Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. After Venezuela, Trump targets Iran—the imperialist rampage escalates
The Trump administration is preparing an imminent military attack on Iran in the next stage of a regime-change operation aimed at returning the Middle Eastern country of 93 million people to neocolonial subjugation and placing its vast oil reserves under US imperialist control and domination.
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On Tuesday morning, in a social media post framed as a message to the Iranian protesters, Trump declared, “TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS... Help is on its way.” This was just hours before he was to confer with top Pentagon generals and his national security staff on “options” for attacking Iran.
Open-source intelligence and flight-tracking data reveal that since December there has been a surge of US war materials to the Persian Gulf region, a necessary prerequisite for waging war on Iran.
Trump’s attempt to depict himself as the “liberator” of the Iranian people is a monstrous fraud, based on the Hitlerian concept of the “Big Lie.”
US imperialism never reconciled itself to the mass uprising that overthrew the tyrannical regime of the Shah in 1979. It has mounted a decades-long campaign of threats, military aggression and economic warfare against Iran and its people. In 2018, Trump torpedoed the UN-backed Iran nuclear accord and unilaterally imposed crippling sanctions—subsequently reinforced under the Democrat Biden—with the avowed aim of crashing Iran’s economy and bringing about regime-change.
Washington’s desired outcome has always been driving the Iranian people into deprivation and misery. The sanction-enforced cut-off of access to drugs and advanced medical devices has alone caused tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of premature deaths.
As always, the US corporate media are all reading from the same script dictated from the White House. They question nothing, investigate nothing.
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Now Trump, his Democratic Party enablers and the media are exploiting the demonstrations in Iran to create a new casus belli. It replaces that used to justify last June’s 12-day US-Israeli war on Iran that killed more than 1,000 people, and which Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked when they held a war conclave at Mar-a-Lago on December 29—the threat supposedly posed by Iran’s civilian nuclear program.
No doubt there is widespread anger and dissatisfaction with Iran’s clerical-led bourgeois nationalist regime, which represses any form of working class political self-expression and has systematically dismantled the social concessions made to the working people in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution that overthrew the tyrannical monarchical dictatorship of the Shah.
Given the shutdown of the Internet and social media, it is difficult to make a comprehensive assessment of all the forces at work within Iran. But at this point, there is not credible evidence that the protests now unfolding in Iran are a movement of and for the working class. This is attested to by their social composition, absence of any demands to address the pressing socio-economic problems facing Iran’s workers and rural toilers, and the lack of any organized working class intervention in the form of mass strikes.
The protests were initiated by the bazaari—that is, a section of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie comprised of money-lenders, merchants and shopkeepers—and have taken on an ever more explicitly right-wing, pro-imperialist character, akin to the “color revolutions” instigated by American imperialism and it agents in Ukraine, Georgia and elsewhere.
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The elements that at this point predominate in the demonstrations are viciously hostile to the plight of the oppressed masses, as exemplified in the prominent protest slogan, “My heart beats only for Iran—not for Gaza, not for Lebanon!,” the protesters’ targeting of Afghan refugees, and the increasing embrace of the Pahlavi dynasty.
Due to the misrule of the Islamic Republic and the political confusion spread by the pseudo-left in and outside Iran, who call for unity with far-right forces in the name of “democracy,” tragically some workers and students have no doubt been caught up in the ongoing protests and state repression. But as the World Socialist Web Site previously explained, “any progressive tendency in Iran would have to immediately repudiate Trump’s ‘support’, denounce the threat of imminent US military action and call for the immediate lifting of the punitive sanctions that are strangling Iran’s economy.”
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The imperialists now declaring their “horror” and “revulsion” over the events in Iran have not been moved by the ongoing slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza—to say nothing of the Nazi-style starvation of the entire enclave’s population—perpetrated by Israel with the full support and military assistance of Washington, first under Biden and now Trump.
As in Venezuela at the beginning of the year, the Trump administration is acting with utter criminality and recklessness.
