiming and death. The infrastructure for flood
control in countries subject to the ravages of typhoons – the
Philippines, Sri Lanka, Vietnam—is criminally undeveloped and
ill-maintained, and thousands of working people die each year as floods
engulf their homes.
All is subject to the profit motive. There is
no other governing principle under capitalism. Human lives must not be
measured by its metrics.
The Gelfand Case, as an element of Security and the Fourth International
investigation more broadly, was part of a turning point in the history
of the Fourth International since Trotsky’s death. It marked the
beginning of the end of the period in which the opportunists and
revisionists had in some respects the upper hand. It was a
counter-offensive by a principled, serious, revolutionary tendency in
the process of maturing, prepared to stand its ground against the
compromised old organizations and their leaderships as well as against
the state.
*****
In the US legal system, like many others around the world, the person
who files a lawsuit is called a “plaintiff” and the people who are
being sued are called “defendants.” In his complaint, Gelfand named as
“defendants” the US government, represented by the Attorney General, the
heads of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, and the National Security Agency. He also named the SWP
and the individual SWP leaders and members who had played a role in his
expulsion.
The list of defendants in the Gelfand Case included
Griffin Bell, then the US Attorney General; William H. Webster, director
of the FBI under the Carter administration (1977–1981); Stansfield
Turner, the Director of Central Intelligence under the Carter
administration, previously the Supreme Allied Commander, NATO, Southern
Europe (1975–1977); and Vice Admiral Bobby Inman, director of the NSA
under Carter.
The
SWP leaders who were named as defendants included Jack Barnes, Larry
Siegle, and Doug Jeness. Hansen, who had been the SWP’s national
secretary, died in January 1979, after Gelfand’s expulsion and before
the case was filed. Barnes was the national secretary at the time the
case was filed, but he would go on to expressly repudiate Trotskyism by
the end of 1982.
Among the other SWP members who were named in the
lawsuit as defendants was notably Peter Camejo. Camejo had been the SWP
presidential candidate in the 1976 election, and he would go on to play
a prominent role in California politics. He ran three times for
governor on a Green Party ticket and was a vice-presidential candidate
for Ralph Nader in 2004.
Gelfand filed the case on his own behalf individually and was the only
plaintiff. If there was ever a caption to a legal case that resembled David v. Goliath,
it was this case: Gelfand, the young lawyer who had just been admitted
to the bar in 1974, versus the national leadership of the SWP together
with the leadership of the entire national security apparatus of US
imperialism.
The United Nations committee on torture has said that Israel has “a
de facto state policy of organised and widespread torture” and
ill-treatment that has gravely intensified since October 7, 2023.
It
expressed “deep concern over allegations of repeated severe beatings,
dog attacks, electrocution, waterboarding, use of prolonged stress
positions [and] sexual violence,” as well as the impunity of Israeli
security forces for war crimes.
*****
While the IDF claims that it investigates all allegations of abuse,
its top lawyer has brought no prosecutions against soldiers for killing
civilians. This is even after high-profile attacks that have prompted
international outrage and were clearly in breach of international
humanitarian law, including the killing of hundreds of medical and
health care workers and 562 aid workers, not to mention tens of
thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Only one Israeli soldier has
been prosecuted and convicted, receiving a seven-month sentence for
assaulting detainees from Gaza. Five other soldiers have been charged
with aggravated abuse and causing serious bodily harm to a detainee at
the Sde Teiman detention centre—downgraded from initial allegations of
rape—after footage of soldiers raping a blindfolded Palestinian detainee
and causing serious injuries was leaked to the Israeli media last year.
This is deliberate policy. Last month, there was uproar after Maj.
Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the IDF’s top lawyer, revealed that it was
she who leaked the infamous video. She became the target of a right-wing
campaign of vilification, arrest and possible prosecution that had
already mobilised in defence of the IDF criminals.
That the Arab
regimes along with the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and
Fatah’s Central Committee have remained silent about Israel’s abuse and
torture of prisoners testifies to their perfidy and collusion with
Israel in suppressing the Palestinians.
The silence of world
leaders and the corporate media about Israel’s abuse and torture of
Palestinian prisoners is confirmation of their complicity in Israel’s
genocidal assault on Gaza and its escalating attacks on the West Bank.
Israel enjoys the support of all the imperialist powers that are now
themselves slashing democratic rights and freedom of speech to suppress
all opposition to their domestic and foreign policies. As far as they
too are concerned international humanitarian law and the Geneva
Convention drawn up in the aftermath of World War II are a dead letter.
Keir Starmer’s Labour government’s preparation for an assault on the
historic right of trial by jury in Britain was exposed last week in a
leaked Ministry of Justice internal briefing from Justice Secretary
David Lammy.
According to the document, Lammy, who is also the
deputy prime minister, aims to introduce legislation to end jury trials
for all cases carrying a maximum sentence of less than five years.
The proposals must be understood alongside the Labour government’s
accelerating preparations for war abroad and for major conflict with the
working class at home.
*****
Should the plans be enacted, instead of jury trials, a new tier of
courts, the Crown Court Bench Division, would be created between
magistrates courts and Crown Courts, to hear cases that did not involve
murder, rape or manslaughter charges. The proposals are based on those
floated earlier this year in a report
from retired judge, Sir Brian Leveson, and are being presented as a
response to backlogs in the legal system meaning that cases can wait
four or five years before going to court. Some 78,000 cases are reported
as currently awaiting trial.
