Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
In a move targeted at immigrant truckers, the Trump administration has revoked the accreditation of nearly 3,000 CDL (commercial driver’s license) training centers and placed another 4,500 on notice that they must prove compliance with federal Entry Level Driver Training (ELDT) requirements within 30 days.
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ELDT requirements include covering the required curriculum, maintaining complete and accurate training records, verifying instructor qualifications, and documenting that the school has the necessary equipment and facilities.
According to federal auditors, the training providers removed from the registry failed to meet the requirements of the ELDT rule. Centers were cited for falsifying or manipulating training data, neglecting to cover required curriculum topics, employing instructors who did not meet federal qualifications, or lacking the necessary equipment and facilities to provide legitimate commercial driver training.
Many failed to maintain complete and accurate records or refused to provide documentation during federal reviews. Some of the removed providers had been inactive for years, a result of a registry system that allowed schools to self-certify without inspection or verification.
But the main target of the move is immigrants. In September, the Trump administration imposed sweeping restrictions on non-domiciled commercial driver licenses after a series of highly sensationalized fatal crashes in Florida, Texas, Alabama and California involving big rigs. Officials focused on the immigration status of the drivers involved and presented these isolated incidents as evidence of a wider safety crisis caused by immigrants.
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According to COGO, a commercial trucking insurance firm that analyzes federal crash data, immigrant drivers are involved in a tiny fraction of fatal truck crashes. Only five fatal crashes this year involved non domiciled commercial drivers out of approximately 1,600 fatal truck crashes recorded through July, or three-tenths of one percent.
Immigrant and foreign born drivers make up between 16 and 20 percent of the trucking workforce, a share far out of proportion to their minuscule representation in fatal collisions.
The crisis in CDL training is the result of decades of deregulation. The ELDR rule was originally developed to end the fragmented system in which each state determined its own standards, producing wide variations in training quality. Industry lobbying stripped the rule of its core provisions before implementation.
Mandatory training hours were removed. Behind the wheel requirements became optional. Instructor qualifications were weakened. Training centers could join the federal registry by submitting an online form without inspection, credential verification, or proof that they possessed equipment or instructors.
For decades, Democratic and Republican governments alike allowed the trucking industry to shape federal regulations to its benefit, repeatedly delaying implementation, weakening enforcement mechanisms and resisting any measures that would impose real oversight on CDL training programs. The result is a nationwide patchwork of state-based standards easily exploited by operators.
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Immigrant workers are being targeted as scapegoats to expand the government’s powers over the workforce as a whole. Measures first directed at immigrants will later be applied more broadly to stem the rising tide of social unrest in the face of the accelerating crisis of capitalism. The defense of jobs and democratic rights requires the development of independent rank-and-file committees that unite immigrant and “native-born” workers in a common struggle against these escalating attacks.
2. Israel bulldozed the bodies of unidentified Palestinians into mass graves in Gaza
On Wednesday, CNN published the findings of an investigation showing that Israeli bulldozers pushed Palestinian corpses into mass graves near the Zikim crossing and buried dozens of unidentified victims in Gaza’s sand.
The CNN investigation, along with earlier reporting of mass burials of unknown Palestinians, exposes evidence of war crimes committed by the Israeli military with the full support of US and European imperialism and the complicity of the Arab bourgeois regimes.
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Through analysis of videos, photos, satellite imagery and interviews with drivers and local witnesses, the report establishes that Israeli forces used military bulldozers to push bodies into the earth, creating unmarked or barely marked graves along the aid corridor.
The investigation links these scenes to a broader pattern of desecration, documenting the bulldozing of cemeteries and the destruction of makeshift graves across Gaza as Israeli ground forces advanced. Residents describe areas where the dead lay for days under constant fire, unreachable by ambulances, before bulldozers arrived to clear the road and cover the bodies.
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The bulldozer graves near Zikim intersect with a second, equally horrific reality: the thousands listed as missing in Gaza whose bodies have never been identified. In late October, the New York Times documented a mass burial in central Gaza in which 54 bodies returned by Israel were interred together because they could not be individually identified.
Hospital staff described remains arriving with numerical tags and minimal information, overwhelming their limited capacity to perform forensic work under bombardment and siege conditions. Families, the Times report noted, searched hospitals and makeshift cemeteries for any sign of their loved ones, often with nothing more than a number or a fragmentary description to go on.
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International humanitarian law, codified in the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, imposes clear obligations regarding the treatment of the dead. Parties to a conflict must search for, recover and respect the bodies of those killed, protect them from despoliation and facilitate identification and dignified burial, with information transmitted to families through neutral channels.
Customary law further condemns outrages upon personal dignity, which in practice extends to the handling of bodies and graves.
Bulldozing corpses into unmarked pits, destroying cemeteries or leaving bodies exposed where families cannot safely reach them is a flagrant violation of these laws. When such practices occur in the context of indiscriminate or targeted killing of civilians and a campaign of mass displacement, they constitute war crimes.
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The bulldozed mass graves near the Zikim crossing are a component part of the genocidal onslaught. People were killed while attempting to reach aid, in areas under Israeli control, and then buried by Israeli machinery without identification. This fusion of displacement, starvation, mass murder and desecration of the dead is the material content of what the Israeli ruling class and its imperialist backers call “security.”
Washington has provided Israel with the bombs, shells, intelligence and diplomatic cover necessary to wage its war, rushing munitions deliveries even as casualty figures mounted and evidence of mass starvation emerged. In the United Nations, the US has vetoed or gutted resolutions calling for a cease-fire and accountability, while repeating the mantra that “Israel has the right to defend itself.”
European governments, while occasionally muttering about “proportionality,” have continued arms sales and security cooperation and have criminalized or repressed the mass demonstrations against the genocide.
The Arab bourgeois regimes—from Egypt and Jordan to the Gulf monarchies—have acted as accomplices, enforcing the siege, suppressing solidarity among their own populations and angling for a seat at the table in the post-war arrangements. Their overriding concern is not the fate of the Palestinian masses but the preservation of their own rule and their integration into the imperialist regional realignment plan.
Against this backdrop, talk of a “peace plan” and “reconstruction” for Gaza, driven by Washington and Tel Aviv, is a cynical fraud. The schemes being prepared envisage sections of the devastated enclave rebuilt under permanent Israeli military control, policed by proxy forces and financed by capital from the imperialist and Gulf countries.
For the Israeli ruling class, this offers a chance to solidify its grip and to reshape Gaza’s geography and demography; for the US and its regional allies, it promises profitable contracts and new levels of imperialist domination.
