Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
As Detroit’s corporate and political elite switch on the Christmas lights and prepare for a season of galas, charity photo-ops and waterfront holiday parties, the reality facing working class families this Christmas season is one of mass layoffs, forced relocations and wintertime evictions.
At the start of the holiday season, General Motors announced the permanent layoff of 1,140 workers at its Factory Zero Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Center, effective January 5. One day after Thanksgiving, dozens of low-income and elderly tenants at the historic Leland House downtown were abruptly told they must leave their homes or face having their electricity cut off in the dead of winter.
Taken together, these events expose the real content of Detroit’s corporate-driven “revival”: record profits, luxury towers and holiday parties for the financial and political elite, and unemployment and homelessness for the working class.
*****
While workers face layoffs and evictions, the city’s elite celebrate a month of holiday galas, waterfront loft parties and corporate festivities. Venues like Waterview Loft on the riverfront advertise executive holiday receptions, luxury corporate galas and even yacht-chartered holiday parties on the Detroit River. In a city where elderly tenants face winter shutoffs and autoworkers face forced unemployment, the wealthy toast the holidays in glass-walled ballrooms overlooking the skyline.
*****
Workers need to build rank-and-file committees in every GM, Ford and Stellantis plant; in supplier factories; in apartment buildings like Leland House; and among teachers, nurses, utility workers and logistics workers throughout Detroit and internationally. These committees, as part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, must launch a unified struggle against layoffs, evictions and utility shutoffs—linking up across borders and industries.
Such a counter-offensive by the working class must be guided by a new political perspective that is independent and opposed to both corporate-controlled parties and the capitalist system they defend. It must be based on a socialist program: the expropriation of the auto giants, utilities, banks and major real-estate holdings; democratic workers’ control over production and housing; and the guarantee of jobs, housing, heat and electricity as fundamental social rights.
2. Through the Gates of Hell: American Injustice at Guantanamo Bay
The US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba became, after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the site of a vast and open-ended extra-legal operation used by the ruling elite in Washington to expand imperialist war powers and cultivate nationalism and Islamophobia within the US population. Guantanamo was selected precisely because it lay outside ordinary US jurisdiction. Prisoners classified as “enemy combatants” were held without any recourse to constitutional protections or the Geneva Conventions.
*****
Through the Gates of Hell, by Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, was published a month ago. While also dealing with the struggle against official injustice at Guantanamo, it takes a slightly different approach from most accounts, as a first-person account of the three-year struggle by an American attorney to secure the freedom of several detainees at Guantanamo. These clients came from the island nation of Bahrain, and had been swept up on the flimsiest basis in the initial operations that filled the prison with hundreds of men, the vast majority of whom were innocent of any offense, much less the attacks of 9/11.
*****
Colangelo-Bryan was successful after several years of strenuous efforts that are detailed in this book. Meanwhile his clients continued to face awful conditions, including the uncertainty of not knowing when or even whether their brutal incarceration would ever end. The book focuses on one detainee in particular, Jaber Mohammed. Finally released in 2007—without, of course, an explanation or apology—Jaber lost five years of his life to Guantanamo.
*****
When Colangelo-Bryan speaks to Jaber and carries out his own examination of the various “allegations” which the US government was using to justify holding him under such inhuman conditions, he quickly realizes that there is absolutely no basis for Jaber’s detention. Strictly speaking, this “case” doesn’t even amount to a frame-up—since a frame-up would necessarily involve evidence, even if it were concocted!
*****
Jaber, by his own description, is a very social person, and the isolation, day after day and year after year, has an understandable impact on his emotional health. Sinking into depression over the years of his detention at Guantanamo, he attempted to commit suicide on nine different occasions. One chapter in the book is titled, “The Purpose of Guantanamo is to Destroy People, And I’ve Been Destroyed.” Jaber’s aim at a certain point becomes one of calling attention to the unbearable state of affairs by killing himself and having his lawyer witness it. A large part of Colangelo-Bryan’s efforts are devoted to convincing Jaber not to commit suicide—to give him hope that he will soon be released, even as the attorney himself wonders when or whether that will be.
In answer to a court filing from the attorneys concerning the conditions of Jaber’s confinement, the authorities responded with obfuscation that insulted common sense. In answer to the clear facts of Jaber’s almost total isolation, for instance, they wrote that he had “established a cordial relationship with members of his interrogation team.” The detainee was prevented from having any communication with other detainees, but the authorities wrote that he could talk to guards through his feed tray slot!
*****
While there were certain US court decisions granting detainees the right to file habeas corpus petitions, these rulings were always appealed, with delays lasting many months. Eventually Colangelo-Bryan realizes that justice is highly unlikely through the courts, and he shifts most of his work over to what he calls “Plan B,” namely fighting to make the conditions facing Jaber and the other detainees known to a wider audience. This is directed primarily to the government of Bahrain, itself a notoriously authoritarian regime in which a Sunni minority rules through a monarchy over a Shia Muslim majority. The aim is to bring pressure to bear on the government so that it will in turn get the US authorities to agree to repatriation of the Bahraini prisoners.
*****
Finally, on July 16, 2007—nearly three years after Colangelo-Bryan had begun work on the case—comes word that Jaber has been flown to Saudi Arabia, where he is reunited with his family before returning to Bahrain. The US authorities maintain the fiction that they are releasing the “dangerous” detainees into the custody of the Bahrainis, but Jaber and the others are freed almost immediately.
In a brief Epilogue, the author explains that Jaber—by this time 18 years after his release from Guantanamo—works for a private company and lives with his wife and family in Bahrain. “Although I suspect he’s gotten a speeding ticket or two, he hasn’t had any other trouble since arriving home,” the author reports. “Jaber and I are still in touch.”
Through the Gates of Hell raises crucial political issues, although they are only touched on in the book. Guantanamo, the site of crimes against humanity, remains open to this day. About 780 prisoners ended up being held there, most for many years. The vast majority are completely innocent of any involvement in attacks on US interests, but have never faced trial or been given the opportunity to prove their innocence. Only about 15 detainees remain at the prison. However, as Colangelo-Bryan explains, the base is now being used by the second Trump administration to house undocumented immigrants before they are deported. There is much in this book that both foreshadows and reminds the reader of the unprecedented measures being taken on a daily basis by the fascistic administration in Washington.