Commissioned in 2024, Leveson’s
report complained that reduced numbers of courts and court staff, poorly
maintained court buildings, disorganisation in the justice system
exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, “pro-active policing” policies of
successive governments, along with greater complexity of cases and new
forms of evidence all combined to make jury trials take twice as long as
in 2000. The years long backlog of cases meant that “justice delayed is
justice denied.”
Leveson’s recommendations included a series of
pragmatic measures, such as more “Out of Court Settlements”, streamlined
digital processes to facilitate those, further investment in drug and
alcohol misuse rehabilitation services, more encouragement towards
rehabilitation, out of court resolutions for minor offenses and similar
measures.
Leveson also proposed restricting the “right to elect”
for a jury trial to cases with maximum sentences of over three years.
The right of appeal would also be curtailed to a more restrictive
“permission” to appeal.
Lammy’s proposals go further. The justice
secretary is seeking to increase the jury trial threshold to cases
carrying sentences of five years imprisonment or over. Leveson also
proposed that juries would be replaced by a trial judge and two
magistrates. This token safeguard, it is reported, has also been
abandoned by Lammy who is suggesting a single judge could preside over
most cases, with juries being reserved only for the most serious crimes
such as murder and manslaughter.
Lammy’s measures were denounced
from within the legal profession itself, with comments warning of the
threat to the legitimacy of the legal system itself.
The Law Society warned, “Our society’s concept of justice rests heavily
on lay participation in determining a person’s guilt or innocence.
Allowing a single person to take away someone’s liberty for a lengthy
period or decide a potentially life changing complaint would be a
dramatic departure from our shared values.”
*****
In a parallel expression of the Labour government’s anti-democratic clampdown, the Guardian reported on the removal of the judge presiding over a judicial review challenging the ban on Palestine Action.
Justice
Martin Chamberlain, described by Defend Our Juries as “widely respected
for his fairness and independence,” will be replaced by Dame Victoria
Sharp, Justices Karen Steyn and Sir Jonathan Swift.
According to Novara
media, Chamberlain has no scheduling conflicts, and the judiciary press
office refused to offer any comment when approached by the Guardian.
Swift is most known for his 2023 rejection of Julian Assange’s appeal
against extradition, and his 2022 ruling in favor of the then Tory
government’s brutal plan to deport failed asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Steyn ruled in June in favor of government exports of F-35 fighter jet
components to Israel amid the ongoing genocide. Sharp’s twin brother is a
former banker, adviser to Boris Johnson and a multi-millionaire Tory
donor. The judicial review began November 26.
London, Ontario police carried out coordinated pre-dawn raids on
November 25 against four homes across southern Ontario, targeting
members of the anti-war and Palestinian-solidarity group World Beyond
War (WBW). The raids bring to six the number of peace activists charged
in relation to a protest of more than 100 people against the Best
Defence Conference in London at the end of October, an arms-industry
gathering attended by Israeli-linked weapons manufacturers and Canadian
military officials.
The sweeping operation saw officers burst into
homes at 6 a.m., frighten children, seize personal electronic devices
and haul activists hours away from their communities.
The World Socialist Web Site
and the Socialist Equality Party (Canada) unequivocally condemn these
raids and charges. They represent a serious escalation of state
repression aimed at criminalizing anti-war and anti-genocide dissent
under conditions where the Canadian government is deeply implicated in
US-led wars around the world and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. All charges
must be dropped immediately.
*****
In its own account, WBW describes officers waking families before dawn,
crowding into small homes, harassing parents, disturbing disabled
residents and seizing every electronic device in sight. These were
intimidation raids carried out to send a message that opposition to war
will be punished.
*****
The London police statements are shot through with
politically-motivated exaggerations and insinuations. A handful of
activists allegedly damaged electronic locks or threw paint, acts that
are insignificant next to the industrial-scale violence of the
corporations and military officials being protected by the police,
companies profiting from the arming of the Zionist regime in Israel as
it commits genocide, and Canadian military officers providing training,
intelligence and logistical support.
The London raids form part of a broader pattern of repression unfolding across Canada.
*****
The Liberal government can tolerate no opposition to war under
conditions in which it is enforcing a massive increase in military
spending unprecedented since World War II. With the backing of the New
Democrats and trade unions, Carney’s government just passed a budget
containing over $80 billion in additional military spending over the
coming five years aimed at equipping Canadian imperialism to secure its
share of the spoils in a rapidly escalating third world war.
*****
The lessons of the past two years of anti-genocide and anti-war
protests in Canada and internationally must be drawn. Despite enormous
public opposition to Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza
Palestinians, and despite countless appeals to Liberal cabinet
ministers, NDP MPs, municipal officials and international bodies, the
slaughter and dispossession continue unabated. Protest alone, especially
when subordinated to moral appeals to the very governments and
corporate CEOs arming the Zionist state, cannot halt imperialist war and
genocide.
