Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The year 2025 when everything changed in global capitalism
Amid the continued surge on Wall Street, albeit with fluctuations, and global growth coming in as forecast at more than 3 percent, there are warnings that all may not be as it seems.
One such warning has come from Gita Gopinath, the former chief economist and first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, in the form of a comment in the Financial Times (FT) entitled “Don’t be fooled—everything has changed.
Gopinath began by noting that 2025 was a year “when everything changed” as the US lifted tariffs to their highest levels in almost a century, China retaliated and “global policy uncertainty intensified” and yet global growth is projected at 3.2 percent which is where it was before the turbulence began.
But it would be a mistake, she continued, to think the global economy is unaffected by “tariff fights and policy chaos” and “structural damage reveals itself slowly and always too late to be reversed.”
She said AI spending and more expansionary fiscal policy had masked the drag from US tariffs and Chinese retaliation and had “made 2025 look more stable than it actually was” and the global economy is “more fragile than the headline numbers suggest, starting with fragility in the AI sector.”
Investors, she noted, have “finally begun to question the gap between sky-high AI valuations and actual AI returns.”
She then made an important point about the development of AI within a capitalist economy.
“This is not a statement about AI’s potential, which is in all likelihood transformative. It is a statement about profitability. With competitive pressure both seen and unseen, the risk of a dotcom-style correction is real.”
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According to Gopinath, the celebrated “resilience” in the face of Trump’s tariffs is “deeply misleading” because tariffs have been costly especially for Americans. Even though some 95 percent of the costs have been absorbed by US firms, tariffs have added 0.7 percentage points to inflation and without them it could have been 2 percent this year.
“Instead, tariffs have made the typical US household $600 poorer.
“The damage from tariffs will grow more visible in 2026 as the resilience afforded by front loaded imports [those brought in before the tariffs came into effect] fades and companies pass through a higher share of costs to consumers.”
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There is an important ideological issue arising from the open manifestation of Trump as the spearhead of imperialist gangsterism which applies to the analysis of the global economy.
For years, decades, the ideological representatives of the ruling classes, including some pseudo-Marxists, maintained the Marxist focus on the economic driving forces of imperialism—the struggle for markets, profits and resources, as analyzed by Lenin in his work Imperialism—was crude and dogmatic. The entire post-modernist school—rampant today on university campuses around the world—played an important role in this campaign.
But Trump himself has now openly declared that the regime change operation in Venezuela was motivated above all by the grab for oil to benefit the US energy giants.
Likewise, these same forces have for decades maintained that the Marxist analysis of the historic crisis of capitalism, leading to its breakdown as a viable socio-economic system and the necessity, therefore, of socialism, was based on a similar crude dogmatism.
But facts, as the saying goes, are stubborn things and they are indicating that the historic contradictions of the capitalist economy are coming violently to the surface.
For the working class this means that it must base its perspective not on the ludicrous proposition advanced by figures such as Gopinath, that some form of repair or course correction can be carried out, but on the understanding that the deepening crisis of capitalism—the basic driving force of war, fascism and social devastation—must be met with the conscious political struggle for socialism.
2. Declaring “I don’t need international law,” Trump moves to seize more oil tankers in the Atlantic
US President Donald Trump asserted unlimited presidential powers to wage war all over the world in an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, declaring, “I don’t need international law.”
3. Following ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good, Trump officials threaten mass repression
The conscious and deliberate character of Good’s killing is underscored by the open and unapologetic defense of the murder by Trump administration officials. By hailing the killing, Trump and the coterie of fascists in the administration are making clear that it was an expression of official government policy.
Everything coming out of the mouths of administration officials is a lie, and everyone knows it is a lie. On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance held a press conference in which he slandered Good and praised her killer. He called the federal agent’s actions “legitimate” and denounced the media for “talking about this guy as if he’s a murderer,” adding menacingly, “Be a little bit more careful.”
According to Vance, “When you look at all angles of that video, it is very clear that her vehicle went right for the guy. She actually collided with him and then that’s of course when he fired his shots.”
But tens of millions of people have seen the video, which shows the exact opposite. As the New York Times, Washington Post, and Guardian have all concluded, the footage shows that Good was trying to escape from a mob of federal agents when she was shot. There is no indication in the video that the ICE agent was ever in danger, let alone “rammed” by the vehicle. The car was moving away from the agent when he raised his gun and fired three rounds at close range.
The Trump administration is seizing on the murder of Good as a pretext for a sweeping escalation in the criminalization of political opposition. Vance announced the creation of a new assistant attorney general position that will answer directly to the president. Asked about his message to “far-leftist agitators,” Vance declared: “Now they have an assistant attorney general who is going to prosecute and investigate their fraud and their violence more aggressively than it has ever been investigated.”
Vance accused “a group of left-wing radicals” of using “domestic terror techniques” to oppose the government’s immigration policies.
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In an extraordinary statement, Trump declared that he operates outside of any legal constraint. Asked whether there were any limits on his ability to strike, invade or coerce other nations, Trump responded: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He dismissed international law outright—“I don’t need international law”—and made clear that he would be the sole arbiter of any legal constraints: “It depends what your definition of international law is.”