However, more than criminality connects the attack on Venezuela and the regime-change operation, and an impending military attack targeting Iran. They are part of a developing world war.
The US is seeking to seize hold of the world’s oil resources in preparation for military confrontation with China.
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Workers must be warned: US imperialism is on the verge of launching a new war against Iran whose consequences are incalculable. In threatening Iran, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stated, “When [Trump] says he’ll do something, he means it.” Trump has repeatedly vowed to unleash military fury against Iran, just as he has pledged to rule like a dictator.
“I don’t need international law,” Trump told the New York Times last week. “The only thing that can stop me,” he continued, “is my own will.”
In reality, there is something that can stop him: the international working class. Even as Trump prepares for war on Iran, 15,000 nurses are on strike in New York City—the largest nurses’ strike in the city in decades. In France, hundreds of thousands have struck against austerity. Italy saw a general strike in November. Belgium’s workers walked out against the country’s coalition government. From Germany to the UK to Latin America, the objective conditions for a global movement against capitalism and war are emerging.
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in its New Year statement: “The ruling class has made clear what they want 2026 to be: a year of unrestrained military violence. The answer must be to make 2026 a year of class struggle and the development of a mass movement for socialism.” This depends on the building of a new leadership in the working class, rooted in the principles of Marxism and armed with the strategy of permanent revolution to forge its political independence and unify its struggles across state boundaries and continents.
2. SEIU cancels 5-day strike at KPC Health facilities in California
A five-day Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike by California healthcare workers has been canceled by Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW West). Around 1,600 workers at six Southern California hospitals operated by KPC Health were prepared to walk out on January 12, with workers voting 98 percent in favor of a walkout.
The SEIU-UHW West bureaucracy announced a tentative agreement on January 10 and called off the strike—just two days before 15,000 nurses in New York City launched what has become the largest nurses’ strike in the city’s history under the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA). The timing of the cancellation is not coincidental. Healthcare workers across the country are fighting for identical demands: safe staffing ratios, wages that keep pace with inflation, fully funded benefits and protections against workplace violence. The objective conditions exist for a coordinated national movement in defense of public health and healthcare workers’ rights.
However, the union bureaucracies that claim to represent healthcare workers are actively working to prevent such coordination. In New York, despite near-unanimous strike authorizations, NYSNA canceled strike notices at all but four hospitals and negotiated last-minute, facility-by-facility tentative agreements designed to divide and isolate workers. In California, SEIU-UHW West has followed the same playbook, canceling what would have been a powerful demonstration of worker militancy at the exact moment it could have linked up with the largest nurses’ strike in New York City history.
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KPC Health is a for-profit healthcare system with $750 million in annual revenue and $10 billion in assets. Frontline healthcare workers face a myriad of workplace issues, including sub-inflation pay raises, skyrocketing turnover, unsafe staff-to-patient ratios, improper equipment and management intimidation.
“We are tired of being asked to do the impossible without enough staff, proper equipment or the support we need to do our jobs safely,” Jessica Meinert, a technician at Hemet Global Medical Center, said in a press release.
The contract will be voted on towards the end of January and will have to be approved and ratified by the membership before being implemented. So far, the SEIU-UHW West bureaucracy has released no substantive information on the January 10 tentative agreement to the public, and what contract language has been released remains ambiguous at best. This secrecy itself is damning—Workers are being asked to vote on an agreement whose terms they cannot properly evaluate.
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If rank-and-file workers at KPC Health do not take control of their fight against the pro-corporate healthcare industry, the union bureaucrats will isolate, sabotage and ultimately betray their struggle. The active sabotage of strikes and enforcement of sellout contracts by trade unions make clear that the struggle for wages, staffing and public services cannot remain in the hands of the bureaucratic apparatus.
The wave of healthcare worker militancy sweeping the country demonstrates that workers are ready to fight. The problem is not worker resolve but the stranglehold that union bureaucracies maintain over workplace struggles.
A coordinated national movement could force real staffing ratios, inflation-indexed wages, fully funded benefits and an end to the for-profit plunder of public health.