The working class requires its own independent
organizations of struggle. Rank-and-file committees must be established
in workplaces, campuses and neighborhoods to unite workers against war,
austerity and repression. These committees must be guided by a socialist
program that links opposition to militarism with the fight against the
capitalist system that breeds war.
The criminalization of anti-war
activism flows from the preparations of the ruling class for a global
conflict against Russia and China. The fight to defend the WBW activists
and oppose war and genocide is inseparable from the struggle to build
an international revolutionary political movement of the working class
against capitalism’s descent into barbarism.
Less than two weeks after her election as Seattle mayor, Katie Wilson
has made clear she would accept a White House meeting with President
Donald Trump if invited.
The declaration by the self-described
“socialist” comes amid mounting mass opposition to the Trump
administration’s fascistic assault on social services, healthcare and
democratic rights, along with the accelerating war drive. It reveals the
character of her politics and her administration’s accommodation to the
capitalist establishment.
Wilson made her statement welcoming a dialogue with Trump in a November 22 interview with the Seattle Times.
“I’ll meet with anyone,” Wilson said. “I mean, he’s the president of
the United States.” Her response came the day after New York Mayor-elect
Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, met
with Trump and declared a “partnership” with Trump.
*****
Wilson’s touted “bold progressive agenda” has been limited to
attempts to reforming public transit, proposing minor tax hikes and
suggesting the need for emergency housing assistance. When challenged
about her previous call for cutting funding to the Seattle Police
Department, Wilson abandoned the pledge almost immediately, stating that
she had “learned a lot since then.”
One of the initiatives with
which Wilson is associated is the effort to “Trump-Proof Seattle” in
2017, when she worked alongside Kshama Sawant,
who at the time was on the Seattle City Council and a member of
Socialist Alternative, which operates in the orbit of the Democratic
Party. With Trump’s return to power, Wilson revived the “Trump-Proof
Seattle” banner, now saying it was necessary to “think about how to
protect ourselves and our neighbors from the actions of an even more
virulent federal administration.”
Not only are such words undercut
by Wilson’s own willingness to talk with Trump, it’s undercut by the
actions of the administration to which Wilson has no answer. There have
been at least 1,000 ICE arrests in Washington this year, and the
agency’s own data shows that at least two-thirds of those picked up have
not committed a crime.
*****
Wilson’s election reflected working class anger at social inequality.
Workers and youth who supported her campaign were expressing their
hatred of the current socioeconomic order and their search for a
socialist alternative. However, they will not find it in Wilson.
While
Wilson is not a member of the DSA like Mamdani, her politics are the
same. She promotes the fiction that the interests of workers and youth
can be advanced through the Democratic Party. In class terms, these
figures represent sections of the upper middle class, not the working
class.
Amidst a broad political radicalization in the US and
internationally, the experiences of these elections must be drawn, as
part of the development of a political movement of the working class, in
opposition to the oligarchy and the entire political system, on the
basis of a genuine and revolutionary socialist program and perspective.
The Yarram sawmill, which cut softwood for products like pallets and
fencing, has been operating since 1996, passing through several
different corporate owners before AKD acquired it in 2018.
No
clear explanation has been given for the sudden shutdown of the sawmill.
The 2023 closure of the Opal paper mill an hour away in Maryvale, which
had been purchasing wood chips from the Yarram plant may well have
contributed.
*****
Yarram sawmill workers and local residents told World Socialist Web Site
reporters they had been blindsided by the sudden closure of the plant,
which had been training new staff, had recently been upgraded, and
appeared to be in full operation.
One local said the company had
“been planning it for sure. They were really holding it close to their
chest, because everyone was in the dark.”
*****
The closure of the Yarram sawmill, the second largest employer—after
supermarket chain Woolworths—in the town of over 2,000 people, threatens
to cascade through the local district, adding to the ongoing employment
crisis in the Gippsland region.
*****
The shutdown and destruction of jobs in Yarram can and must be
fought, but it will require a fight to mobilise the support of workers
at the other AKD facilities in Colac, Caboolture, Tumut and Oberon,
throughout the timber industry and more broadly.
The material
basis for this support is that the sudden Yarram closure is not a unique
phenomenon, but part of a global attack on the working class. It is a
reminder that, under capitalism, no worker is safe from being thrown on
the scrapheap without notice, according to the profit imperatives of
corporations and their shareholders.
With the votes of the governing Christian Democratic Union/Christian
Social Union (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD), the Bundestag,
Germany’s federal parliament, passed the budget for 2026 on Friday. It
is a war budget. Eighty years after the unprecedented crimes of the
Wehrmacht and Hitlerite fascism, the ruling class is once again pursuing
a massive rearmament program that breaks with all post-war
restrictions and is systematically preparing Germany for a third world
war—with Russia as its main target.
Defense spending will rise to
€108.2 billion next year—the highest military budget in the history of
the Federal Republic. It consists of the regular defense budget of
€82.69 billion and an additional €25.51 billion from the Bundeswehr’s
(German Armed Forces) special fund approved in 2022. Compared to 2025
alone, this means an increase of more than €20 billion.
This
historic increase is the prelude to a gigantic rearmament program that, in terms of its scale and objectives, is openly modelled on the
Nazi war machine of the 1930s. By 2029, the defense budget is set to
rise to more than €150 billion. If we add the “infrastructure-related”
war expenditures in the transport, research and economics ministries,
around five percent of Germany’s gross domestic product will then be
spent on military purposes—around €215 billion annually.