While these statements were made in the context of foreign policy, they apply equally to, and indeed are inextricably connected to, the “theory” of dictatorship within the United States itself. As the murder of Renee Nicole Good demonstrates, it is asserting that the president has power over life and death, that a US citizen can be murdered in cold blood and her killers defended and praised.
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Popular outrage over the ICE killing is mounting. In Minneapolis, a memorial at the site of the killing has become the epicenter of continuous vigils and demonstrations, with over 10,000 attending Wednesday night despite subzero temperatures. Protests have since spread nationwide, including in New York City, Columbus, San Antonio, Tucson, Portland and many other cities. More protests are planned in the coming days.
In opposition to the passivity and complicity of the Democratic Party and the trade union apparatus, workers and youth must advance a program rooted in the strength of the working class itself.
The demands raised by the Socialist Equality Party in its statement of January 7 outline the basis for a genuine struggle: the arrest and prosecution of her killer; the immediate withdrawal of all ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) forces from Minneapolis and every city; the abolition of these Gestapo agencies; the release of all detainees; an end to raids, renditions and deportations; and full legal rights and protections for all immigrant workers and their families.
These demands cannot be realized through appeals to the political establishment or moral outrage alone. They require mass social struggle. The logic of events is driving toward a general strike: a coordinated intervention by the working class across every industry to bring the machinery of repression and exploitation to a halt.
4. Trump’s military strikes against boats in Caribbean target Latin American working class
President Trump’s naval and air campaign in the southern Caribbean and Pacific against supposed “narco-terrorism” has not been a targeted strike at transnational cartels but a direct assault on the Latin American working class. The boats struck are overwhelmingly civilian workboats and fishing skiffs, pangas used by fishermen, transport workers and small traders. Their destruction and the massacre of their crews are acts of international piracy and war crimes that have terrorized coastal communities.
The strikes escalated sharply this past Saturday with the US military’s operation that abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. This criminal violation of Venezuelan sovereignty came on top of an effective blockade of the country and the missile attacks against common civilian boats in the Caribbean and Pacific killing at least 107 people in 30 strikes since September. The Trump administration has justified these actions, claiming the boats and Maduro himself are part of a massive drug smuggling operation bringing large quantities of fentanyl to the United States.
Such claims are blatant lies. Venezuela is not the source of any fentanyl and accounts for only a minuscule share of the cocaine flowing north from South America.
As Trump’s own subsequent statements have shown, the goal is regime change in Venezuela to secure US oil interests. In the aftermath of Maduro’s kidnapping, Trump threatened Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez, stating that if she “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” Given that Maduro faces the possibility of life in a US prison, this is a thinly veiled death threat.
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It is a further lie that the boats are running drugs in the first place. Photo evidence released by the Trump administration itself reveals that these were small, fast, but rudimentary fiberglass cargo boats used commonly in Latin America for every purpose, including delivering groceries, fresh water and fuel to remote locations. These boats also often take passengers for travel or tourism.
With few roads in the jungles, islands and coastal regions of Latin America, these pangas or lanchas are skiffs that are a primary mode of transportation in the region extending from Mexico to South America. Many of these boats were provided as part of government economic stimulus projects begun decades ago in order to cheaply connect these widespread, remote communities and allow them to engage in a higher level of fishing, support the burgeoning tourist industry and feed a growing and modernizing population.
The original panga design was created by Yamaha as part of a World Bank project circa 1970. The upswept bow resembles the machete or knife called a panga and allows the boats to be operated directly from the beaches without having to install any infrastructure, such as boatyards and docks.
The boats are about 22 feet (6.7 meters) long with a beam of about 6 feet (1.8 meters). They were mass produced out of heavy fiberglass materials, making them nearly immune to collisions and rough use, and they have lasted for decades with further decades of use ahead of them as well.
The missile strikes on the pangas are the equivalent of bombing pickup trucks used ubiquitously across the US.
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In other words, the boats that have been sunk and the crews that have been murdered could not have been heading to the US. The vast majority were workers trying to make a living amid the poverty imposed by more than a century of US interventions in the region.
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No confidence can be placed in any section of the Democratic Party to stop these attacks. Congressional leaders bemoaned the lack of notification but largely agreed with the military action itself. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, only stated his “opposition” and did nothing to mobilize the mass opposition that exists to these attacks, even as Trump holds Maduro in a New York prison.
These attacks abroad will be matched with attacks on the working class domestically with the last vestiges of democratic rights and vital social programs squashed and more austerity imposed upon workers. The working class is the only social class with the interest and ability to end the threat of world war and barbarism by abolishing the capitalist system that is their source.
5. Nurses in New York City and Long Island must stop NYSNA’s sabotage of next week’s citywide strike!
More than 21,000 nurses in New York City and Long Island must act immediately to prevent the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) from sabotaging their city-wide strike scheduled for January 12. As of this writing, the union has withdrawn strike notices at seven of the 15 hospitals involved without even having secured contracts.
The union bureaucracy is openly defying its members’ near-unanimous strike vote and working feverishly to prevent what would be the largest nurses strike in New York City history. The nurses must organize independent rank-and-file committees, impose their decision to strike from below and take control over bargaining and the conduct of the strike to prevent a sellout. They must also appeal to workers throughout New York for support.
