Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
Will Lehman, a 39-year-old Mack Trucks worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania, today announced his candidacy for president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in the 2026 elections.
In his campaign announcement, Lehman announced that he had set up a website, WillforUAWPresident.org. He called for workers to support his campaign, including by running as delegates for the UAW Constitutional Convention, which will be held from June 15-18. The convention will nominate candidates for the national leadership elections that will be held later in the year.
Lehman outlined four central demands of his campaign:
First, “To end the dictatorship of the Solidarity House bureaucracy over the union, purge the UAW of hundreds of parasitic union bureaucrats, promote the creation of a network of rank-and-file committees, and transfer power and decision making from the pro-corporate union apparatus to workers on the shop floor.”
Second, ending the collaboration of the UAW with the corporations. “Forty-five years of pro-corporate policies must be replaced with a strategy of class struggle,” Lehman stated. His program calls for wages that fully recover losses caused by past concessions and inflation, a zero-layoff policy, health insurance at the company’s expense, and the historic demand for a 30-hour week with no loss of pay.
Third, Lehman calls for repudiating the chauvinism and nationalism of the UAW bureaucracy. “Workers have nothing to gain from a trade war, which amounts to a struggle among capitalists for control of markets and a greater share of profits gained through the exploitation of the working class,” he declared. “What we need is an international strategy based on the unified struggle of American, Canadian and Mexican workers against transnational corporations.”
Fourth, Lehman calls for mobilizing the industrial power of the union membership to defend democratic rights and oppose war.
Lehman previously ran for UAW president in 2022. He won nearly 5,000 votes—almost 5 percent of ballots cast—despite massive voter suppression by the union apparatus that resulted in a historically low turnout of just 9 percent.
Lehman’s announcement comes amid a deepening crisis in the auto industry. More than 21,000 autoworker jobs have been eliminated in the US since the beginning of 2024. Last month, General Motors reduced Detroit’s Factory Zero to a single shift, eliminating 1,140 jobs. Ford has extended layoffs at its Dearborn facilities and Kentucky battery plants, and more than 2,500 Stellantis workers remain laid off in Michigan, Ohio and other states.
“This is not a normal election, because these are not normal times,” Lehman said. “Across the country, workers in the UAW and throughout industry face a wave of mass layoffs driven by automation, speedup, and unsafe conditions.”
The eruption of social opposition in 2025 and 2026—from mass protests against deportations to growing resistance to war and austerity—has demonstrated the enormous potential power of the working class. But this power, Lehman stated, cannot be realized as long as workers remain “bound hand and foot by a union apparatus that works against us at every turn. As it is presently constituted, the UAW is a union in name only. It functions to isolate us, discipline us, and protect the interests of a privileged bureaucracy that is in bed with the companies and the government.”
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In the 2022 election—the first direct vote for UAW leadership in over 70 years—the bureaucracy engaged in massive voter suppression. Out of 1.1 million eligible voters, only 104,776 cast ballots, the lowest turnout for any national union election in US history.
Lehman filed multiple legal challenges. In June 2024, federal district court Judge David Lawson ruled in Lehman’s favor, finding that the Biden administration’s Department of Labor had acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” in dismissing his complaints. Bloomberg Law described the ruling as a “rare rebuke” of the Labor Department. Despite this victory, both the Biden and Trump administrations sanctioned the illegitimate vote.
Lehman’s campaign announcement also comes as the Fain administration is engulfed in corruption scandals. Court-appointed UAW Monitor Neil Barofsky has documented a “toxic culture of division and retaliation at the highest levels of the organization.” Fain himself is under investigation for allegedly threatening to “slit the f***ing throats” of anyone who challenged his inner circle, and for obstructing the monitor’s investigation.
“Shawn Fain came to power promising reform,” Lehman states. “But what have we gotten? Layoffs. Concessions. The stand-up strike that left most workers on the job. And now, the revelation of more corruption. The truth is, this bureaucracy can’t be reformed. It must be abolished.”
At the conclusion of his launch video, Lehman states: “I am running as a socialist and an internationalist. Socialism means a society run by the working class, not the billionaires, who profit off our exploitation. We must reject every attempt to divide us by race, nationality or ethnicity and fight to unite workers across borders in a common struggle.”
Lehman ends with an appeal to UAW members to be active in the campaign. In particular, he called on workers to “demand that your local hold a well-publicized meeting at which delegates to the UAW Constitutional Convention will be selected democratically.” He called on workers to “elect delegates, or become a delegate yourself, to the UAW Constitutional Convention for your local to ensure that I am nominated as a candidate.”
Invoking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, Lehman concluded: “As the great Tom Paine wrote, ‘These are the times that try men’s souls.’ The time has come to revive our revolutionary ideals.”
For more information on Will Lehman’s campaign for UAW president, visit WillforUAWPresident.org.
2. NewYork-Presbyterian nurses defeat strong-arming by NYSNA bureaucracy, continue strike
On Wednesday, nurses at New York-Presbyterian Hospital overwhelmingly rejected the sellout contract which leaders of the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) tried to impose through an entirely illegitimate vote. Out of approximately 4,200 NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP) nurses who were eligible to cast ballots, 3,099 voted to reject the deal and 867 voted to approve it.
The rebuke to the NYSNA bureaucracy is all the more signficant because union officials sought to isolate the NYP nurses from their more than 10,000 counterparts at the Mt. Sinai and Montefiore hospital systems, who were part of the powerful month-long strike. NYSNA officials claimed their deal was ratified by a wide margin by nurses at the other hospital systems during voting Tuesday and Wednesday.
But those snap votes were far from free and democratic and nurses are questioning the reported results. NYSNA officials conducted voting online through the SurveyMonkey platform. This system is completely unsuitable for formal, legally binding voting procedures because it lacks the necessary security, auditability, and voter verification controls, with no independent oversight. At Mount Sinai, exactly 3,000 “yes” votes were reported—a suspiciously round figure.
At NYP, top NYSNA officials blatantaly violated the union’s bylaws by holding the vote over the heads of the local executive committee, which had previously rejected the deal. The three-year proposal does not even come close to meet the members’ central demands on staffing, wages and healthcare coverage.
Responding to the NYP nurses outrage, NYSNA President Nancy Hagans and Executive Director Pat Kane tried to strong-arm nurses to ratify the deal in a video and email sent to them before the sham vote.
With the height of cynicism, Hagans declared, “As a democratic, member-led union that responds to its members, we are moving forward with a vote on tentative contracts at all four hospitals with the goal of returning all nurses to work as soon as possible.” Kane added arrogantly, “The simple fact is that we’ve reached the end of negotiations.”
At a protest held outside the NYSNA headquarters Wednesday, a NICU nurse with 20 years at NYP told the WSWS said the vote is “illegal” because “our executive committee did not sign off” on the deal. Top NYSNA officials, another nurse said, “went above members that were elected that represent our interests to force a vote,” adding that the move was “a violation of their own bylaws.”
Rank-and-file nurses have delivered a blow to the union bureaucracy, hospital management, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had also conspired to end the strike. The walkout has inspired a mood of resistance from workers throughout the city, dominated by a corporate and financial oligarchy which claims there is no money to address workers’ most elemental needs.
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A rank-and-file strike committee of NYP nurses should call on their co-workers at the other hospitals to reject the NYSNA bureaucracy’s betrayal and resume the strike until all nurses win their legitimate demands. No contract can be considered binding unless nurses receive the full text and adequate time to discuss, and the vote is overseen by workers to ensure its integrity.
Nurses must move quickly to hold mass meetings to elect representatives to a network of rank-and-file strike committees at all four hospitals. This is the necessary first step to continue the strike and prepare for its expansion to the other 11 hospitals which NYSNA refused to call out on strike.
Appeals must be made to the working class across New York City and the country, including by sending out flying pickets to transit worker locations, UPS, Amazon and other major workplaces. And New York nurses must establish lines of contact with the striking Kaiser Permanente workers and other healthcare workers to coordinate a national movement in defense of public health.
The conflict is an open confrontation between the rank and file and the union apparatus, which acted in defiance of the will of the membership, aligning itself with management’s demand to shut down the strike.
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It is also a direct conflict with the Democratic Party, including its left-talking operatives like Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Both Sanders and AOC posted messages on X hailing the sellout agreements reached by the NYSNA bureaucracy, with AOC writing:
Congratulations to the 10,000+ @nynurses who have reached an agreement with Mount Sinai and Montefiore hospitals! This is what happens when working people refuse to compromise their dignity. When we fight, we WIN. Solidarity as they ratify this new agreement.
The rejection at NYP testifies to a growing mood of resistance in the working class. Strikes and protests are breaking out across the country. More than 31,000 healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente on the West Coast are engaged in a three-week long strike. Teachers in San Francisco launched a strike on Monday. In the mass protests against Trump and the murders by ICE, the question of a general strike is being openly raised.
The appearance of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) this weekend is a demonstration of the essential political function of both AOC herself and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the political organization which she joined when she began her political career in 2018.
The DSA is not a socialist organization but a “left” faction of the Democratic Party, one of the two major parties of the American capitalist class. Both the DSA and AOC herself are committed defenders of American imperialism.
AOC will participate in two panels at the conference at the invitation of the German organizers, who are closely linked to that country’s national-security establishment. There she will give voice to the foreign policy of the Democratic Party, whose differences with fascist President Donald Trump largely revolve around his reduction in US military support to the war in Ukraine against Russia.
The entire Munich conference is focused on the mounting conflict between the United States and Europe, whose flashpoints, in addition to Ukraine, include Trump’s demand for Denmark to hand over Greenland to the US and his use of tariffs against former allies, seeking both economic and security advantages.