*****
The biggest beneficiaries of the budget are the German arms
companies—the same ones that already armed Hitler’s Wehrmacht. According
to the latest SIPRI Arms Trade Report, the four German companies in the
ranking—Rheinmetall, Diehl, ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems and
Hensoldt—already increased their revenues from arms sales by 36 percent
last year.
*****
In his speech on the military budget in the Bundestag, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius made clear the comprehensive imperialist goals
pursued by the German government. First, in the style of a warmongering
militarist during the First World War, he railed against a “capitulation
peace” in Ukraine: “There must be no false peace, no capitulation
peace.”
This is the familiar propaganda that turns reality on its
head and obscures the predatory interests of German imperialism. As in
the German Empire and under Hitler, the aim is to dominate Europe
militarily in order to become a world power. The immediate focus is on
the escalation of war against Russia, but the conflict with the US is
also coming to a head with Trump’s Ukraine deal, which Pistorius made no
secret of in his speech.
He declared: “We must redefine our
position on the geopolitical chessboard. We do not know which alliances
we can still trust in the future and how long they will last.” NATO must
therefore “become more European” and Europeans must “do more for our defense.” In other words, Germany and the EU must build up an
independent military power that can act independently of Washington if
necessary.
The extent to which preparations for war have already progressed is underlined by a recent report in the Wall Street Journal.
Under the headline “Germany’s Secret Plan for War With Russia,” the
newspaper describes how the more than 1,200-page “Operation Plan
Germany” (OPLAN DEU) was developed.
The plan describes in detail
how, in the event of war, up to 800,000 German, US and NATO soldiers are
to be deployed to the east via ports, highways, rivers and rail lines.
Germany is being organized as the central hub of a future NATO ground
war against Russia. The concept calls for an “all-of-society approach to
war:” the merging of civilian and military infrastructure and the mobilization of the entire society for war.
The working class is
to pay for the war policy in every respect: As cannon fodder on the
battlefield and in the form of massive attacks on social and democratic
rights to finance and enforce the war policy. Nevertheless, the war
plans are supported by all parties in the Bundestag.
*****
The massive rearmament and war preparations are meeting with growing
opposition among the population. Strikes and protests are forming
throughout Europe—in Belgium and Italy, where general strikes lasting
several days took place last week, in France, and increasingly in
Germany as well.
The nominally “left” parties, trade unions and
pseudo-left organizations, which in some cases verbally support the
strikes and protests, do not represent the interests of workers and
youth, but seek to control them and subordinate them to the capitalist
governments. But the warmongering of the ruling class stems from the
capitalist profit system itself, which is in a historic crisis and, as
in the past, is relying on fascism and war.
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) and
its European and international sister parties in the International
Committee of the Fourth International are the only force consistently
opposing this path to catastrophe. We give voice to the opposition to
war and link it to the necessary political perspective: the building of
an international socialist movement to overthrow the capitalist
system—the only way to prevent a Third World War.
Trincomalee is a major city in the Eastern Province, where Tamils,
Muslims, and Sinhalese live. The erection of a Buddhist shrine was a
deliberate provocation with the potential to ignite communal tensions
between Sinhala-Buddhists and the Tamil and Muslim communities that form
a majority in the province.
The North and East were devastated by
the 26-year communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which ended in May 2009. As part of the systematic
discrimination against Tamils, successive Colombo governments
established Sinhala colonies, particularly in the East, in a bid to
change demographic patterns and foster communal tensions. Since the end
of the war, Buddhist monks have been seeking to re-establish “their
heritage” and expand their influence in the north and east.
*****
The Colombo political establishment has long used Sinhala supremacist
ideology and anti-Tamil chauvinism to bolster their support and divide
the working class, particularly in times of crisis. All of the
opposition parties immediately joined the fray, condemning the removal
of statue as an attack on Buddhism.
Speaking in the parliament,
the opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, from the Samagi Jana Balawegaya
(SJB), demanded that the government uphold the constitution and the
supremacy of Buddhism. Sections of the establishment media joined in the
filthy communal campaign.
In response, the Tamil nationalist
parties opposed the government’s actions on the basis of their own
communal politics. ITAK spokesperson M.A. Sumanthiran called on all
Tamil members of the government to resign immediately, declaring that
the government’s support for the placement of the statue exposed its
claims to be fostering equality for all.
*****
Amid the ongoing furor, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake appeared
in parliament on November 18. The Buddha statue, he said, had been
“replaced” at the original location and “everything related to this
issue has now been resolved.” The government would act according to the
verdict of the court to be delivered on December 26.
“We do not
allow communalism,” Dissanayake lyingly declared. “If someone is trying
to revive old communalism, they will not be allowed at present or in the
future.” In fact, the JVP has been steeped in Sinhala supremacism since
its formation in 1966 and an aggressive and violent “patriotic”
defender of the “Sinhala nation,” particularly during the protracted
communal war against the LTTE.
However, as it sought to win power
for the first time last year, the JVP—together with its electoral front,
the NPP—drawn from layers of the upper middle class—attempted to put on
a democratic and liberal face and whitewash its past. The aim was to
boost its vote among Tamils and Muslims and get the backing of sections
of big business.