The death of Dick Cheney last month highlights the horrific legacy of Guantanamo. As vice president for two terms under George W. Bush, beginning in 2001, Cheney was a major architect of the crimes conducted under the rubric of the “war on terror.” He had major responsibility for the “American injustice” detailed in this book. Not only did he never face justice himself, however; his death has been the occasion for official tributes, above all from the leadership of the Democratic Party. Former Vice President Kamala Harris called him “a devoted public servant,” and others added their own fulsome praise. These tributes demonstrate that, although Cheney may have been the architect, the war crimes and attacks on democratic rights—as later shown by the record of both the Obama and Biden administrations—are the product of both political parties of the US ruling class.
Whatever the bitter disputes between Cheney and the fascist demagogue in the White House today, the former vice president paved the way for Trump. Cheney developed and defended the doctrines of preemptive war and the legal rationales for torture, indefinite detention and the surveillance state.
As Colangelo-Bryan sums up the Bush-Cheney administration’s policy, the government could “(1) detain foreigners who had not knowingly done anything against the US, wherever those foreigners were found around the globe; (2) hold them at Guantanamo for as long as it wanted as ‘combatants’; and (3) subject them to treatment we would scream about if inflicted on US personnel—all without any court having authority to say anything about it.”
3. Trump’s Caribbean murders and the legacy of Nuremberg
The naked criminality of the Trump government has raised almost of necessity the issue of war crimes and international law. The level of gangsterism and filth spewing out of the White House marks a qualitative shift. However, there is no serious discussion from the Democratic Party or the media of the real political and historical context, and what has given rise to Trump.
In fact, for over two decades, the World Socialist Web Site has pointed to the significance of the Nuremberg precedent in the context of the eruption of American imperialism.
In 2004, in a debate at the Philosophical Society of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, World Socialist Web Site Chairman David North delivered remarks focused on the significance of the Bush administration’s proclamation of the doctrine of “pre-emptive” war. North noted that the Nuremberg trials laid down the principle that aggressive war is “the supreme international crime.”
The tribunal explicitly declared that it was setting a precedent that bound not merely the defeated Axis powers, but also the victorious Allied powers, including the United States. North quoted Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who headed the American prosecution staff, as saying:
If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others that we would not be willing to have invoked against us.
Jackson added, “To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”
North noted that “Much has changed since those words were uttered.” Today, he wrote:
American imperialism, in pursuit of global hegemony, is the principal instigator of violence, exploitation and inhumanity in the world today. Its foreign policy has assumed the character of a vast international criminal exercise.
The context of this assessment was the illegal invasion of Iraq, begun in 2003 under the Bush administration, which followed a series of wars of aggression during and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, including the first Gulf War in 1991 under Bush Sr. and the war against Serbia in 1999 under Clinton.
The war against Iraq was part of the “war on terror,” begun in 2001, which was used to legitimize not only aggressive war—first against Afghanistan and then against Iraq—but assassination, torture and mass warrantless domestic surveillance. Vice President Dick Cheney declared at the time, “We have to work on the dark side… We’re going to spend time in the shadows.”
As part of the Second Gulf War, the Bush administration set up a series of “black sites” around the world, into which it whisked thousands of people who were illegally kidnapped through the policy of “extraordinary rendition.” The White House instituted a policy of torture, branding as “interrogation techniques” such “tactics” as “waterboarding,” “walling” and “rectal rehydration.”
Summing up the crimes of the Bush administration, former President Barack Obama deadpanned, “We tortured some folks.” But Obama introduced his own innovations, including hundreds of drone strikes that killed between 2,500 and 4,000 people. The policy of assassination without due process, including of US citizens, was so widespread that a complex bureaucratic system was created for selecting victims at weekly “terror Tuesday” meetings.
The first Trump administration, building upon this legacy of criminality, pardoned Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who stabbed a teenage prisoner to death and then photographed himself with the corpse. It escalated US aggression abroad, including the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad.
It was left to the Biden administration to reintroduce genocide—the most horrific and distinctive of the Nazi leaders’ crimes. Biden funded, armed and politically defended the Israeli genocide in Gaza, providing Israel with thousands of 2,000-pound bombs used to massacre at least 60,000 Palestinians, whom Israeli Defense Secretary Yoav Gallant—indicted this year on war crimes charges—called “human animals.”
The second Trump administration sits atop this heap of corpses. Trump, an admirer of Adolf Hitler, openly defends torture, assassination and ethnic cleansing to a degree without precedent in American history. That he has been promoted to the head of the American state is a testament to all of the crimes that preceded his ascent.
To the extent that the murder of unarmed civilians in the Caribbean has produced a crisis within the US political establishment, it is because sections of the military see such unrestrained criminality as completely discrediting the entire project of US global domination. The more far-sighted sections of the US political establishment believe that if they are to succeed in dominating the world through military force, American imperialism must promote the pretense that it is upholding international law.
*****
Working people throughout the United States and the whole world must draw the lessons of the experience of the eruption of American imperialism. The struggle to defend the democratic, economic and social rights of workers requires the struggle against imperialist war and the building of a global anti-war movement of the working class.
From November 7th to the 9th, the union “reform” caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union held their 50th annual convention. The event was dedicated to platforming and endorsing Sean O’Brien for re-election as president in 2026. O’Brien, a right-wing Trump supporter who has presided over tens of thousands of job losses at UPS and other companies, was invited to speak and given an overwhelming vote to endorse his campaign for reelection.
In endorsing O’Brien, the TDU, which for decades has served as a model for would-be “democratic reform” union groups across America, is effectively endorsing support for fascist dictatorship. This is the inevitable outcome of their rejection of a struggle by the rank and file to overthrow the corrupt union apparatus—as advocated by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees—in favor of bureaucratic self-reform. An approach that aligns with the TDU’s opposition to the fight for the political independence of the working class and socialism.