The MSC, held annually at the luxury Bayerischer Hof hotel since 1963, was founded during the Cold War as the Wehrkundetagung—literally, a “defense studies meeting”—by Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin with the explicit purpose of consolidating the Western military alliance. Kleist-Schmenzin himself had served the Nazi Third Reich as an officer in the Wehrmacht.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky will be in Munich to accept the annual Ewald von Kleist Award. Zelensky cancelled presidential elections nearly two years ago but continues to rule as the head of a police-state regime that is visibly crumbling under Russian military pressure.
For over six decades, the MSC has served as the premier salon where NATO officials, defense ministers, arms industry executives, intelligence chiefs and transatlantic policy elites coordinate the strategic consensus that underwrites Western military dominance.
Its guest lists read like a directory of the forces that launched the Iraq War, expanded NATO eastward against repeated warnings, armed Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and maintained unconditional military support for Israel. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and BAE Systems are among its corporate sponsors. Ocasio-Cortez has chosen to make her debut as a “left” representative of American imperialism at this foul gathering.
Several other potential Democratic presidential candidates are attending the Munich conference, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego. In a press interview, Gallego said, “We’re doing our best to make sure the world knows the Trump worldview is not the dominant view of foreign policy.”
But it is Ocasio-Cortez whose presence has drawn the most media attention, as it represents her first major venture into the snakepit of imperialist politics. This effort has been widely interpreted as preparation for a 2028 campaign, either for US Senate in New York state, for the seat now held by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, or for the presidency. AOC herself encouraged speculation about her political ambitions, tweeting out a poll showing her defeating Vice President JD Vance in a hypothetical 2028 presidential contest.
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A glowing article in the New York Times, published last week under the headline, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Steps Onto a Wider Stage,” announced her impending visit to the MSC, calling it “her most significant overseas trip since taking office, according to Mike Casca, her chief of staff. There, she is expected to present a left-wing alternative to Mr. Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip approach to world affairs.”
This is called “being licked into shape.” But not all that much licking is required. AOC, without a single independent thought in her head, is so much silly putty in the hands of managers.
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Ocasio-Cortez began her own political career in 2018 after an internship as an aide to Senator Edward Kennedy, focusing on immigration and foreign policy issues and a brief foray into business. She ran as an “insurgent” and upset incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary in a heavily Latino district in Queens and the Bronx. She quickly made her peace with the congressional Democratic leadership and was given significant committee and party assignments by Nancy Pelosi.
During her seven years in Congress, AOC voted to illegalize a strike by 100,000 railroad workers and force through a contract the workers had rejected. She cast a vote to provide $40 billion in weapons to far-right forces in Ukraine and endorsed the US/NATO war against Russia, which threatens a nuclear holocaust. She voted in favor of US military aid to Israel throughout the genocide in Gaza and condemned pro-Palestinian protesters in the US as antisemitic.
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Her top foreign policy adviser, Matt Duss, a former aide to Senator Bernie Sanders, claimed that AOC would provide a “working class perspective” on foreign policy. “She believes the U.S. has an important role to play around the world, but military intervention is not the way to do that. And there’s clearly a strong constituency in the country that agrees with that. That’s a constituency Trump and Vance appealed to.”
It is true that Trump and Vance sought to posture, falsely, as opponents of “endless wars.” But they could only carry out this pretense because of the militarism of the Biden administration and the Democrats, which had the full backing of Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders and the DSA.
Ocasio-Cortez declared her solidarity with Biden in an interview with the New York Times in 2023, on which the World Socialist Web Site commented:
The most significant statement made in the interview was Ocasio-Cortez’s disavowal of any opposition to American imperialism. “I wouldn’t necessarily characterize my foreign policy goals as oppositional to the president’s or to the United States,” she said. “I am a member of Congress. I have sworn an oath to this country, and I take that oath very seriously.”
The WSWS continued:
When Ocasio-Cortez says that she has “sworn an oath to this country,” what she in fact means is that she has sworn an oath to uphold the interests of the American ruling class at home and abroad.
Notably absent in the interview is any mention of the word “socialism.” Indeed, taken as a whole, the interview confirms that the DSA and AOC have as much to do with socialism as the CIA. In fact, from the standpoint of policies and objectives, the initials are interchangeable.
Three years later, there is no need to change a word in this assessment.
4. Princeton University cancels discussion by Norman Finkelstein on the ongoing Gaza genocide
In their Wednesday announcement of the cancellation on social media, the organizers wrote:
We regret having to inform you on such short notice, but due to unforeseen circumstances involving new University policy, this event has been cancelled. There are no confirmed plans at this stage for a rescheduled date.
The last minute cancellation of the lecture by Princeton University on Wednesday is a calculated act of political censorship, aimed at silencing prominent and well‑informed critics of Zionism and the US‑backed genocide in Gaza. The “new University policy” refers to the battery of administrative measures adopted by universities across the US to throttle pro‑Palestinian protests, police speech critical of Israel based on the false claim that such events are “antisemitic.”
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For decades, Finkelstein has been subjected to a relentless campaign of vilification and repression by right‑wing and Zionist forces precisely because he grounds his exposure of Israeli crimes in documented fact and in the framework of international law. In Germany in 2010, a coordinated operation by neoconservative and Zionist pressure groups, such as Honestly Concerned and BAK Shalom, forced the cancellation of several of his public events, with organizers parroting the claim that his “behavior and theses do not remain within the limits of legitimate critique” and thanking those who intervened to shut him down.
In the US, the most notorious example was the campaign spearheaded by Harvard law Professor Alan Dershowitz to block Finkelstein’s tenure at DePaul University following the publication of his book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti‑Semitism and the Abuse of History. Finkelstein’s book exposed Dershowitz’s falsifications in The Case for Israel and demolished the standard apologias for Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.
Despite strong support in the Political Science Department at DePaul, the university bowed to external pressure and denied Finkelstein tenure, effectively destroying his official academic career.
He has also been targeted directly by the Israeli state. In May 2008 Finkelstein was detained and interrogated at Ben Gurion Airport, deported from Israel and slapped with a 10‑year ban on entry because of his contact with Hezbollah and, more fundamentally, his role in publicizing the record of Israeli war crimes.
In 2024, members of Betar, a fascist tendency founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, recorded themselves physically threatening Finkelstein in New York City, an incident that showed the increasingly open resort to Zionist thuggery against opponents of the Gaza genocide.
Everywhere the same political logic operates. Pressure groups, the Israeli state and their allies in the media denounce Finkelstein as an “antisemite” or “extremist,” demand cancellations and rely on cowardly administrators to do the rest. The aim is to criminalize historically accurate and factual criticism of Israel and to make an example of Finkelstein to intimidate students, academics and workers who are speaking out at campuses around the world against the genocide.
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In detailed public talks since October 7, 2023, he has repeatedly returned to the basic legal and moral question: that the deliberate destruction of civilian life and the blockade of food, water and fuel constitute the crime of genocide under international law, whatever pretexts are invoked by the Zionists and their supporters and apologists.
The World Socialist Web Site has consistently defended Finkelstein against state repression and right‑wing campaigns aimed silencing him, while also pointing to the limitations of his political outlook. In a report on his February 2025 lecture “Free Gaza, Free Speech” at the University of Michigan, the WSWS described him as “an opponent and chronicler of the crimes of Zionism and the Israeli state” whose exposure of these crimes is “courageous and principled.”
The meeting, which drew some 500 people on short notice, was noted as an expression of “broad popular anger and deep disgust” at the normalization of genocide and the role of the entire political establishment, including the Democrats, in backing it.
In that lecture, Finkelstein denounced the Biden administration for fully backing the Gaza genocide “with bombs, money and political and diplomatic support,” and ridiculed Biden’s posturing on academic freedom as the universities led an unprecedented crackdown on pro‑Palestinian protests.
He condemned the fraudulent equation of opposition to genocide with antisemitism and attacked the use of billionaire donors like Bill Ackman to manufacture claims that students “feel unsafe” as a pretext to criminalize slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
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Finkelstein’s meticulous documentation of Israeli crimes, his defense of academic freedom and his principled rejection of identity politics are significant. However, these positions must be linked to the development of a working class movement and the fight for socialism.
The shutting down of Finkelstein’s lecture at Princeton is an attack on fundamental democratic rights and an integral part of the pro‑Israel, pro‑US campaign to criminalize opposition to genocide. It comes amid a nationwide offensive in which university administrations, acting on behalf of the state and under the direct pressure of billionaires, donors and the political establishment, have rewritten conduct codes, banned organizations and called in police against students and faculty who oppose the destruction of Gaza.
By invoking the “new University policy” to cancel a talk by one of its own graduates, Princeton has signaled that its campus is not a place for free speech about the crimes of US imperialism and its allies but an institution of ideological discipline aligned with the war aims of the Trump administration in the Middle East and beyond.
If a scholar whose entire career has been spent in painstaking documentation of human rights violations can be barred in this manner, every student, worker and academic who takes a stand against Israeli and American war crimes can expect the same treatment.
The working class and youth must reject all attempts to smear Finkelstein, students and other opponents of Zionism as antisemites and must insist on their unconditional right to speak, organize and demonstrate against the genocide in Gaza.
5. “Germany must be strengthened”: Social Democrats prepare new right-wing party programme
Under the slogan “Writing the future together,” Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD) gave the go-ahead last weekend for the drafting of a new party program, which is to be adopted at a party conference next year. In light of the keynote speech by SPD chairman, finance minister and vice-chancellor Lars Klingbeil at the Willy Brandt House in Berlin, one thing is already certain: It will be the most right-wing program in the party’s history.