A year on, the government’s promises about
democracy and reconciliation have been jettisoned. The North and East of
the island are still under military occupation. The political prisoners
are in jails despite JVP/NPP’s pledge to release them. Those
responsible for war crimes and atrocities of the Sri Lankan military
have not been held accountable.
*****
Now the JVP/NPP government has caved into the demands of the Sinhala
Buddhist supremacists over the statue in Trincomalee. Dissanayake’s
“opposition” to communalism is empty political posturing.
The Sri
Lankan ruling class confronts a deepening political and economic crisis.
The JVP/NPP government is intensifying the implementation of the
International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) demands for devastating austerity
measures. It will resort to anti-Tamil chauvinism to whip up communal
provocations and divisions as it faces mass opposition from workers and
the rural poor to the destruction of jobs and their living conditions.
The
Socialist Equality Party (SEP) opposes all forms of racialism and
nationalism and urges Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim workers to learn the
lessons from the bloody consequences of the past—above all the 30-year
communal war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
It is only
the working class in the fight for socialism that will defend the basic
democratic rights of all. Workers need to unite and rally the rural poor
and oppressed in the struggle for a workers’ and peasants’ government
that will restructure society from top to bottom to meet the needs of
the vast majority, not the profits of the wealthy few—that is, along
socialist lines.
Protesters thwarted a federal immigration raid in New York City on
Saturday, despite a violent crackdown by the New York Police Department
(NYPD), overseen by Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s re-appointed police
commissioner, Jessica Tisch.
The spontaneous protest erupted
outside a parking garage in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where agents from
Trump’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were
preparing to launch their second large-scale immigration raid in six
weeks. A crowd of roughly 200 people formed human chains and barricades
made of trash to block the convoy of agents from exiting the garage.
The
NYPD responded by deploying its notorious Strategic Response Group,
which is known for using militarized tactics to suppress protests, to
aid the immigration Gestapo. Officers forcibly cleared a path for the
agents, violently assaulting demonstrators who refused to move,
deploying pepper spray and arresting more than a dozen people.
Ultimately, the protest succeeded in forcing the federal agents to call
off the raid and retreat to New Jersey.
Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition,
summarized the role of both federal agents and police. “The violence
that occurred today could have been avoided had ICE agents not escalated
tensions,” he said. “But instead of holding federal agents accountable
for their aggressive tactics, the NYPD instead helped facilitate ICE’s
campaign of terror. ICE must stop wreaking havoc across New
York—separating families and harming our communities. The NYPD must
immediately release the New Yorkers who they arrested, and stop all
collaboration with ICE.”
*****
The significance of Saturday’s NYPD operation under Tisch is that it
strips away the rhetorical pretense and bares the political reality of
Mamdani’s incoming administration.
As of Monday, Mamdani has made no public comment on the ICE raid or
the NYPD’s role in defending it. His transition spokesperson, Monica
Klein, told the press: “The Mayor-elect has made it clear—including to
the President—that these raids are cruel and inhumane, and fail to
advance genuine public safety.”
Tisch, meanwhile, informed the New York Times that
she had spoken with a Department of Homeland Security official and
called the federal agents’ actions “unacceptable.” Neither Mamdani nor
Tisch addressed the glaring contradiction: If ICE is a “rogue agency”
conducting “cruel and inhumane” raids in an “unacceptable” manner, why
did the NYPD, led by Mamdani’s appointee, defend it against protesters?
The attempted raid also explodes the myth that Mamdani’s meeting with
Trump at the White House was a clever political move that neutralized
the fascist president and prevented further immigration raids. Just over
a week after their meeting, federal agents were preparing a major
operation that could not possibly have gone ahead without Trump’s
approval.
*****
Saturday’s ICE raid was not stopped by Mamdani’s backroom dealings
with Trump. It was stopped by the independent initiative of ordinary New
Yorkers who took it upon themselves to defend their neighbors. That
spontaneous action is an indication of future struggles on a much
broader scale.
Trump, acting on behalf of the capitalist
oligarchy, is accelerating the drive toward dictatorship. Opposition to
Trump and fascism must be consciously organized, based in the
international working class, and completely independent of and in
opposition to the Democratic and Republican parties.
Two students from Western International High School (WIHS) in
Detroit—16-year-old cousins from Venezuela—were seized by federal
immigration agents in a predawn raid on November 20. US Customs and
Border Protection (CBP) agents swept into their home on Detroit’s east
side with a search warrant for another individual. Not finding their
target, the CBP seized the young students together with one parent from
each family.
The youths are Venezuelan asylum seekers with active
cases and valid work permits. They both worked at a Chili’s restaurant
and were described as “excellent students.” The young boys and their
family members are now imprisoned in the South Texas Family Residential
Center, an ICE facility.
*****
There is no national or statewide database of how many students or
youth have been abducted, detained or deported, although the Detroit ICE
field office oversaw the deportation of approximately 2,300 people to
more than 80 countries in the first six months of 2025. The available
information indicates that these deportees include at least 40 children
under 16, the youngest of whom is three or four years old.