*****
O’Brien is one of the leading figures of a large section of the American union bureaucracy lining up with the fascistic Trump administration, endorsing in particular trade war measures, and his attacks on immigrants and foreign workers. Just a week before the convention, O’Brien had appeared with US Vice President JD Vance to demand Democrats end the shutdown by surrendering to Trump’s demands, which they eventually did. O’Brien was one of 10 major union officials, also including AFGE (American Federation of Government Employees) President Everett Kelley and the heads of several airline unions, present at the event.
Since speaking at the Republican National Convention last year, O’Brien has built a close relationship with Trump, and even says he speaks with him on the phone several times a month. He has also developed ties with Senator Josh Hawley, who played a major role in the January 6 conspiracy, publicly endorsing his anti-immigrant and anti-transgender rhetoric. He has been a guest on the podcast of far-right political pundit Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox News.
Among those joining O’Brien was United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, whose administration likewise rests on the TDU-inspired Unite All Workers for Democracy. Fain’s own embrace of Trump has been openly defended by UAWD, claiming that trade war measures and the elimination of the jobs of workers in Canada, Mexico and other countries will benefit American workers. Fain has also been furiously defended by pseudo-left groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, which supports TDU and similar formations.
Fain has spent the last two years all but campaigning for World War III, citing the war economy during the Second World War as the model for today. He gave a major pro-war speech at the 2024 Labor Notes convention, which barely avoided a breakup over the issue of the Gaza genocide. TDU, for its part, rejected a motion condemning the genocide at its last convention in 2023.
The embrace of Trump expresses in the most open form the function of the union bureaucracy as an industrial police force, whose social privileges depend on its ability to enforce sellouts. These privileges are drawn from its longstanding support for US imperialism and ferocious anti-communism and nationalism. For decades, the mantra of the trade union bureaucracy has been “America First,” identifying its interests with American capitalism against its rivals. In the meantime, it has covered for its own role in enforcing massive job and wage cuts by blaming “foreign” workers.
*****
In 2021, with O’Brien’s first election, the World Socialist Web Site wrote that TDU’s endorsement showed “The real orientation of these groups is not to a rank-and-file rebellion against the pro-corporate unions but toward bolstering the credibility of the unions by falsely presenting factional disputes within the bureaucracy as a titanic struggle for ‘democracy.’” They assisted the bureaucracy of which it is a part to create a “new public face of the union under conditions where decades of betrayals led by the James P. Hoffa—the son of the better-known Jimmy Hoffa—administration has badly tattered its image.”
It added, citing O’Brien’s then-close connections to the Biden White House, that O’Brien would “facilitate closer connections between the state and the Teamsters union, including its most overtly right-wing layers, as well as with the pseudo-left.”
Subsequent developments have confirmed this. In 2023, with critical support from TDU, the Teamsters used the “strike ready” campaign to disarm UPS workers, avoid a strike and push through a sellout contract. Since then tens of thousands of jobs at UPS have been destroyed through automation. For the most part, this has not even been acknowledged by the Teamsters.
*****
O’Brien’s administration also pushed through sellouts in the rail industry—where they stalled for time to give Congress the chance to block a national strike—and at Anheuser-Busch, Molson-Coors, ABF and Yellow. In the latter, 20,000 workers lost their jobs when the company went under.
These sellouts have contributed to the growth of an industrial slaughterhouse of deadly workplace disasters, including the recent plane crash at the UPS Worldport facility in Louisville, Kentucky that killed 14 people. Significantly, no reference to this disaster appears in any of the published reports of the convention, even though it took place only three day prior to its opening.
As for state connections, the embrace of Trump is in continuity with, and a development upon, the bureaucracy’s corporatist relations with the Biden White House. In particular, the Biden administration had also hoped to use the bureaucracy to discipline the working class in preparation for new, bloody wars against China, Russia and other. This was summed up in a 2024 statement that the AFL-CIO was “his domestic NATO.”
Now, wide layers of the bureaucracy are auditioning for a similar role under the regime Trump is trying to build.
*****
Within recent months, a definite tendency towards accommodation with Trump has openly emerged.
The most direct expression of this so far is the visit by Democratic Socialists of America member and mayor-elect of New York City Zohran Mamdani to the White House, where he claimed he could “work together” with the would-be fuhrer to bring down the cost of living. Mamdani’s visit has been hailed as a tactical “masterstroke” by the rest of the DSA and the pseudo-left.
Similar arguments were made at the TDU convention. Steering committee member Tyler Condo was quoted by Labor Notes as saying, “I don’t like Trump either . . . I wish Sean O’Brien was taking a stronger stand against what the president is doing to workers and immigrant workers and unions. But the majority of Teamsters I work with support Trump. I don’t go to work every day looking for a reason to argue with them.” He added that “Our goal as TDU is to make action plans so we can mobilize Teamsters no matter who you support.”
The Labor Notes article concurred that “TDU is most effective when it focuses on organizing members around union and workplace issues rather than partisan politics.”
This is criminal indifference to fascism, which is treated as some sort of external issue which the working class need not take a position on. In fact, the chief target of Trump’s dictatorship is the working class. Behind Trump stands the American oligarchy, which is determined to use dictatorship to crush all resistance from below and impose slave-like conditions. Indeed, Trump is already carrying out massive violence against immigrant workers, which will be expanded to the whole working class.
*****
A diametrically opposite program is being advanced by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. In a recent statement, the IWA-RFC declared: “A basic task of the growing working class movement is a rebellion against the union apparatus and the destruction of its social influence.” It added, “This must be developed into a powerful movement of the working class in defense of its basic social rights.”
“Workers must reject the nationalist poison that seeks to play workers in one country off against workers in another and to blame immigrants and minorities. These are not enemies but brothers and sisters, all being exploited by the same financial oligarchy.”
5. Trump plans to expand asylum ban, deploy ICE Gestapo against Somali immigrants
In a social media post on Monday night, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced that after a meeting with President Donald Trump the administration is expanding asylum and immigration restrictions.