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If you are a healthcare worker interested in building or joining a rank-and-file committee at your workplace, contact the World Socialist Web Site today. Workers across the country are taking the first steps toward independent organization—your participation can help build the national movement that the union bureaucracies fear and that healthcare workers desperately need.
The strike raises the necessity for its expansion into a unified movement against social inequality, bringing the organized power of the working class into direct conflict with the financial oligarchy, which is centered in New York City and has the Trump administration at its head.
4. Trump attack on Fed chief sparks deep concern in financial institutions
The decision by the Trump administration to launch a criminal investigation into Fed chair Jerome Powell through the Justice Department, concerning statements he made to Congress on the cost of renovations to the Fed building, has vast implications for the stability of the US and global financial system.
In response to the turmoil this action could set off, former central bankers and leading former economic officials in the US have backed Powell, followed by a statement of “full solidarity” issued by central bank governors from 11 major institutions around the world.
Meanwhile the pretext for the attack—that Powell misled or even lied to Congress—appears to be unraveling with the news that the Fed chief sent a letter to Senators about the renovation project after he gave testimony last July.
The criminal investigation into Powell and the possible bringing of criminal charges after a grand jury hearing is not a personal conflict.
It is the culmination of a years-long campaign against Powell by Trump, which has escalated in the first term of his second presidency, over the demand that the Fed cut interest rates to as low as 1 percent.
Trump is acting on behalf of the most rapacious and outright criminal sections of the financial oligarchy he represents which is demanding lower rates in order to finance the highly speculative operations in crypto, real estate and other areas of the market in which it is embedded.
After maintaining a restrained silence in the face of Trump’s denunciations of him as a “numbskull” and a “moron,” amid continual threats to have him removed, Powell’s decision to go on the offensive and denounce the attacks is significant.
It reflects an assessment by key sections of the financial establishment that Trump’s attacks on the Fed’s independence and his efforts to bring it under his direct control, rather than making America great again, strike at the very foundations of the US financial system and threaten its global financial dominance.
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The Fed is not a neutral instrument, and Powell is not speaking for the “public.” He is acting on behalf of the more traditional sections of Wall Street which fear the lower interest rates demanded by Trump will spark inflation and set off a wages movement by the working class.
The joint statement issued by four living former Fed chairs and other former leading officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations supporting Powell pointed to the underlying concerns that Trump’s actions threaten the dominant position of the US within the global financial system.
It denounced the criminal inquiry into Powell as “an unprecedented attempt to use prosecutorial attacks” to undermine the independence of the Fed.
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The growing fear is that with the development of another financial crisis, potentially larger than that of 2008 and March 2020, the institutions of the capitalist state—the government and the central bank—will be unable to carry out the bailout and rescue operations they made in the past.
Confidence in the stability of the US has already been severely shaken with the attack by the Trump administration on the post-war trading system with the imposition of massive tariffs on so-called “liberation day” April 2, 2025.
The immediate impact of this decision was to send the dollar plunging and sparked a sell-off of US Treasury bonds along with other financial assets.
While markets stabilized somewhat because of a certain pullback by Trump and the continued growth of the US economy, largely as a result of massive AI investments, the essential content of the tariff war has now emerged in another form as revealed in the attack on Venezuela.
The violent militarist grab for resources—a volcanic eruption of imperialism—is a new stage in the desperate effort to maintain US economic and geopolitical dominance.
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The actions of the Trump regime have set off alarm bells internationally. In an editorial the Financial Times warned: “Fed independence is not just a vital pillar of US economic governance but an anchor of the entire global financial system.”
It went on to claim that this action was an “oddity” because it seemed so unnecessary as Powell was to retire in May. But this assertion ignored the wider context.
The action was not just directed at Powell but is part of total subordination of the Fed to the president despite whoever becomes the next chair. Just as significant as the attack on Powell is the attempt to remove Lisa Cook as a Fed governor, an action which will come before the Supreme Court later this month. If successful it will mean that the majority of Fed governors will be Trump appointees.
Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota and multiple senior Civil Rights Division lawyers at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. have resigned in the last 48 hours after the Trump administration refused to investigate the killing of Renee Nicole Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross last week in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Among those who have resigned are Assistant US Attorney Joe Thompson, appointed by President Donald Trump last June, along with Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams, Thomas Calhoun-Lopez, Ruth Schneider and Tom Hollenhurst.
In D.C., at least six senior prosecutors in the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division have also indicated they are resigning after the head of the division, Trump loyalist Harmeet Dhillon, informed staff that the division would not investigate the actions of Ross.
The Civil Rights Division normally investigates every fatal shooting by a federal officer to review whether civil rights violations occurred, even if the inquiry later concludes that no charge is warranted. In this case, however, the division was excluded from the Minneapolis shooting probe entirely, a decision that prompted an extraordinary exodus of career prosecutors.
In a statement Tuesday, Trump’s personal lawyer-turned Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said there was “currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation” into the killing of Good.
The murder of Good and ongoing federal occupation of Minneapolis-St. Paul have provoked mass protests across the United States. Demonstrations erupted last week after video evidence, viewed by millions of people, showed ICE agent Ross positioning himself in front of Renee Nicole Good’s vehicle before firing his pistol first through the bottom far-right corner of the windshield and then twice through the open side window, killing the unarmed mother of three.
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The Trump administration’s refusal to investigate the killing of Good is not an isolated distortion of justice, but part of a broader political-legal offensive rooted in National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) issued in September and the December 4 memorandum from US Attorney General Pam Bondi that followed. NSPM-7 creates a “domestic terrorism” framework that strings together unrelated acts of protest, opposition to immigration enforcement and left-wing political expression into a single alleged conspiracy of “organized political violence,” recasting anti-capitalist, pro-immigrant, anti-fascist and socialist sentiments as indicators of terror to be hunted down by the federal state.
The Bondi memo, issued in December to implement NSPM-7, explicitly tasks the FBI and Department of Justice with compiling lists of groups and individuals deemed to be engaged in “domestic terrorism,” disseminating intelligence on “Antifa and Antifa-aligned” networks, and mobilizing joint terrorism task forces to investigate and disrupt these political formations.
Far from being limited to violent crime, these directives criminalize political dissent and protest under the rubric of terrorism, effectively giving the state license to treat criticism of the government, pro-immigrant activism and socialist advocacy as security threats. As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, NSPM-7 and the Bondi memo together constitute a fascistic blueprint for deploying the full federal police apparatus against the democratic rights of workers and immigrants, regardless of citizenship status.
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The Democratic Party offers no genuine opposition to this police-state agenda. Notwithstanding verbal denunciations from so-called “progressives” such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, the Democrats oppose calls to shut down ICE, end the pogrom against immigrants, release the tens of thousands imprisoned in ICE concentration camps and guarantee the rights of all workers, native-born and immigrant alike. The Democratic Party—like Trump and the Republicans a party of the corporate oligarchy and the capitalist state—fears the emergence of mass working class opposition from below far more than it does the consolidation of a presidential dictatorship.
The response cannot be appeals to the very institutions carrying out these crimes. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class and the building of rank-and-file organizations outside the control of the corporate parties and union bureaucracies to protect workers from the immigration Gestapo and begin preparations for a general strike to bring down the fascistic Trump regime.
6. South Africa’s ANC clings to “non-alignment” after US attack on Venezuela
The US attack on Venezuela has dragged the world toward open colonial rule. Washington has declared it intends to seize control of Venezuela’s oil resources, block its relations with Russia and China, and reimpose colonial domination not only over Venezuela but across Latin America and beyond.
Its actions are rapidly imploding South Africa’s post-Apartheid foreign policy of “non-alignment” adopted by the African National Congress (ANC) after it came to power in 1994. The strategy seeks to balance relations with the US, Europe, Russia and China, allowing the ANC to appeal to popular hostility to imperialism—particularly the US, which backed the white supremacist apartheid regime—while maintaining foreign investment and patronage to the benefit of an aspiring Black elite tied to the state.
