“U.S. capitalism is up against the same problems that pushed
Germany in 1914 on the path of war. The world is divided? It must be
redivided. For Germany it was a question of ‘organizing Europe.’ The
United States must ‘organize’ the world. History is bringing humanity
face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism.”
More
than 90 years after Leon Trotsky issued this warning, the “volcanic
eruption” of American imperialism he described has entered a new and
especially explosive phase. One year after the renewed installation of
Donald Trump as president, the aggressive foreign and military policy of
the United States is escalating not only against dependent countries
and declared adversaries but increasingly against its own imperialist
allies in Europe.
The year began with the illegal attack on
Venezuela and the abduction of its president, Nicolás Maduro, followed
by open threats to bomb Iran in order to impose a US-backed regime. Now
this policy is being directed openly against Europe. Over the weekend,
Trump reiterated his supposed claims to ownership of Greenland and
threatened European governments that oppose his plans with massive trade
sanctions and military consequences. “The world is not safe until we
have complete and total control over Greenland,” he wrote in a letter
addressed to the Norwegian prime minister. At the same time, he made
clear his willingness to resort to military force, cynically stating
that he no longer felt obliged “to think only about peace.”
*****
As in the United States itself and around the world, Trump’s actions
have provoked widespread anger and opposition among the European
population. But workers and young people must not succumb to the
illusion that the European governments represent a progressive or
peaceful alternative. The ruling classes in Berlin, Paris and Brussels
are responding to US threats not by mobilizing against the fascist in
the White House and imperialist war but by adopting their own aggressive
measures and openly preparing for economic and military confrontation.
*****
In bourgeois think tanks, scenarios involving even war between the
United States and Europe are now being openly discussed. “We either
fight a trade war, or we’re in a real war,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a
senior fellow at Bruegel, a research institute in Brussels. Such
statements underscore that the conflict is not limited to economic
disputes, but the fight between the imperialist powers over resources
and spheres of influence is exploding NATO and the entire postwar system
and erupting into open trade war and ultimately war.
The
hypocritical invocations by European governments of international law,
human rights and a “rules-based international order” deserve nothing but
contempt. Over the past three decades, they have supported every US-led
war of aggression—from Kosovo to Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya. Only
days ago, they aligned themselves with US aggression against Venezuela
and Iran. They are complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians,
which has reduced Gaza to rubble and killed tens of thousands,
overwhelmingly women and children.
In the war against Russia in Ukraine, the European powers now play the
most aggressive role. This war was deliberately provoked through NATO’s
systematic encirclement of Russia and is being exploited to militarize
Europe and prepare for a direct confrontation with the nuclear-armed
state. In the conflict with Russia, the major European powers even criticize Trump for being too “soft,” as they fear that Washington may
strike a deal with Moscow that sidelines European interests,
particularly access to raw materials.
*****
The scale of the rearmament plans of the European powers recalls the
years preceding the First and Second World Wars. German imperialism, in
particular, is once again openly reviving its great-power traditions and
pursuing the goal of militarily leading the continent in order to
assert its interests against Russia, against the United States and
globally.
This development was anticipated long ago by the
Trotskyist movement. As early as 1991, the International Committee of
the Fourth International’s “Manifesto Against Imperialist War and
Colonialism” warned that the attack on Iraq would not only inaugurate a
new era of neocolonial wars but also intensify conflicts among the
imperialist powers themselves—above all, the historic antagonism between
the United States and Germany, which had confronted each other in two
world wars during the 20th century.
*****
Today, the point of open confrontation has been reached. But at the
same time, another fundamental analysis of the ICFI is being confirmed.
The same contradictions of the capitalist system that inexorably drive
society toward war—the contradiction between the global economy and the
nation-state system, and between the social character of production and
its private appropriation—also create the objective basis for social
revolution.
*****
The answer to Trump’s fascistic policy of “might makes right” is not
European rearmament but the international mobilization of the working
class against all of the imperialist warmongers. The only progressive
perspective lies in the overthrow of the capitalist system that gives
rise to war and the construction of an international socialist society.
The International Committee of the Fourth International and its
sections, the Socialist Equality Parties, are fighting for this program
in the US, in Europe and throughout the world.
On Sunday night it was revealed that a man living in Minneapolis who
was kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs on
January 6 died on January 14 at the Camp East Montana concentration camp
in El Paso, Texas. Multiple outlets reported that Victor Manuel Diaz,
36, from Nicaragua, was found unconscious and unresponsive at the
facility last week.
Diaz is at least the third person to die at
the sprawling tent camp in south Texas in the last month and a half. On
January 3, ICE announced that Geraldo Lunas Campos died at the same
facility after “staff observed him in distress.” This purposefully vague
statement was aimed at concealing the fact that Lunas Campos died after
he was attacked by guards at the facility.
Last week, the Washington Post
reported that the El Paso County Office of the Medical Examiner was
likely to classify Lunas Campos’ death as a “homicide,” with the
preliminary cause of death being “asphyxia due to neck and chest
compression.” That is, Lunas Campos did not receive enough oxygen
because severe pressure was being applied to his neck and chest.
Santos
Jesus Flores, a witness to the incident, told the paper he saw at least
five guards fighting with Lunas Campos after the latter refused to
enter a segregated cell without his medication. Flores told the Post
he saw guards choking the father of three and that he heard Lunas
Campos scream, “No puedo respirar,” Spanish for “I can’t breathe,”
before falling unconscious.
*****
In the first 19 days of 2026, at least six people have already died
while in the custody of ICE. These deaths are unfolding amid the ongoing
federal occupation of Minnesota, where roughly 3,000 Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) agents have been deployed to carry out mass
raids and attacks on the working class as part of the Trump
administration’s drive to establish a presidential dictatorship.