In language fascists use before exterminating people, Noem said she is “recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”
Referencing the shooting last week of two National Guard soldiers in Washington D.C. by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, a CIA asset and Afghan national, Noem railed against “foreign invaders” who “slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS.”
She added: “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”
The expanding blacklist is reinforced by racist incitement that now accompanies every major policy announcement. At the end of an over two-hour long cabinet meeting Tuesday, in which each of Trump’s secretaries took their turn praising the would-be dictator, Trump attacked the country of Somalia and all Somalis in overtly racist language.
Prompted by a right-wing reporter to comment on Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Trump, who called Walz “seriously retarded” in a social media post on Thanksgiving, said Walz was a “grossly incompetent man.”
In a barely coherent rant, he said, “And you look at what [Walz] has done with Somalia, with Somalia, which is barely a country. They have no anything... They just run around killing each other...”
Turning to Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar from Minnesota—the first Somali American in the US Congress, one of the first two Muslim women to be elected, and a frequent target of the far-right—Trump said:
and when I see somebody like Ilhan Omar… for years I’ve watched her complain about our country, our Constitution, how she’s being treated badly, our Constitution, the United States of America is a bad place, hates everybody, hates Jewish people, hates everybody, and I think she’s an incompetent person. She’s a real terrible person.
Trump went on to refer to Omar and “her friends” as “garbage.” His incitement against Omar comes less than six months after Vance Boelter, an anti-abortion zealot and Trump fanatic, assassinated Melissa Hortman, a state representative and former speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and her husband Mark in their home. Boelter also nearly killed State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. The shootings occurred in the early morning of June 14, the same day millions marched in the first “No Kings” protests in opposition to Trump and dictatorship.
Seeking to stoke violence not just against elected officials, but against all non-white people and immigrants in Minnesota, Trump added:
But what I watch is happening in Minnesota... this beautiful place and I see these people ripping it off... ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions... And they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88 percent. They contribute nothing.
In the same language Adolf Hitler used to describe Jews, or Benjamin Netanyahu uses to describe Palestinians, Trump added:
I don’t want them in our country to be honest with you... Some will say, “Oh that’s not politically correct.” I don’t care. I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks and we don’t want them in our country. And I can say that about other countries too.
*****
Trump ended his racist rant by expressing the fear that is gripping not only his crisis-ridden administration, but the capitalist ruling class as a whole, which knows it is despised by large sections of the population for its greed, warmongering and lies, rooted in its defense of the capitalist system and the inequality it creates.
Trump said:
You know our country is at a tipping point. We could go bad. We are at a tipping point. I don’t know if people mind me saying that, but I’m saying it. We could go one way or the other.
Venting his racism, he added:
And we are going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage... Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work... These are people that do nothing but complain... they came from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch. We don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.
After Trump’s racist tirade on Tuesday, the assembled cabinet secretaries burst into applause and the meeting concluded.
*****
The real human scum are the politicians, billionaires and military killers who are currently overseeing genocide in Gaza and war crimes in the Caribbean. Every serious study of crime in the United States shows that immigrants commit crime at lower rates than the native-born population.
Census data reveal that immigrants are incarcerated at roughly half the rate of citizens born in the United States, a pattern repeated every year for more than a century. Texas, the only state that records immigration status at arrest, reports that undocumented immigrants are 37 percent less likely to be convicted of homicide than native-born Texans, while legal immigrants have the lowest violent crime rates of all. Peer-reviewed studies by the National Academy of Sciences confirm that increased immigration does not raise crime and is often associated with declines in violence.
The claim that immigrants are a threat to public safety is a lie used by the ruling class to justify repression, divide workers and prepare wider attacks on democratic rights.
*****
Trump’s racist rant and expanded pogrom against immigrants come less than two weeks after Democratic Socialists of America member and New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani held a love-fest in the White House with Trump, where the pair shook hands, smiled and posed for photographers. During their public appearance, Mamdani said nothing as Trump confirmed he would continue with the immigrant kidnapping operations in New York City. Trump said he and Mamdani had the same goal, declaring, “He wants to have a safe New York … If there are horrible people, we want to get them out … He wants to get them out more than I do.”
Democrats in Minnesota responded to Trump’s rant with pleas for partnership and precision. In response to the coming raids, Governor Walz wrote, “We welcome support in investigating and prosecuting crime... But pulling a PR stunt and indiscriminately targeting immigrants is not a real solution to a problem.”
6. More than 50,000 workers demonstrate in Quebec against austerity and anti-strike laws
Responding to a call from Quebec’s main trade union federations, more than 50,000 workers and their families marched through the streets of Montreal last Saturday to protest against capitalist austerity and the authoritarian policies of Premier François Legault and his Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government.
Those joining the November 29 demonstration came from all parts of Quebec. They included construction workers, Canada Post employees, hospital staff, paramedics, public school teachers and forestry, aluminum and steel workers. Small delegations from New Brunswick and Ontario also attended.
Workers’ determination to resist the dismantling of public services and the Legault government’s attacks on democratic rights—including the right to strike, sharply curtailed by Law 14—was palpable. Many workers held handwritten placards denouncing one or another of Legault’s reactionary measures and calling for his seven-year-old government to be ousted.
All this was in striking contrast to the stance of the trade union bureaucracy. As the Socialist Equality Party explained in a statement widely circulated among the demonstrators, the union leaders did not call the November 29 protest to launch a working-class counteroffensive against the combined assault on its social and democratic rights being mounted by Legault and the Mark Carney-led federal Liberal government. For the union bureaucrats, the event was a mechanism for controlling and dissipating growing social discontent. They decried the CAQ government’s “bad decisions” and “failure to listen,” while deliberately obscuring the fact that the class-war agenda it is implementing is that demanded by the entire capitalist ruling elite in North America and internationally.
*****
Supporters of the Socialist Equality Party (Canada) intervened in the demonstration to politically arm workers with a socialist-internationalist strategy. To fight the austerity and anti-democratic measures of the ruling class it is necessary, they explained, to unite all sections of workers—in Quebec, Canada, and throughout North America—in a common political struggle against the capitalist profit system.
