Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Washington preparing military strikes against Iran
The US military is poised to attack Iran after a massive, weeks-long redeployment of warships, bombers and personnel to the region.
2. Class Struggle USA: Major strikes erupt nationwide
The first month of 2026 has seen the eruption of major social struggles in the United States, beginning with the mass protests against dictatorship and ICE killings. Opposition is now increasingly taking on a class character, with the emergence of a developing strike movement.
On Monday, 6,400 San Francisco teachers walked out on strike. In a city where housing costs have been driven to unaffordable levels by the spending of tech billionaires, teachers are demanding wage increases, enforceable class-size limits and staffing levels and increased funding. They are striking as high school students—defying threats from school administrators, politicians and teachers’ union bureaucrats—are walking out nationwide in opposition to the assault on immigrants.
In Los Angeles, tens of thousands of teachers have voted to authorize strike action over the same issues, while 40,000 graduate students across the University of California system are currently voting to authorize another strike.
Also on Monday, 4,000 pharmacy and laboratory workers joined the ongoing strike of 31,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses and other healthcare workers, now entering its third week, against profit-driven cuts to healthcare. It is significant that on the same day, the unions in New York moved to betray a month-long strike by 15,000 New York City nurses—precisely because of the potential emergence of a national movement by healthcare workers.
Growing militancy among refinery workers is fueling opposition to a new contract that falls far short of demands for higher wages and job security. Tens of thousands of workers at UPS, Amazon, in the auto industry and elsewhere are also fighting mass layoffs.
These struggles are being driven by inflation, the deterioration of living standards, the destruction of jobs and the broader rampage of the corporate and financial elite against all the rights of workers. The artificial suppression of organized resistance by the union bureaucracy has produced a situation in which decades of pent-up social tensions are now bursting into the open.
This movement must find new channels. The growing size and duration of strikes reflect the increasing difficulty the union apparatus faces in suppressing organized resistance, a role it has played for decades.
But the bureaucracy is doing everything it can to disrupt and isolate this resistance. Its six-figure salaries, billions in assets drawn from workers’ dues and access to management and corporate politicians all depend on its ability to fulfill this function.
The compensation for Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association (NEA), the parent organization of the union on strike in California, is nearly $500,000. The president of the United Steelworkers (USW) David McCall brings in $250,000, and UAW President Shawn Fain is paid $270,000. These officials preside over apparatuses that control billions of dollars, used to finance an entire layer of bureaucrats whose interests are independent of and hostile to those of rank-and-file workers.
In response to the mass protests against ICE murder, the union bureaucrats opposed participation in a general strike in Minneapolis, cynically citing “no-strike” clauses that they themselves inserted into contracts. Their outlook was summed up by an injunction from teachers’ union officials in San Diego, responding to growing support for action from rank-and-file teachers: “Obey now. Grieve later.”
In California, the California Teachers Association (CTA) has kept most major districts on the job for months under the hypocritical slogan, “We Can’t Wait.” In New York City, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) responded to the expansion of the Kaiser Strike by announcing a sellout agreement with none of the nurses’ demands. They are holding snap ratification votes which would end the strike at three hospitals, while isolating nurses at one remaining hospital, New York-Presbyterian. The move has nurses “filled with rage,” as one striker put it.
The United Steelworkers, which bragged in 2022 that the last contract fought inflation by depressing wage increases, is now attempting to ram through a national deal that would isolate workers at the BP refinery in Whiting, Indiana. The contract is also a war contract, sandwiched in between Trump’s war to seize oil in Venezuela and the next war now being planned against Iran.
The bureaucracy is attempting to prevent any break from the stranglehold of the Democratic Party, which is more terrified of a mass movement than of fascism and which is implementing austerity at the local and state level.
In California, teachers directly confront the Democratic Party, which controls the government at the state and local levels. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul responded to the nurses’ strike by issuing emergency orders to help bring in scabs. The New York Police Department (NYPD), under the administration of so-called democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, arrested more than a dozen striking nurses at a demonstration last week. The sellout contract was brokered by Mamdani and Biden’s former Labor Secretary, Julie Su, whom Mamdani had appointed to his city administration.