The involvement of figures such as Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald Trump—whose family real estate empire epitomizes parasitic speculation and the financial oligarchy—underscores the class character of these plans. The same system that turned Gaza into a killing field now seeks to turn its ruins into an investment bonanza, from which the survivors are to be excluded except as a super-exploited labor force under the guns of the Israeli occupation troops.
3. Videos: Wayne State University students speak out against ICE raids and inequality
This week, World Socialist Web Site reporters and members of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) spoke to students at Wayne State University about the attacks on immigrant workers by the Trump administration.
These videos are posted on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and Twitter/X. Please like, comment and share them, and subscribe/follow the World Socialist Web Site on each platform for more.
4. Survivors of September 2 boat strike waved for rescue, did not know they had been attacked
The survivors of the US military’s September 2 drone strike in the Caribbean attempted to wave to US military aircraft for rescue and appeared not to understand that the US military had attempted to kill them, the New York Times reported Friday.
The Times, citing people who saw the video following its screening at a meeting before congressional committees yesterday, wrote that “two survivors of the US military’s first boat strike on Sept. 2 climbed atop the overturned hull and waved to something overhead.” The people who saw the video told the Times the “most logical explanation was that the two survivors had seen the American aircraft above them and started signaling for a rescue.”
The report in the Times contradicts the claims of defenders of the Trump administration’s drone murders. “I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound to the United States back over so they could stay in the fight,” said Republican Senator Tom Cotton, in an attempt to defend the killings.
Rather, the video indicates that the survivors had no idea they were in any “fight.” According to the Times, a person who watched the video added that “it is also not clear if the survivors even knew the initial explosion was an attack.”
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The American public has the right to view the recording of the strike, which has so far only been shown to members of Congress behind closed doors. It must be publicly released immediately.
The Trump administration, however, will no doubt seek to cover up or even destroy the tape and is counting on the Democrats to help them do it. In 2005, the Bush administration destroyed recordings of the torture of detainees at a CIA black site. At the time, congressional Democrats were made aware of the destruction of the tapes but did not inform the public.
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The details of the murder come the same day that the Trump administration published a new National Defense Strategy that places central emphasis on US domination of Latin America, as a base of power projection in the conflict with China and other states.
The document declares, “We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere … remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.”
It demands “a readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere … to control sea lanes … and to control key transit routes in a crisis...”
It declares effectively, all of North and South America as “our hemisphere,” giving a generality to the seemingly disparate plans floated by Trump over the past year to annex Panama, Greenland and Canada, as well as the massive militarization targeting Venezuela. Control of these strategic territories and waterways would give the United States, the Trump administration hopes, the weight to confront China on the global sphere.
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in February following Trump’s statement that he intended to annex Canada, there is a direct precedent for Trump’s efforts to unify “our hemisphere” in the Anschluss policy of the Nazi regime.
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This plan for world domination entails criminality on a vast scale, as has been demonstrated by the killing spree in the Pacific and Caribbean.
5. Amnesty International report details torture, abuse at immigration detention camps in Florida
On Thursday, Amnesty International published a report titled “Torture and enforced disappearances in the Sunshine State,” documenting torture carried out by the US immigration Gestapo at detention camps in Florida. The report includes interviews with four immigrants kidnapped and held at the Everglades compound (run by the state in conjunction with the federal government), which Trump has proudly labeled “Alligator Alcatraz,” and at Miami’s notorious Krome detention and processing center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility with decades of documented abuse and maltreatment.
The report’s most explosive revelations describe torture methods at the Everglades camp that directly mirror the war crimes committed by the US military and intelligence agencies at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp in Cuba beginning in the early 2000s. At those imperialist outposts, the US carried out beatings, forced stress positions, sensory deprivation, sexual humiliation and confinement in boxes and containers, all under the authority of the Pentagon and CIA. The same methods of domination and terror have now been imported wholesale onto US soil and used against immigrant workers.
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The use of small-box confinement has long been part of the repertoire of US imperialist torture. Abu Zubaydah, captured by the US in 2002 and still held at Guantánamo, was subjected to prolonged confinement in dark cramped boxes as part of the CIA’s torture program.
The same methods used against alleged “terrorists” are now being deployed against immigrants and will soon be used against workers and citizens that object to ongoing attacks on their living standards and democratic rights.
The Everglades concentration camp opened in July 2025 with the capacity to detain roughly 3,000 people. It is the first state-owned and operated immigration concentration camp in the United States. Located directly in a hurricane corridor, the facility operates without regard to federal rules even though the Department of Homeland Security recently approved more than $600 million in grant money to fund and sustain operations.
Because the camp is state-run, it is not integrated with federal databases, including the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Locator. As of this writing, there is no public record of who is detained there or how many. Lawyers report being unable to contact clients for weeks, creating effective incommunicado detention and conditions that meet the definition of enforced disappearances.
Consequently, not only is there no federal oversight of the facility, but there exists no integration into ICE’s systems or databases. The absence of registration or tracking mechanisms for those detained at “Alligator Alcatraz” facilitates incommunicado detention and constitutes enforced disappearances when the whereabouts of a person being detained there is denied to their family, and they are not allowed to contact their lawyer.
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Amnesty International concludes that people detained in “Alligator Alcatraz” are held in cages of approximately 1,000 square feet, with 32 people per cage and eight cages per tent. “The lights are like stadium lights; they’re always on, they’re never turned off or even dimmed. It’s very cold, the air-conditioning is very strong. There are a lot of mosquitoes,” one man said.
Another described the toilet conditions: “There are three toilets in each cage. There’s no privacy; there are cameras above the toilets. The toilets were clogged a lot and shit overflowed from them. I saw a big snake. A friend was bitten by a spider that laid eggs inside of him.”
One man reported that someone died while he was held there. “I heard a lot of screaming,” he said. “But there’s no way to know what actually happened to the person because we’re not registered in ICE’s system.” Although the state of Florida is required to keep records of deaths and major medical incidents, the Florida Division of Emergency Management provided no such documentation to Amnesty International.
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At Krome immigrants faced many of the same cruel, inhuman and degrading treatments. One man said that after a guard punched him in the neck, he was forced into solitary confinement for 24 straight days. “I went nine days without any sort of medical attention,” he said. “My neck hurt; I couldn’t move it. My ribs and ear hurt too. I was finally just given a pill. I went outside only once in 24 days. I was basically incommunicado.”