In
addition to deaths in ICE custody, at least two people have been shot
by immigration thugs in Minnesota since the start of the year, including
the murder of Renée Nicole Good on January 7 by DHS agent Jonathan
Ross. As social opposition mounts, Trump has repeatedly threatened to
invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy an additional 1,500 active-duty
soldiers from the 11th Airborne Division to the state.
The federal government’s attacks on the working class in Minnesota
have provoked mass outrage throughout the state, and especially in the
Twin Cities of Minneapolis–St. Paul. In the face of the Democratic
Party’s acquiescence to the Trump administration’s attacks, more workers
are coming to the conclusion that the only way to counteract these
assaults is through mass strike action by the working class.
Outside the Hennepin County Medical Center, World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke with residents and healthcare workers about the ongoing federal occupation and their views on a general strike.
Roughly 40,000 academic and research workers across the University of
California system will vote February 5–13 to authorize strike action.
The workers are members of United Auto Workers Local 4811, the Research
and Public Service Professionals-UAW (RPSP-UAW) and the Student Services
and Academic Professionals-UAW (SSAP-UAW).
This strike vote is
unfolding amid a rapidly escalating and explosive wave of working class
opposition across the United States. In Los Angeles, 35,000 teachers in
United Teachers Los Angeles will vote January 27–29 on strike
authorization, alongside some 30,000 school support workers in SEIU Local 99.
In Minneapolis, a general strike
is set for January 23 in response to Immigration and Customs
Enforcement terror, following the killing of Renée Nicole Good. In New York City,
15,000 nurses are already on strike against hospital chains and
state-backed austerity, while 31,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses in California and Hawaii are preparing strike action.
These struggles express a growing objective tendency toward broader, unified class action, culminating in a general strike, in defense of democratic and social rights, driven by conditions of deepening inequality, repression and war.
Graduate student workers at UC occupy a critical position within this
emerging movement. Over the past several years, they have repeatedly
shown a willingness to challenge both management and the union
bureaucracy itself. They have threatened to escape the confines imposed
on their struggles by the UAW apparatus and merge with wider layers of
the working class.
*****
The workers involved are essential to the education of hundreds of
thousands of students across the UC system, as well as to the
functioning of critical scientific research. They include teaching
assistants, tutors, readers and graders, instructors, funded PhD and
master’s researchers, postdoctoral scholars, professional researchers
and project scientists. They also include academic counselors, financial
aid officers, student services advisors, research administrators and
public program coordinators.
Their immediate grievances remain fundamentally unchanged from 2022, which was sold out
amid widespread opposition. Low wages, job insecurity and layoffs,
barriers to career advancement and reclassification and the lack of
protections for international workers persist and have worsened under
the present political climate.
In that six-week strike,
48,000 academic workers demanded cost-of-living adjustments tied to
inflation and housing costs. Facing mounting pressure from below, the
bureaucracy moved quickly to shut the struggle down, dropping core
demands, isolating postdoctoral researchers and imposing a settlement
that left workers on unlivable incomes.
*****
Opposition at UC resurfaced even more sharply in 2024, when graduate
students walked out in protest against the police rampage on UC campuses
targeting Gaza solidarity protests. That strike expressed not only
opposition to state repression but a broader identification with
democratic rights and opposition to imperialist war. The UAW bureaucracy moved to limit the action, obeying a court injunction and ordering workers back on the job, openly aligning itself with the state.
*****
The central lesson of the past period is that meaningful struggle
cannot be waged through the existing union apparatus. Graduate students
must consciously organize themselves as an independent force. This means
forming rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled and
independent of the UAW bureaucracy and the capitalist parties, to assert
control over demands, strategy and alliances.
The murder of Renée Nicole Good on January 7 in Minneapolis, like the
US invasion of Venezuela three days before—has proven to be a critical
turning point in popular consciousness. There is a deep and profound
feeling that things cannot go on like this. Something has to give.
Veteran
singer-musician Bruce Springsteen’s public dedication of a performance
this past weekend to Renée Nicole Good—declaring that “ICE should get
the f-ck out of Minneapolis” and framing her killing as an attack on
“democracy” and the rule of law—is politically significant in this
regard. It underscores the increasing revulsion over the Trump
administration’s paramilitary assault on immigrant communities.
At the Light of Day Winterfest in Red Bank, New Jersey—an annual
benefit for Parkinson’s Disease and other neurological
disorders—Springsteen made these remarks before playing his song Promised Land. The audience replied with sustained applause.
Now,
right now, we are living through incredibly critical times. The United
States, the ideals and the values for which it stood for the past 250
years, is being tested as it has never been in modern times. Those
values and those ideals have never been as endangered as they are right
now. So as we gather tonight in this beautiful display of love and care
and thoughtfulness and community … if you believe in democracy, in
liberty … if you believe that truth still matters, and that it’s worth
speaking out, and it’s worth fighting for … if you believe in the power
of the law and that no one stands above it … if you stand against
heavily armed masked federal troops invading American cities, and using
Gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens … if you believe you don’t
deserve to be murdered for exercising your American right to protest …
then send a message to this President. And as the Mayor of that city has
said, ICE should get the f-ck out of Minneapolis. So this one is for
you, and the memory of the mother of three and American citizen Renee
Good.
Springsteen represents something genuine
in American popular music. As we said in a 2003 review of the
Manchester, England stop on The Rising tour, “his songs have
traced in an honest manner the trajectory of numerous social layers and
ongoing themes in US society—the worker burdened with the monotony of
life in the factory, the laid-off workers and their anxieties, the
desperate hardships faced by immigrants who struggle in the face of
constant adversity, police brutality, disenfranchised young people in
gangs and those with family trouble and personal problems, and the
problems people confront in cultivating meaningful relationships.”