In a speech Monday at the United Auto Workers so-called “Community Action Program” conference, in reality, a meet-and-greet for Democratic Party officials, union President Shawn Fain warned that “fascism is on our doorstep,” declaring, “If you think it can’t happen to you, you’re fooling yourself. If you think that can’t happen on a UAW picket line, you’re crazy.”
Yet he proposed no action. The words “general strike” arose only from a single shout from the audience. Instead, Fain pointed to the 2026 midterm elections—elections that Trump is openly preparing either to cancel or conduct at gunpoint—and to 2028, when the UAW’s sellout contracts expire, promising vaguely that “we’re going to do whatever the hell we have to do” more than two years from now, when it will be too late. His choice of words here quietly abandons earlier rhetoric about supporting a general strike even at that distant future.
Fain ominously declared, “We are not Democrats or Republicans,” not to argue for a break with the two-party system but to signal the union’s willingness to collaborate with open fascists as well as Democrats. The UAW is one of several unions cultivating ties with Trump, supporting his fascistic “America First” economic nationalism while preparing to endorse anti-immigrant, racist and right-wing populist figures such as Dan Osborn.
As the class struggle continues to grow, the bureaucracy will try ever more openly and shamelessly to sabotage it. Workers, therefore, need the means through which they can fight this sabotage, unite on a national and international scale and establish their political independence and initiative.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) urges workers to form a network of committees, composed of trusted shop-floor militants, to discuss strategy and prepare joint actions across industries, regional and national borders. The bureaucratic apparatus that exists to suppress the class struggle must be abolished, and power must be transferred to the shop floor. Such committees will give workers the power to oppose sellouts and override decisions that violate the will of the membership.
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Rank-and-file committees should embrace the whole working class, not just those in unions, in order to prepare the ground for a general strike. They are based on a strategy of class struggle and the international unity of the working class regardless of nationality, race or immigration status. Committees must become organizing centers for working class opposition to immigration raids and other police-state measures in the workplaces and neighborhoods.
A mass movement is emerging. The outcome depends on whether workers break the grip of the union bureaucracy and intervene as an independent social force.
3. Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show highlights mass opposition to Trump
Sunday’s Super Bowl LX halftime show, headlined by Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny, was an overt indication of the deep popular opposition to Donald Trump’s far‑right regime in Washington and its assault on democratic rights and immigrant workers.
The 2026 halftime show has already entered the record books as the most watched in history, with early figures indicating more than 135 million viewers in the United States alone. The songs were almost entirely in Spanish, with vivid displays of Puerto Rican and Latin American imagery, and a humane sensibility sharply at odds with Trump’s fascistic xenophobia.
That this performance could attract such an audience underscores the highly integrated, multilingual character of the working population and its deep democratic sentiments, even within the framework of “Super Bowl Sunday,” a central ritual of consumerism, nationalism and militarism. Within this thoroughly “all‑American” spectacle, Bad Bunny’s set was, in its own limited way, an artistic response to recent political developments.
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Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, born March 10, 1994, in Bayamón, Puerto Rico) is a Puerto Rican reggaeton and rap artist who has become one of the world’s most‑streamed musicians. He has topped Spotify’s global charts four times and drew nearly 20 billion streams in 2025. Since at least the 2019 mass protests that forced out Puerto Rico’s governor, he has become increasingly politically outspoken, denouncing colonialism and the repression of immigrants. This culminated last week in his Grammy speech demanding “ICE out” and affirming that Latinos “are humans, and we are Americans.”
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The performance culminated in “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”), a protest anthem against the privatization of Puerto Rico’s power grid and the rolling blackouts that continue nearly a decade after Hurricane María in 2017. Surrounding Bad Bunny were dancers dressed as line workers, while transformers sparked and streets darkened, recalling the criminal neglect of Puerto Rican infrastructure by the US government and the ongoing enrichment of private utility firms.