Klingbeil’s speech was an open declaration of aggressive German-European great power politics. In doing so, he sought to portray the social democratic program of militarism, rearmament and imperialism as a supposedly progressive response to a world in which “strength and power are returning as the dominant motives of international politics.” He stated:
Russia has brought war back to Europe with its invasion of Ukraine. China is showing what it intends to do with its great power ambitions, threatening gestures and aggressive trade and industrial policy. And the United States is turning its back on a rules-based international system.
This is well-known propaganda. Klingbeil knows full well that it was the German-supported wars in the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia, carried out in violation of international law, that devastated entire regions, cost millions of lives and systematically exacerbated international tensions.
In Ukraine too, Moscow is not the sole or original aggressor as the official narrative portrays it. NATO’s systematic military encirclement of Russia deliberately provoked the reactionary response of the Putin regime. Now, the European NATO powers in particular are pushing for further escalation in order to assert their own strategic and economic interests in the resource-rich region. They are pursuing the same course of encirclement and confrontation against China.
When Klingbeil criticizes Trump’s aggressive foreign policy and the fascist actions of his ICE henchmen at home, he does so not from a progressive standpoint but to legitimize his own imperialist agenda—a German-European counterpart to “Make America Great Again.” Just how blatantly these ambitions are formulated is evident in a key section of his speech. Klingbeil stated:
We must be careful that we don’t end up being the fools. That is why it is now our task to strengthen Europe internally and to pursue a course externally in which Europe plays a more significant role in international politics than is currently the case. We should strengthen Germany comprehensively so that our society and our economy are resilient.
He continued:
In a world of centers, we must aspire to make Europe the most attractive center of all. We have too often belittled ourselves. Europe does not often enough display the self-confidence that it should have as the world’s largest economic area. And now is the time to wake Europe from its beauty sleep, to breathe new life into the European idea.
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The power politics rhetoric of social democracy differs—at least in its use of catchwords such as human rights and democracy—from that of the German Empire or the Nazi regime. But in its fundamental aspirations, it pursues the same goal. The ruling elites see the current struggle for the redivision of the world as an opportunity to re-establish German imperialism as a leading military power.
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More than a century after its historic betrayal on 4 August 1914, when it approved war credits and supported the First World War, and 67 years after its open renunciation of Marxism at the Bad Godesberg Party Conference in 1959, social democracy is today the central political pillar of German imperialism and its renewed bid for world power.
The Left Party and the Greens are no less aggressive in their support. In federal and state governments they back rearmament, war and social spending cuts. Like the openly right-wing parties in the Bundestag (Federal Parliament), they also support the military strengthening of Germany—especially under conditions in which German imperialism is increasingly positioning itself against the United States. Significantly, the Left Party and the Greens supported the rearmament package praised by Klingbeil with their votes in the Bundestag and Bundesrat (Federal Council).
The only party opposing Germany’s new great power politics is the Socialist Equality Party (SGP). As the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, it fights to build an international mass movement of the working class against war and its cause, capitalism. The SGP is contesting the Berlin state election in order to give the growing opposition to rearmament, militarism and social attacks a conscious political leadership and socialist perspective. Read our statement and support the SGP’s participation in the election with your signature.
The attack, which included multiple unprovoked violent assaults, and the welcome to Herzog led by the federal government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, have underscored the reality that Labor is a party of imperialist war and authoritarianism. The issue of not only a complete break with Labor, but a political fight against it based on a new socialist perspective, is objectively posed by the situation itself to all those who wish to oppose the Gaza genocide and war and to defend democratic rights.
But there are political forces active in the leadership of these protests who seek to prevent the necessary political clarification of this reality. They are the pseudo-left organizations, such as Socialist Alternative (SAlt) and Socialist Alliance. While they claim to be left-wing or even socialist, they work to funnel opposition back behind the existing political establishment, including the Greens, the union bureaucracy and Labor itself, to which they are tied by a thousand strings.
The response of the most prominent of them, SAlt, has been to sow complacency, in the face of the most serious state attacks on democratic rights in decades, and to peddle the fraud that all that is required is more protest, based on the same perspective of appealing to governments that has failed over the course of more than two years of the genocide.
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While it is of significance that thousands defied government threats and turned out on Monday evening, the actual circumstances of the evening hardly speak in favour of the noisy protest politics promoted by SAlt.
The police were able to enforce a ban on a planned march to the NSW parliament. The activation of “major event” legislation to impose that prohibition creates a precedent for all political rallies and activities to be barred as a threat to public order.
The cops were wholly responsible for the violence that occurred and had clearly been instructed by police command and the government that the “gloves were off.” But the generally disorganised character of the rally meant that the police were able to pick protesters off, one by one, including the vulnerable.
The defeat of police state repression requires the mobilisation of a more powerful force than individual protesters, the working class.
The fact that the union bureaucracies ensured no organised contingents of workers is not mentioned by SAlt. Throughout the genocide, SAlt, along with the rest of the pseudo-left, have run cover for the union leaderships as they have maintained their lockstep alliance with the Labor governments supporting the genocide and viciously attacking opposition.
The idea that Herzog’s visit should have been met by mass industrial action by the working class was not raised by SAlt, or any other of the pseudo-left groups, because it would have raised the need for a struggle against the bureaucracies that they collaborate with and promote. The union leaderships have said virtually nothing in response to the police attacks or to Herzog’s visit itself.
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Capitalism, globally and in Australia, is in the midst of a breakdown. The Trump administration, responding to the historic crisis of American imperialism, is tearing up all of the old norms of international relations and diplomacy, substituting them for naked gangsterism. Australia, closely aligned with the US, is involved not only in the genocide and the broader plans for war in the Middle East targeting Iran, but also in advanced preparations for a catastrophic conflict with China. Such a war would require conscription, the subordination of the entire economy to the military and police-state rule.
Domestically, there is growing opposition to a social crisis that has seen the biggest reversal to living standards of the post-World War II period. The agenda of the ruling elite is for the dismantling of social services and a “productivity” offensive, aimed at driving up profits at the expense of jobs, wages and conditions.
The global and domestic tensions are roiling the political establishment that has defended capitalist rule for decades. The Liberal-National Coalition is in an advanced state of disintegration. Every day, nervous editorials and comments in the financial press warn that the two-party system is at risk of collapse.
Under those conditions, the capitalist class is heavily dependent on Labor and Albanese himself to ensure stable rule and to enforce its program of war and austerity.
That is the deeper significance of the turn to authoritarian measures. It also underscores the critical role that the pseudo-left plays as a linchpin of capitalist politics. As the old mechanisms of bourgeois rule are strained and threatened, the pseudo-left comes forward to defend them in its promotion of illusions in Labor.
The alternative, fought for by the Socialist Equality Party, is the development of a genuine socialist movement of the working class. That means, not appeals to Labor, but the most determined political fight against it; a rebellion against the corporatized union bureaucracy, aimed at establishing independent rank-and-file committees controlled by workers themselves, and the unification of the working class internationally on a revolutionary and socialist program as the only means of halting the descent into world war and the associated turn to dictatorship.
7. Australian protesters against Herzog visit speak about police attacks
Following Monday’s brutal police attacks on demonstrators in Sydney against the visit by Israeli President Isaac Herzog, a number of the protesters have contacted the World Socialist Web Site to report their own experiences. The following are just some of their accounts.
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Sarah:
“The police officer pulled my Keffiyeh off and threw it on the ground and then he pushed me by my chest. I said, ‘don’t touch me’ and went to push him back. Then he pushed me again, shouting at me, and then a second police officer came and pushed me to the ground. They were saying, ‘stay there, don’t f***ing move,’ that sort of thing."
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Karl:
"I saw a line of police, probably 10 metres away from me and I turned my back and was walking down George Street. And within seconds, I didn’t know what happened. They came down and punched me and pushed me to the ground, smashed my glasses and then said I assaulted them."*****
Gabrielle:
"They charged towards us with pepper-spray in hand. At one point the majority of people running either side of me were screaming and crying for help after being sprayed or running over with water bottles to help those who had been sprayed."*****
Gina:
"When the speeches were over, the police refused to let anyone leave and I was introduced to a new word: “kettling” the trapping of people in a limited area in an attempt to cause discomfort, distress and intimidation.
For more than an hour, the police refused to let anyone leave and, as night began to fall, without warning, they began pushing those gathered to the far end of the square.
I was shoved by the police several times while obeying instructions. One of many devastating realisations of the night was the number of police who were smirking and smiling at being able to use force."
8. New York City Mayor Mamdani seeks to stop aid to homeless while grandstanding on taxing the rich
In a reversal of a central campaign promise, the Mamdani administration has moved to block the expansion of CityFHEPS, a rental voucher program that currently supports roughly 140,000 of New York City’s poorest residents. The program, aimed at preventing homelessness and eviction, was set to be expanded under legislation passed by the City Council in 2023 and upheld in court after legal challenges by Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams.
Mamdani, who denounced Adams at the time for refusing to implement the law and pledged to “ensure expansion proceeds as scheduled and per city law,” is now requesting that the case be delayed in order to renegotiate the scope of the program. His administration is actively working to convince the Council to scale back or entirely halt the planned expansion.
Roughly 47,000 additional households would become newly eligible for the vouchers under the expansion, but Mamdani and budget officials have claimed the cost—projected at $17 billion over five years—is “unsustainable.” At least 40,000 people are in limbo waiting for aid in the least affordable rental market in the United States.
Mamdani’s decision to try to block funding for the CityFHEPS program, a move applauded by the conservative “fiscal watchdog” Citizens Budget Commission, spells disaster for tens of thousands of working class families.
This is the first open admission by the DSA mayor that his administration’s priority is not meeting the urgent needs of the poor but balancing the budget in the interests of Wall Street. Far from a break with austerity, Mamdani is exposing himself as a conventional bourgeois politician.