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Under the auspices of a mediator, NYSNA officials met with representatives of One Brooklyn Health’s Interfaith Medical Center, One Brooklyn Health’s Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, Maimonides Medical Center, Wyckoff Heights Medical Center and Richmond University Medical Center on January 5. On January 7, they withdrew strike notices at Brooklyn Hospital Center and Flushing Hospital Medical Center.
Claiming to have made “major progress,” NYSNA unilaterally withdrew strike notices at these five hospitals, even though no contracts had been finalized. The union also claimed to have reached agreements on artificial intelligence and pensions with the hospitals. It has given no details about any of these agreements, and they have called off strikes at these facilities without full contracts. Nevertheless, NYSNA announced that it aimed to settle contracts with these hospitals by Friday, January 9, and hold ratification votes afterward.
Nancy Hagans, president of NYSNA, told CBS News that she hoped to reach deals with all hospitals before the strike deadline.
This is deliberate sabotage. No contract reached under such circumstances can be anything else but entirely pro-management.
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Under the direction of conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sharply reduced the schedule of childhood vaccinations and recommended that the hepatitis B vaccine be delayed instead of administered at birth. The very institutions charged with protecting workers’ health are being dismantled, and the result will be major increases in disease, disability and death.
The NYSNA officials have refused to defend public health or its own members’ jobs and rights. It did nothing to mobilize workers against the closure of Mount Sinai Beth Israel in April 2025. It is doing nothing but holding ineffectual vigils in response to the disciplining of three Mount Sinai Hospital nurses, one of whom was suspended, for raising safety demands after an attempted shooting in the emergency room.
Another sellout will encourage further attacks on healthcare workers everywhere. These attacks will come not only from hospital administrators, but also from the state.
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The New York nurses’ struggle must become the spearhead of a broader working class offensive against the subordination of vital social services to the profit interests defended by the entire political establishment.
Following its opening in the middle of November, the exhibition “COMUNE – The Paradox of Similarity in the Middle East Conflict” by Italian artist Costantino Ciervo, was confronted with a campaign of intimidation and threats by Zionist networks, German politicians and a broad swathe of the press. The aim of these forces was to defame the artist as antisemitic and close down the exhibition at the Fluxus+ Museum in Potsdam (near Berlin).
In response, Ciervo issued a short video on Facebook and Instagram defending the exhibition’s concept and repudiating the slanderous claims of antisemitism. In the course of a few weeks, the video (in German, English and Italian) has been seen and positively received by a worldwide public. In Spain alone, the video has been liked over 40,000 times. In addition to the tens of thousands of likes, many artists, intellectuals, youth and workers have posted messages of support.
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The most important new development was the visit to the exhibition on Sunday by a large delegation from the organization Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East. Jewish Voice is the leading organization of Jews in Germany that has sided unequivocally with the oppressed Palestinians and denounced the genocidal policies of the Israeli government. Members of the organization have been arrested many times by the German police for voicing their opposition to the Merz coalition government’s collaboration in the Israeli genocide. Jewish Voice has been labelled “left extremist” by the German domestic security agency (Verfassungsschutz) and has had its bank accounts annulled.
A USPS worker in Duluth, Georgia, has now contacted the rank-and-file committee about a horrific ongoing experience at the North Metro Processing & Distribution Center. She says she suffered serious health issues while working during a construction project at her facility. After falling into a coma due to breathing dust and other particles, she was denied workers’ compensation. Management ignored her physician’s restrictions and then fired her.
8. Australian Labor government calls Royal Commission to witch-hunt opposition to the Gaza genocide
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday announced that his government has called a Royal Commission to be conducted over the next 12 months.
Nominally an inquiry into the December 14 terrorist attack at Bondi Beach, every aspect of the announcement made clear that the Commission will, in fact, serve as a witch-hunting body directed against mass opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Albanese’s announcement was a response to a frenzied and unprecedented campaign by powerful sections of the ruling elite. The major corporate publications, big business groups, Israeli leaders and Zionist lobbies had hysterically demanded a Royal Commission, with increasingly open signals from the political establishment that Albanese’s political future depended on it.
The most striking element of that campaign, and of the Royal Commission that has eventuated from it, is that the terrorist attack itself is increasingly being relegated to the background. It is still referenced, but only in the vaguest of terms as the nominal pretext for an inquiry that has little or nothing to do with the actions of the two Islamic State-inspired gunmen on December 14.
Their atrocity is not even mentioned in the official title of the inquiry, which is instead billed as a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
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The perpetrators were not pro-Palestinian protesters or anything like it.
Based on what little has been revealed, they were adherents of Islamic State (IS), a sectarian Sunni militia that has a long history of hostility to the Palestinian national struggle, including perpetrating terrorist attacks against Hamas in Gaza. In the Middle East and Central Asia, its violent operations have frequently dovetailed with imperialist intervention, with IS playing a key role in the US proxy war to topple the Assad regime in Syria and carrying out strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
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The other reason for the disinterest in the concrete circumstances of the attack are the many unanswered questions that it raises.
One of the gunmen, Naveed Akram, was investigated by ASIO, the domestic spy agency, for six months in 2019 over connections to the prosecution of an Islamic State terrorist. Despite that, his father Sajid, the other perpetrator, was granted a gun license, and the two were able to plan and prepare the attack without hindrance.