“This is very wrong! Kids shouldn’t be taken,” a Western International student told the World Socialist Web Site.
“School is supposed to be a safe space. They were kidnapped by ICE even
though they were following the rules. This is kidnapping, no matter how
you cut it. Kidnapping in its finest form. Kids should be able to go to
school without having to be worried about if ICE is going to take them
or not.”
*****
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE)
campaigned at Western International last week, alerting students of the
abduction of their classmates. Most had not yet been informed. The IYSSE
not only demanded the immediate release of the students, but put
forward a program to build rank-and-file committees among students,
teachers and workers to organize independent resistance. The IYSSE
stressed that young people had to turn to the working class—the social
force that had the power to cut off the flow of profits to the oligarchy
and drive Trump and his fascist cabal from office.
This meant
mobilizing the collective strength of workers in the auto, healthcare,
logistics and other industries fighting job cuts and deadly working
conditions, federal and other government workers fighting budget cuts
and mass layoffs and other sections of the working class.
Such a
fight could only be waged if workers organized independently of the
union bureaucracies and the Democratic Party, which have done everything
possible to block resistance by workers and young people to these
attacks. The industrial counter-offensive of the working class being
championed by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees had to be combined a political counter-offensive against
Trump and his Democratic Party enablers and for workers’ power and
socialism.
*****
Far from opposing Trump, The Democrats have facilitated the fascist
president’s policy of mass deportations every step of the way, including
providing critical support to the Laken Riley Act,
which has normalized the criminalization of immigrant workers and
channels funding and police powers into federal immigration enforcement,
enabling mass roundups. Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer backed
federal proposals to “make it easier for immigration officers to remove
those who are here unlawfully,” and even supported deploying the
National Guard to the border—moves that politically and materially
facilitate Trump’s illegal war against immigrants and the working class
as a whole.
Several tens of thousands of young people from across Hesse and
beyond protested in Giessen on November 29 against the founding of a new
youth organization by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Driving
the protests was an alliance called “Widersetzen” (“Resist”),
consisting mainly of groups such as “Students against the Right,”
“University Students against the Right,” “Apprentices against the Right”
and others. They had already called nationally for a school strike
against the AfD on Friday, November 28, and in the weeks beforehand.
Protected
and shielded by the state authorities in Giessen, the AfD founded its
new version of a Hitler Youth movement under the name “Generation
Germany.”
Journalists from public broadcasters, reporting from the
AfD assembly in the Giessen exhibition halls, expressed shock, saying
the new organisation was “obviously firmly right-wing extremist.” The
demand for “the mass deportation of millions” had been greeted with
frenzied applause. The delegate Alexander Eichwald, who delivered a
speech to the assembled fascists, mimicking Hitler’s distinctive verbal
style, received more than 12 percent of the votes in the preliminary
elections.
“We cannot allow right-wing extremist, fascist politics to spread
more and more in the public arena,” Zita, Leo, Felix and Jule from
Darmstadt told the World Socialist Web Site. “This also has to
be stopped when it comes in the guise of the Christian Democratic Union
(CDU) or other establishment parties.” The four agreed that capitalism
must be abolished, and that none of the establishment parties aims to do
so, not even the Left Party.
*****
The decision to hold an AfD event in Giessen, a city with a long
anti-fascist tradition, was a deliberate provocation. In the working
class city and in the neighbouring town of Wetzlar, home to the Buderus
steelworks, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens and the unions
have traditionally been strong; in recent years (especially since the
Nazi murder of the Kassel district president Walter Lübke) there have
been numerous large demonstrations against the AfD.
Protests
therefore had to be expected. The Hesse state Interior Ministry took
advantage of this by using the day to conduct a major police operation.
The exhibition halls were cordoned off completely and across a wide
area; police escorted AfD participants partly across the premises of the
municipal utilities towards the venue.
The city center was closed to cars, and most shops had shut. Many houses displayed banners against fascism.
*****
From the establishment parties, which attempted to co-opt the
protest, there were practically no political statements on how fascism
can actually be stopped—other than reactionary appeals to the bourgeois
state. Only the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality
Party, SGP) and its youth organisation, the International Youth and
Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), put forward a clear,
well-thought-out perspective. In the statement “The fight against the AfD requires a fight against capitalism,” which also appeared on the WSWS over the weekend, it reads:
[T]he
AfD is being ever more openly integrated into the political
establishment, and substantial parts of its programme—such as the
persecution of refugees and the massive rearmament drive—are being
implemented by all the parliamentary parties. … A serious struggle
against the fascist danger requires a clear understanding of the causes
of this shift to the right: escalating militarism and the deep crisis of
capitalism. It requires a socialist perspective that abolishes the
foundation of war and fascism: the capitalist system.
The
statement received a strong response, and many young people agreed that
the establishment parties, including the Left Party, are moving further
and further to the right in their policies. The protest in Giessen was
therefore an expression of a new movement against war, fascism and
social devastation, which is developing across Europe and must be armed
with a clear socialist perspective and leadership.
Tens of thousands are demonstrating in Giessen against the founding
of the fascist youth organization of the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The mass protests are significant, because the AfD is being ever more
openly integrated into the political establishment. Substantial parts of
its program, such as the persecution of refugees and the massive
rearmament drive, are being implemented by all the parliamentary
parties.