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As an article in the New York Times pointed out this week, Mamdani has so far failed in his attempts to regulate private landlords, including his campaign pledge to freeze rent hikes on rent-regulated buildings.
Also on Wednesday, Mamdani appeared before a joint budget hearing of the New York State Legislature in Albany to request funds to help close the city’s budget gap.
This largely pro forma annual visit to the Democratic-controlled state legislature gave the city’s pseudo-left mayor an opportunity to grandstand in support of his proposal for a 2 percent income tax on New Yorkers earning more than $1 million a year.
It is widely understood that neither the governor nor the legislature will make the slightest move to tax the wealth of the ruling class. Every politician in the room, Mamdani above all, understood that the call to “tax the rich” was meant to paper over the austerity program the DSA mayor has begun to implement.
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Mamdani’s austerity measures and his endorsement of Hochul’s re-election bid have exposed him as an operative of the ruling elite.
All of this has thrown the DSA into a crisis. In response to the Hochul endorsement, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) released a statement cynically attempting to distance itself from the very mayor who is a member of its organization and for whom it campaigned. It reads in part:
NYC-DSA does not believe that Governor Kathy Hochul has risen to meet this moment. … [W]ith fascism here, and ultra-wealthy hospital CEOs refusing fair pay and benefits for nurses amid a historic strike, New York cannot afford to let the Governor continue to protect billionaire donors at the expense of SNAP, Medicaid, truly universal childcare, and the enactment of the mayor’s affordability agenda.
The NYC-DSA and several other organizations, including United Auto Workers Region 9A, have organized a protest in Albany for February 25 designed to pressure Hochul to include progressive tax hikes in the final state budget. This is a desperate antic to hold on to the credibility of Mamdani and the DSA itself, predicated on the conception that, no matter what rotten alliances one of their own makes in office, popular pressure can still force concessions from the Democrats.
In fact, these developments expose the real function of Mamdani and the DSA: to provide left cover for the Democratic Party, politically disarm the working class and impose the demands of Wall Street.
9. United States: Walz hails Homan as ICE shifts tactics in Minnesota
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Trump administration “border czar” Tom Homan held consecutive press conferences Thursday morning announcing what they claimed was the end of “Operation Metro Surge,” the months-long federal occupation of Minnesota by thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents.
In reality, the operation is not ending but being reorganized, with Democratic state and local officials openly collaborating to deepen the integration of the immigration Gestapo into Minnesota’s police and jail system while intensifying the repression of opposition.
The announcements came just hours before the US Senate failed to advance a spending package to prevent a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. In the wake of the murders of Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good, daily student walkouts and mass protests in Minneapolis, including growing calls for a general strike to abolish the immigration police and hold the fascists in Washington accountable, the Democrats have advanced a series of so-called “reforms” in exchange for their votes to keep these repressive agencies operating and fully funded. The dispute in Washington is not over abolishing ICE or CBP but over how these agencies are to be cosmetically regulated while their criminal operations continue uninterrupted.
In his remarks, Homan made clear that ICE agents are being redeployed into county and city jails across the state, where they will seize immigrants directly from police custody. Under this arrangement, immigrants who have not been convicted of any crime, including pretrial detainees, can be taken by ICE at the point of release and rapidly transferred out of state, cutting them off from lawyers, families and community support.
Homan, who repeatedly praised Democratic officials for their cooperation, emphasized that ICE now has “the ability to arrest criminal illegal aliens throughout the state in the jail when they are being released” and that federal officers have been strategically placed so local police do not have to “hold them unnecessarily.” He also boasted of commitments from state and local law enforcement to intervene aggressively against protests, declaring that police would “shut down unlawful agitator activity,” and lauding recent mass arrests carried out by Minnesota authorities.
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Throughout his remarks, Homan made no reference whatsoever to the murder of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents. Instead, he repeatedly invoked “criminal aliens,” “agitators” and “public safety.” Threatening to murder more ICE-watch observers and protesters, Homan said he and heavily militarized “quick reaction forces,” or “QRFs,” would remain in Minnesota over the coming days.
Walz, speaking after Homan and acknowledging that he had communicated with him in advance, described the federal operation as an “unprecedented federal invasion in all aspects of life” and “unlike anything we have witnessed.” Yet even as he acknowledged the sweeping scale of the occupation, Walz sought to recast its violence as a matter of poor training and tone rather than purpose. Referring to Homan’s announcement, Walz declared that he was “cautiously optimistic” that the “surge of untrained, aggressive federal agents are going to leave Minnesota.”
The CBP agents who executed Alex Pretti, as well as the ICE agent who shot Renée Good in the head as she was fleeing, were not “untrained” but veteran officers. The problem is not a lack of training but the class function of these forces. ICE and CBP exist to enforce state violence, intimidate immigrant communities and suppress resistance by the working class as a whole, regardless of immigration status, a reality underscored by the murders of Good and Pretti.
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Significantly, Walz delivered his remarks surrounded by business owners, not workers. His focus was on “economic recovery” and the need to “move forward,” underscoring that the primary concern of the Democratic Party is the stabilization of commerce and the suppression of unrest, not the defense of democratic rights or the protection of immigrants and workers.
The essence of Trump and Homan’s conditions for a drawdown was collaboration by the Democratic Party with the immigration operation. Trump and Walz held a phone call on January 26 that the governor’s office called “productive” with an aim to “reduce the number of federal agents in Minnesota” and called for “a more coordinated fashion on immigration enforcement.”
The first payment to the Trump administration by Walz was to order the Minnesota State Patrol along with other state and county departments to carry out a mass arrest of protesters at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building on February 7 that has been the main headquarters for ICE and CBP operations, as well as a holding facility for abducted immigrants slated for deportation.
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Besides the crackdown on protest, the other aspect of the pact with Trump is the cooperation of state law enforcement with Homan’s goons to continue Operation Metro Surge. Homan hopes to reduce ICE’s presence in Minnesota from the current 2,300 agents to the original 150 agents before the surge.
In reality, Trump and Homan are counting on Minnesota state law enforcement to relieve them so they can send ICE and CBP forces elsewhere in the country. According to the website WIRED, which obtained federal records, “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have carried out a secret campaign to expand ICE’s physical presence across the US. Documents show that more than 150 leases and office expansions have or would place new facilities in nearly every state, many of them in or just outside of the country’s largest metropolitan areas. In many cases, these facilities, which are to be used by street-level agents and ICE attorneys, are located near elementary schools, medical offices, places of worship, and other sensitive locations.”
The scale of the occupation in Minnesota has been staggering. And it continues despite the effort of the national media to divert attention elsewhere. Less than 48 hours before Homan and Walz’s press conference, plain-clothed ICE agents chased and tackled an 18-year-old through the lobby of the Hennepin County Government Center as lawyers, family members and court observers looked on. The young man, later identified as Junior de Jesus Herrera Berrios, was in the courthouse for a hearing when federal agents pursued him through the public space, slammed him to the floor, handcuffed him and marched him out of the building under escort amid whistles, shouts and demands to see a warrant.
The arrest of immigrants, separation of families, physical and mental abuse in detention centers, the lack of hygienic conditions and no access to medical assistance have been ongoing. The abuses are so flagrant that U.S. District Judge Nancy E. Brasel granted a temporary restraining order on February 12 halting aspects of the government’s conduct at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building.
Currently, ICE is patrolling school bus stops and detaining parents as they drop off their children. They are beating up observers. The simple act of honking a horn to warn immigrants of ICE’s presence leads to detention. Protesters are manhandled.
Hospital workers report people showing up beaten with bruises, broken bones and concussions. ICE agents demand to ride in ambulances to accompany those they have beaten. They invade patients’ hospital rooms and take pictures of their victims.
ICE agents are scanning vehicle license plates and the faces of demonstrators. Protesters approached by ICE have been called by their names. Other protesters have had ICE agents show up at their homes, all indicating the federal government is building up a database of those who oppose the government crackdown.
A store owner, who in a media interview criticized ICE operations, found two federal agents turning up within hours to announce an audit of employee records.
The Department of Justice is threatening to charge observers who “track, surveil, or share” the locations of federal officers with felony charges for obstruction.
Speaking at Walz’s press conference earlier this week, two restaurant owners reported their sales have declined by 50 to 80 percent since the surge began in December. The Minneapolis-St. Paul metro region is honeycombed with ethnic restaurants, touted for their cuisine. They are unable to pay sales tax, rent or employees’ wages. Many have been forced to close their doors.
Minneapolis Director of Community Planning and Economic Development Erik Hansen, crunching new data, says the city is losing upwards of $20 million every week.
Workers, who have seen their lives upended and are unable to work because of the federal dragnet, are unable to pay rent. Many are proposing a rent moratorium to prevent workers from being evicted. But Minnesota Public Radio, quoting Walz’s office, said that “the governor is open to exploring all avenues to helping people, but he does not currently have the legal authority to enact an eviction moratorium.”
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Since the mass arrests at the Whipple building, many protesters have called Walz a “sellout.” But the truth of the situation is that with the deepening crisis of the capitalist system, the true nature of the Democratic Party is further revealed. It is a capitalist party. Its priority is not to defend the working class against the dangers of Trump’s fascist onslaught. It is to defend the interests of the financial oligarchy, come what may.
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The reality is that the breakdown of the capitalist system necessitates the establishment of dictatorship. The United States is losing its preeminent position in the global economy. It must impose ever greater levels of impoverishment on the working class to salvage capitalist rule, and this cannot be done democratically.
The Trump administration is grooming ICE and CBP in the style of Hitler’s Brownshirts to be used to crush working class resistance. The role of the Democratic Party is to conceal this conspiracy against the working class.
The only progressive force on the entire planet that can combat the rise of fascism is the international working class. Across the United States, workers must create new organizations—rank-and-file committees—to forge the unity of American workers with their class brothers and sisters throughout the world against the specter of war and dictatorship.