*****
Socialist Equality Party supporters distributed nearly 2,000 copies of a statement titled “For the Unity of North American Workers in Common Struggle Against Legault, Carney and Trump.” It read in part:
This rally comes barely a month after mass demonstrations in the United States against Trump’s dictatorial measures. It follows a series of strikes across Canada by large contingents of the working class: Air Canada flight attendants, postal workers, drivers and maintenance workers at the STM (Montreal transit system), to name just a few examples.
This demonstrates the potential for a powerful pan-Canadian and North American working-class counteroffensive against the program of capitalist austerity and imperialist aggression being carried out in unison in Quebec City, Ottawa and Washington.
But a warning must be made: this potential cannot be realized without a break from the nationalist strategy of the union federations organizing today’s demonstration. (...)
Workers must take matters into their own hands by forming rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions and capable of mobilizing the rising social anger in defense of working and living conditions.
Above all, workers must understand that they are engaged in a political struggle, a class war against the entire existing social order. This struggle must be waged outside all the parties and institutions of the establishment, including the pro-capitalist unions.
To oppose austerity, authoritarianism and war, we need a socialist program that tackles the root of the problem head-on: the absolute control that the financial oligarchy exerts over the wealth produced by the collective labor of the international working class. This clique of parasitic billionaires must be expropriated in order to free up the resources necessary to meet the social needs of working people.
7. Germany’s Greens approve delivery of Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine
At the heart of Germany’s Greens lies a need to accompany every political shift to the right with ostentatious hand-wringing. It is not enough for them to sacrifice pacifism to a pro-war policy, environmental protection to the auto industry, asylum rights to Fortress Europe, and democracy to the building of a police state. They also want to be pitied for it. Everyone must see how they wrestle with their consciences as they lay their moral principles at the feet of German imperialism.
Green Party congresses are therefore usually characterized by long, emotional debates, by hundreds of resolutions, counter-motions and counter-counter-motions, as well as by backroom intrigues. Every word, every comma, is bartered over—until, finally, a rotten compromise emerges, which no Green minister or office holder has ever cared about.
And so it was again last weekend in Hanover. This time, the dispute revolved around the Middle East conflict. With the Israeli army having killed well over 70,000 Palestinians and turned the Gaza Strip into a field of rubble, and Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock—who actively supported the genocide—no longer in office, the Greens have felt compelled, for electoral reasons, to soften in words their unconditional support for Israel.
*****
The political evolution of the Greens confirms Marx’s famous statement that the history of society is a history of class struggles. It is not moral values or Kant’s categorical imperative that determine political action, but material class interests.
The Greens embody the affluent layers of the urban middle class—the top 90 to 99 percent on the income scale—whose wealth and lifestyle are threatened by increasing social polarization, and who look with fear at the radicalization of the working class and with envy at the richest one percent, whose wealth exceeds their own many times over.
Of course, there are individual exceptions. Not every well-paid academic and city dweller automatically veers to the right. But once this layer appears as an organized party, it becomes a pillar of the ruling order.
When there was room for social compromise, the Greens presented themselves as “left”. In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, where the electoral system has so far kept them from government posts, they still do so today. But the era of social compromise has long since passed.
The constant shift to the right of the German Greens is itself an expression of the advanced crisis of global capitalism, which no longer allows such compromises. It is a harbinger of sharp class struggles in which the working class will emerge as an independent force under its own revolutionary leadership and overthrow capitalism. Building the necessary leadership is now the urgent task of the hour.
8. Massive humanitarian crisis looming in the wake of Ditwah cyclone disaster in Sri Lanka
In the wake of Cyclone Ditwah, which has now veered toward India, Sri Lanka is in the grip of a rapidly worsening humanitarian disaster. The official death toll has surpassed 410, with more than 330 people still reported missing. Growing piles of recovered bodies suggest that hopes of finding survivors are fading, raising fears that the final toll could exceed one thousand.
*****
Most of the officially recorded deaths and missing persons come from the hardest-hit central hill districts—Kandy (88 deaths), Nuwara Eliya (75), and Badulla in the Uva Province (83)—where large numbers of tea plantation workers live in decaying, British-era line rooms.
Heartbreaking scenes reminiscent of the 2004 tsunami are now unfolding across Sri Lanka. Shocking accounts continue to emerge from flood- and landslide-devastated areas as survivors begin to access previously cut-off regions.
*****
Aside from the 25,000 troops deployed by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, virtually no formal rescue teams are on the ground. Those providing aid are the survivors themselves—villagers, workers and ordinary citizens. While grieving the loss of loved ones, they are distributing food, clothing, medicine and other essentials. Displaced families are left to clean out and repair homes on their own or with the help of neighbors.
The full economic cost of the disaster is still unknown. On Tuesday, the Daily Mirror quoted President Anura Kumara Dissanayake as stating that the “government has begun discussions with the World Bank to prepare a detailed assessment of the damage across sectors and the financial requirements for reconstruction.” Given the scale of destruction to infrastructure—bridges, rail lines, roads, water purification plants and industries—the final bill is expected to run into the hundreds of billions of rupees.
In a televised address Sunday night, Dissanayake indicated that the cost of recovery would be borne by a population already suffering under IMF-imposed austerity. He cynically defended the state of emergency, claiming it was needed to “provide legal protection and financial allocation” to “rebuild our country better than before.” While he promised not to use emergency powers repressively, the measure is certain to be used to enforce deeper austerity under the guise of “rebuilding” the country.
*****
The disaster has already triggered a political crisis—not only for the JVP/NPP government, which ignored early warnings from the Meteorological Department, but also for the opposition parties now seeking to exploit the tragedy to rebuild support.
On Monday, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and others staged a parliamentary walkout, accusing the government of blocking debate on urgent policy responses. They claimed the administration failed to act on early forecasts. While this is true, none of the opposition parties can credibly claim they would have responded differently if they were in power. Millions of Sri Lankans vividly recall the failures of previous governments led by these same parties during past climate-related disasters.