*****
Springsteen has consistently supported the Democratic Party and its
presidential candidates. Despite these mistaken positions, it is
important that he placed the tyranny of the Trump regime in the context
of the 250-year history of the United States, a nation born of a mighty
democratic revolution whose traditional hostility to unaccountable power
finds expression in the “No Kings” protests, some of the largest
demonstrations ever recorded in the country.
The genuinely
plebeian, anti-authoritarian content of his remarks expresses deep
democratic traditions and the moral indignation of wide layers of the US
and world population.
*****
It is a welcome development that prominent artists continue to speak
out against the fascistic dragnet of ICE. This continues, or deepens, a
trend of cultural figures opposing the genocide in Gaza, including rap
trio Kneecap, rapper Macklemore and more recently, singer Lorde. More is certainly in store.
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.
*****
At the same time, the question of a general strike has now taken root in
the political life of the United States. It is hard to understate the
seismic shift underway in all aspects of life, cultural included.
Portugal’s 2026 presidential election has delivered a stark warning
about the state of the country’s political system. André Ventura, leader
of the fascist Chega party, secured second place in the first round
with 24.24 percent of the vote—well short of the 50 percent required for
outright victory, yet sufficient to propel him into a second‑round
run‑off. His opponent will be António José Seguro of the Socialist Party
(PS), who topped the poll with 30.62 percent. Seguro previously led the
PS between 2011 and 2014, during the Eurozone crisis, the Portuguese
bailout, and the imposition of the troika’s austerity program.
Ventura’s
advance is not the product of a mass fascist movement, but of a
political order that has exhausted its legitimacy. The result exposes a
ruling class unable to resolve the social crisis it created and a
working class that has been politically disenfranchised by the PS and
reactionary, pseudo-left parties of the affluent middle class.
*****
The election unfolded amid deepening economic and political instability.
Portugal has held three general elections in as many years, each
producing fragile governments incapable of addressing the structural
contradictions of a society subordinated to global markets. The
presidency—though formally limited—has become increasingly central as
governments rely on constitutional manoeuvres to manage crisis after
crisis. The first‑round results reflect not democratic renewal but
systemic decay. Eleven candidates stood, yet none offered a coherent
response to the social catastrophe confronting millions. The
fragmentation of the vote is the political expression of a society in
which the traditional mechanisms of bourgeois rule are failing.
*****
Ventura’s first‑round result will embolden far‑right elements within
the state and ruling class. The run‑off will not resolve the crisis but
intensify it. Workers face a choice between austerity and
reaction—between the parties that created the crisis and the far‑right
forces that seek to exploit it. The danger is not only to immigrants and
minorities but to the entire working class.
The central lesson
of the election is clear: the working class cannot rely on any faction
of the bourgeois political system. The union bureaucracies and the
pseudo‑left parties have subordinated workers’ struggles to
parliamentary manoeuvres, demobilizing resistance and allowing the far
right to fill the vacuum.
Last Thursday, two events unfolded simultaneously, though roughly
2,000 miles apart. The first was in Washington D.C., the second in
Caracas. Together they provide a damning indictment of the Venezuelan
national bourgeoisie and the subservience to US imperialism of all of
its political representatives in the wake of the criminal January 3
invasion of the country and abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and
his wife, Celia Flores.
The first event was a grotesque spectacle
staged at the White House, where Maria Corina Machado, the CIA-backed
leader of Venezuela’s far-right opposition, came to pay homage to the
man who ordered the bloody invasion of her country. In a groveling
display of servility, she bestowed upon the would-be US Führer the Nobel
Peace Prize medal she was awarded, supposedly for “her struggle to
achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
*****
Norway’s Nobel Institute issued a statement noting that the prize
itself cannot be transferred, though the medal may change hands. One
relevant precedent is Norwegian Nobel literature prize winner Knut
Hamsun’s gifting of his medal to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels in 1943. The equation of Trump with “peace” is roughly
analogous to equating Goebbels’ pig grunts with literature.
For
all of her bootlicking—including her vow to privatize Venezuela’s oil
sector and make US corporations $1.7 trillion richer—Machado left the
White House empty-handed. She exited through a side entrance with no
escort, and Trump made a short comment on social media describing the
handing over of the medal as “a wonderful gesture of mutual respect.”
*****
An even more revealing and politically significant meeting was unfolding
in Venezuela as Machado made her pilgrimage to the White House. Delcy
Rodríguez, installed as Venezuela’s “interim president” after Maduro’s
abduction, cordially welcomed John Ratcliffe, the director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, to an airport terminal outside Caracas for a
lightning visit that appeared to consist of the CIA chief delivering
Rodríguez her marching orders.
*****
On the same day that she hosted the head of the CIA, a man who played
a central role in organizing the bloody invasion of Venezuela and the
abduction of Maduro and his wife, Rodríguez delivered an annual address
to the country’s National Assembly. To say that she spoke out of both
sides of her mouth would hardly do the speech justice.
On the one
hand, Rodríguez mouthed the same increasingly hollow “anti-imperialist”
and left nationalist phrases that have long characterized the chavista
government (founded by the late President Hugo Chávez more than a
quarter-century ago). She denounced Washington as “the invading
aggressor,” adding: “They attacked, assaulted, killed, invaded and
kidnapped President Maduro and the first lady. There is a stain on
relations between the United States and Venezuela.”