10. Indonesian government joins Trump’s colonial “Board of Peace” in Gaza
At the Davos World Economic Forum last month, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto signed the charter to join the misnamed Board of Peace, the administrative body led by the Trump administration to rule over devastated Gaza in the interests of US imperialism. Prabowo pledged $1 billion to the Board, which his government has falsely described as a humanitarian initiative focused on the “transition, stabilization and reconstruction” of the decimated Palestinian territory.
Presidential spokesperson Prasetyo Hadi announced on Tuesday that Indonesia was preparing to send up to 8,000 troops to Gaza as part of the so-called International Stabilization Force (ISF) to suppress any opposition to Trump’s plans to transform the Palestinian territory into a US-dominated colony.
While the exact size and remit of the Indonesian force is yet to be determined, it will form a major component of the ISF which reportedly will number around 20,000 troops. Politically, the fact that the world’s largest predominantly Muslim country has been the first to commit troops hands the Trump administration a significant boost to its criminal plans. On Monday, Indonesia’s army chief of staff General Maruli Simanjuntak announced that the training of troops as “peacekeepers” had already begun.
At Davos, Prabowo was at pains to justify Indonesia’s support for the US take-over of Gaza. “It is clear that the suffering of the people of Gaza has been reduced, alleviated. Humanitarian aid has been entering the enclave on a massive scale. Indonesia is ready to participate,” he said. “This is truly a chance to achieve peace in Gaza.”
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This is a monstrous fraud. Trump’s Board of Peace has nothing whatsoever to do with “reconstruction” or “peace.” It is an openly colonial body, dominated by the US and Israel itself—in other words, the very forces that have funded, directed and enacted the genocide of Palestinians. It includes notorious political figures such as British war criminal Tony Blair, who played a key role in the illegal US-led invasion and subjugation of Iraq in 2003.
The Indonesian government—which under former president Joko Widodo and now Prabowo has postured as being pro-Palestine—is falsely claiming that its participation in this reactionary council will be a safeguard against any violation of Palestinian rights.
Sugiono declared: “We will ensure that the efforts carried out by the Board of Peace remain focused on Palestinian independence and the achievement of a two-state solution.”
After two days of meetings with religious and foreign policy figures, the Prabowo government suggested the country may withdraw from the Board of Peace if it fails to advance “Palestinian sovereignty.”
Such statements, as the latest announcement of Indonesian troops demonstrates, are completely meaningless. From the outset, the board’s purpose has been to exclude Palestinians from any governing role, instead giving the butchers of Gaza free rein to police the enclave and allocate reconstruction funds according to their geopolitical and economic interests.
By lending support to these reactionary plans, Prabowo is clearly seeking US support for the economic interests of the Indonesian bourgeoisie. That he sees no problem in supporting a framework built on the bones of Palestinians to do so is no surprise.
As a general during the Suharto military dictatorship, Prabowo was personally responsible for numerous bloody crimes: first as a highly trained killer for the notorious Kopassus special forces in East Timor, Papua and elsewhere, and later as an army commander who kidnapped, tortured and “disappeared” student protesters. His crimes were so blatant that he was discharged from the military, after the junta collapsed in 1998, and was even barred entry to the US until Trump rehabilitated him in 2016.
It should be noted that Prabowo, Suharto’s son-in-law, was the slated successor to head the military regime, which had come to power through the 1965–66 CIA-backed coup that resulted in the massacre of more than half a million workers, peasants and alleged Communists—one of greatest crimes of the 20th century. Last November, Prabowo officially declared the mass murderer Suharto a “national hero.”
Prabowo’s support for Trump’s plans signals a closer alignment of Indonesia with US imperialism. This is highly significant, given that one of the main features of Prabowo’s administration has been repeated declarations of a “non-aligned” foreign policy. Like other countries, Indonesia has attempted to balance between the US and China, which is its largest trading partner. But this balancing act is proving increasingly impossible as Trump accelerates the drive to war against Beijing.
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If successive Indonesian governments have had to present themselves as sympathetic to Palestine, that is because of the profound hostility felt by the country’s working class and youth towards imperialist oppression, especially in the Middle East. A demonstration in Jakarta in November 2023 against Israel’s invasion of Gaza reportedly drew two million people.
No political parties in Indonesia’s parliament, either within or outside Prabowo’s large coalition, have publicly condemned the decision to join the Board of Peace. Nor have major Islamic organizations such as Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah. The Islamic Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) voiced opposition on religious grounds and urged Prabowo to withdraw, but had nothing to say about the predatory character of US imperialism.
Prabowo’s embrace of the powers responsible for the genocide is a warning that he will not hesitate to use similar violent methods towards any opposition at home, either over his support for the US-led subjugation of Gaza or his government’s austerity program.
11. Online Public Meeting: Sri Lankan doctors’ protests and the fight to defend free public health
The Health Workers Action Committee (HWAC) will hold a public online meeting at 8 p.m. on February 20 entitled “Sri Lankan Doctors’ Protests and the Fight to Defend Free Public Health.”
Since January 23, around 20,000 Sri Lankan government doctors have been involved in widespread protest actions, including a two-day token strike on January 23–24, to demand an increase in their legitimate allowances. The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government has responded with rejections and threats against the protesting doctors.
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake publicly declared on February 6 that “no allowances or salary increases will be made… no matter how many street protests or strikes take place.” He directed this threat at the protesting doctors and all state employees, insisting that the government will adhere only to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) directives to curtail public spending.
While the doctors’ demands over allowances and working conditions are legitimate and urgent, they cannot be separated from the broader assault on the free public health system carried out by successive governments and intensified by the current JVP/NPP government.
Marking a decisive step toward privatising healthcare, the cabinet decided on January 6 to legalise a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) system to obtain essential medical tests from private institutions.
The public healthcare system is on the brink. Hospitals are crippled by shortages of doctors, nurses and support staff. Vital equipment is lacking, medicine shortages are widespread, and infrastructure is decaying.
The struggle for better conditions for health employees is inseparably bound up with defending free healthcare, which was won through the bitter struggles of the working class and supported by the poor.
The trade union bureaucracies are the main barrier to organizing this struggle. The outright rejection of the doctors’ demands has once again shattered the illusions spread by trade union leaders—including the Government Medical Officers’ Association, which called the current protests—that the government can be pressured into granting health workers’ demands.
We call for the building of action committees independent of the union bureaucracies in all public hospitals and health institutions and urge employees in private health institutions to do the same. These committees must turn to other workers and the poor in the struggle to defend free public healthcare.
Our meeting will also discuss the strategic need to connect this struggle to international working-class solidarity and to the broader socialist perspective necessary to defend and rebuild public health.
We call upon you to join the meeting and participate in this important discussion.
12. Norwegian union makes M.A.N. Truck & Bus workers pay for a phoney strike
A collective bargaining dispute at M.A.N. Truck & Bus in Trondheim (Norway) has now been going on for five weeks. The so-called “dagsing,” or “go-slow,” by the Fellesforbund union, which began on January 8 and is still ongoing, is a cynical farce that workers are paying for with significant wage losses. It is necessary to draw important conclusions from this.
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Since 2022 at the latest, the costs of the global economic crisis and war have been passed on to the working class in Norway in the form of sharp price increases for food, energy and housing. This additional reduction in real wages has intensified the exodus of skilled workers from M.A.N. and developed into a real problem for the company. This is, of course, a problem for which the Norwegian government and the unions are responsible based on the agreed collective bargaining laws, along with M.A.N.’s wage policies.
In economically strong Trondheim, the largest union federation of private companies, the Fellesforbund, is now trying to act as a final arbiter, after the same union was responsible for the miserable regional collective agreement. Since January 8, 2026, Regional Department 12 of the Fellesforbund, together with its works council at the Trondheim branch of M.A.N., has been conducting a local “labor dispute” in order to enforce local supplementary wage negotiations. If successful, the works council is demanding a 5 percent local allowance instead of the national flat-rate allowance of 1.21 percent offered by M.A.N. The likely result will be a local allowance of approximately 2 percent, which would not even begin to compensate for the real wage cuts suffered by workers for years.
However, with its local “industrial action,” the Fellesforbund is encountering the trap set for workers in the national right to strike: the two-year peace obligation of the regional collective bargaining parties, which prevents local strikes as a means of industrial action. The Fellesforbund is therefore trying to make do with the form of industrial action known as “dagsing” or “gaa-sakte-aksjon,” the “day laborer” or “go-slow” strike. Under Norwegian law, “dagsing” is not considered a strike and may therefore be used during the peace obligation period.
With full attendance of workers in the contested company, daily work output is reduced to 45 percent—but so is pay! This form of strike prevents workers from mobilizing broader solidarity actions by colleagues both in Norway and internationally. At the same time, the “non-strike” is not compensated by the union strike fund for organized workers, nor by the NAV employment agency for unorganized workers. Although regulated in writing in the right to strike law, “dagsing” actions are rare and little known in Norway and primarily harm workers and their families.
The local online newspaper Nidaros expressed the workers’ dissatisfaction in an article headlined “Major conflicts and dismissals: This is basically ‘suicide’ for employees.” It quotes works council chairman Jon Olav Bergem’s revealing statement that “dagsing” is “a powerful weapon that has consequences for both employers and employees.” By contrast, one worker is quoted as saying, “We’ve already had a month where people have used up their savings to cover the costs. Next month, most of them won’t be able to pay off their debts, and most of them have children to support.” The worker added, “The action is destroying people’s lives, and no one is talking about it.” Another says, “Solidarity in the workplace has now been completely destroyed.”