The choice of material and imagery recalled the disastrous response to Hurricane María, when Trump’s first administration starved the island of aid and used the catastrophe to open the way for privatization and austerity. In one notorious scene, Trump himself tossed rolls of paper towels to desperate survivors of the disaster, even while claiming that only a few dozen people had been killed: the actual death toll topped 5,000.
One of the most striking moments in the performance came when Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin emerged to sing a portion of Bad Bunny’s “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii” (“What Happened to Hawaii”). The song, a lament over dispossession and migration, functioned as a rebuke to contemporary US policy in Latin America and beyond.
At one point in the performance, Bad Bunny handed his grammy award to a young child, prompting broad speculation that it was Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old child seized by ICE in Minneapolis and transported to Dilly detention center in Texas. It subsequently emerged that the child was an actor, possibly intended to represent a younger Bad Bunny, but the popular response nevertheless expressed the mass outrage over the actions of Trump’s Gestapo.
The event concluded with Bad Bunny, football in hand, declaring “God bless America” and proceeding to name all nations in South, Central and North America. The gesture tended to highlight the shared interests of all working people throughout the region, even as much of the performance was confined to a vague pan‑Latin Americanism.
The show stood at a qualitatively higher level than the same event last year. That spectacle, headlined by rapper Kendrick Lamar and capped by a petty diss track against Canadian rapper Drake, was hailed by the identity‑politics‑obsessed upper middle class as an “earth‑shattering” revolt against Trump, when it was nothing of the sort. In the year since, political life in the United States has shifted enormously.
It is precisely this exposure of another, non‑chauvinist America that has provoked the fury of Trump and the far right. Within minutes of the performance, Trump denounced the halftime show on social media as “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER,” calling it “a slap in the face to our country.” Trump declared “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.”
The ignoramus in the White House is apparently unaware that Spanish is the most widely spoken language in the Western Hemisphere, that nearly 50 million US citizens speak Spanish, and that 8.5 million K-12 and college students take Spanish classes, making it the most widely studied “foreign” language.
Other fascistic know‑nothings mobilized to put their ignorance and racism on display, declaring Martínez “isn’t an American”—the artist is a US citizen from Puerto Rico, a US territory. Fascist youth organization Turning Point USA staged an “All‑American Halftime Show” as counter‑programming, headlined by Kid Rock and billed as a celebration of “faith, family, and freedom.” The event was completely dwarfed by the 135 million viewers who tuned into the Super Bowl halftime show, drawing barely 6 million viewers in contrast.
The broad appeal of Bad Bunny’s performance cannot be separated from political developments. Over the past weeks, the world has seen mass protests against Trump’s deployment of ICE and the occupation of Minneapolis. Over the weekend, demonstrations at the Winter Olympics in Milan saw athletes and spectators alike voice hostility to the Trump administration’s plans for dictatorship and war. Elsewhere within the cultural sphere, artists have canceled appearances at the Trump‑controlled Kennedy Center in protest of the administration, leading the latter to aggressively attempt to shut it down to stem the embarrassment.
The halftime show forms part of this global process, which is witnessing the working class of all countries increasingly coming forward in opposition to far‑right governments’ assault on living standards and the shredding of democratic rights.
4. Widespread anger over NYSNA’s sellout bid to end New York nurses’ strike
The union is attempting to push through sellout contracts for striking nurses at Mount Sinai and Montefiore systems, while isolating the 4,500 nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian.
5. UAW hails sellout agreement at Tennessee Volkswagen plant as “historic”
The 20 percent pay increase is the same take-it-or-leave-it offer from VW that the UAW denounced as "inadequate" last October.
6. Divisions within NZ coalition government over India Free Trade Agreement
Right-wing, anti-immigrant NZ First leader Winston Peters falsely declared the Free Trade Agreement will see an influx of “tens of thousands of people” from India, taking opportunities “away from New Zealanders.”