Another man described being placed in an overcrowded tent. “There are 126 of us in there. There are only three telephones that we can use for five minutes a day. They count us at least twice a day. When this is happening we have to sit on our cots. The bathrooms are closed during the count which lasts over an hour.”
Another detainee said, “People are extremely stressed. They’re having a hard time, they’re sad, they’re anxious. The guards are racist and hostile. It’s almost like we disgust them.”
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The horrors described in the Amnesty International report are not aberrations and not the product of a single administration. The torture, enforced disappearances and inhuman detention conditions at “Alligator Alcatraz” and Krome express a bipartisan policy developed and expanded over decades. The torture methods pioneered under George W. Bush and acknowledged by Obama with his infamous admission, “We tortured some folks,” have now been brought onto US soil and turned against immigrant workers.
This has been made possible only because of the criminal complicity of the Democratic Party. Far from opposing Trump’s fascistic attacks on immigrants, the Democrats have facilitated them. They joined Republicans to pass the “Laken Riley Act” which expands the mass detention and deportation of immigrants. Senior Democratic figures, including Bernie Sanders, have praised Trump’s mass deportation operation and echoed his claims that immigrants pose a threat to the nation and US workers.
As resistance grows towards the raids against immigrants, the conditions in the Everglades and at Krome are a warning to workers and students that the methods of imperialist torture abroad are being brought home for use against the working class.
6. Painter Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) at New York’s Guggenheim Museum: “Life Can’t Be Stopped”
Rauschenberg belonged to a generation of artists (such as his friends and romantic partners Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns) that emerged between the twilight of Abstract Expressionism in the mid-1950s and the dawn of Pop Art in the early 1960s. Alongside his peers, Rauschenberg deepened the Abstract Expressionists’ turn away from political engagement and even abjured serious ideas and large human problems as the basis for artwork. His passive stance spoke to the harmful social indifference that had become the norm in the art world after the traumas and tribulations of the 1930s and 1940s.
This was not the doing, much less the fault, of the individual artists, many of whom were both sincere and skilled but rather the objective consequence of disorienting events: above all, the terrible degeneration of the Soviet Union and the various Communist parties and its demoralizing influence on intellectual and cultural life. The confidence of artists and others in the perspective of society moving to a higher stage had been dealt damaging blows.
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These traumas were followed by the slaughter of World War II and the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States. America became the dominant world power. The postwar boom raised the population’s living standards but also spawned a banal consumer culture fueled by an expanding mass media. Anticommunism became the state religion, and social conformity the rule. The imperialist powers made deals with Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy but also took advantage of the latter’s totalitarian character to terrorize the population with the danger of the “Red menace.”
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Faced with the brutality and philistinism of capitalism and mistakenly believing that “socialism” had failed, many artists lost hope in the prospect for radical social change. They largely lacked the capacity to recognize the restabilization of capitalism as temporary. Meanwhile, the anti-Marxist Frankfurt School and related trends, though putatively leftist, encouraged demoralization and withdrawal. The Abstract Expressionists sought “timeless,” “universal” themes often in the iconography of ancient religions and Jungian psychology. Though they produced dynamic, heroic work in some cases, theirs ultimately was a current of despair.
Other changes in the art world were contributing to a crisis within modernism itself. The gallery system was expanding, and art was becoming integrated into the culture industry. Museums, galleries and the art market were beginning to professionalize and absorb the postwar avant-garde.
Rauschenberg’s work emerged from these complex, often painful processes. Though an acquaintance and admirer of the Abstract Expressionists, he rejected their earnestness and their grand, existential (and Existentialist) themes. In fact, his work sometimes poked fun at their project without proposing new values or goals. By “debasing” his art with everyday materials, Rauschenberg showed more of a kinship with Dada, which had emerged during and after World War I. Yet he quite deliberately eschewed Dada’s caustic social criticism.
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Unlike his near-contemporary Andy Warhol (1928-1987), whose silkscreen paintings depicted celebrities and consumer products, Rauschenberg continued to embrace everyday life. But neither artist viewed his subjects critically. Neither suggested that society in Cold War America needed to be changed—or even could be changed. Rauschenberg, undoubtedly a thoughtful, gifted individual, foreshadowed Pop Art’s deplorable glorification of an unmediated surface reality.
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In 1964, Rauschenberg won the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale, a prestigious international cultural exhibition. This victory was interpreted not only as an official embrace of Pop Art but also, and more fundamentally, as a Cold War triumph for the US. At the time, the US State Department and CIA made use of artists, musicians and others as part of its propaganda warfare against “Soviet communism,” contrasting the supposed freedoms artists enjoyed in the “democratic” West, including the freedom to create experimental art, with repressive conditions in the USSR. None of the artists, rendered vulnerable by their indifference or active hostility to larger political concerns, objected to this fraudulent campaign.
In 1966, in opposition to the Vietnam War, Rauschenberg, a life-long pacifist, provided much of the funding for the “Artists’ Tower of Protest” built in an empty lot on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. Four years later, again in an anti-war protest, Rauschenberg withdrew from the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
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The world had passed through major upheavals between “Barge” and “Easter Lake (Galvanic Suite).” However, artists like Rauschenberg, committed to an approach that consciously rejected a concern with concrete historical and social development, could not in their work valuably, richly reflect or make sense of the enormous social shocks. A detrimentally static, frozen element makes itself felt. Rauschenberg’s artistic technique and his political semi-abstention remained fundamentally the same.
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The Guggenheim exhibition does not fully convey Rauschenberg’s complexity as an artist. Still less does it examine the era of artistic, economic and political shifts and transitions during which he emerged.
In important respects, Rauschenberg foreshadowed artists’ turn toward postmodernist subjectivism and pessimism. His supposed demystification of the artwork (e.g., in the Combines) inspired the Conceptual artists who followed him, for whom the “Concept” was “the most important aspect of the work.” They de-emphasized artistic form and aesthetics, arguing, like Sol LeWitt, that “execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” But artists such as LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner moved away from the sensuality of Rauschenberg’s work toward colder, language-based forms. Their work was more rarefied and even less socially engaged than Rauschenberg’s.
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Overall, Rauschenberg’s efforts convey an appealing warmth, physicality, spontaneity and embrace of human culture in various forms. He inevitably reflected the conditions and contradictions of his time, which were not conducive to artwork that took on titanic questions or challenged the status quo. Rauschenberg’s acceptance of the world as he found it was a symptom of the historical difficulties and a general retreat by the artists from social reality and commitment.