Even today, many who lost everything in earlier calamities still lack proper housing. For decades, successive governments have ignored the threat of climate change, dismissed repeated warnings and abandoned the most vulnerable. This new catastrophe strikes amid an already staggering burden on the working class and oppressed masses, still reeling from the 2022 economic collapse and its aftermath.
According to a recent World Bank report, poverty in Sri Lanka has more than doubled since 2019, rising from 11.3 percent to 24.5 percent. For millions of working class families, basic necessities have become unaffordable. In the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Ditwah, vegetable prices have already surged, with other essential goods expected to follow, pushing the poor deeper into hunger and malnutrition.
*****
On the global stage, the absence of the US, China, and India from the COP30 summit, and the summit’s parade of empty promises, proves that capitalist governments and corporations will neither phase out fossil fuels nor fund meaningful protection for vulnerable populations. The conclusion is clear: climate-driven disasters will continue to kill the poorest—unless the working class organizes to fight for a socialist reorganization of society, based on human need, not profit.
9. Australia: False claims of “backflip” on job and course cuts at University Technology Sydney
On Wednesday last week about 150 people, mostly University of Technology Sydney (UTS) staff, rallied outside the campus in central Sydney after the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) called a four-hour stoppage as part of the union’s enterprise bargaining with UTS management.
At the rally, NTEU speakers claimed to be winning the fight against the management’s plans, announced earlier this year, to slash $100 million from the university’s budget by 2027 by cutting 400 jobs—about a tenth of the workforce. The plans included stopping new enrollments for nearly a fifth of the university’s courses, notably in international studies, social sciences, education and public health.
Similarly shocking restructures have been unveiled at many, at least 19, of the country’s 39 public universities in 2025, with proposed job cuts rising above 3,500 nationally.
As at UTS, limited stoppages have been called by the NTEU at several universities across Australia in recent days. The union leadership is trying to channel immense discontent over the destruction of jobs and pro-corporate restructuring nationally back into union-run negotiations over new three-year enterprise agreements (EAs). But these agreements will do no more than the current EAs to halt this offensive.
*****
In effect, the union is creating the conditions for the job losses and course cuts to take place in slightly modified forms. This is a warning of the union’s readiness to work with the UTS administration to get people out the door via expressions of interest in so-called voluntary redundancies, as it has at other universities, including Western Sydney University.
The union’s UTS enterprise bargaining log of claims proposes to “improve job security” by “prohibiting forced redundancies and strengthening provisions for redeployment of staff whose positions are disestablished.”
Such clauses have proven no protection against restructuring. The NTEU has a long track record of assisting managements to achieve job cuts via “voluntary” redundancies.
For the past year, the NTEU and the other main campus trade union, the Community and Public Service Union (CPSU), have worked to block calls, particularly by the rank-and-file committees at Western Sydney University and Macquarie University, for unified national action against the cuts and the underlying measures of the Labor government.
The Albanese Labor government is deliberately applying financial pressure to the universities, including by reactionary cuts to international student enrollments, to restructure in line with the government’s Universities Accord, which demands the subordination of both teaching and research to “national priorities.”
These priorities include the AUKUS pact for the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines and other weaponry, as part of preparations for a US-led war against China.
*****
The union leadership is trying to confine protests to individual universities, blaming particular vice-chancellors for the cuts and to head off calls for unified action nationally against the underlying agenda of the Labor government.
*****
Opposition exists throughout the universities to the job destruction, course closures and pro-corporate restructuring. But the unions are standing in the way of any unified fight by university staff and students.
This can be answered only by the formation of rank-and-file committees (RFCs), independent of the unions, at every university. Staff and students need to form their own organizations of struggle to develop and fight for demands based on the educational and financial needs of students and staff, not the dictates of the Labor government, the financial markets and the war machine.
10. South Korea ramps up war preparations against China
The US and South Korea are currently implementing plans to “modernize” their decades-long military alliance in line with US plans for war with China. These plans involve a significant increase in South Korea’s already substantial militarization and preparing the country as a base of operations for a future conflict.
Last Friday, the US acting ambassador to South Korea Kevin Kim delivered a speech at a forum in Seoul hosted by the Korea-US Alliance Foundation and Korea Defense Veterans Association where he discussed the meaning of “modernization.” He stated: “First and foremost, addressing the common challenges on the Korean Peninsula, as well as the Indo-Pacific region, starts with having a shared assessment of the threats that we face.
“Based on that combined assessment, which we all share between the United States and [South] Korea, we will address that moving forward, and ultimately what matters is that we strengthen deterrence on the Korean Peninsula and the Indo-Pacific region.”
In real terms, this means preparing to launch a war against China. To justify this, US Defense Pete Hegseth claimed without evidence in May that China was preparing to invade Taiwan by 2027. Kim hinted at the same on Friday, saying, “I can’t speak to the probabilities. All I know is that the Chinese military is in the middle of a historic buildup to strengthen its military capabilities.”
*****
Washington has routinely undermined the One-China policy over Taiwan, which states that the island is a part of China. Washington and Seoul both formally adhere to this policy by only having official diplomatic relations with Beijing.
For Beijing, Taiwan is its most significant red line. Beijing considers the island a renegade province and is conscious that were Taipei to declare independence it would not only become a base for US military operations against the mainland, but set a precedent for the further dismemberment of Chinese territory. Beijing has repeatedly stated it would use force if Taiwan declared formal independence.
11. New Zealand Māori Party in chaos
For the past few months New Zealand’s Māori nationalist Te Pāti Māori (Māori Party) has been consumed with a bitter internal power struggle, which may well result in a split.
On November 10, the party’s co-leaders Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer announced the expulsion of MPs Mariameno Kapa-Kingi and Tākuta Ferris. This was the culmination of an intense, long-running dispute between Kapa-Kingi and Ferris and party president John Tamihere. In a lengthy Facebook post a week earlier, Tamihere accused the pair of seeking to “destabilize” the party and “take over” the leadership. He said they were motivated by “greed, avarice and entitlement.”