7. New alliance of Sri Lankan health unions to contain opposition to IMF austerity
Confronted with rising anger among health workers over the government’s attacks, the unions have formed an alliance, not to wage a political fight for workers, but to suppress their opposition.
8. Leqaa Kordia, Palestinian detained for one year, suffers medical emergency at Texas ICE facility
ICE officials are refusing to disclose the location of 33-year-old Leqaa Kordia after she suffered a medical emergency at the Prairieland Detention Center in North Texas on Friday and was taken to the hospital.
8. Royal Oak High School students in Detroit suburb walk out to defend immigrants
Dozens of students staged a spirited protest in defense of immigrants at Royal Oak High School in suburban Detroit Monday.
At Friday’s protest, students marched and carried handmade signs that read “No one is illegal on stolen land,” “The revolution is in the hands of the youth” and “It was never about criminals.”
10. IYSSE meeting: For a socialist perspective against the reintroduction of conscription in Germany
While wars are being stoked and escalated in the Middle East, Latin America and worldwide, thousands of young people in Germany are currently receiving letters to register for military service.
11. UN report calls for action on “water bankruptcy” affecting billions of people
The report warns that unsustainable water resource practices are causing potentially irreversible damage to water systems that require urgent action to rectify.
12. Police rampage against Sydney protest opposing Israeli president’s Australian visit
The police violence against protesters opposing a war criminal was orchestrated by the Labor governments and then defended by them.
13. Australian workers and youth denounce visit by Israeli President Herzog
“For Albanese to invite Herzog here is completely wrong—it was a line in the sand for me—and I just had to come here and be part of the opposition.”
14. Bonobo demonstrates the cognitive ability to imagine “make believe” objects
... This raises the question of what selective advantage would have been gained by wild populations with such latent capacities.
The authors propose, “Secondary representations underlie many other complex cognitive capacities, such as imagining future possibilities and mental state attribution.” These, in turn, form the foundation for the development of abstract symbolic thought—the foundation of human culture.
Abstract symbolic thought marks a decisive qualitative leap in the evolution of human cognition. It is the capacity to form and manipulate symbols—patterns, sounds, marks or gestures—that stand for objects, relations or ideas not immediately present. This capacity underlies language, technology, art and social organization; it is thus central to the emergence of culture, cooperative labor and the collective understanding necessary for conscious political action.
The German-American historian Jochen Hellbeck has written an important book. In clear and engaging language and with great empathy for the Soviet people, it deliberately opposes the efforts to minimize the crimes of Nazism and the decisive contribution of the Red Army and the Soviet people to the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Central to Hellbeck’s analysis is the link between Nazi anti-Semitism and anti-Communism.
Hellbeck, a distinguished professor at Rutgers University in the US state of New Jersey, is a renowned expert of Soviet history. He has made his reputation as a historian primarily through his work in Russian archives, concentrating on the diary entries of ordinary workers and soldiers. In particular, he has done extensive work on the battle of Stalingrad, resulting in a book that has been translated into multiple languages. He was also involved in the discovery and first-time edition of the original version of Vasily Grossman’s seminal novel, Stalingrad.
Hellbeck's new book has appeared first in a German edition under the title “A War Like No Other: The German War of Annihilation against the Soviet Union. A Revision” (Ein Krieg wie kein anderer. Der deutsche Vernichtungskrieg gegen die Sowjetunion. Eine Revision). The English edition has a different and more significant title: World Enemy Number 1, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews. Hellbeck’s central thesis is that the Nazis’ principal enemy was Bolshevism and that anti-Communism was the driving force behind its crusade against both the Soviet Union and the Jewish population of Europe.
16. Historical issues arising from the Stalinist Turkish Communist Party’s mass meeting in Ankara
The TKP’s meeting brought to the fore vital issues that demonstrate the relevance of the historical struggle between Trotskyism and Stalinism.
17. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Canada:
Nova Scotia long term care workers moving toward strike
Mexico:
United States:
Faculty at New York University to vote on strike authorization as talks stall
Drivers at Bronx-based FreshDirect set to strike
18. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