7. Brazilian postal workers set to strike against attacks by Lula government
Postal workers in the state of São Paulo, Brazil’s richest and most industrialized state, voted on Thursday for a strike to begin December 16 amid deadlocked negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement for next year.
More significantly, they are also fighting against a “restructuring plan” presented on November 21 by the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party – PT) that will accelerate plans to privatize one of Brazil’s largest public companies.
Assemblies have also been called by the other 35 local unions, and in the coming days workers in other regions and states of Brazil may approve further strike action.
The Lula administration’s “restructuring” establishes a Voluntary Dismissal Plan (PDV) for 10,000 of the 83,000 employees, the closure of 1,000 agencies, and the sale of Brazil’s Post Office properties. In addition, it provides for a loan of 20 billion reais (US$3.7 billion) to supposedly “modernize” the postal service and bring it into line with business interests.
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The Post Office has existed for 360 years in Brazil, operating in all 5,500 of its municipalities, offering services ranging from postal and delivery services to banking and the distribution of vaccines and food to poor families. It is this unique logistical capacity that has attracted the interest of companies such as Amazon and Fedex from the US, Germany’s DHL, China’s Alibaba and Argentina’s Mercado Livre.
To meet the growing interests of these and other companies, successive Brazilian governments have been cutting staff, wages, and rights, making working conditions more precarious, and advancing the privatization of the Post Office. Today, only the postal service is a monopoly of the Post Office, while parcel delivery has been open to free competition in Brazil since 2009.
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The Lula administration, despite claiming to be against the privatization of the Post Office, is implementing measures that will pave the way for it. In addition to the recently announced “restructuring plan,” these measures include opening up certain areas to competition from private companies and reducing funding.
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The approval of the strike notice for December 16 by São Paulo postal workers comes after a series of local protests and walkouts throughout Brazil this year.
The major obstacle to advancing these struggles is the nationalist and pro-corporate perspective of the postal workers’ union federations, which have a record of dividing workers, isolating them from other sectors of the federal public service, and diverting their struggles into empty appeals to the courts to break collective-bargaining deadlocks.
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What postal workers need is not to defend national sovereignty to guarantee their interests, but to advance a struggle independent of the Lula government, the PT and its pseudo-left satellites, and the unions controlled by them. This means forming rank-and-file committees affiliated with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to unify their struggles with their brothers and sisters internationally.
In countries such as the US and Canada, where postal workers are facing the same threats as their Brazilian counterparts and have staged protests and strikes that have been betrayed by the unions, these committees have been formed to oppose job cuts, the intensification of working hours and the consequent increase in workplace accidents, along with the root cause of these attacks: the capitalist system. We call on postal workers in Brazil who are beginning their struggles to join this movement.
Determined to suppress growing public anger over the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government’s catastrophic mishandling of Cyclone Ditwah, which has left nearly 1,000 dead, a senior JVP/NPP minister has ordered police to invoke emergency regulations against critics.
The measure, framed as a response to an “extremely malicious attack” through social media campaigns targeting President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and several ministers, is in fact a blatant attempt to silence dissent.
Sri Lanka has been under a draconian state of emergency since Dissanayake declared it immediately after Cyclone Ditwah devastated large sections of the island. In a televised address on November 28, he justified the move as necessary to “provide legal protection and financial allocation” to “rebuild our country better than before.”
Notably, opposition figures such as Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) leader Sajith Premadasa had urged the declaration of an emergency, underscoring the bipartisan support within the ruling elite for using repressive laws to preempt social unrest.
Although Dissanayake pledged in his speech last Sunday that emergency powers would not be used repressively, the World Socialist Web Site warned they would be deployed to enforce deeper austerity under the guise of “rebuilding.” The latest statement by his minister confirms that the government is quickly moving in that direction.
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The minister’s remarks were swiftly condemned by journalist associations and civil liberties advocates. The Sri Lanka Working Journalists’ Association (SLWJA) denounced the directive, stating: “The very people who once championed freedom of speech and expression are now issuing orders to abolish it, showing the government has embarked on a path against democracy.” The SLWJA also pointed to several incidents over the past year that threatened media freedom under the JVP/NPP.
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) endorsed the SLWJA’s statement, calling on the government to respect the public’s right to information and uphold freedom of expression.
Since taking office late last year, the JVP/NPP government has mounted a series of attacks on press freedom and journalists.
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The Cyclone Ditwah disaster has completely exposed the bankruptcy of the JVP/NPP government and the capitalist system as a whole. It has triggered a profound political crisis—not only for the government, but also for the opposition parties, which are scrambling to disassociate themselves from responsibility for what is ultimately a man-made disaster rooted in decades of neglect and corruption.
Successive governments failed to invest in modern forecasting systems or to develop infrastructure that could have saved lives and mitigated the cyclone’s impact. Now, while making empty phrases over the catastrophe, both government and opposition are united in fear of the growing outrage in the working class and among the oppressed masses.
The JVP/NPP government remains focused on fulfilling its pledges to the International Monetary Fund. President Dissanayake and his ministers have made clear that not even a natural catastrophe of this magnitude will shift their commitment to brutal austerity. Officials insist that working people must bear the burden of recovery costs, now estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. Anticipating resistance, the government has responded by imposing emergency regulations to punish even modest criticism of its failures.
9. Jacobin’s defense of the Trump–Mamdani pact and the capitalist state
In the aftermath of New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s White House meeting with Donald Trump, in which the so-called “democratic socialist” and the fascist would-be dictator exchanged pleasantries and mutual praise, Jacobin, the unofficial organ of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has published a series of articles hailing the meeting and praising Mamdani’s capitulation to Trump as a political tour de force.
One of the most significant of these articles is a commentary by Christopher Marquis headlined “Trump and Mamdani Agree on the State, Not on Whom It Serves.” In the course of the article, Marquis, a professor of management at the University of Cambridge, argues that the capitalist state is not intrinsically hostile to the interests of the working class and can, through prodding from the “left,” be either pressured to serve the needs of working people or captured outright by them.
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Marquis defines the “underlying issue” as “economic governance” (emphasis in the original). This is a false statement that could be taken from the talking points of any run-of-the-mill Democratic politician.
In reality, the underlying issue is the social relations of production under capitalism, in which the capitalists own the means of production, and the workers, who produce all of the wealth, own nothing but their ability to work, which they must sell to their exploiters in return for a wage. These relations generate an irreconcilable class struggle, leading either to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the working class and the establishment of a workers’ state and socialism, based on common ownership of the means of production, equality, and production for social need rather than private profit, or a descent into fascist barbarism and nuclear war.