The two MPs, one-third of TPM’s six-member caucus, have accused Tamihere of acting like a “dictator” and may mount a legal challenge against their expulsion. In an interview with Radio NZ on November 25, Ferris claimed that the leadership had mistreated the late MP Takutai Tarsh Kemp by trying to oust her from her seat while she was suffering from terminal illness (she died in June). Tamihere called the claims “innuendo” and “hearsay.”
While each faction is accusing the other of bullying and toxic behavior, no one in the party has expressed any differences over TPM’s right-wing political program. The party represents indigenous capitalists and promotes divisive racialist identity politics. Its main demands are for increased payments from the state, through the Treaty of Waitangi settlements process, to benefit tribal-based businesses, and for more political power to be given to the tribal elites.
TPM has worked with both the major parties of big business to achieve these aims. At present, it is positioned to support the opposition Labour Party in next year’s election, but from 2008 to 2017 the Māori Party was part of a coalition government led by the conservative National Party.
*****
The precise chain of events that triggered TPM’s internal power struggle remains unclear. An early sign of inner-party divisions was in September, when Ferris made a blatantly racist social media post attacking the Labour Party’s multi-ethnic campaign team during the by-election held in the Tāmaki Makaurau electorate following the death of TPM’s Tarsh Kemp. Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer apologized for the post, which undercut TPM’s alliance with Labour, but Ferris refused to apologize.
*****
The sordid spectacle of a fight for influence among members of the Māori bourgeoisie has once again exposed the fraud perpetrated by the middle class pseudo-lefts—as well as “liberal” publications like the Daily Blog and the BHN podcast—which portray TPM’s divisive racial identity politics as progressive.
Working people confront unprecedented social inequality, homelessness, food insecurity, the collapse of public services, and the integration of New Zealand into US plans for a catastrophic war against China. This historic crisis produced by capitalism will not be resolved by handing more wealth and power to indigenous tribal corporations or to organizations like Tamihere’s Waipareira Trust.
The working class—Māori and non-Māori, immigrants and workers of all countries—must be united on the basis of a socialist program. The system of private profit must be abolished, and the wealth hoarded by the super-rich must be expropriated, placed under the democratic control of the working class, and used to eliminate poverty and social inequality.
12. Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party founding conference: Witch-hunts and expulsions against the left
Your Party’s founding conference held in Liverpool on November 29-30 confirmed the extraordinary decline in the party’s political fortunes since it was announced by former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and ex-Labour MP Zarah Sultana.
It was a conference of crisis. Months of bitter and unprincipled factional warfare between Corbyn and Sultana, centered on control of financial assets and membership lists, saw a wave of enthusiasm among workers and young people collapse. From 850,000 who signed up as supporters, just 55,000 had joined by the eve of conference.
Your Party has been eclipsed in the polls by Zack Polanski’s Green Party, which now has more than three times as many members, including over 50,000 in its youth section, and is seen by many as a better “left” alternative to Keir Starmer’s despised Labour government.
From a forecast attendance of 13,000 two months ago, and 4,000 a week ago, fewer than 2,000 members arrived at Liverpool Arena and Convention Centre. A conference livestream attracted just 1,700 viewers. Online voting that began pre-conference on the party’s name and a series of vetted amendments never surpassed 17,000.
The conference saw Corbyn and his main backers—led by chief enforcer Karie Murphy—ride roughshod over basic democratic norms—beginning with a witch-hunt and expulsions targeting the left, and continuing with every conceivable form of bureaucratic skulduggery.
*****
On Friday, Corbyn’s Independent Alliance of MPs and their appointed conference steering committee expelled Socialist Workers Party (SWP) national secretary Lewis Nielsen and SWP members Samira Ali and Hector Sierra. So zealous were the witch-hunters that Alex Callinicos, the SWP’s leading theoretician, was also sent an expulsion email, despite his never having joined. Michael Lavalette, former Preston councillor and Counterfire member was refused entry, alongside James Giles, former political advisor to George Galloway and councilor from Kingston, south London, a close ally of Sultana.
Corbyn’s “Day of the Long Knives” sent an unmistakeable message to the founding conference: no opposition will be tolerated toward the party’s founding as a Labour Party Mark 2 and all efforts to shift it in a more left-wing direction will be blocked.
Yet Nielsen, speaking that night at Sultana’s pre-conference rally, proclaimed, “I’m filled with the possibility of hope for the first time in a long, long time”. Faced with Corbyn’s factional assault, he insisted: “we can make this thing work… we can turn Your Party into a political force that can win.”
Silent on his own expulsion until midway through his seven-minute speech, Nielsen refused to name those responsible, referring only to “a clique of people running the party from the top”.
He insisted, “this weekend has to be a turning point”, pledging the SWP would support Sultana “all the way”, and stating, “We don’t need a Labour Party Mark II”.
But Corbyn’s backers delivered exactly that, safe in the knowledge that Sultana and her cheerleaders in the SWP, Counterfire and other pseudo-left groups had already declared the overriding need for “unity”.
*****
Your Party’s founding conference confirmed Corbyn’s eclipse as leader by Sultana.
Corbyn, who broke with Labour only reluctantly, years after he was expelled from the Parliamentary Labour Party, was bounced by Sultana into supporting Your Party. He has done everything in his power to confine it to the minimal reformist nostrums he pursued as Labour leader.
Sultana has argued for a more radical presentation, seeking to channel an insurgent mood in the working class, especially its younger generations, behind an alliance of pseudo-left parties (including the SWP, Counterfire, the Socialist Party) and left-talking trade union bureaucrats. The support she has won on this basis was evident at conference.
*****
Britain’s pseudo-left groups have united to insist that Sultana’s campaign can transform Your Party into a vehicle for socialism. In doing so, they are seeking to repeat, under far more dangerous conditions, their earlier promotion of Corbyn, who was said to be transforming Britain’s Labour Party into an instrument for 21st century socialism.
The real measure of Sultana’s “insurgent campaign” is her continuing declarations of unity with Corbyn. The SWP follows suit. Even after their own members were expelled by Corbyn’s clique, the SWP wrote on Sunday that Your Party’s “best chance is if it is united with a collective leadership with both Corbyn and Sultana.”