Nonetheless,
this “stain” would be resolved, she declared, adding, “Let us not be
afraid of diplomacy.” Her government has announced plans to reopen its
embassy in Washington, which was closed after the first Trump
administration launched its abortive regime change operation centered on
its recognition of the political non-entity Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s
“legitimate” president in 2019. The State Department, meanwhile, sent a
delegation to initiate plans to reoccupy the sprawling 27-acre US
embassy compound in Caracas.
Washington’s view of “diplomacy” with Venezuela was summed up by
Trump, who threatened that Rodríguez would get “worse than Maduro” if
she failed to comply fully with US orders. Given that Maduro is in a New
York jail cell facing a trial that could put him away for life, the
comment can only be interpreted as a death threat. The “interim
president” has seemingly gotten the message.
The most substantive announcement in Rodríguez’s speech unveiled
legislation to “reform” the hydrocarbon law, which has constituted a
principal bone of contention between Venezuela, which possesses the
largest proven oil reserves on the planet, and Washington and US energy
conglomerates. As amended under Chávez in 2001, the law reasserted state
sovereignty over the country’s oil resources and required that foreign
oil corporations enter joint ventures with the state-owned oil
corporation, PDVSA, in which PDVSA would hold majority stakes. The law
was the immediate catalyst for a failed 2002 CIA-backed coup attempt.
The
proposed “reform”—drafted at the point of a US gun—would open the door
to US investments and effective control of Venezuela’s oil under the
guise of developing fields that have yet to be tapped or that lack
sufficient infrastructure.
*****
Rodríguez had played a leading role in attempts to reach a negotiated
settlement with Washington and had apparently impressed US officials as
someone with whom they could do business. Nonetheless, Maduro himself
had, by both his and Trump’s accounts, offered the kind of subservient
relationship now being pursued by his successor.
Both of them,
along with the rest of the top echelons in Caracas, began not with
“anti-imperialist” convictions but rather with a determination to defend
the power and privileges of the chavista officialdom along with its principal constituents, the so-called boliburguesía,
the bourgeois layers close to the regime that have enriched themselves
off of government contracts, speculation and oil revenues, and the
military, which plays an outsized role in governing the country.
The debacle in Venezuela is the product not only of criminal US aggression but also of a turn to the right by the chavista government and the bourgeois layers it represents under the unrelenting pressure of imperialism.
For all the talk of “21st century socialism” and “Bolivarian revolution,” from its outset, the chavista movement
was bourgeois nationalist in character. Its program sought not the
revolutionary overthrow of capitalism but rather a limited
redistribution of wealth that was dependent upon a single export
commodity, oil. So long as the price and demand for oil remained high
and its export continued unimpeded, limited social reforms remained
possible. Once demand and prices fell and exports were blocked by a
tightening unilateral US sanctions regime, the burden of the ensuing
economic crisis was placed on the backs of the working class and the
masses of oppressed, even as bourgeois layers continued to extract
profits.
The turn by a crisis-ridden US imperialism toward
military aggression in pursuit of renewed US hegemony in the Western
Hemisphere has laid bare the class character of the chavista movement and of the broader Latin American “Pink Tide” with which it is associated.
*****
US imperialism’s attempt to reverse the course of the 20th century
and reimpose colonial shackles upon Latin America cannot be waged
without igniting a social powder keg. The way forward lies through the
independent political mobilization of the working class in Venezuela and
throughout the continent on the basis of a socialist and
internationalist program.
Realizing this program requires the
closest bonds between the workers of Latin America and the United
States, who confront the destruction of democratic and social rights by
an administration and a ruling oligarchy bent on imposing dictatorship,
in a common struggle to put an end to capitalism.
The US invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás
Maduro are a criminal attempt to reimpose colonial domination not only
in Venezuela, but across Latin America and beyond. The events have also
exposed the Bolivarian regime in Venezuela. Its leaders are rapidly
moving toward accommodation with US President Donald Trump at the
expense of the working class, amid mounting popular anger at Trump’s
policy of plunder.
This explosive situation is exposing the
bourgeois character of the Venezuelan regime and the reactionary role of
those who glorify it. That includes Stalinist Communist Party
Marxist–Kenya (CPM-K) General Secretary Booker Omole, who for years has
promoted bourgeois nationalism and denounced the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) for its principled criticisms of such regimes and the CPM-K’s defence of capitalism.
The
CPM-K leadership is publicly praising interim Venezuelan President
Delcy Rodríguez, portraying her as an emblem of “anti-imperialist
resistance,” even as she holds direct talks with the Trump, meets with
the CIA, and presides over arrangements placing Venezuela’s oil revenues
under US control. Omole’s glorification of a regime ready to facilitate
the imperialist subjugation and plunder of its country is laying bare
the bankruptcy of bourgeois nationalism and Stalinism.
His promotion of forces trying to work out relations with the CIA flows
from his Stalinist orientation to bourgeois nationalism and his
vitriolic hostility to Trotskyism. His enthusiastic promotion of
“Comrade Delcy” as she orients to Trump has gone hand-in-hand with
denunciations of the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth
International, the leadership of the world Trotskyist movement.
*****
On January 14, the CPM-K organized a protest outside the US embassy
in Nairobi, which Kenyan police violently suppressed. The CPM-K tweeted:
“Kenyan police, with instructions from Washington and CIA intelligence,
blocked protestors who were showing solidarity with the people of
Venezuela and against US imperialism.”
But even as the CPM-K sought to tap into genuine mass hostility to US
imperialism in Kenya, the party’s leadership was working to channel it
back into promoting bourgeois nationalism and the Bolivarian regime,
which was seeking out ties with the same CIA the CPM-K blamed for
repressing its supporters.