There is not a hint of class struggle or working class revolution in the Jacobin article, or in the politics of the DSA and Mamdani. On the contrary, this is their greatest fear, which leads them into the arms of the fascist representative of the oligarchy, Trump.
It is striking that Marquis’ presentation of the political situation, couched in abstract, academic jargon, provides no sense of the staggering and unprecedented levels of wealth concentration and social inequality in today’s America. It says nothing about Trump’s fascist pogrom against immigrants, his unconstitutional deployment of troops to major cities, his assertion of dictatorial powers, his support for genocide in Gaza, or his illegal military attacks on Iran, Venezuela and other countries.
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The class function of the state has never been more naked, rendering absurd the DSA’s politics of tinkering around the edges of the capitalist status quo.
Marquis’ argument is not merely wrong in theory. It serves a definite class function. Jacobin is an organ of the DSA and a broader affluent middle class layer clustered in academia, NGOs and the trade union bureaucracy. This milieu has grown socially and politically dependent on the capitalist state: on public grants, tenured posts, foundations, and the managed “left” spaces supplied by the Democratic Party. Its material interests bind it to the preservation of the existing order, even as it cultivates a left‑wing image through rhetoric about “democratic socialism” and identity politics.
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The objective conditions for socialist revolution are maturing rapidly. The same technological and economic processes, such as AI, which have driven the rise of the oligarchy are also creating the material basis for the mass political radicalization of the working class. The decisive issue is the building of a revolutionary leadership capable of turning this objective movement into a conscious struggle for power.
The announcement by the Left Party (Die Linke) that it would abstain in Friday’s Bundestag (parliament) vote on the pensions package of the Merz government, thereby ensuring its adoption, exposes it once again as a pro-capitalist party loyal to the state. Confronted with growing social and political opposition in Germany and across Europe, it is doing everything it can to keep in office the most right-wing government since the founding of the Federal Republic—a government that is rearming Germany on a scale not seen since Hitler, organising massive social attacks, implementing the policies of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) and thus paving its way into government.
The Left Party tries to cloak its support for Merz in social phraseology. “We will not accept that pension levels are pushed down even further,” declared faction leader Heidi Reichinnek. The introduction of a “guard rail” should not fail because of her party, she said–referring to the government’s plan to continue the expired minimum pension level of 48 percent until 2031.
A brief look at reality shows how cynical this justification is. In view of massive price increases and continuing inflation, this “guard rail” amounts to a cut. Germany’s pension level is already among the lowest in Europe and will continue to fall in the coming years—not despite, but because of the pensions package, which explicitly aims to make the social devastation more inevitable.
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The anti-working class and reactionary character of this collaboration can only be understood against the backdrop of the social and political offensive of German imperialism.
Barely a week ago the government adopted the 2026 budget—the largest war budget since the fall of the Third Reich. At over €108 billion and still rising, it breaks all previous limits and drives militarisation forward with unprecedented speed. The logic of the budget is clear: the hundreds of billions flowing into armaments must be clawed back from the population through social cuts.
The pensions plans are therefore not isolated, but part of a social counterrevolution. The assault on pensions, healthcare, care provision, basic welfare and wages is one of the domestic pillars of Germany’s new great-power policy. And the Left Party demonstratively stands behind it.
The Left Party’s support also comes at a moment when the Merz government is consciously acting as a springboard for the fascist AfD. Merz already cooperated with the AfD ahead of the last federal elections. Now the coalition led by him, together with the SPD, is organising mass deportations, sharply expanding the police and intelligence agencies and adopting open Nazi rhetoric—such as Merz’s agitation about refugees “disfiguring” the “urban environment.”
The new budget even includes a direct bridge to the far right: €250,000 [$US291,000] are being channelled to the right-wing think tank “Republik 21” (R21), founded by former Merz adviser Andreas Rödder and former Family Minister Kristina Schröder (CDU)—a project that officially seeks “dialogue” with the AfD and is preparing its political integration at federal level.
That the Left Party supports Merz in parliament under these conditions reveals its true character. It is not a bulwark against fascism and militarism, but the political lubricant for strengthening the far right and implementing its agenda.
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Pseudo-left forces play the same role around the world. The election victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York reflects the leftward shift of workers and youth in the heart of world imperialism. But Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), to which he belongs, have since worked feverishly with the Democratic Party machine, Wall Street boardrooms and the state apparatus to recapture and suppress the political anger that propelled him into office. The provisional climax of this effort was Mamdani’s repulsive and humiliating subordination to the fascist President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on November 21.
How is this rightward shift of pseudo-left forces to be explained? Regarding the Left Party, we wrote in an earlier analysis:
Despite its name, the Left Party has never been a socialist or even left-wing party. It has always been a bourgeois organisation representing the interests of the state apparatus and a wealthy upper-middle-class strata, defending German capitalism and imperialism and being rewarded for this with ministerial posts and state subsidies running into the millions.
None of the Left Party’s verbiage can hide the fact that its predecessor organisation, the Stalinist party of state in the former East Germany (SED/PDS), supported the introduction of capitalist relations there, thereby laying the foundations for the return of German militarism and fascism.
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There is only one clear conclusion. Anyone who wants to fight war, rearmament, fascism and social devastation needs a completely different perspective from the servile grovelling of the Left Party. It is necessary to organise opposition independently of all bourgeois parties and the pro-capitalist trade unions tied to them and to develop it based on an international socialist strategy.
The central task here is to build the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP—the German section of the Fourth International) as the revolutionary leadership of the working class. Only on this basis can the war course of German imperialism and the turn of the ruling class—including its “left” representatives—towards fascism and war be halted.
In what public health experts are calling the most consequential attack on disease-prevention policy in modern US history, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), under the control of the Trump administration, has voted to delay the Hepatitis B vaccine for newborns.
The decision effectively dismantles the decades-long standard of administering the first dose within the first 24 hours of life, a cornerstone of the universal immunization strategy that has protected millions of infants from a lifelong, incurable viral infection. The “birth dose” is needed because maternal infection is often asymptomatic, and screening fails to identify all infectious mothers. This critical vaccination has helped reduce pediatric Hepatitis B infections by more than 95 percent since 1991.
This vote by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is part of the Trump administration’s campaign, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to dismantle public health in the United States. What is being implemented under the guise of “health freedom” is, in fact, the demolition of the very institutions and structures that have protected millions from infectious disease.