For almost 25 years, since the September 11, 2001 attack in New York, ASIO has listed Sunni Islamic extremism as the most probable terrorist threat. IS has been notorious for more than a decade for perpetrating mass casualty attacks, including in the West. But despite this, the public is supposed to believe that two IS members were able to assemble an arsenal, and then plan and perpetrate their attack, under ASIO’s nose without it having any forewarning.
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The prime minister told various lies about the anti-genocide movement, including that its regular protests were preventing Jewish people from going to the city centres. That is simply a slander, including against the many Jewish people who have participated in the protest movement.
He declared that it was legitimate to have opinions on the Israel-Gaza “conflict,” but that the “conflict… not be brought here.” In reality, the Labor government is a party to the genocidal war, having backed Israel politically, diplomatically and materially throughout, including through the export of weapons components.
The suggestion that the “conflict” is confined to the Middle East, aside from being factually false, is part of the thinly-veiled racism in which the entire Royal Commission is enveloped. The none too subtle message of those demanding “social cohesion” has been that Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims are a threat to Australia and must be combatted. Behind a veil of opposing racism, the ruling elite is attempting to stoke up an anti-immigrant and even fascistic atmosphere.
The irony is that it is precisely in such an atmosphere that genuine antisemitism flourishes. In all of the discussion surrounding the Royal Commission, little mention has been made of the growth of openly fascist forces, such as the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network, which constitute a threat to Jewish people and to the entire working class.
9. Introduction: Ukraine as the Object of World Counterrevolution, by Mikhail Pavlovich
Even if this book were of only historical interest, its renewed circulation on a world scale would mark a significant contribution to the struggle of the international working class to deepen its political and historical understanding of the Russian Revolution. But the political questions developed in the essay remain the central issues of our own time—the class character of bourgeois nationalism and its relationship to imperialism, the relationship between the struggle of the oppressed for national liberation and the struggle of the working class for world socialism. Thus, this work’s assimilation by workers in 2026 will greatly assist them to develop a more complete understanding of their own world-historical task—the overthrow of capitalism and the struggle for a socialist world society.
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The relevance of Pavlovich’s polemic 106 years later is immediately apparent. The villains of Pavlovich’s pamphlet, Hetman Skoropadsky and Symon Petliura—not to mention their fascist and Nazi successors who emerged from these defeated nationalist elements in the years after Pavlovich’s death—are the heroes of today’s petty-bourgeois Ukrainian nationalist ideologues and the ruling class of gangster-capitalist oligarchs who fund them. They remain ideological links to present-day Ukraine’s imperialist sponsors in Germany and Poland, whose eyes remain firmly fixed on the Donetsk basin, and the Russian lands to the east. While the Stalinist bureaucracy destroyed the Soviet Union, the region’s vast natural wealth and geography remain.
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It is of critical political significance to recall that contemporary Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism owes its second reincarnation to the politically degenerate Stalinist bureaucracy. The bureaucracy dissolved the USSR in 1991 in a social and political counter-revolution which restored capitalism and opened up the newly created “independent” states to imperialism. Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist ideology, incubated after World War II by western intelligence agencies and their Nazi collaborator accomplices, was transplanted back into Ukraine proper, as the World Socialist Web Site has extensively documented here and here.
Ukrainian workers, cut off politically from their class brothers and sisters in Russia and the other Union states, politically isolated from the revolutionary socialist tradition and thrown into extreme exploitation and poverty, have since 1991 been prescribed for their pains ever larger doses of political poison — the ideology of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, OUN, who helped the Nazis carry out the Holocaust in Ukraine. Hatred of all things Russian is cultivated to divide Ukrainian from Russian workers, to prevent their unified struggle against their exploiters.
World imperialism elevated these social forces to power in the 2014 Maidan coup. American, British, Canadian and German imperialism then re-armed them, deploying them as their military and political proxies for the war against Russia. The reactionary 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was a desperate response of the Putin regime to negotiate a deal with the same imperialist powers who have invaded Russia by the same route twice in the last 100 years.
Changing what must be changed, the same essential class and geopolitical dynamics described by Pavlovich remain operative.
The Ukrainian bourgeoisie has once again put Ukraine up for sale to the lowest bidder. In an effort to secure an endless supply of western armaments, the Zelensky regime has signed an extremely disadvantageous deal with the fascistic Trump regime to exploit Ukraine’s supply of critical minerals, permitting US corporations to pillage the country. As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, imperialism’s need to appropriate for itself Eurasia’s immense stock of natural wealth, mineral, energetic, natural and human, in an effort to postpone capitalism’s ultimate crisis, is a key factor driving its rearmament and plans for war against Russia and also China.
Today, US-based asset management corporations such as Blackrock and Oaktree Capital are scooping up Ukrainian farmland. Monsanto, Cargill and Dupont by themselves already own 40 percent of this farmland. Ukraine’s debt now stands at $152 billion, 70 percent of which is owed to external creditors. Today’s Ukrainian “independence” is every bit as much of a cruel hoax as it was a century previous.