However, the protest is being led politically by the very
forces that are themselves moving ever further to the right and paving
the way for the fascist AfD—the trade unions, the Social Democratic
Party (SPD), the Greens, the Left Party and even the Liberal Democratic
Party (FDP). A serious struggle against the fascist danger requires a
clear understanding of the causes of this shift to the right: escalating
militarism and the deep crisis of capitalism. It requires a socialist
perspective that abolishes the foundation of war and fascism: the
capitalist system.
In the United States, Donald Trump has already
formed a government of the financial oligarchy that suppresses all
resistance to the mass deportation of immigrant workers, to the genocide
in Gaza and to its war plans, with the help of fascist gangs and the
military.
In Germany, too, the fascists are increasingly being
integrated into parliamentary work. The Association of Family-Owned
Businesses recently announced that it will in future cooperate with the
AfD. In the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), faction leader Jens Spahn
and Bundestag (parliament) President Julia Klöckner have long been
working towards receiving support from the AfD, or even bringing it
directly into government.
For this reason, the mobilization fortoday’s
demonstration has also been massively attacked. In Berlin, students
were prohibited from holding anti-fascist assemblies in order to
mobilise for Giessen. The CDU-SPD state government in Hesse sent
thousands of police officers into the city to brutally suppress the
protests and enable the founding of the fascist youth organization.
*****
In the United States, the Democratic Party is working closely with
Trump. The newly elected “left-wing” mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani,
reconciled himself with Trump even before taking office. This shows that
the entire ruling class is committed to war and dictatorship.
Here
too, the Greens and the Left Party support the extreme right-wing
policy of the federal government on all essential points. The Left Party
approved the one-trillion-euro war credits in the Federal Council,
enabled Friedrich Merz to be elected chancellor swiftly and lends the
government its votes whenever they are required. At the state and
municipal level, it implements cuts and deportations. For the Greens,
the government’s war policy does not go far enough; they would prefer to
wage war against nuclear-armed Russia sooner rather than later.
The
formerly “left” parties are marching straight to the right because they
defend the bankrupt capitalist system, which is descending ever deeper
into barbarism. The same applies to the trade union bureaucrats. They
have degenerated into co-managers who enforce the dictates of corporate
executives against the workforce. They support the nationalist agenda of
trade war and military conflict.
Workers can halt the shift to
the right and prevent war and fascism only if they break with these
pro-capitalist organizations and organize themselves in independent
rank-and-file action committees that link the struggle against social
attacks with the struggle against war and defend democratic rights.
These action committees must unite across all national borders and join
the International Workers’ Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
Two Palestinian children were killed by an Israeli drone strike on
the edge of the Bani Suheila neighborhood of Khan Younis in Gaza on
Saturday.
Palestinian medical officials at Nasser Hospital in Khan
Younis reported that an Israeli drone fired on two brothers in the area
east of the city, in a zone that Israel designates as being on the
Israeli‑controlled side of the ceasefire line.
Palestinian media
also reported the identities of the victims as brothers from the Abu Asi
family, Juma, aged 11, and Fadi, aged 8. International coverage noted
that the strike took place close to the mapped Yellow Line east of Khan
Younis, where the army has warned Palestinians not to approach its
forces and has used drones and live fire to enforce the boundary.
*****
Throughout the ceasefire period, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has continued to reject any recognition of Palestinian
statehood even as the Gaza “peace” framework is pushed through the UN
Security Council, insisting that Israel’s opposition to a Palestinian
state “in any territory has not changed.” This stance is mirrored by the
murderous attacks on Palestinians that has continued and is essentially
an extension of the genocide that began more than two years ago.
Israeli
officials have paired such statements with assertions that they will
maintain full freedom of military action in Gaza throughout the
ceasefire period, openly admitting that the lines and maps published for
civilians do not restrict the army’s right to strike anywhere it deems
necessary.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, as many as 350
Palestinians have been killed and nearly 900 wounded by Israeli fire
since the ceasefire formally came into effect on October 10. These
figures include people killed by drone strikes, tank fire and snipers
along and beyond the Yellow and Red Lines, as well as those killed in
continued airstrikes on residential areas and camps that Israel claims
are linked to “security operations.”
*****
Parallel to the ongoing violence is the Trump administration’s
aggressive reconstruction and “stabilization” scheme that would further
partition Gaza and entrench Israeli control of Gaza. A US‑backed UN
Security Council resolution endorses Washington’s 20‑point ceasefire
strategy, calls for deployment of an International Stabilization Force
to enter, disarm and govern Gaza, and establishes a “Board of
Peace”—headed by the fascist US President Donald Trump—to oversee
Israeli control, without any genuine Palestinian representation or
commitment to statehood.
Central to this plan is the construction
of large “Alternative Safe Communities” in Israeli‑controlled areas of
Gaza, composed of dense housing compounds made of temporary structures,
each designed to hold between 20,000 and 25,000 Palestinians and to
include clinics and educational facilities.
These residential
zones would be built primarily on the eastern half of the Strip under
longstanding Israeli military control, creating a chain of isolated
settlements ringed by army positions and international forces along the
Yellow Line.