The path to this outcome was paved through a calculated dismantling of the public health advisory structure, a central component of the Trump administration’s broader war on science. Earlier this year, Kennedy took the unprecedented step of firing all 17 members of the existing ACIP panel—historically composed of experts in vaccinology, infectious diseases, epidemiology and immunology—and replacing them with anti-vaccination advocates.
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The consequences of this policy shift have already been modeled in detail, and the projections show a significant rise in preventable illness, cancer, death and long-term healthcare costs.
In a preprint study titled “Economic Evaluation of Delaying the Infant Hepatitis B Vaccination Schedule,” Eric W. Hall of Oregon Health & Science University assessed the lifetime clinical and economic impact of delaying the birth dose for the 2024 US birth cohort. The model incorporates the realities of the US healthcare system, including “imperfect adherence”—the well-documented fact that when the birth dose is not administered in the hospital, the likelihood of completing the full vaccine series drops sharply.
According to Hall’s modeling, even a brief delay of the first dose until two months of age for infants born to mothers not known to be infected would result in 1,437 additional preventable acute Hepatitis B infections in children, 304 additional cases of liver cancer, 482 additional HBV-related deaths, and $222 million in excess healthcare costs annually.
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The vote to delay the Hepatitis B vaccine is the most advanced expression of the broader restructuring of American public health by the Trump-Kennedy administration. With far-right anti-vaccination activists now installed across the Health and Human Services (HHS), CDC and ACIP, the administration has created the machinery to revise, and ultimately dismantle, the entire childhood immunization schedule and the scientific norms that once governed it.
This is part of a broader war on the working class and all remaining social programs. The Trump administration is pursuing the same strategy in every sphere: gutting environmental regulations, dismantling public education, militarizing police forces and criminalizing political opposition.
This transformation, however, did not begin with Trump. The Biden administration played an indispensable role in creating the political and institutional framework for the present collapse of public health. It was Biden who prematurely declared in 2022 that the pandemic was “over,” dismantled all mitigation measures, ended federal funding for testing and treatment, blocked mask requirements and forced millions back into unsafe workplaces and schools.
The bipartisan “forever COVID” policy normalized mass infection, sickness and death—abandoning the basic principle that society has a responsibility to protect public health. This cultivated the political environment in which Trump and Kennedy can move openly to destroy all that remains of evidence-based policy.
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The defense of public health is inseparable from the defense of all democratic and social rights. It cannot be entrusted to either faction of the ruling class. The independent political mobilization of the working class is the only force capable of halting this descent into dictatorship. The defense of science—real science, grounded in evidence and dedicated to human welfare—requires the overthrow of the capitalist system that subordinates life to profit.
We urge scientists, health care workers, educators, students and all workers who recognize the danger of this moment to join this fight for socialism.
12. United States: FedEx to close Dallas, Texas-area facility, impacting 856 jobs
FedEx is laying off all 856 employees at its FedEx Supply Chain Logistics & Electronics center in Coppell, Texas, 20 minutes northwest of Dallas. The layoffs are beginning in “phases” starting in January, with the facility fully closing in April. This comes amid an ongoing job slaughter, with 32,000 jobs being cut in November and 30 percent of US corporations planning holiday season layoffs.
The explanation given by the company is that “this action is necessitated solely by our customer’s decision [an undisclosed business] to transition its business to a new location that will be managed by a new third-party logistics provider.” A similar explanation was given in the announcement of the layoff of 611 workers at a Memphis Fed Ex Supply Chain center.
The layoffs were detailed in a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice) notice to the Texas Workforce Commission. The WARN Act requires that private employers give notice 60 days in advance to relevant state authorities and employees for layoffs affecting more than 50 people. Recent notices in Texas notices are viewable on the TWC website here.
The WARN Act does not cover contractors, however. Given the large number of independent contractors that FedEx relies upon for shipping and other aspects of operating the site, the announced layoff numbers are likely an undercount of the closure’s real impact.
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FedEx launched a $2 billion cost-reduction plan in 2023 called “Network 2.0,” aimed at combining 650 Fedex Express and 650 FedEx Ground locations into 850 to 900 combined locations. This plan, modeled on a similar one by the company in Canada, seeks to slash jobs and close facilities, consolidating the company’s operations into a smaller number of highly automated facilities. The plan is reportedly 25 percent complete and expected to be completed in May. Previously, FedEx has stated it intends to close 30 percent of package facilities as part of the plan.
More than 1.1 million layoffs have been announced so far by US corporations this year, the highest level since the start of the pandemic and approaching the figure from the first year of the Great Recession in 2008. While the largest components come from the government (as part of the Trump administration’s attack on social programs and corporate regulators) and technology firms, logistics is also playing a leading role.
FedEx’s main private competitor UPS is carrying out a similar plan, the “Network of the Future,” aiming to close 200 facilities and introduce technology with the potential to automate 80 percent of its warehouse jobs. While FedEx is nonunion, the UPS job cuts are being carried out with the support of the Teamsters union; the cuts began almost as soon as a sellout contract passed in 2023. This year alone, UPS has axed 48,000 jobs.
The United States Postal Service (USPS) is in the midst of its own “Delivering for America” consolidation program, which aims to close hundreds of post offices and thousands of routes and automate much of its operations. Related systems are being introduced to impose speedup on letter carriers through the use of Amazon-style AI-tracking programs.
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Behind all of the logistics layoffs is the rapid rise of Amazon’s competing logistics network. The company, which only began offering last-mile delivery around a decade ago, leads the industry with 25 percent of the total US parcel volume, more than combined volume of FedEx and UPS. Other alternatives besides Amazon—such as Walmart, Target, and smaller carriers—have also grown their market share by 3 percent at the cost of FedEx and UPS, accounting for 10 percent of the market by 2024.
The use of third-party contractors (or “Delivery Service Providers” as they are known at Amazon) and Uber-style deliveries using private vehicles marks the further shift towards the highly exploited “gig” economy.
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Tariffs and relentless cost-cutting will contribute to accelerating layoffs across the US and the world.
In response, workers must launch a global counter-offensive through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). The IWA-RFC is organizing workers independent of the sellout union bureaucrats to fight for the right to a good-paying job, workers’ control over safety, the defense of immigrant workers and other basic social and democratic rights.
FedEx workers must join this growing movement by founding rank-and-file committees at their own workplaces, comprised of the most trusted workers, to prepare a fight against layoffs.