The “dagsing” at M.A.N., which has now been going on for five weeks in Trondheim, has already cost employees almost three weeks’ wages—over 4 percent of their annual salary—which is about as much as they would gain from a 2 percent increase over two years. The financial side effects of this farce of a labor dispute were deliberately concealed from them in advance by the union and the works council leaders; they were only informed after the action began on January 8. The union federation is thus deceiving the workers, withholding strike funds paid for by membership dues, and plummeting workers into financial ruin instead of organising strong industrial action—all within a legal framework that the union apparatus helped to organize at the national level.
The effect on the mood, cohesion and morale of the workers at M.A.N. in Trondheim has been devastating. And this is no coincidence. Fellesforbund’s attempts to suppress the struggle of the workers at M.A.N. are an expression of its support for the Norwegian Arbeiderpartiet (Labor Party, AP) government. With around 175,000 members, Fellesforbundet is the second largest union in the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO). The LO provides financial and political support to the AP, whose leader, Jonas Gahr Støre, is also Norway’s prime minister. The finance minister is Jens Stoltenberg (AP), the former NATO secretary general.
Since Støre came to power in 2021, the AP government has drastically increased military spending, co-organized NATO exercises and maneuvers in Norway against Russia, and allocated billions to the imperialist war in Ukraine. Its current minority government can only implement its right-wing policies thanks to an agreement with some so-called left parties, including the Socialist Left, the Greens and Red Party. As in other countries, the Norwegian Social Democrats have long since abandoned their former national reformist policies and turned into the most aggressive warmongers and open opponents of the working class.
13. Bosch workers in Germany express support for the formation of action committees
Over the past two weeks, members of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) spoke with workers at several Bosch plants in Baden-Württemberg. In numerous conversations—in front of factory gates during shift changes—workers expressed their rejection and open displeasure with the IG Metall union apparatus. Many workers, including both IG Metall members and colleagues who have already turned their backs on the union, supported the proposal to build independent rank-and-file action committees.
Bosch plans to cut 22,000 jobs and close entire plants. Head of Mobility Markus Heyn and Director of Industrial Relations Stefan Grosch openly justified the jobs massacre by saying that profits are to be doubled to €7 billion within two years by the end of 2026.
The IG Metall apparatus and the General Works Council Chairman of the Mobility business sector, Frank Sell, immediately signalled agreement—under the condition of “site guarantees.” For almost a year, local IG Metall officials and works council members have been enforcing the job cuts demanded by the corporation at one location after another—accompanied by lip service to investments for “securing the location.”
But resistance is stirring against this. At Bosch Automotive Steering GmbH in Schwäbisch Gmünd, this also finds expression in the works council. There, works council member Mustafa Simsek opposed the secret machinations of the works council body and received support from more than 200 workers. They now want to found a new union organization and run with their own slate in the upcoming works council elections.
The IG Metall apparatus reacted to this opposition with time-honored bureaucratic suppression and rejected the admission of the “Free Metalworkers” slate with 89 candidates for the works council elections in March, citing alleged formal errors.
The SGP opposed this decision and called on the World Socialist Web Site for all workers at Bosch to defend the right of the “Free Metalworkers” slate to participate in the works council election. Employees have the right “to decide for themselves who should represent them on the works council,” the SGP wrote.
Members of the SGP discussed this article with workers in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Feuerbach, Schwieberdingen and Waiblingen in order to break through the division created by the IG Metall apparatus.
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The two fundamental principles on which action committees must be based were discussed animatedly by workers:
- The action committees must connect workforces across locations, companies, sectors and countries by joining the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). The divisions sown by the unions must be overcome. An attack on one is an attack on all locations and their employees.
- The action committees must pursue a perspective that reaches beyond capitalism—that is, beyond the private ownership of the means of production and the nationally based system of competition, which the union apparatuses defend so vehemently. It is not possible to defend jobs and wages, and at the same time accept the conditions imposed by the markets and international competitive pressures. Otherwise, one inevitably ends up with the policies of IG Metall and all the other unions. The decisive question is: Who determines matters of production—the shareholders or the workers who build everything?
Many workers reacted approvingly to the call to overcome the divisions sown by IG Metall.
Contact information is provided at this article's World Socialist Web Site web page.
14. Israel tightens grip on West Bank to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”
Israel’s far-right security cabinet has approved sweeping measures expanding the Zionist state’s power in the occupied West Bank, marking the start of formal annexation.
The changes include publishing land registries, repealing restrictions on land sales to Israeli settlers, reviving a state land-acquisition mechanism for land purchases, extending Israeli enforcement into Palestinian Authority-administered Areas A and B, shifting authority in Hebron settlements to the Civil Administration, and creating a special municipal body to oversee Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem.
As the West Bank is not formally part of Israel, but under military rule, the security cabinet’s decisions do not require legislation. They function as direct orders to the military and were determined by the security cabinet, not the full cabinet.
Israel’s push to annex the West Bank is inseparable from its broader project of driving the Palestinians from land it claims as exclusively its own through policies of genocide, expulsion, and displacement.
Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister and de facto minister of the settlements, who has long called for Israel to annex the territory, said the government was “burying the idea of a Palestinian state”. He called it a historic day for the settlements of Judea and Samaria. Energy Minister Eli Cohen, the Yesha Council which represents Israeli settlements, and Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria council, welcomed the moves as steps towards full Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.
Making the land registries public will allow settlers to identify Palestinian landowners and purchase land directly. A Jordanian-era law prohibiting transfers to non-Palestinians will be overturned.
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The measures also extend Israel’s ability to carry out demolitions and prevent Palestinian development from Area C, about 60 percent of the West Bank designated under the Oslo Accords as fully under Israeli military control, to the rest of the West Bank: Area A (18 percent) where the Palestinian Authority supposedly has full control, and Area B (20 percent), where the PA shares control with the Israeli military.
Since the start of the war, Palestinian communities in Area C have been systematically displaced from their homes at unprecedented rates. The 100,000 Palestinians living there are banned from building, and demolitions and displacements are a regular occurrence. Israeli settlements have been expanding.
Henceforth, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will be able to enforce regulations on so-called unlicensed buildings in Areas A and B, citing heritage, archaeological, environmental and water-related concerns. With the West Bank full of archaeological sites, this provides a pretext for confiscating Palestinian land, demolishing buildings, closing waste treatment facilities without viable alternatives, sealing wells and taking over heritage sites.
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In a particularly provocative move, the security cabinet has stripped the Palestinian Authority of its powers of administration over the Cave of the Patriarchs—the burial site in Hebron, revered in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—in the area within the city that is home to 700 settlers, and over Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, transferring them to Israel’s Civil Administration. This will allow Israel to expand the settlement, build new settlements in the city and implement changes at the site without approval from Hebron municipality. For the Palestinians, they will be subject to more restrictions on building or enlarging their homes and more demolition orders for existing ones.
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Israel’s latest measures constitute a blatant violation of the 1993 Oslo Accords that were countersigned and witnessed by the United States, the Russian Federation, the European Union, Egypt, and Norway and subsequently endorsed by the UN in several resolutions.
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Trump issued a pro forma statement reiterating his nominal opposition to formal annexation that has done nothing to deter Israel, saying a “stable West Bank keeps Israel secure” and aligns with his administration’s regional peace plans.
Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates denounced the changes, saying they would “impose unlawful Israeli sovereignty” in the West Bank and “inflame violence, deepen the conflict and endanger regional stability and security”.
The European Union called the measures “another step in the wrong direction” and said sanctions were “still on the table”, including the possible suspension of some parts of the EU-Israel trade agreement. The UK said it “strongly condemns” the Israeli measures as “inconsistent with international law” and called “on Israel to reverse these decisions immediately.”
Not one of the European powers or regional states that attended the Sharm el-Sheikh summit and discussed the agreement supposedly to end the genocidal assault on Gaza based on Trump’s plan for a “Riviera of the Middle East”, much less its signatories—Egypt, the United States, Qatar, and Turkey—have done anything to stop Israel’s daily violence against the Palestinians.
15. Stellantis steps up attacks on workers as company takes $26 billion charge due to EV reversal
On February 6, Stellantis reported that it is taking a huge, $26 billion charge to profits, to reflect the cost of the reversal of its EV strategy amid slumping sales. According to CEO Antonio Filosa, the charges “[L]argely reflect the cost of overestimating the pace of the energy transition that distanced us from many car buyers’ real-world needs, means and desires.” Stellantis stock plummeted 25 percent on the news and company has cancelled dividend payments.
Concurrent with the announcement, Stellantis joint venture Automotive Cells Company announced the cancellation of plans to build battery gigafactories in Italy and Germany. The same day Stellantis also announced it was sellings its joint stake in its Ontario, Canada battery joint venture to South Korean partner LG Energy Solution.
The past several weeks have seen an escalating series of attacks on US Stellantis workers, including the reported further delay of the reopening of the shuttered Belvidere Assembly plant in Illinois and management’s reneging on an expanded buyout offer to US production workers. Attacks are escalating against other Big Three workers too, including the indefinite layoff by General Motors of over 1,100 workers at its flagship Factory Zero EV plant in Detroit.
Last October Stellantis had announced it was scrapping plans to reopen its Brampton, Ontario plant in Canada where 3,000 workers were laid off when the plant closed in 2024. Instead, the company said it planned to build its new Jeep Compass at the idled Belvidere facility.
The Detroit News reported, “A presentation to union members late last year showed Compass production starting by December 2027 with the Cherokee rolling off the line by November 2028. It called for two work shifts initially, and potential production volumes of more than 100,000 vehicles annually for both models.”
At the time UAW President Shawn Fain had gloated over Stellantis’ decision to shift jobs to Belvidere at the expense of brother autoworkers in Canada, calling it a vindication of his collaboration with the fascist Trump and his reactionary tariffs.