The next day, Rodríguez met directly
with the agency. Such was Washington’s confidence in the political
reliability of the Venezuelan regime that it dispatched the Director of
the CIA himself, John Ratcliffe, to Caracas. Trump had not the slightest
concern that he might be detained to demand the release of the abducted
president.
*****
The Bolivarian regime is still hiding the precise workings of the
plunder operation now unfolding. Beyond the limited outline provided in
the US government’s January 7 fact sheet and Trump’s January 9 executive
order, cynically titled “to protect Venezuelan oil revenues for the
benefit of the American and Venezuelan peoples”, little has been
disclosed. Even these sparse revelations, however, establish the
neocolonial character of the arrangement Trump and Rodríguez are trying
to impose on Venezuela.
Press reports note
that Washington has
already begun selling Venezuelan oil and is exercising direct control
over the revenues. The proceeds from these sales are being placed in
accounts administered and overseen by the US government itself. Major
energy trading multinationals—including Vitol and Trafigura—have been
authorized, under the continuing sanctions regime, to market the tens of
millions of barrels of Venezuelan crude that had accumulated in storage
due to the US blockade, while tankers carrying millions of barrels have
already departed Venezuelan ports.
The initial sales amount to
hundreds of millions of dollars. These funds are reportedly being
deposited in accounts under US control, including accounts held in
Qatar.
*****
Omole and the CPM-K have uttered not a word of opposition to this
unfolding betrayal. Nor have they issued any call to Venezuelan workers
to oppose the neocolonial policies of the Venezuelan president. These
policies inevitably entail dismantling what remains of the limited
social programmes instituted by the Bolivarian regime in a previous
period and a renewed assault on workers’ living standards, as
Venezuela’s dwindling oil revenues are handed over to Trump.
By
defending and glorifying the Rodríguez regime, the CPM-K leadership is
functioning as an accomplice in the subordination of the Venezuelan
working class to US imperialism.
*****
The trajectory of Rodríguez’s regime confirms Leon Trotsky’s theory of
Permanent Revolution: In countries of belated capitalist development,
the bourgeoisie is incapable of waging a consistent struggle against
imperialism. Bound by its class interests to global capital, it
inevitably seeks accommodation with imperialism against the working
class. Genuine opposition to war and imperialist domination therefore
cannot proceed through the defence of bourgeois nationalism, but
requires a struggle against capitalism itself, led by the working class,
and a struggle for world socialist revolution.
*****
The Venezuelan operation is a warning not only to Latin America, but
to the African masses as well. In a continent where there is deep
popular hostility to imperialism, forged by centuries of colonial
oppression, a social explosion against bankrupt, “post-colonial”
capitalist states is brewing, already leading tens of millions to take
the streets in recent years.
Amid an intensifying global crisis,
imperialism is signaling that even the limited forms of sovereignty
tolerated in the post-colonial period are over. Africa is being put on
notice. Any government that resists the imperialist diktat over
resources or military alignment faces the threat of invasion and
military subjugation. The imperialist powers intend for the attack on
Venezuela to establish a precedent for the eruption of neocolonial wars
on a global scale.
*****
The only progressive response to the eruption of US imperialism lies
in the independent mobilization of the working class as an international
class, against all factions of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist
system itself.
This requires a conscious rejection of nationalism
and the building of genuinely revolutionary, Trotskyist parties in the
working class, guided by socialist internationalism. The historic task
posed today is the construction of sections of the International
Committee of the Fourth International, uniting workers across Africa,
Latin America, the US and globally in a common struggle against
imperialist war and capitalist exploitation.
On January 3, NASA closed the library at the Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the largest research library in the
agency. The closure follows months of chaotic building shutdowns,
laboratory dismantling and workforce reduction that have gutted one of
the most important centers for space science in the United States.
The
library housed over 100,000 volumes, including books, scientific
journals and historical documents dating from the early 20th century
through the space race with the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s.
Many of these materials have not been digitized and are unavailable
anywhere else. NASA officials claim the holdings will undergo a 60-day
review, with some materials stored in government warehouses and the rest
discarded.
The shutdown is part of what NASA calls a facilities
consolidation plan that will close 13 buildings and more than 100
laboratories on the 1,270-acre Goddard campus by March. The workforce at
Goddard has been reduced from more than 10,000 to 6,600 through
buyouts, early retirements and layoffs carried out under the Department
of Government Efficiency campaign early last year.
*****
The library closure represents only one aspect of the infrastructure
destruction taking place at Goddard. Earlier reports detailed the
shutdown of laboratories and the removal of specialized testing
equipment, including the ElectroMagnetic Anechoic Chamber, a unique
facility essential for testing spacecraft antennas. Employees were given
minimal notice to empty buildings during the government shutdown when
few workers were present on campus.
Dave Williams, the former director of NASA’s Space Science Data Coordinated Archive, told the New York Times,
“You can’t just get these things online.” Williams spent 30 years at
Goddard as a planetary scientist before taking early retirement in 2025
and spent thousands of hours in the library researching historical
mission data. He curated information from old scientific journals that
could only be found in the library collection and uploaded it to online
archives.
Williams also emphasized the importance of historical
records for current space missions. “It’s not like we’re so much smarter
now than we were in the past,” he said. “It’s the same people, and they
make the same kind of human errors. If you lose that history, you are
going to make the same mistakes again.”
*****
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, himself a billionaire, defended
the closure, claiming it is part of a facilities consolidation plan
approved in 2022 under the Biden administration. He asserted that
materials would be digitized, transferred to other libraries or
preserved for historical purposes, and that researchers would retain
access through digital services and interlibrary loans.