13. Australia: Mass arrests of protesters at Newcastle coal port
Over 8,000 people from across Australia attended the “People’s Blockade” in Newcastle, New South Wales (NSW) over the weekend of November 27 to December 2, voicing hostility to the escalating climate catastrophe and the refusal of successive governments to curb Australia’s vast coal and gas exports.
Australia is the world’s second-largest exporter of thermal coal and a major LNG producer, with Newcastle hosting the largest coal port in the world in terms of export volume.
Participants were motivated by the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events attributed to rising greenhouse emissions including soaring temperatures, intensifying bushfires and storms. Under these conditions, coal and gas companies enjoy tens of billions in revenue with some paying virtually zero tax according to experts.
Taking to kayaks and other small craft over the weekend, protesters blocked three coal ships and rescheduled 10 according to organisers, crossing a “maritime exclusion zone” imposed by the NSW Police. On Sunday around 2 p.m., the port authority was compelled to announce the cancellation of all shipping movements.
Over this time, police carried out a coordinated crackdown on protesters arresting 181 people. Sixteen of these were detained on Monday morning, including one juvenile, for entering the restricted areas of the coal terminal nearby and chaining themselves to coal loaders and conveyor belts for three and a half hours.
The police operation included marine units, drones, rapid-response teams and mounted patrols aimed at preventing even symbolic interference with the movement of coal ships. While draconian anti-protest laws were not formally invoked, which can carry up to two years’ imprisonment for disrupting major economic activities, police relied upon the exclusion zone to carry out the detentions.
Whilst many in attendance were genuinely opposed to the actions of the Labor government, the politics that lead the “protestival,” of appealing to the government to change course, are bankrupt.
This is the third year that the People’s Blockade by “Rising Tide” has run, and the response of both the state and federal Labor governments has been to solidarize with the coal and gas giants whose operations dominate the Hunter region (where Newcastle is based).
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While the Newcastle event pointed to growing anger over the climate crisis, definite political lessons must be drawn. The environmental catastrophe will not be halted through yet more appeals to capitalist governments, or protest stunts aimed at placing pressure on them.
Climate change is a product of capitalism, an outmoded social order hurtling to catastrophe, including the threat of a nuclear war. The climate crisis cannot be resolved under conditions where society’s resources and productive capacity by a tiny corporate and financial elite. It is, moreover, an inherently global issue which cannot be addressed within the framework of rival capitalist nation-states, each representing their own capitalist class.
What is required is the development of an international movement of the working class, completely independent of the governments and political establishments responsible for the climate crisis. Such a movement must be socialist, aiming at nothing less than the reorganisation of society from top to bottom on a world scale, so that the immense resources that exist can be harnessed to address social need, including by addressing the climate catastrophe, not the accumulation of vast private profit.
14. Union sells out New Zealand high school teachers
The Post-Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) announced on Thursday that secondary school teachers had voted to accept the New Zealand government’s revised pay-cutting offer.
Teachers will receive pay rises of 2.5 and 2.1 percent over the next two years—significantly below the 3 percent inflation rate and 4.7 percent increase in food prices.
The deal is a blatant sellout of teachers, who have undertaken repeated strikes since August in opposition to the National Party-led government’s moves to slash wages and starve schools of staff and resources.
The PPTA’s 20,000 members joined the October 23 “mega strike” involving more than 100,000 public sector workers including primary school teachers, nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers. With 3.5 percent of the country’s workforce involved, it was New Zealand’s biggest strike since 1979 and part of a growing upsurge of the working class internationally.
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The PPTA’s sellout confirms the Socialist Equality Group’s warning, in a statement distributed to workers during the October 23 strike, that the union leaders were determined to block a genuine struggle against austerity and militarism.
The only way to fight the government’s agenda is in a rebellion against the union apparatus, which enforces the dictates of big business and the government. This requires the building of new workers’ organizations: rank-and-file committees, controlled by workers themselves and independent of the unions and all the capitalist parties.
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The union has not revealed how many teachers voted for and against the revised deal. In the Reddit forum r/newzealand, one teacher commented: “A lot of teachers are disappointed, this was a really divisive vote from what I see—I think a lot of people were just afraid that there wouldn’t be a better offer/that the govt would insist on more clawbacks in any future offer, even if the salary offer was improved.”
A primary school teacher added: “They’re obviously going to use this to try push through basically the same [deal] for primary on the grounds [that] secondary accepted it.”
The primary teachers’ union NZEI will certainly use the PPTA’s sellout to pressure about 30,000 primary teachers to accept the same deal. Following nationwide strikes in 2019 and 2023 both unions used similar tactics to persuade their members that they had no alternative to accepting what were essentially pay freezes demanded by the then-Labour Party government.
In a provocative move, the New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union released a statement titled “NZPFU congratulates PPTA on settlement.” Around 2,000 low-paid firefighters have taken strike action in recent weeks to oppose a below-inflation pay offer (5.1 percent over three years) and now the union leadership is publicly applauding a real wage cut for teachers. The NZPFU echoed the government’s propaganda that teachers are highly paid and privileged.
The New Zealand Nurses Organisation, the Public Service Association (PSA) and the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists will likewise use the PPTA’s agreement to insist that nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers must accept a pay cut.
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The union bureaucracies called the October 23 strike with extreme reluctance. They did so not to launch a real industrial and political campaign against government austerity, but to try and maintain control over tens of thousands of workers, who are deeply outraged over soaring living costs and unbearable conditions in public hospitals and schools.
No further joint strikes were scheduled. Instead, the unions went back into separate negotiations with the government behind closed doors, designed to isolate and demoralise workers.
Unions and pseudo-left groups are also encouraging illusions that workers can reverse the current attacks by voting for the Labour Party and its allies in next year’s election. The last Labour Party government lost the 2023 election in a landslide precisely because it had overseen worsening social inequality, poverty and homelessness, as well as attacking health and education workers.
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The Socialist Equality Group repeats its call for workers to build rank-and-file committees in schools, hospitals and all workplaces. These committees must expand the fight against austerity to all sections of the working class, in the public sector and private industries, in opposition to the unions which are doing everything to prevent such a unified struggle.
They must also forge links with workers in Australia and other countries who confront the same attacks.
This fight requires a socialist strategy. Workers should base their demands not on what the government, the corporate media and the unions claim is “affordable” or “realistic,” but on what workers actually need, including an immediate 30 percent pay increase to make up for decades of stagnant wages.