America’s turn to open colonialism has sharply narrowed the ANC’s room for maneuver. A policy of remaining silent in the face of events like Trump’s air strikes in Nigeria, or President Cyril Ramaphosa’s deference to Trump while he repeated fabricated claims of a “white genocide” in South Africa, is becoming untenable.
The ANC felt forced to comment on Venezuela to appease popular opposition to the war crime, as hashtags such as #HandsOffVenezuela surged across social media and even the conservative bureaucratic leaderships of the COSATU, SAFTU, and NUMSA unions—representing millions of workers—were compelled to denounce the invasion.
However, the ANC still waited three days to release an official statement condemning Washington’s acts as “driven by contests over strategic resources, control of markets, and resistance to the independent development paths chosen by sovereign nations of the Global South.”
It further softened the blow by limiting itself to a call on the United Nations and the UN Security Council to act “swiftly and decisively”— the very institutions that have repeatedly legitimised US-led wars, from Korea (1950–1953) to the Congo crisis of 1961, the Gulf War of 1990–1991, Somalia in the early 1990s, and Libya in 2011.
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Highlighting the contradiction in its policy of “non-alignment”, the ANC government began the year by hosting week-long “Will for Peace” military exercises at South Africa’s main naval base in Simon’s Town with China, Iran and Russia. Wary of Washington’s ire, it sought to downplay the geopolitical implications—describing the operation as an exercise in maritime safety, interoperability and the protection of shipping and economic activity—and even attempted to persuade Iran to participate only as an observer.
Time is clearly running out for this balancing act, however, as US imperialism demands total allegiance and subordination. That fact has provoked a deep crisis within the South African ruling elite, with one faction calling for closer alignment with Washington, and another looking toward China.
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There is no peaceful “multipolar” path available to global capitalism, in which oppressed countries can find a same middle ground. Intensifying competition between the imperialist ruling classes, and the ruling capitalist class in China, is waged at the expense of South African and all workers.
In opposition to all these parties of the affluent middle class and factions of the South African ruling elite, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) appeals to the only force capable of preventing a repeat of Venezuela and putting an end to the conditions that lead to war: the international working class.
Workers in South Africa and across the continent must build independent political parties based on socialist internationalism, rejecting all illusions in capitalist states, imperialist institutions like the UN, or capitalist powers like China and Russia. This requires the founding of new sections of the ICFI across Africa.
7. Workers and students in the UK speak out against imperialism and attack on democratic rights
Workers and students have been speaking to the World Socialist Web Site across the UK about the US invasion of Venezuela, the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, and the imperialist agenda of the Starmer government.*****
8. United Kingdom: The reality of Labour’s grossly misnamed “Renters’ Rights” Bill
Presented as a step forward for tenants, Labour’s Renters’ Rights Act preserves landlord profits and entrenches the dominance of the private rental sector. Providing only the most marginal concessions, its purpose is to prop up collapsing poll numbers.
The legislation passed last October arrives against the backdrop of a deepening housing crisis. According to the Office for National Statistics, the average private renter now spends £1,366 per month on rent. Young people aged 18–24 spend more than half their income simply to keep a roof over their heads, while renters now pay more each month than mortgage holders.
Many young people will never be able to own a home, condemned instead to lifelong dependence on wealthy landlords who extract rent as a permanent levy on wages.
9. Germany: Rightward shift rips apart the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance
From the outset, the party's program, policies and election promises were based on a fundamental lie: It presented itself as an anti-war party and a party of social justice, but defended the capitalist system that produces war and social inequality, and allied itself with the parties defending capitalist rule.
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The World Socialist Web Site has followed [Sahra] Wagenknecht’s career for many years and warned of the reactionary implications of her politics. In 2016, we discussed her book Wealth Without Greed, a plea for nationalism and the market economy, and in 2021, her nationalist diatribe The Self-Righteous.