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One hundred and five years later, the theoretical insight of Leon Trotsky into the permanent and international nature of the coming socialist revolution, and the historical proofs of this theory provided by Mikhail Pavlovich are as politically relevant, immediate and pressing as the day they were written.
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Mikhail Pavlovich’s numerous books and essays, well-known during his lifetime, have been kept largely obscure, due to their incompatibility with Stalinism, and all forms of national socialism. With a few small exceptions, his collected works, published in part by the state publishing house Gosizdat in 1925-26 remain untranslated into English.
This is due, above all, to his close political connection to Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and his principled socialist internationalism. Pavlovich served alongside Trotsky in several responsible capacities during the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, and in his later life his journal Novyi vostok published the works of leading members of the Opposition. Having risen to their feet to observe a minute of silence in his memory at the opening session of the 15th Party Congress in 1927, the Stalinists rapidly proceeded to pretend that Pavlovich had never existed.
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The betrayal of the Second International of 1914, in which most of its parties voted to support their respective bourgeoisies in the war, was a political watershed in the development of the revolutionary socialist movement.
Pavlovich sided with the internationalists. He understood the war to be an imperialist war, and he rejected the ‘national self defence’ position of the Second International.
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When the Chinese Revolution erupted in 1925, Pavlovich published a report from sources in China, and insisted that the working class must play the leading political role in the struggle: “The Chinese proletariat, yesterday still ignorant, yesterday still a submissive slave, is raising its head and increasingly emerging as the leader in the struggle for the national liberation of a country of 400 million people. The hour is not far off when the Chinese proletariat, in its heroic struggle against the vultures of world imperialism, will lead not only the students, small shopkeepers, laborers, etc., but also the millions of peasants of their country.” The essentially Menshevik position of the Stalinist bureaucracy was that the working class would play a subordinate role, and that the national revolution in China would be led by the bourgeoisie, a policy that led the revolution to catastrophic defeat.
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The hostility of the bureaucracy towards the internationalist perspective of the October Revolution, towards the theory of Permanent Revolution, culminated in Stalin’s political genocide of the Great Terror, in which not only the entire revolutionary cadre of the party and the Red Army was exterminated, but also leading intellectuals, academics and artists, along with their families. Out of over 100 individual authors who contributed to Novyi vostok during Pavlovich’s term as editor, at least thirty-one were repressed. Seventeen were shot. Eleven perished in prison or shortly after release. Joffe committed suicide in 1927. As more scholarly work is done on Novyi vostok, this list will surely grow.
10. Ukraine as the Object of World Counterrevolution by Mikhail Pavlovich
This is the first English translation of Mikhail Pavlovich's 1920 pamphlet on the civil war in Ukraine.
1. The war for great trade routes, for sources of raw materials and fuel
2. The Ukrainian hypnosis
3. The riches of Ukraine, Ukraine's role in the world economy on the eve of the war
4. The Adventure of the Polish Nobles. Its driving forces
5. The Polish adventure and Ukrainian culture
[Summary] From defense to attack
In order to achieve their class liberation and the right to genuine national liberation as quickly as possible and with the least loss of blood, the workers and peasants of Russia, Bashkiria, the Tatar regions, Ukraine, the Caucasus, etc. must join hands and, through joint efforts, put an end to the centuries-old, hereditary enemy of the working and peasant people—the capitalist, the kulak, both native and foreign.
Polish lords, Polish landowners, and Polonizers from the banks of the Vistula are now marching on Ukraine, declaring war on Ukrainian freedom and independence, on the Ukrainian worker-peasant Soviet government, and on the Ukrainian language. We will double, triple, or even increase our efforts tenfold if necessary, and we will put an end to the threat of the Polish nobles as soon as possible. However, let us remember that noble Poland is only an outpost of international imperialism, only a tool in the hands of the Imperialist International of death and destruction, and above all Anglo-French imperialism. As Comrades Chicherin and Rakovsky rightly point out in their note on the offensive of the Polish lords: “The very existence of workers’ republics successfully fighting for the economic revival of their countries is a thorn in the side of countries where the workers are not yet in power.”
11. The Crans-Montana inferno: New findings prove the responsibility of local authorities
One week after the deadly fire in Crans-Montana, it is becoming clear that this was not a tragic accident, but manslaughter driven by profit. The bar “Le Constellation” had been known for years as a deadly fire trap, without the authorities intervening or even carrying out inspections.
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In the Swiss ski resort, 40 people aged between 14 and 39 were burned beyond recognition on New Year’s Eve. A further 116 were injured, some of them critically. Eighty-three are still being treated in specialist clinics across Europe.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Nicolas Féraud, president of the municipality responsible for fire safety inspections, was forced to admit that the local authority bears joint responsibility for the catastrophe. The last inspection, Féraud said, had taken place in 2019. For five years, the bar had not been inspected.
However, even during the three inspections that took place between 2015 and 2019, the cheap insulation material on the ceiling of the bar was not considered important. The highly flammable material was ignited on the night of the fire by “fountain candles.” These were mounted on champagne bottles, emitting a bright flame, causing the inferno. Féraud justified the lack of inspection by stating that the law did not require the quality of the acoustic insulation material used to be checked during the regularly prescribed inspections.