15. Australian state Labor government to impose life sentences on children as young as fourteen
The Labor Party government in Australia’s second-largest state Victoria, headed by Premier Jacinta Allan, announced on November 12 that it will introduce laws allowing children as young as 14 to be tried in adult courts and sentenced to life imprisonment. The so-called “Adult Time for Violent Crime” legislation, to be introduced by the end of this year, marks an escalation in the assault on democratic rights being carried out by Labor and Coalition governments across Australia.
The laws target children from 14 to 17 charged with offences including home invasion, carjacking and causing injury. Under the current Children’s Court system, the maximum sentence for any offence is three years. Under the new regime, children will be dragged before the County Court, where the same offences will carry the threat of adult penalties up to life imprisonment.
The basic legal principle that detention should be a “last resort” for children—enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child—will be effectively abolished. Judges will instead be directed to prioritise “community safety,” a deliberately vague formulation that subordinates children’s futures to the political requirements of a government seeking to posture as “tough on crime.”
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The measures will worsen the very problems they purport to address. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data show 51 percent of young offenders who serve their first sentence in detention return to offending before turning 18, compared to 41 percent when community-based sentences are used. Dr Susan Baidawi of the Monash Criminal Justice Consortium warned the legislation “will at best have no impact on their future risk of crime, at worst, it will inflate” it.
Victoria Legal Aid chief executive Toby Hemming noted that many children before the courts “have committed violent crimes, and many have been victims of crime themselves. These children are in urgent need of support to help them build stable, positive lives and avoid reoffending, which the adult justice system is not designed to do.”
Exposed by researchers but ignored by the government is the phenomenon of “child criminal exploitation”—organised adult criminals grooming impoverished and disadvantaged youth to commit offences on their behalf. Rather than targeting these criminal networks and the social conditions that make such exploitation possible, the Labor government seeks to imprison the exploited children.
The Allan Labor government knows its laws will not reduce offending. Their real purpose is to construct new mechanisms and infrastructure of state repression under conditions of a deepening social and economic crisis, and to channel legitimate popular anger over deteriorating living standards into support for authoritarian measures directed at the most vulnerable layers of the working class, above all youth.
The social conditions producing desperation among working-class youth are a matter of public record. The 2023 Australian Youth Barometer report found 90 percent of young Australians experienced financial difficulties in the preceding 12 months, 72 percent believe they will never own a home, and 21 percent experienced food insecurity.
Young workers are grossly over-represented among the unemployed, comprising 15.7 percent of the workforce but 25.2 percent of the long-term jobless. Only 22 percent work full-time, while 67 percent require financial support from family. The psychological toll is immense: 97 percent reported feelings of worry, anxiety or pessimism.
These are the conditions over which successive state and federal governments, Labor and Coalition alike, have presided. The Allan Labor government has deepened them. Its response is not to address the housing crisis, restore secure, well-paid employment or reverse decades of social spending cuts. It is to imprison children.
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The Allan government’s crime laws are only its latest assault on the democratic and social rights of workers and youth. It has viciously denounced school students striking against the Gaza genocide, joining the official campaign to suppress opposition to Australian imperialism’s complicity in Israeli war crimes. It has participated in escalating attacks on the right to protest, including a ban on face coverings at demonstrations and leaving intact the repressive apparatus used against climate, anti-war and pro-Palestine protesters. Meanwhile, it is overseeing the demolition of public housing estates amid the worst housing crisis in decades.
The bipartisan adoption of authoritarian methods by Australian state and federal governments is part of an international shift towards dictatorial rule, epitomised by the fascistic Trump administration. Confronted with a growing social and economic crisis, capitalist governments worldwide are turning to the most repressive measures.
Defending the democratic rights of children and workers in general can only be achieved through a struggle against all the major parties of capitalist rule in Australia and globally. That requires the independent mobilisation of the working class against the entire political establishment and the capitalist system it defends. The laws targeting children today will be extended to workers, students and all those who oppose Labor’s agenda of war and social devastation. The urgent task is to build a socialist leadership in the working class to wage this political struggle.
Teaching staff at a secondary school in Bacup, Lancashire north-west England, took their first day of strike action on Wednesday to protest pupils being taught by a virtual teacher (VT). The walkout takes place amid a deepening recruitment and retention crisis as public education faces an existential breakdown after decades of underfunding by successive Conservative and Labour governments.
Members of the National Education Union (NEU) voted by an 82 percent majority on a 75 percent turnout to strike, expressing the deep opposition among staff. Further strike action is planned for December 10 and 11, and next term from January 6 to 8.
In July, management at the Star Academies Trust imposed distance learning for top-set pupils in Years 9–11 at The Valley Leadership Academy, citing a chronic shortage of maths teachers which it could not recruit locally. A well-attended picket of around 25 staff gathered outside the school with NEU placards reading “No virtual teachers—our children deserve better”, alongside a mock-up cardboard dummy labelled “What next-Robot Teachers ?”. Passing cars beeped in their support of the strikers. The teachers’ opposition has broader community support: the BBC reported that a confidential union petition opposing the new arrangement received 500 signatures in August.
A reporting team from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) spoke with teaching staff about their concerns and why they have decided that strike action was necessary.
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The WSWS reporting team also distributed the article “Teachers in secondary school in Bacup. England to strike demanding face to face qualified teacher in the classroom” which was widely taken up on the picket line. It outlined the broader context of the dispute and the need for a wider fightback to defend public education.
The introduction of VTs at The Valley follows two “very limited” pilots at Highfield Leadership Academy in Blackpool (English) and Laisterdyke Leadership Academy in Bradford (Maths), and parallels developments in the United States where private firms profit from virtual staffing due to the shortage of qualified teachers.
Government data shows widespread secondary teacher vacancies in the UK, especially in maths, physics, computing and languages. The Labour government has pledged to recruit 6,500 teachers by 2029, but National Foundation for Educational Research data shows little progress. Special Educational Needs and Development (SEND) funding faces a £6 billion shortfall, and the government is preparing a white paper to “bring costs down”.
Virtualisation is not educational innovation but an austerity measure benefiting business-oriented academy trusts. The groundbreaking developments with technology, the internet, AI and digital tools could support learning, but only under the control of trained, qualified teachers—not as a substitute for them or to mask the recruitment crisis engineered by government policy.
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To defend high-quality, fully funded education, educators must build independent rank-and-file committees, linking their fight with workers across public services. This is a political struggle against a Labour government committed to austerity and defending corporate interests—including academy trusts reshaping schools for profit.
17. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
New Zealand:
Philippines:
South Korea:
18. 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.