Both the United Auto Workers and Stellantis are continuing their silence in the wake of the report by UAW Local 1268 President Matt Frantzen that Stellantis plans to push back the reopen date for the shuttered Belvidere Assembly Plant another six months, until mid 2028, after the May 2028 expiration of the UAW-Stellantis national agreement.
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In another attack on Stellantis workers, the Detroit Free Press reported January 26 following a conversation with a Stellantis spokesperson that the new round of buyouts aimed at reducing headcount being offered by Stellantis to its US workforce will only be made available to traditional or “legacy” employees, workers hired before 2007. They would not be offered to all full-time Stellantis production workers, as workers had been led to believe.
Many less senior workers had counted on being able to take the buyout due to onerous working conditions and constant threat of layoffs. “We prevailed in the arbitration,” Jodi Tinson, Stellantis North America director for media relations, reportedly told the Free Press in a statement not contradicted by the UAW.
The action further exposed the bogus “victory” in the 2023 contract struggle and the claim that the UAW has eliminated tiers.
Anger and a determination to resist are building among autoworkers over these and similar attacks. This is part of the growing wave of militancy throughout the working class expressed in mass walkouts by healthcare workers in New York City and California as well as teachers in San Francisco. There is growing sentiment for a general strike in opposition to ICE terror and escalating attacks on living standards and jobs.
Fain has responded by amping up populist demagogy, including his warnings at this week’s UAW Community Action Program conference, that “fascism is on our doorstep.” But, the UAW president proposed absolutely no action to fight back. Instead, Fain told workers to wait until the 2026 congressional elections, elections that will likely to take place under police-state conditions if they are held at all. As popular demands for a general strike are gaining increasing traction, Fain is quietly stepping back even from his call for a performative “general strike” on May Day 2028, over two years down the road when the fate of US democracy may well have already been decided.
Even as the UAW leader warns of imminent fascism, he continues to embrace and promote the trade war policies of Trump, including massive tariffs, which are part of the preparation of the US ruling class for WWIII against its capitalist rivals, in the first place Iran, China and Russia, with even supposed allies in NATO now in the target sight.
The UAW’s bureaucratic apparatus is joined to the hip with management through multiple layers of union-management bodies. It exists only to block any fight by the working class, not to organize and lead workers. It must be abolished and replaced by networks of rank-and-file committees, as part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, to transfer power to the shop floor.
These committees, controlled by workers, not bureaucrats, must form links with other sections of workers, union and nonunion, in defense of democratic rights, jobs, living standards and safe working conditions. The committees must reject America First demagogy and forge a fighting unity with brother autoworkers in Canada, Mexico and globally against the escalating corporate attacks.
The machinery of state-sanctioned killing in the United States continued this week with executions in Florida and Oklahoma, the second and third executions of 2026. The deaths of these men underscore a legal system that remains indifferent to systemic trauma, poverty and profound sentencing disparities in the cases of those condemned to death.
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On Tuesday, February 10, the state of Florida executed 64-year-old Ronald Palmer Heath by lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. He received a three-drug lethal injection protocol, consisting of a sedative, a paralytic agent and a drug to induce cardiac arrest. Heath’s final words were, “I’m sorry. That’s all I can say. Thank you.” He was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m.
Heath spent 35 years on death row for the 1989 robbery and murder of Michael Sheridan, a traveling salesman met at a Gainesville bar. While Heath acknowledged his role and expressed deep remorse for the crime, the logic behind his death sentence was the subject of intense criticism.
His younger brother and co-defendant, Kenneth Heath—the undisputed “trigger man” who in fact shot Sheridan—received a life sentence after testifying against Ronald. Despite the younger brother’s 2025 plea to the Clemency Board that he and Ronald were “equally culpable,” the state chose to execute the brother who did not fire the fatal shots.
The state’s determination to kill Heath also ignored a harrowing history of institutional abuse. He was tried and sentenced as an adult at age 16 for the 1977 second-degree murder of Michael Green and was subjected to horrific violence within the Florida adult prison system. He reported multiple instances of gang rape and sexual assault at gunpoint, which were so violent they necessitated a three-month hospitalization and surgery.
The jury that eventually recommended his death sentence for the Sheridan murder never heard evidence of this “polyvictimization” and how it impaired his brain development and judgment.
In addition, Heath’s sentence was the product of a nonunanimous jury recommendation of 10-2. Florida remains an outlier in this practice, allowing state-sanctioned death without a consensus of 12 jurors. Before 2016, the state of Florida allowed judges to override jury recommendations of death sentences by a simple majority of at least 7-5.
A Tampa Bay Times analysis of more than 450 death penalty cases found that as of early 2016, 80 percent of people on death row had been recommended for death sentences by nonunanimous juries. A 2016 US Supreme Court ruling in Hurst v. Florida struck down nonunanimous jury findings as a violation of the Sixth Amendment, which protects criminal defendants’ rights.
While unanimous jury recommendations became mandated in Florida following Hurst, pre-2016 sentences, including Heath’s, were not vacated retroactively.
In 2023, a state law signed by Governor Ron DeSantis again lowered the threshold to an 8-4 majority. Alabama is the only other state practicing the death penalty to allow nonunanimous jury recommendations of death (by a 10-2 vote).
Heath’s final appeals, which challenged Florida’s secretive lethal injection protocols and the failure to consider his juvenile brain development, were summarily rejected by both the Florida and US Supreme Courts.
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Two days later, on Thursday, February 12, Oklahoma carried out its first execution of the year, killing 45-year-old Kendrick Antonio Simpson. Strapped to a gurney at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, Simpson told his family, “I love y’all. Thank y’all for being here to support me,” before being pronounced dead at 10:19 a.m..
Simpson was convicted for the 2006 drive-by shooting of Anthony Jones and Glen Palmer following a nightclub altercation. His case is a textbook example of how the death penalty disproportionately targets the mentally ill and victims of systemic poverty.
A native of New Orleans who fled to Oklahoma as a Hurricane Katrina refugee, Simpson’s childhood was marked by abandonment, a mother addicted to cocaine, and sexual abuse beginning at age 11. He also suffered from severe PTSD after surviving a separate drive-by shooting that left him with wounds to his skull and abdomen.
During his two decades behind bars, Simpson underwent a remarkable rehabilitation, becoming a published poet and earning his GED. Despite this, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-2 against recommending clemency. Governor Kevin Stitt, who has granted clemency only twice in his tenure, allowed the execution to proceed despite a pending legislative effort, SB 601, which seeks a moratorium on executions.
Simpson’s final appeal, which argued that the jury never heard of his documented PTSD, was rejected by the US Supreme Court without comment on the eve of his death.
17. The measles vaccine: A product of two centuries of science and public health reform
In early 2026, as the United States approached the loss of its measles elimination status—a public health achievement maintained for more than 25 years—Dr. Ralph Abraham, the principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), offered a blunt assessment. Asked whether this reversal mattered, Abraham replied that it was “not really” significant, describing the return of a vaccine-preventable disease as simply the “cost of doing business” in a globalized world.
Abraham further sought to shift responsibility overseas by pointing to “somewhat porous” borders and international travel. Yet this explanation is contradicted by CDC surveillance data. Only a small fraction of measles cases are imported into the United States; the overwhelming majority arise from sustained domestic transmission within under-vaccinated communities. In 2025, more than 2,200 measles cases were confirmed nationwide—the highest annual total since 1992. Outbreaks have been concentrated on vulnerable populations, including a documented spread at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in South Texas, where detainees are confined in high-risk congregate conditions.
This resurgence is not an accident, nor the product of unavoidable global forces. It is the outcome of a deliberate dismantling of public health infrastructure under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Since taking office, Kennedy has removed scientific experts from advisory roles, dismissed the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and undermined the vaccination programs built in the 1960s that sharply reduced childhood illness and death across the United States.
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The pandemic established a principle that has since hardened into state doctrine: profit extraction must be preserved, regardless of the human cost. The normalization of mass death from COVID-19 laid the groundwork for the revival of measles, polio and other preventable diseases. The formal withdrawal of the United States from the WHO in January 2026—leaving the organization on the brink of financial collapse—marked a decisive break with even the limited framework of international health cooperation that had existed since the postwar period. The result is a world increasingly vulnerable to the return of plagues once brought under control.
It would be a mistake to reduce this regression to the actions of individual figures such as Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They are not the cause, but the expression, of a system in terminal decline. A social order that requires the suppression of science and the sacrifice of the vulnerable to sustain itself has exhausted its historical justification. The regression from Alexander Langmuir’s confidence in 1962 that measles eradication could be achieved “because it is there—and because it can be done,” to Ralph Abraham’s blunt declaration in 2026 that disease is merely the “cost of doing business,” traces the trajectory of a dying system. Barbarism is not a future danger; it has become policy.
For scientists and medical professionals, the implications are unavoidable. The defense of science cannot be separated from the struggle to transform the social order that governs it. The conquest of disease for the benefit of humanity is incompatible with a system organized around private profit and national division. If science is to serve life rather than destruction, those who practice it must align themselves with the only social force whose interests lie in the preservation of human existence: the international working class. The struggle against the microbe has become inseparable from the struggle against capitalism itself.
18. The Tumbler Ridge mass shooting: An indictment of social and political life in Canada
On Tuesday, 18-year-old Jesse van Rootselaar shot and killed eight people in Tumbler Ridge, a small municipality in the northeast of British Columbia, before turning the gun on herself. The death toll of nine is one of the highest ever in a school shooting in Canada.
The shooter fatally wounded her mother, 39, and stepbrother, 11, at the family home, before travelling about 2 kilometres (1.25 miles) to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School. She then opened fire on students and educators, killing five students, four aged 12 and one aged 13, and a 39-year-old educator. Two people, including a 12-year-old child, are in serious condition in hospital, while a further 25 people have been treated for non-life-threatening injuries.