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It has also now become clear why so many minors are among the victims, even though under cantonal law young people under the age of 16 are not permitted to remain in bars or restaurants after 10 p.m. without being accompanied by a parent, and they are prohibited from consuming alcohol. The bar “Le Constellation” was known for its lax admission controls. According to reports from young people, it was also possible to bypass the bouncer at the main entrance via a side door, the access code to which was known to insiders.
The new findings confirm what [the World Socialist Web Site] wrote in the first article on the inferno in Crans-Montana: it is part of a chain of developments—the coronavirus pandemic, the increase in fatal workplace accidents, the genocide in Gaza, the reintroduction of conscription in Germany—in which profit or power interests take precedence over human lives.
The tourism industry, too, is increasingly dominated by profit-hungry, globally operating corporations. In the case of Crans-Montana, US corporation Vail Resorts, which owns all the ski facilities and several restaurants, plays this role. The authorities are put under pressure or bought off by them.
Many workers who spoke to World Socialist Web Site reporters drew the connection between the US attack on Venezuela and escalating state violence against resistance at home.
13. Libbey Glass workers resist sabotage by IAM, USW officials as Toledo strike nears 5 months
After nearly five months on strike, more than 500 Libbey Glass workers in Toledo, Ohio continue to hold the picket line against an employer determined to shred seniority, destroy overtime protections and gut the skilled trades that keep the plant running safely.
Libbey’s owners and their financiers seek to eliminate seniority, expand blanket “management’s discretion,” impose mandatory 12‑hour shifts and outsource critical trades to contractors who have no healthcare or pension obligations.
The courage and solidarity of the strikers have been tested every step of the way not only by management’s threats but by the open sabotage of the trade union bureaucracy of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and the United Steelworkers (USW).
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In a courageous act, rank-and-file workers from Local 65 attending the first meeting unanimously rejected the deal. Before the vote, the World Socialist Web Site issued a statement calling on Libbey workers to vote no, form a democratically elected strike committee and take the conduct of the strike out of the hands of the USW bureaucracy.
The repeated backstabbing by USW and IAM officials confirms an iron rule: the trade union bureaucracy acts as agents of corporate management and the state. The USW and IAM bureaucracies control vast resources, live on large salaries and use members’ dues to underwrite structures that are hostile to the interests of the rank and file.
It is clear that Libbey management and its private equity investors have been emboldened by the class war policies of the Trump administration and its wars of plunder abroad and state violence at home.
Added to this are the Trump administration’s tariffs, encouragement of “reshoring” that is a pretext for increased speedup and layoffs, and embrace of corporate restructuring and the weaponization of technologies like AI to eliminate jobs.
The IAM, USW, the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters support Trump’s economic nationalism and actively collaborate with a ruling class determined to make working people pay for the crisis of capitalism.
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The only way forward is the transfer of power from the bureaucracy to the workers themselves. Libbey workers must form a Libbey Rank‑and‑File Strike Committee now. Such a committee must do the following:
- Demand full disclosure of any proposed contract, side letters and bargaining minutes and insist on a ratification vote conducted under worker control, with adequate time to review and debate. Snap, blackmail votes by international officials must be rejected.
- Take control of strike communications, publish all income and expenditures and ensure strike benefits sufficient to sustain rank‑and‑file perseverance. Union assets must be made available for strike defense, not hoarded by a privileged apparatus.
- Organize independent mass meetings, picketing and enforcement of the picket line; determine the terms of any return to work and refuse to allow bureaucrats to call off the strike unilaterally.
- Coordinate active solidarity—flying pickets, demonstrations and mass information drives—with workers at the Toledo Jeep assembly, Dana Driveline, Mercy and ProMedica hospitals, Cleveland Cliffs and local oil refineries to break the isolation the bureaucracy has imposed.
- Reach out internationally via the International Workers Alliance of Rank‑and‑File Committees (IWA‑RFC) to mobilize support from glass workers and allied trades in Mexico, Portugal and elsewhere.
A specific appeal must be made to the thousands of Jeep workers at the Stellantis Toledo Assembly Complex whose class interests are identical to those on the Libbey picket line. The UAW bureaucracy has a record of making deals that lock in speedup, concessions and deadly conditions, like those that led to the deaths of Toledo Jeep worker Antonio Gaston and Dundee Engine Complex worker Ronald Adams Sr.
Libbey and Jeep workers should convene joint meetings, organize cross‑plant demonstrations and prepare coordinated stoppages where necessary. A united working class in Toledo will strike a blow against the wholesale rollback of conditions across the region.
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For victory, workers must act independently, democratically and in solidarity with their co-workers across industries, the region and national borders.
14. Off-duty ICE agent kills California father celebrating on New Year’s Eve
Keith Porter Jr., 43, and father of two, was shot and killed on New Year’s Eve by an as-yet unidentified off-duty Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, in Northridge, a suburb of Los Angeles, California. He was the 13th victim of an ICE-involved shooting since the fascist Trump returned to power and began to make good on his promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in US history by deporting up to 20 million people.
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A friend of the family, Bishop Jack Wilson said, “He was full of life, and always smiling, it hurts me that he didn’t take his last breath, but his last breath was taken from him.”