The
International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers
disputed this characterization. “This was not part of some long-planned
facilities consolidation as Isaacman claims,” union president Matt Biggs
said in a statement. “The Goddard Master Plan, written in 2022, does
not call for the library’s closure. Building 21, which houses the
library, was scheduled for renovation not elimination.”
Similarly,
Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland condemned the closures at Goddard:
“The Trump Administration has spent the last year attacking NASA
Goddard and its work force and threatening our efforts to explore space,
deepen our understanding of Earth, and spur technological advancements
that make our economy stronger and nation safer.”
Yet neither
Biggs nor Van Hollen offered any perspective to fight against the cuts.
The Trump administration has launched a frontal assault on science and
art for the past year as part of the cultural component of establishing a
dictatorship in the US. And as this conspiracy has unfolded, the
Democratic Party has not fought to mobilize the population against
Trump’s efforts. Quite the opposite: the Democrats have collaborated to
fund the administration, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE), and fought to channel the growing opposition into electoral
channels.
The library closure follows the shutdown of seven other NASA
libraries since 2022. Only three NASA libraries remain operational, at
the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the Ames Research Center in
Mountain View, California, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena.
The destruction of scientific infrastructure at Goddard
echoes the losses that occurred when NASA contracted dramatically after
the cancellation of the Apollo program in the early 1970s. The most
notable casualty was the original analog tapes of the slow-scan
television footage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the
Moon. The existing footage had been converted to broadcast framerates
through crude real-time converters that simply pointed studio cameras at
slow-scan playback screens. The quality of the slow-scan originals was
far superior, and for missions where those tapes survived, modern
digital techniques have restored them with remarkable clarity.
*****
The lost imagery from the Apollo missions serve as a lesson of the
dangers of dismantling Goddard. Once materials are discarded or
equipment is thrown away, the capability to recover information may be
lost permanently. The hasty closure of buildings and laboratories during
the government shutdown, with minimal time given to preserve equipment
and materials, all but ensures that an irreplaceable scientific heritage
will be destroyed.
The library closure is part of a broader
pattern of cultural and scientific destruction under the Trump
administration. Last year’s general funding freeze, the closure of the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, attacks on the Department of
Education and potential cuts to research funding at the National Science
Foundation all reflect the hostility of the ruling class to critical
thought and scientific inquiry.
The transformation of NASA from a
center of basic scientific research into a vehicle for private profit
represents a fundamental assault on the collective knowledge and
cultural achievements produced by generations of scientific work. The
dismantling of Goddard threatens not only current space missions but the
capacity of future generations to understand and explore the cosmos.
The World Socialist Web Sitereport
on the audit of United Auto Workers Local 862, the blatant corruption
of UAW local officials and deteriorating conditions at the Ford Kentucky
Truck Plant (KTP) has triggered a significant response from workers,
rapidly making it one of the most widely read articles on the site over
the weekend. Workers from KTP and beyond came forward in large numbers
to confirm the findings, describe their own experiences, and express
support for independent rank-and-file organization.
The article
detailed findings from a financial audit released in December showing
large, unexplained salary increases for top union officials, improper
use of union funds, and the absence of any disciplinary action against
those responsible. These revelations stand in stark contrast to the
reality facing workers on the shop floor, where injuries, unsafe
conditions, stagnant wages and intensified production demands continue
unabated .
The WSWS article also placed these developments within
the broader crisis engulfing the UAW nationally, following years of
federal investigations, convictions of top officials and the endorsement
of pro-company contracts that have failed to halt layoffs, speedups and
the erosion of living standards. None of this was changed through the
installation of supposed “union reformer” Shawn Fain in the 2022-23 UAW
election, which was marred by vast voter suppression sanctioned by the
UAW Monitor and the US Labor Department under both the Biden and Trump
administrations.
Since the publication of the WSWS article, workers have come forward in
significant numbers to share their own experiences and voice support for
the formation of rank-and-file committees, to transfer power from the
UAW apparatus to workers on the shop floor. Their written comments to
the WSWS underscore not only anger over corruption, but a deep sense of
betrayal by the union apparatus.
At lunchtime on Friday, January 9, bells rang throughout Switzerland
in remembrance of the victims of the Crans-Montana inferno. Flags were
lowered to half-staff, and the entire country commemorated the 40 people
killed and more than 110 injured, some of them seriously, who fell
victim on New Year’s Eve to the horrific “flashover” fire in the Le
Constellation bar.
Two weeks later, at the opening of the World
Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, the sombre tones surrounding
Crans-Montana have faded. Swiss Federal President Guy Parmelin (Swiss
People’s Party, SVP), together with four other members of the Federal
Council (Swiss government), turned their attention in Davos to the
business of world politics.
Those expected in Davos include US
President Donald Trump with four cabinet members and his son-in-law, as
well as Israeli President Isaac Herzog, European Commission President
Ursula von der Leyen, and hundreds of heads of government, including
Friedrich Merz from Germany, Emmanuel Macron from France, Giorgia Meloni
from Italy, as well as Javier Milei from Argentina and Volodymyr
Zelensky from Ukraine. Not invited is Vladimir Putin, the president of
Russia.
*****
With its “Security Policy Strategy 2026,” Switzerland is attempting
to bind itself more closely to NATO at precisely the moment when the alliance threatens to break apart. Just one day after the Crans-Montana catastrophe came news of the US attack on Venezuela. Since then, the Trump administration has massively threatened Iran and announced plans for the annexation of Greenland.
European governments, and Germany in particular, which is rearming on a
scale not seen since World War II, have responded with undisguised
threats. Imperialism is heading toward a third world war, and the US
government, Switzerland’s declared “value partner,” has explicitly
stated that only the law of the strongest now applies.