The fact that she is now moving ever closer to the AfD confirms our warnings and proves what we have always emphasized: war, social inequality and fascism can only be fought by mobilizing the international working class for a socialist program that targets their cause, the capitalist system.
Trump’s determination to take over Greenland is part of his so-called “Donroe Doctrine.” Outlined in last November’s National Security Strategy, it vows to eliminate all “non-hemispheric competitors” from the Western hemisphere and give Washington unchallenged domination over the area’s raw materials and trade routes, as well as the governments of other states. Taking control of Greenland, which lies off the Canadian east coast, would strengthen Trump’s push to integrate Canada as the 51st state of the US.
This “America first” policy has produced a deep rift in the post-war transatlantic alliance. The European imperialist powers, which long relied on US hegemony to pursue their own global interests, now find themselves targeted by Washington as competitors in a new redivision of the world. Trump’s seizure of Greenland would spell the end of the alliance, an outcome the European powers are desperately trying to avoid because they are not yet ready militarily to act independently without US support.
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The European powers have postured as defenders of international law in the face of Trump’s threat to resort to military force to “own” Greenland if necessary. Last week, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain issued a joint statement with Denmark declaring that they would all uphold the principles of “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity.” European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen stated that “law is stronger than force,” while Council President Antonio Costa asserted, “Nothing can be decided about Denmark and about Greenland without Denmark, or without Greenland.”
This is utter hypocrisy. The European powers have never shown any concern for international law when violating it suits their imperialist interests, such as with the carve-up of Yugoslavia, or NATO’s involvement in the neocolonial occupation of Afghanistan or air bombardment of Libya. Earlier this month, they refused to explicitly condemn Trump’s illegal abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his vow to run the South American country like a colony.
The major European powers are desperately trying to retain some form of cooperation with the US for as long as possible, as they rush at breakneck speed to carry through vast rearmament programs to put them in a position to act independently of, and even against, Washington on the world stage. But these plans will still take several years to implement, and will inevitably provoke an explosion of class struggle as governments across the continent eliminate what remains of public services and worker rights to pay for militarism and war. For the time being, they remain dependent on US logistical and military support to continue the war against Russia, which the European powers want to pursue at all costs.
11. New Zealand government exploits Auckland fire to slander striking firefighters
New Zealand’s National Party-led government has seized on a fire that broke out in Auckland during a brief firefighters’ strike on January 9 to escalate a vicious propaganda campaign against the firefighters.
The pile-on by government ministers and state agency Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) represents an attempt to criminalize industrial action and intimidate workers throughout the public sector who are fighting against austerity.
12. Europe’s cannon fodder: Introduction and expansion of conscription in numerous EU countries
In the coming days, 18-year-olds in Germany must register to be mustered for the new military service. Most of them will receive this news with horror and fear. The gradual reintroduction of conscription, which was initiated last year, signifies the preparation for war in a very immediate sense. Young people are to fight, kill and die for the interests of German imperialism.
This prospect is meeting with overwhelming opposition among young people. Following a nationwide school strike in December, school students and young workers are planning the next strike against conscription for early March. The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) stresses that the fight against conscription requires a fight against war preparations and militarism as a whole and the mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist perspective. The strikes must be expanded from the schools to the factories and workplaces and can thus become the spark for a Europe-wide strike movement against the pro-war policy.
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Conscription is on the march across Europe. Numerous countries have expanded military service, are reintroducing conscription or harbor corresponding plans. This step results directly from the military rearmament in the NATO war against Russia and the preparation of a Third World War, which would turn the entire European continent into a battlefield.
In 2025, nine of 27 EU countries had conscription—Greece, Cyprus, Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden. While Latvia only reintroduced the 11-month military service in 2024, all these countries are expanding their existing military service, like Greece.
For example, Denmark’s Social Democratic government has extended the duration of military service from four to 11 months and introduced mandatory mustering for women starting this year.
Croatia is returning to conscription, which had been suspended since 2008. Even the nominal opposition Social Democrats voted in favor. From this year, men must once again complete a two-month basic military training.