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The shooting is now under investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Robbery-Homicide Division; however, it has also been widely reported that the FBI, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security Investigations are also handling the case because “a federal agent was involved.” Given that the agent was off duty, this explanation for involvement of federal officials in the investigation of the killing of Porter reeks of a cover-up.
There is no reason to believe anything coming from the DHS. It was only a few months ago that ICE agents shot another man in Los Angeles, claiming it was in response to an “active shooter.” The brazen lawlessness under which ICE agents operate is in every case defended by DHS and the fascistic Trump administration as legitimate responses to threats of bodily harm to the agents themselves. Yet, in every case that has been investigated, it has been shown to be a lie.
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Protests and appeals to reason, directed either to the fascists in power, or their Democratic Party colleagues from across the aisle, will not bring justice for Keith Porter Jr., the other victims of ICE shootings, or the thousands and hundreds of thousands who are terrorized by the actions of the ICE Gestapo daily. The vilification and terrorizing of immigrants, the poorest of the poor, is a bi-partisan policy that has been continued without interruption under one administration after another.
What is needed is for immigrant workers and youth to organize with other workers into rank-and-file committees that are independent of both capitalist parties and the unions. These committees should be democratically organized and the starting point for preparations for a general strike against the ICE Gestapo, fascism, dictatorship and war.
Espionage allegations against a Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) military intelligence officer accused of acting on behalf of Ukrainian intelligence have exposed a campaign waged by elements within the Canadian military to smear veteran Ottawa Citizen reporter David Pugliese as a “Russian asset.”
Much of the story has emerged via a series of leaks to the Globe and Mail, the unofficial “national newspaper” of the Canadian ruling class, and reported in such a way as to obscure the central political fact that the scandal has exposed—the seething hostility of the ruling class to opponents of its planned wars against Russia and China and its readiness to use anti-democratic methods to silence them.
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Ukrainian intelligence, whose agencies include the GUR and the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine), emerged directly out of the Soviet KGB, the Stalinist secret police. Today they are infested with openly pro-Nazi elements and draw inspiration less from their institutional roots in the KGB than their political-ideological forebears in the World War II era Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which collaborated with Hitler’s Third Reich in the Holocaust and its war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.
Canadian relations with Ukrainian intelligence, authorized or illicit, cannot be separated from Canadian imperialism’s collaboration with Ukrainian fascists since 1946. This unbroken relationship continues today via the far-right Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), which has attained immense political influence in Ottawa.
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Canadian military prosecutors allege that Robar handed classified information to his Ukrainian handlers. This included the identity of another Canadian military intelligence officer “engaged in covert intelligence and information-collection activities;” the Canadian state’s intelligence assessment of Ukraine; and the military movements of a “foreign military partner.” Ukrainian intelligence then used this knowledge to attempt to “gain leverage over Canada” and “make threats.”
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The Globe and Mail subsequently revealed that the “project” Robar was working on together with Ukrainian intelligence was “thematically aligned” with ongoing attempts to remove veteran Ottawa Citizen reporter David Pugliese from his job, because his reporting was “undermining Canadian support for Ukraine.”
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Though not well-known to most readers of the World Socialist Web Site, David Pugliese is an accomplished investigative reporter “of the old school.” Although he operates within the ideological framework of capitalism and calls himself a “proud Canadian,” his reporting has long infuriated Canada’s ruling class and military establishment.
To name only those most immediately relevant to the current campaign against him, Pugliese has penned exposés of the growing influence of the far-right Ukrainian Canadian Congress in Canadian politics; of the Canadian state’s ongoing support for Ukrainian and other Nazi war criminals, including through its “Victims of Communism” monument; and of Nazi and fascist groups active within the Canadian military. He was also one of a tiny number of mainstream journalists who challenged the attempts of the entire Canadian political establishment to dismiss the revelation that former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s “beloved grandfather” was a prominent Ukrainian Nazi collaborator as Russian “disinformation” and of no consequence.
Pugliese has strenuously denied the allegations that he worked for the KGB, pointing out basic factual errors in the alleged KGB file, such as its assertion that he was employed by the Ottawa Citizen before 1989.
In his own testimony before the Parliamentary Committee, given to answer Alexander’s allegations, Pugliese revealed that “Military public affairs officers have acknowledged that during my time at the Ottawa Citizen, there have been no fewer than three attempts by senior DND (Department of National Defense) officials to convince my employer to remove me from the defense beat.”
His employer, Post Media Group, has defended Pugliese unconditionally in the face of the Globe and Mail’s recent contribution to the smear campaign (detailed below). This is all the more significant, given that the Post Media Group is itself a right-wing media conglomerate, virulently hostile to the working class and democratic rights.
If any reporters should be accused of working on behalf of a state intelligence agency, it is those at the Globe and Mail who often report as if they were stenographers for the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS). Reporters Steven Chase and Robert Fife, the Globe’s lead writers on the Robar affair, served as the primary conduits for elements within the Canadian state who in 2023 whipped up a furor over claims that Beijing had interfered in the 2021 and 2019 federal elections. This campaign, it need be recalled, was used to stigmatize China as an existential threat to Canadian “democracy,” destabilize the Trudeau government from the right and press for sweeping new powers for Canadian’s security-intelligence apparatus
The Globe has reported on the Robar case in a manner that lends credibility to the smear campaign and fraudulent allegations against Pugliese. On his X account, Pugliese has noted that Chase, Fife and fellow Globe reporter Mark MacKinnon have declined to publish material he supplied to them refuting the allegations against him peddled by the Ukrainian government and elements in Canada’s military-security apparatus.