That
the Swiss government and all the establishment parties, including the
Social Democrats in government, the opposition Greens and the trade
unions, support this military turning point and regard it as “without
alternative” is not an expression of strength, but on the contrary their
fear of a resurgence of the class struggle, to which an absurd social polarization between rich and poor is giving new momentum. This is
already made clear by the new domestic measures aimed at repression,
surveillance and control of the working class.
In this respect,
Switzerland differs little from the US and other countries that are in
the process of discarding democratic norms. The Trump administration has
explicitly endorsed the killing of US citizen Renée Nicole Good by
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. The World Socialist Web Sitecommented that
such measures mean that “In the actions of the Trump regime, the
American oligarchy is crossing a Rubicon, from which there is no turning
back. The issue confronting millions of workers and young people is the
most fundamental: socialism or barbarism.” This assessment now also
applies equally to Switzerland.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters has publicly rebuked NZ
Reserve Bank (NZRB) governor Anna Breman for adding her signature to
those of other global central bankers standing in solidarity with US
Federal Reserve chairperson Jerome Powell.
The US Department of Justice instigated a criminal investigation into
Powell and the Fed over his testimony about cost overruns for
renovations at the bank. Powell hit back, saying the probe was in
reality “a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates
based on our best assessment of what will serve the public” rather than
following the demands of President Donald Trump.
Breman, who took
up the top role at RBNZ in December, joined central bank governors from
around the world in releasing a statement on January 13 expressing their
“full solidarity” with Powell and seeking to defend central bank
independence. The bankers were alarmed, as the WSWS has explained, about the “vast implications” of Trump’s actions for the stability of the US and global financial system.
Peters
sharply retorted on X the next day that Breman must “stay in her New
Zealand lane and stick to domestic monetary policy.” This would have
been the advice of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, he said,
“if the Governor had sought its advice, which she did not.” While
acknowledging that the RBNZ is statutorily independent, Peters insisted
it “has no role, nor should it involve itself, in US domestic politics.”
Peters’ extraordinary public rebuke was later echoed by National
Party Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Finance Minister Nicola
Willis, who told the media that Breman should have consulted the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs before making any comment on the US Fed.
The
episode exposes the sham of “central bank independence” and lays bare
the class interests at stake in monetary policy. 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 highly speculative operations in crypto, real estate
and other areas of the market in which it is embedded. Powell meanwhile
represents 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.
*****
Now, the entire monetary policy framework is being retooled for a new
round of austerity and war. Amid the deepening capitalist crisis,
contesting sections of the ruling elite, finance capital and the state
are fighting over who will control the levers of economic life. Powerful
factions that have benefited from the flow of cheap money and
speculative finance want a regime that keeps interest rates low to
sustain debt-financed speculation.
*****
As the entire NZ ruling elite lurches to the right amid an escalating
social disaster and class tensions, Peters, leader of the populist NZ
First Party in the governing coalition, invokes far-right Trump-style
politics. These include declaring a “war on woke,” attacking democratic
rights, demonizing immigrants and denunciations of Marxism.
*****
The fundamental questions of economic life cannot be left to central
bankers or any other section of the capitalist class. These decisions
must be made democratically by the working class through workers’
governments committed to reorganizing economic life on socialist
foundations. Workers can defend their interests only through the
development of an independent political movement based on the program of
socialist internationalism.
A massive garbage mound collapsed at the landfill in Cebu City,
Philippines, on January 8. The industrial disaster has claimed 36 lives
with the last deceased worker only discovered this past Sunday. Hundreds
of rescue personnel had engaged in a treacherous search-and-rescue
operation that was hampered by the risk of igniting methane gas and the
threat of further collapses.
*****
Workers as well as local officials have pointed to the poor waste
management practices at the facility as the cause of the landfill
collapse. Joey Boy Gealon, 28, an office worker at the facility, said,
“We are just workers. We already felt it was dangerous because the
garbage was very high.”
The landfill site had previously been the
subject of investigations, complaints, and warnings, meaning that the
disaster was entirely predictable and therefore preventable. The Mines
and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) pointed to the fact that landfill had
reached a dangerous height of 35 meters while having slope instability
and inadequate drainage.
*****
In the past several months, the Philippines has dealt with large
amounts of rain caused by the country’s annual rainy season and large
typhoons that have struck repeatedly, including Typhoons Fung-wong and
Kalmaegi in November. These are believed to have contributed to the
Binaliw disaster.
*****
While local authorities claimed that they had raised concerns over
the landfill in the past, they were quick to deflect blame, stating that
only the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) had the
authority to take action against PIWS. The DENR is well known for being
rife with corruption, something that was exposed last year following
massive flooding.
While Manila allocates billions of dollars for
infrastructure, this money often gets diverted into so-called “ghost
projects” in which the money disappears without any work being carried
out. Therefore, whether it is for flood control measures or sanitary
waste management, the ruling class profits while leaving the working
class to suffer the brunt of disasters.
The Binaliw disaster
follows a well-worn pattern in the Philippines, where environmental and
safety regulations are ignored in collusion with establishment
politicians. The Mines and Geosciences Bureau for the region has long
identified many areas in Central Visayas as landslide-prone,
particularly where “people have altered the natural landscapes or
stripped its vegetation.”
*****
Under capitalism, waste management is not a public service but a
lucrative business. The needs of the population for clean air, water,
and soil are subordinated to the balance sheets of companies like Prime
Integrated Waste Solutions.
Nor is the Binaliw disaster an
isolated event. It is a gruesome echo of past tragedies that have taken
place over many years and have provoked public outrage, but never any
changes.