In her speech to conference Sunday, Sultana hailed Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) politician elected Mayor of New York City last month, describing him as “unapologetically socialist, unapologetically Muslim, unapologetically immigrant”, who “built a campaign that proved what is possible when the working class unites people who look different, pray differently and love differently”.
Mamdani’s victory expressed a leftward shift among workers and young people in the heart of world imperialism, but he and the DSA have worked with the Democratic Party machine, Wall Street executives and the state to row back on policies that propelled him into office. This process culminated in Mamdani’s abject surrender to fascist president Donald Trump inside the Oval Office on November 21.
Workers and youth looking for a socialist alternative cannot afford to place their trust in words. It is urgently necessary to review parties, their leaders and programmes, based on their history and the class interests which they serve. The indispensable political and theoretical resources for achieving this task are to be found in the struggle waged by the world Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International and its daily publication, the World Socialist Web Site.
*****
The World Socialist Web Site thanks readers who sent letters protesting Your Party’s decision to ban our reporter from conference. While the ban on World Socialist Web Site was maintained, our statement of protest had one positive outcome. A reporter from the right-wing Daily Express complained they were de-credentialled following our statement’s publication.
Speaking outside conference Saturday, Zarah Sultana opposed the ban on the World Socialist Web Site and other left-wing publications. She pointed out that Your Party officials had credentialled the Daily Express despite its senior political correspondent, Christian Calgie, having called for her deportation from the UK.
13. Mehring Yayıncılık holds screenings of Tsar to Lenin in Istanbul and Izmir
Last month, Mehring Yayıncılık, publishing arm of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Turkey, organized two public screenings of the unique documentary film on the 1917 Russian Revolution, Tsar to Lenin, in Istanbul and Izmir.
The events were held with the collaboration of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International) and its student and youth organisation, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE). SEP chairman Ulaş Sevinç delivered a speech on “The Relevance of the October Revolution of 1917.” Based on David North’s introduction to the 2012 DVD release, the film’s extraordinary story was presented to the audience at both events.
The film’s first public screening in Turkey was organized by the Social Equality Group, in political solidarity with the ICFI, on November 16, 2014, in Taksim, Istanbul. At the event, the group’s leader, Halil Çelik, gave a speech titled “The October Revolution and the struggle against imperialist war.”
The next public screening took place in Kadıköy, Istanbul, in 2017. Çelik gave a presentation titled “The Relevance of the Russian Revolution on its centenary.” It was organized as part of ICFI’s lectures and events marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
The screening held in Istanbul on November 15, 2025, had a special historical significance. The venue, Tokatlıyan Han in Beyoğlu, was a famous hotel in the 1920s. In February 1929, Leon Trotsky, who co-led the October Revolution alongside Vladimir Lenin, was exiled to Istanbul by the Stalinist bureaucracy. The hotel hosted Trotsky for several weeks after he was forced to leave the Soviet consulate. He would eventually settle on Prinkipo (Büyükada). The film would be completed in 1931, while Trotsky was in exile on the island.
The event in Istanbul took place on the last day of painter Gülhan’s exhibition, “Trotsky Was Here.” Gülhan had played a significant role in initiating the annual Trotsky commemorations on Prinkipo. At the event, she presented her exhibition, “Trotsky’s Path,” which is a comprehensive work related to the places Trotsky visited throughout his life. The exhibition first opened in August at the “Third International Commemoration of Leon Trotsky“ on Prinkipo, which featured an online interview with David North on the 85th anniversary of the assassination of Trotsky.
The event held in Izmir, an Aegean Sea city, on November 30 was the first public event of the SEP in this major city. With a population of 4.5 million, Izmir is Turkey’s third largest city.
Teaching staff at a secondary school in Bacup, England are set to strike on December 3 to protest pupils being taught by a virtual teacher (VT). The action underlines the ongoing crisis in teacher recruitment and retention and funding in UK state schools.
In July, management at the Star Academies Trust took the decision to incorporate distance learning for top-set pupils at The Valley Leadership Academy in years 9-11 (13-16-year-olds)—prompted by the chronic shortage of math teachers which meant they could not recruit in the locality.
In September as the autumn term began, a teacher based 300 miles away in Devon was taken on to teach math. In the face of opposition from staff, management agreed to employ a qualified teacher—though not a math teacher—to give face-to-face support in the classroom. The role of the other adult, who is in the classroom, is therefore limited to behavior control and to ensure the children stay on task.
According to the National Education Union (NEU), this support is not “guaranteed”, so staff at The Valley decided to walk out. Further stoppages are planned for December 10 and 11, and January 6 to the 8 at the beginning of the next school term. NEU members balloted 82 percent in a 75 percent turnout to strike.
The BBC reported that in August the union set up a “confidential online petition in opposition to the new arrangement” which was signed by 500 people.
SchoolsWeek reported that comments from parents and teaching staff “touched on a range of concerns including the lack of in-person interaction, how well the model will work for children with SEND [Special Educational Needs and Disabilities] and the impact on teachers’ career progression.”
Before introducing the scheme to The Valley, Star Academies trailed two “very limited” VT pilots, teaching English at Highfield Leadership Academy in Blackpool and math at Laisterdyke Leadership Academy in Bradford.
The revolutionary developments in technology bound up with the use of the internet and AI creates limitless opportunities for enhancing teaching and learning. The schoolchildren will use electronic pens and touch screens to interact with the VT.
But to achieve the best standard of education, it must be employed as an aid to qualified teachers in the classroom, not to replace them or shore up a crisis in teacher shortages.
*****
If the NEU leadership, under pressure from teachers struggling under intolerable conditions, eventually sanctions some strikes, it will be only to diffuse anger. Establishing a fully-funded and high quality education system is bound up with education workers building their own organizations, rank-and-file committees and unify their fight with all workers across the public sector who face the destruction of jobs and services.
This fight demands the expropriation of the wealth of the billionaires and big corporations, which the Starmer government defends.
15. 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.