In September 2025, the Canadian magazine The Walrus confirmed that an independent forensic investigation exposed the “KGB dossier” as a fake. The archives of the KGB in Kiev contain no such files, and the archival file numbers which should be present are missing. Typeface specialist Erik van Blokland asserts that the Cyrillic typewriter typeface used in the documents is in fact a digital typeface which he himself invented in 1993, three years after the documents are alleged to have been created.
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But in their reporting on this story, the Globe reporters fail to refer to these investigations. Instead, their reporting lends credibility to the assertions of the promoters of the documents, which align with Canadian imperialist interests, and the previous reporting of the Globe and Mail hyping the “Russian threat.” The Globe has breathlessly reported the claims “Russia” orchestrated an intimidation campaign targeting those with knowledge of the “KGB dossier” on Pugliese. It has sought to boost the veracity of this dossier by highlighting remarks it solicited from Andriy Kogut, the SBU director of archives. Kogut asserts, reports the Globe, “the documents would have been difficult to forge without ‘real documents or perfect and deep knowledge from within the KGB.’”
In fact, the SBU possesses such “perfect and deep knowledge” as it emerged directly out of the KGB! Moreover, it and the Ukrainian security services as a whole have a long and notorious record of using torture and frame-ups against their political opponents, including against Bogdan Syrotiuk, a socialist opponent of the Zelensky regime and anti-war activist who has been jailed on frame-up charges since April 2024.
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Canadian imperialism is terrified of the growing anti-war sentiment among workers and youth. Pugliese’s exposures within the capitalist press have thus become politically unacceptable as the ruling class launches a war-spending orgy, already in the hundreds of billions of dollars, to prepare for the planned carve-up of Eurasia. The campaign against Pugliese cannot be understood apart from the ruling class drive to criminalize all expressions of principled opposition to its imperialist policies, including tarring opponents of Israel’s genocide in Palestine as “antisemitic” and shutting down student solidarity encampments. Since the start of Canadian imperialism’s war against Russia in 2022, the state and the Ukrainian far right, acting as one, have waged a vicious propaganda campaign, including attacking and shutting down multiple anti-war meetings, and censoring critical artwork, such as the film Russians at War.
The NDP and its trade union sponsors have said nothing in defence of Pugliese. This is not surprising. The NDP has long stood foursquare behind Canadian imperialism’s wars. This is the party that drove out Ontario MPP Sarah Jama for mild remarks in defense of the Palestinians and which has excluded the pseudo-left Yves Engler from its federal leadership race based on his opposition to Canadian imperialism’s war plans. The NDP leadership’s preferred choice for leader, Edmonton MP Heather McPherson, is a staunch supporter of the Ukraine war and frequent participant in Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) activities.
The union bureaucracy has joined together with the Carney government in a corporatist alliance to crush opposition on the shop floor to its war on workers’ rights and living standards, the necessary domestic component of the war drive abroad. There is no “peace constituency” within the ruling class, and there is no constituency which defends democratic rights.
The only viable program to defend both democratic rights and oppose imperialist war is socialist internationalism—the fight to mobilize the Canadian and international working class to establish workers’ power and put an end to capitalism, the outmoded nation-state system, and the domination of society by a predatory oligarchy.
16. Surge of immigration arrests and state terror in the Pacific Northwest in 2025
A ten-fold increase in arrests in Oregon took place last year, alongside targeted workplace raids in Washington that terrorized working class communities.
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The fight to defend immigrants is inseparable from the fight for the working class and democratic rights; only independent, class‑based mobilization can stop the deportation machine and the authoritarian program it advances.
17. Syrian HTS regime clashes with Kurdish SDF forces, makes a deal with Israel
Less than a year after the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, US-allied forces in Syria have reached the brink of civil war. This underscores that the so-called “Syrian revolution” was a reactionary regime change operation supported by imperialism.
Resident doctors, nurses, and all National Health Service staff enjoy the respect of millions and can mobilize mass working-class opposition to austerity and war against the culprits responsible for driving the public health service to ruin.
19. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Nigeria:
Europe
Belgium:
Firefighters in protest strike over staff shortages amidst government austerity measures
France:
Strike by doctors over government budget measures
Germany:
Theater performers, musicians and technicians strike for improved pay and conditions
Greece:
Theater performers, musicians and technicians strike for improved pay and conditions
Portugal:
Distribution workers strike for pay increases and better work/life balance
Spain:
Amazon workers in O Porriño face police enforcement as they strike over working conditions
Turkey:
Solar panel factory workers on indefinite strike for cost-of-living pay increase
United Kingdom:
Staff at coal mining museum continue strike over Christmas holiday period
Bus workers in Cambridge, England to continue strike over cuts to overtime ratesTraffic enforcement staff in London Borough of Bromley walk out over pay
Iran:
Protests continue across country over deteriorating living standards and social conditions
20. 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.