Media reports about the scheme identify senior Trump
administration official Aryeh Lightstone—previously a key aide to former
ambassador David Friedman and an architect of the Abraham Accords
economic projects—as the point man for the “Alternative Safe
Communities” initiative, publicly arguing that the compounds are the
“easiest way” to get Palestinians into housing “as soon as humanly
possible.”
Meanwhile,
Jared Kushner, Trump’s son‑in‑law, has been closely associated with
post‑war economic and real‑estate planning in Gaza and the wider region,
leveraging his ties with Gulf monarchies and his background in property
development. This is an unambiguous indication of the plan by powerful
real estate interests to make a fortune from the conversion of Gaza into
a vast wasteland of rubble where tens of thousands of Palestinians have
been killed and many thousands are still buried.
*****
By transforming Gaza into a patchwork of fenced “safe
communities”—essentially overcrowded concentration camps—and off‑limits
Red zones, the plan aims to convert a devastated, densely populated
enclave into a source of highly-exploited labor and a consumer pool
under long‑term occupation.
As pointed out by the World Socialist Web Site
since the announcement of the October 10 ceasefire, the US‑Israeli
“peace” framework is not a step toward Palestinian self‑determination or
an end to the barbaric treatment of Gazans. These are instruments for
consolidating a strategic defeat of the population while preserving the
foundations of Zionist rule and US imperialism in the region.
The
ceasefire has not halted Israeli violence; instead, it has provided a
political and legal cover for continued killings, such as the Bani
Suheila drone strike, while internationalizing the occupation through an
“International Stabilization Force” that would police Palestinians on
Israel’s behalf.
The creation of “Alternative Safe Communities”
corresponds in content to the goal of ethnically cleansing zones in Gaza
in which an uprooted people are warehoused under guard, stripped of
basic democratic rights and any genuine control over their own lives.
By
channeling reconstruction funds through US‑dominated businesses and
Gulf monarchies, the plan will tie Palestinian survival to the same
capitalist and imperialist forces responsible for their historic
dispossession and make every aspect of daily life contingent on
political oppression and subordination to the wealth accumulation aims
of the international financial oligarchy.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is pausing
indefinitely all decisions on asylum applications, while launching
systematic reviews that threaten the legal status of two large groups of
immigrants—the 3.3 million green card holders from 19 countries
designated by President Trump and the 180,000 people admitted as
refugees during the four years of the Biden administration.
The
Trump administration claims that these actions are in response to the
shooting Wednesday of two National Guard soldiers in Washington D.C. by
an Afghan refugee, a former participant in a CIA-run death squad in his
home country who fled after the Taliban takeover in 2021. One of the two
soldiers, Sarah Beckstrom, 20, of Summersville, West Virginia, has
died, while the other, Andrew Wolfe, 24, of Martinsburg, West Virginia,
remains in critical condition.
The shooting last week is merely a pretext, as both the selection of
the 19 countries “of concern” was announced in June and the decision to
review all refugees admitted during the Biden administration had been
made public Monday, before Wednesday’s attack.
The review of green
card holders will affect 3.3 million people, the bulk of them, 2.2
million, from three countries in the Caribbean basin—1 million from
Cuba, 700,000 from Venezuela and 500,000 from Haiti. All three countries
are subject to either US economic blockade or other forms of sanctions,
which have devastated living standards.
*****
Trump sought to justify his sweeping attack on refugees with a racist
diatribe against “Third World Countries” whose people would be
“non-compatible with Western civilization.” White House Press Secretary
Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the administration had effectively
stopped all refugee intake since taking office, “with the exception of
Afrikaners fleeing persecution in South Africa.” (In other words,
members of the white South African minority who ruled under apartheid.)
The
plan to review the cases of all 180,000 refugees admitted to the US
between January 20, 2021 and February 20, 2025 was revealed November 24
by the Associated Press, which obtained an internal memo from USCIS
Director Joseph Edlow. The memo also required that even refugees who
have already received green cards should be subjected to review.
*****
At a press conference Monday afternoon, Press Secretary Karoline
Leavitt declared, “President Trump believes that he has a sacred
obligation to reverse the calamity of mass unchecked migration into our
country. … In the wake of last week’s atrocity, it is more important
than ever to finish carrying out the president’s mass deportation
operation.”
The response of the Democratic Party to Trump’s effort
to smear all immigrants with the blood of the two National Guard
soldiers shot last week has been one of tacit acceptance. At his press
briefing Monday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries did not even
raise the issue, instead appealing for the Trump administration and the
Republicans to “actually partner with Democrats to solve problems on
behalf of the American people.”
Only when directly asked by a reporter—after a lengthy disquisition
on healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act—did Jeffries
address the effective ending of asylum for refugees and the attack on
green card holders and then with another appeal for bipartisanship.
“Yeah,
our view is that, one, of course we support the notion of having strong
border security, no one ever disputes that,” the Democrat said. “We
have a broken immigration system. We need to fix it, but it should be
fixed, in a comprehensive and bipartisan way. But at the same period of
time we are going to stand up for law-abiding immigrant families and
communities who have been under assault by Donald Trump and the
so-called secretary of homeland security. They’re a disgrace.”
As to taking any action to oppose this “disgrace,” the House Democratic leader said nothing.
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.