In France, conscription, suspended since 1997, is not yet being reactivated. But President Emmanuel Macron, who is also Commander-in-Chief of the French Armed Forces, announced the introduction of a new “voluntary service” starting this September during an appearance before uniformed soldiers in November. Recruitment of 18- to 25-year-old men and women for the 10-month military service, which is allegedly oriented towards “homeland defense,” has begun in recent days. The number of volunteers is to rise to at least 10,000 by 2030.
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In Italy, Defense Minister Guido Crosetto of the fascist governing party Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) also proposed a new military service at the end of November last year. The goal is initially the recruitment of 10,000 volunteers and then the increase of the armed forces by 40,000. At the same time, Italy is increasing military spending and wants to establish a new “cyber army” for digital warfare.
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In Poland, where conscription was abolished in 2009, the government has launched a nationwide military training program. It wants to train 400,000 people for the event of war this year—from school students to pensioners. Despite the vehement war propaganda and rearmament in Poland against the backdrop of the Ukraine war, here too, the majority of the population is not in favor of military service. Based on an opinion poll from August 2025, Euronews reported that 49.1 percent of all respondents refused to defend the country voluntarily in the event of war, while 6.1 percent were undecided. Among 18- to 29-year-olds—the age group that would be sent to the trenches first—the result was even more unequivocal: 69 percent do not want to go to the army.
In Romania, where conscription was abolished in 2007, the government introduced a four-month voluntary military service last October for 18- to 35-year-old men and women starting in 2026, in order to replenish the professional army with young reservists. They are lured with remuneration of €400 to €600 per month as well as free accommodation, board, medical care and a bonus—a perfidious blackmail when one considers that many young people in this shattered Balkan country live in poverty.
All these voluntary or mandatory military service models have one and the same goal: to prepare the youth of Europe quickly and comprehensively for a hot war—militarily and ideologically. When Donald Trump goes on a rampage of plunder in Eastern Europe, Latin America or the Middle East and ignites a war against China, the European powers do not want to stand there empty-handed. They are pursuing their own imperialist predatory interests, which have not the slightest thing to do with the “defense of European peace ideals” against Russia or the US. Just like Trump, they are concerned with access to more raw materials, markets and sources of profit, for which they are ready, as in the First and Second World Wars, to sacrifice millions of young people as cannon fodder on the battlefields of Europe.
The concerted corporate effort to chloroform the public and suppress criticism from within the entertainment industry is running up against objective limits. It is increasingly impossible to conceal the aggressive fascistic nature of the Trump administration, as it carries out kidnappings and bombings of foreign cities, piracy on the high seas and murder on the streets of US cities.
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Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr, according to the Guardian, “delivered a blistering condemnation of the US federal government on Friday, criticizing official accounts of the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.” Kerr insisted the response from federal authorities, claiming that the ICE agent had acted in self-defense, was “shameful.”
The Minnesota Timberwolves of the NBA held a moment of silence for Good last week before a game. The scoreboard showed a photo of a vigil with the words “In memory of Renee Nicole Good.” During the moment of silence, according to news reports, “one fan in attendance yelled, ‘Go home, ICE.’ Another yelled, ‘F—- ICE,’ and cheers erupted.”
14. Australian media steps up attack on pro-Palestine workers
Since the reactionary mass murder of 15 people at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on December 14, the entire Australian political and media establishment, led by state and federal Labor governments, has sought to use the horrific terrorist attack as a pretext to slash democratic rights.
The immediate target is opposition to Israel’s imperialist-backed genocide in Gaza, but ultimately this campaign is aimed at stamping out all forms of political dissent by workers and young people.
Enthusiastically backing this witch hunt is the Murdoch-owned Australian, the journal of record for the country’s ruling elite. The newspaper has waged an unrelenting campaign since October 2023 against students, academics, medical professionals and anyone else who has failed to unconditionally support the Zionist ethnic cleansing operation, but its crusade has risen to a fever pitch in the wake of the Bondi attack.