*****
The profit-driven, lethal practice of open dumping continues under
corporate management as the capitalist ruling class treats the lives of
workers and the poor as expendable. As with past disasters, nothing will
change after the landfill collapse in Cebu under the capitalist system
no matter what promises politicians make or toothless regulations are
passed.
Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled a trade agreement with China last
Friday, at the conclusion of a four-day visit to Beijing that included
high-level meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li
Qiang.
The agreement will scale back a two-year bilateral trade
war, with Canada slashing tariffs on Chinese EV imports and China
reciprocating by reducing tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of
Canadian canola exports.
Carney, the first Canadian prime
minister to visit Beijing since 2017, described the trade deal and a
series of mainly aspirational economic agreements aimed at promoting
bilateral trade and investment as initiating a “new era” in
Sino-Canadian relations. At the same time, he insisted that Canada will
maintain “security guardrails” in its relations with Beijing, limiting
or outright barring Chinese investments across large swaths of the
Canadian economy, including AI and critical minerals.
The
Carney-led Liberal government’s attempt to expand economic ties with
China is a “high risk” maneuver—and acknowledged as such by Ottawa and
its proponents within the Canadian ruling class. It is aimed at
diversifying Canada’s economic ties under conditions of the ongoing
crisis in US-Canada relations.
*****
Since becoming prime minister last March, Carney has turned to the
European Union, Britain, Japan, South Korea, India, and now China in an
effort to gain leverage against Washington, which is ruthlessly
exploiting Ottawa’s heavy dependence on the US market. Some 75 percent
of Canadian exports go to the US.
None of these tactical shifts,
however, offer a basis for Canadian imperialism to offset the damage
done to its position by the breakdown in the military-strategic and
economic partnership with its southern neighbour that for the past eight
decades has served as the basis of Ottawa’s global strategy.
These
shifts will not just exacerbate tensions with the US. They are
intensifying the cleavages within the Canadian ruling class, as
competing factions rooted in different industries and regions wrangle
over who is to bear the cost of reorganizing Canadian imperialism to
prevail in the repartition of the world economically and territorially
between the imperialist powers.
*****
Ottawa will allow up to 49,000 Chinese-made electric vehicles into
Canada annually at the most-favoured-nation tariff rate of 6.1 percent,
with the possibility of the quota rising to 70,000 by the end of the
decade. The prime minister claimed the deal would “protect and create”
auto manufacturing jobs in Canada, by gaining access to Chinese-EV
technology (now considered the most advanced in the world) through
anticipated joint-venture Chinese investment in Canada, while expanding
consumers’ access to “affordable” Chinese-made EVs priced under $35,000.
China,
meanwhile, will ease crippling tariffs on Canadian agricultural
exports, most importantly canola seed, which Ottawa says will see
combined tariff rates reduced to around 15 percent by March 1, down from
roughly 85 percent. There is additional tariff relief for other
Canadian foodstuff exports, including canola meal, lobster, crab and
peas, although Beijing has to this point only guaranteed that the lower
rates will apply through the end of this year.
Chinese tariffs on
Canadian pork exports and canola oil remain, as does the 25 percent
surtax that Canada imposed in the fall of 2024 on Chinese-origin steel
and aluminum products.
Carney’s rhetoric cannot conceal the fact that his trade deal is
extremely modest. The number of Chinese vehicles to be allowed into
Canada accounts for about 3 percent of total annual Canadian vehicle
sales, and none of the proposed investments are guaranteed.
*****
The new trade agreement comes after nearly a decade of strained
relations between Ottawa and Beijing. Since 2017, ties have been
destabilized by conflicts rooted in Canada’s alignment with US
imperialism, including the arrest of Huawei
executive Meng Wanzhou at Washington’s behest and the retaliatory
detention of two Canadians in China. Ottawa has deepened its
participation in Washington’s strategic encirclement of China through
military provocations, including “freedom of navigation” operations in
the Taiwan Strait.
In its 2022 Indo-Pacific strategy, the Trudeau
Liberal government designated China a “disruptive global power,” placing
Beijing just below Russia in Ottawa’s gunsights. This was part of
Ottawa’s ever-deeper integration into Washington’s economic and
military-strategic preparations for war with China. This integration has
continued under Carney, with Ottawa strengthening military-security
ties with Washington’s principal Asia-Pacific allies, Japan, South Korea
and Australia; massively increasing military spending; and signaling its willingness to join Trump’s “Golden Missile Dome” initiative.
Friday’s
agreement has not overcome any of these conflicts rooted in the
deepening world capitalist crisis. On the contrary, Carney’s high-risk
maneuver could well serve as a basis for efforts by hostile factions of
the ruling class around Poilievre and Ford, or the Alberta or Quebec
separatists to destabilize and topple his government in the event that
USMCA talks fail and Trump’s drive to economically ruin Canada
intensifies.
Unifor, which claims some 40,000 members across the
Canadian auto industry, moved quickly to back Ford’s protectionist
denunciation of the deal. Unifor President Lana Payne blasted it as a
“self-inflicted wound to an already injured Canadian auto industry.”
Allowing Chinese EV imports, she exclaimed, risks turning Canada into a
“dumping ground” and endangering auto jobs ahead of the USMCA review
negotiations. Dressing corporate and state trade-war policy up as a
defense of workers, the union apparatus is again promoting “Team Canada”
nationalism that divides autoworkers internationally and subordinates
Canadian workers to the interests of the country’s financial oligarchy.
The
fundamental issue posed by the trade deal is not whether Ottawa should
align more tightly with Washington or seek limited accommodation with
Beijing. It is that the working class is being dragged into a struggle
between rival capitalist powers and rival factions within the Canadian
ruling class, each determined to defend their profits at workers’
expense amid the breakdown of the old global economic order.
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.