On Thursday, the newspaper’s front page featured an “exclusive,” headlined “Exposed: union’s secret anti-Israel campaign.” Citing “leaked internal documents,” author John Ferguson denounces the Unionists for Palestine (U4P) group, which he claims has carried out “a systematic attack on Israeli interests in Australia and an internal struggle to gain mainstream union support for the cause.”
In fact, the role of the U4P, led by the pseudo-left groups Socialist Alternative in Melbourne and Solidarity in Sydney, has been to provide left cover for the intransigent refusal of Australia’s trade unions to allow workers to take action against the genocide. In explicit repudiation of the calls from Palestinian unions for solidarity actions, the bureaucracy has ensured that not a single strike aimed at blocking the supply of weapons parts or other goods to the Zionist regime has taken place.
This absence of industrial action is not because of any lack of opposition among workers to the genocide, a fact clearly attested to by the sustained and often weekly mass protests in Australia’s major cities, and, in particular, the August march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge involving some 300,000 workers and young people.
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For decades, the unions have served as an industrial police force, suppressing workers’ opposition to attacks on their jobs, wages and conditions by governments and big business. A key component of that suppression has been the unions’ enforcement of the harsh anti-strike provisions contained in the Fair Work Act, drafted and refined through the collaboration of the top union bureaucrats with successive federal Labor governments since it was introduced under the Rudd-Gillard administration in 2008.
Labor’s moves to criminalize protest—openly supported by Hayes and Hilakari and not opposed by a single union leader—are the logical extension of these draconian strike bans from the workplace to the political arena. As is the case with the Fair Work Act, the anti-protest laws will provide a pseudo-legal justification for what the union apparatus has already been enforcing since October 2023—the suppression of working-class struggle against genocide and war.
Despite this, the pseudo-left organizations, including their Unionists for Palestine front groups, continue to insist that the union bureaucracies and Labor governments can be reformed through polite appeals and yet more protests. Most strikingly, Socialist Alternative has characterized Labor’s state and federal assault on democratic rights in the aftermath of the Bondi attack as an inexplicable “capitulation” to the far-right, against which it must be defended.
This is in line with how the pseudo-left cover for the unions in every workplace betrayal, cloaking their complicity with the bureaucracy behind periodic appeals for greater “militancy” and occasional calls for the repeal of anti-strike laws.
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Like the unions, the pseudo-left organizations’ claim to represent the working class is a fraud. Instead, they speak for sections of the upper-middle class, seeking to advance their own material interests within the capitalist system.
The lesson for workers is clear: To fight genocide and war, and to defend democratic rights, workers need to take matters into their own hands. In the first instance, this means establishing rank-and-file committees in every workplace, politically and organizationally independent of the complicit unions and Labor. Through such committees, linking up across industries, throughout Australia and internationally, what must be built is a socialist movement of the working class, directed against genocide, war and their root cause, capitalism itself.
15. Australian Greens back Royal Commission witch-hunting opposition to Gaza genocide
Shortly after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a Royal Commission last Thursday, ostensibly into the December 14 attack in Bondi, the move was effusively welcomed by the Australian Greens. The inquiry, the Greens claimed, was a “chance to learn hard lessons” from the terrorist atrocity.
In reality, the Commission, as its terms of reference and the ruling-class campaign for its establishment make clear, has nothing to do with uncovering how the Bondi terror attack occurred. Instead, the horrific murder of 15 people is being exploited to establish what will be a witch-hunting body, aimed at suppressing mass opposition to the genocide in Gaza, based on the slander that it is antisemitic, the label falsely applied to all criticism of Israel’s actions.
The Greens’ immediate support for such an operation is highly revealing. Throughout the more than two years of Israel’s bombardment, the party has condemned the war crimes, seeking to win support on that basis from workers and particularly young people.
But, amid a sharp shift in the situation and an escalation of the protracted campaign to outlaw mass opposition, the Greens are falling into line, demonstrating that their previous criticisms were phony posturing.
17. 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.