Van Rootselaar was by all accounts a solitary figure, who had long shown an interest in firearms and hunting. The police confiscated firearms from the family home in 2024, apparently after one or more incidents where threats were made, but they were returned after their adult owner petitioned for their release. That this was done by the authorities is all the more inexplicable in light of the fact that Van Rootselaar had repeatedly suffered serious mental health issues and was treated in a psychiatric facility for a time.
Born as a male, Van Rootselaar began transitioning six years ago. Her family background appears to have been characterized by precarious living conditions. A 2015 court order compelling Van Rootselaar’s mother, Jennifer Strang, to allow her children to have contact with their father described the family’s lifestyle as “nomadic.” Whether immediate social pressures played a role in Van Rootselaar’s deadly outburst remains unclear.
The shooting has shaken the local community, which has a population of little over 2,000 people. It was built in the early 1980s as part of a coal mining development project. It remained heavily dependent on resource extraction into the 21st century but since the mines closed has increasingly emerged as a tourist destination and a place for retirement. The deaths of so many young children has evoked particular horror. The plight of those directly impacted naturally prompts feelings of great sympathy.
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Carney, the rest of the political establishment and media talking heads may not want to admit it publicly, but Tuesday’s sudden outburst of violence is a product of social and political life in Canada. This is underscored by the regularity of mass casualty events over the past decade, as illustrated by this partial list beginning in 2016.
• January 22, 2016: Four people were killed in La Loche, Saskatchewan, when a teenage gunman fatally shot two relatives at home, before killing another two people at La Loche Community School.
• January 29, 2017: An Islamophobic lone gunman went on a shooting spree during evening prayers at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Quebec City, claiming the lives of six worshippers.
• April 23, 2018: A 25-year-old man drove a van into passers-by on the sidewalk of Yonge Street in Toronto, killing 11.
• July 22, 2018: A lone gunman shot and killed two people on Danforth Street, Toronto, before being shot to death in a police intervention.
• April 18-19, 2020: A 51-year-old man dressed as a police officer launched a 12-hour shooting spree across several rural communities north of Halifax, Nova Scotia, killing 22 people.
• June 6, 2021: In another hate crime, a 20-year-old male driver killed four members of a Muslim family in London, Ontario, ploughing into them at a crossing with his pickup.
• September 4, 2022: Two assailants fatally stabbed 10 people on the James Smith Cree First Nation and nearby communities in Saskatchewan.
• December 18, 2022: A gunman shot and killed five neighbours at a condo building in Vaughan, Ontario.
• October 23, 2023: Four people were killed when a gunman opened fire at various locations in Saint-Ste. Marie, Ontario. He was subsequently shot dead by police.
• April 26, 2025: Eleven people at a Philippine street festival in Vancouver were killed when a lone attacker rammed his SUV into the crowd.
To the extent that the ruling class can portray events like the Tumbler Ridge shooting as a singular act of brutality with little or no connection to broader social life, it is chiefly because compared to the neighboring United States, the level of gun violence and other armed attacks in Canada is relatively low. However, acts of violence in Canada, in line with an international trend, have risen sharply over the past decade. The number of homicides per 100,000 people, a benchmark figure when studying social violence, rose from 1.47 in 2014 to 1.98 in 2023, making Canada the country with the highest homicide rate per head of population in the G7 after the United States, which recorded a homicide rate of 5.8 per 100,000 people in 2023.
The social and political influences on specific violent acts are often complex and indirect, but the broader picture tells a clear story. Canada is an aggressive imperialist power that has been at war almost continuously since 2001. Military operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Ukraine, as well as the government’s active support for the Gaza genocide, have made barbaric violence a part of everyday life.
The other side of the coin is that social programs and public services, like healthcare and mental health supports, have been slashed to the bone to pay for bloated military budgets and make tax cuts for big business and the rich, and this process is intensifying under Carney. The dearth of mental health supports in large cities as well as rural areas is well documented, leaving many of the most vulnerable to suffer and creating the conditions in which a tiny handful of the most disoriented can snap, with catastrophic consequences.
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There is a very direct connection between the propagandizing of Canada’s far right and the Tumbler Ridge shooting. Nothing is yet known about Van Rootselaar’s political views, but it is hard to believe that her mental health issues were not exacerbated by the hate-filled tirades from far-right political forces against the LGBTQ community. Tumbler Ridge is close to the border with Alberta, where the far-right United Conservative Party government recently rammed through laws prohibiting doctors from providing transgender people with certain types of treatment and barring trans young people from accessing gender-related medical care.
Predictably, far-right “influencers” online have erupted following the shooting with foul denunciations of trans people as inherently more violent than the average person. Tara Armstrong, who was elected to the British Columbia legislature as a Conservative and now sits as an independent, responded to the shooting by denouncing “an epidemic of transgender violence spreading across the West.” She continued, “This epidemic of violence will continue until we change our society’s response to transgender ideology.”
19. The 50th anniversary remaster of Tales from Topographic Oceans by progressive rock band Yes
Tales embodies Anderson’s yearning for human brotherhood and world peace in the lyrical invocations of oceans, ancient suns and spiritual journeys, and in the rejection of conventional song structures in favor of long, suite‑like forms intended to approximate meditation.
Anderson—who founded Yes with Chris Squire in 1968—has consistently maintained his belief in spiritual growth, universal love and the transformative power of art, drawing heavily on Eastern philosophy, mystical texts and a sense of “cosmic interconnectedness.” From his early days with Yes through to his departure from the band in 2004, he framed music as a vehicle for higher consciousness rather than just entertainment.
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Anderson has also long woven environmentalism into his worldview, repeatedly describing humanity as “connected so much to Mother Earth” and insisting that “whatever we do to Mother Earth, we do to ourselves.”
From the ecological themes in his 1970s lyrics through later interviews where he calls humanity “the gardeners of the earth” whose mission is to “share the world” and change our perception of climate and environmental crisis, he has framed ecological responsibility as a core theme of his music and public commentary.
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The new release is a qualitative leap in how the album can be heard. Earlier concerns by listeners about the “muddy” quality of the original—an issue often cited in discussions of the record’s controversial status—are addressed in the remaster. The intricate guitars, keyboards, percussion and vocals have been more effectively layered without sacrificing the density that is central to the album’s sound.
Reviews of the super deluxe edition have emphasized the “widescreen‑sounding” nature of the new vinyl cut and the way Wilson’s 2026 Atmos mix offers “a new way to experience this music,” with percussion, synthesizers, guitars and gongs placed discretely in three‑dimensional space.
The improved quality of the remastered recording is notable, and, like many anniversary releases of progressive rock works from the 1970s, the 5.1 surround and Dolby Atmos mixes provide an entirely new listening experience. Listeners can also find the new mixes on a variety of streaming services.
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The elaborate cover art by renowned illustrator Roger Dean, gatefold packaging and lengthy liner notes reinforced the sense of the LP listening experience as an environment of sound, text and image. In this sense, the 50th anniversary edition of Tales from Topographic Oceans is a reminder of a moment in the 1970s when rock musicians, under conditions of mass popularity and label support, took their work very seriously and produce large‑scale experimental projects that required of listeners a commitment of concentrated attention.
20. Mexico’s president invites in US Marines after marking 1913 US-orchestrated overthrow of Madero
On February 9, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum marked the US-orchestrated overthrow of Francisco I. Madero in 1913 by calling for “loyalty” against foreign intervention—only to invite US Marines into Mexico two days later, underscoring the wholesale subordination of the Mexican bourgeoisie to US imperialism.
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The 1913 overthrow of President Francisco I. Madero, which the March of Loyalty commemorates, stands at the heart of this contradiction. Madero rose to prominence opposing the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. He launched the Plan of San Luis Potosí, promising political democratization and limited land reform in 1910, winning broad support from peasants, small farmers and sections of the urban middle class.
Once in power, however, Madero quickly subordinated his government to the interests of the large landowners, foreign investors and the army high command. He refused to carry out substantive agrarian reform and maintained the basic framework of the Porfirian state, including its repression of workers. This betrayal alienated peasant revolutionary forces like Emiliano Zapata in Morelos, whose Plan de Ayala of 1911 denounced Madero as a traitor for failing to restore communal lands, and Pancho Villa in the north, who broke with Madero as the latter turned his guns on insurgent peasants and workers.
This erosion of popular support opened the door for reactionary forces even more closely aligned with the landowning oligarchy and US imperialism. Gen. Victoriano Huerta, representing the old Porfirian officer corps, entered into a conspiracy with Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson and leading oligarchs to depose Madero.
In the Decena Trágica (“Ten Tragic Days”) of February 9–19, 1913, mutinous troops under Gen. Bernardo Reyes and Felix Díaz (Porfirio’s nephew) opened fire in Mexico City, bombarding the city center. Amid the chaos, Madero foolishly trusted in the “loyalty” of Huerta and the army command rather than arming workers and peasants. Huerta, whom Madero tapped as head of his armed forces, turned on him. He arrested both Madero and Vice President José María Pino Suárez, and, with US blessing, installed a military dictatorship. The two were murdered on February twenty-second.
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The subsequent course of the Mexican Revolution confirms this assessment. As Eric London explains in the series “One hundred years since Zapata and Villa took Mexico City,” the high point of the Revolution—the joint occupation of the capital by Zapata’s and Villa’s armies in December 1914—proved unable to break bourgeois rule because there was no revolutionary Marxist party to lead the working class independently.
In Russia, where a late-developing capitalism also coexisted with a vast peasantry, the liberal bourgeoisie first took power under Alexander Kerensky after the February 1917 overthrow of the tsar. But, like Madero, Kerensky clashed with the egalitarian aspirations of workers and peasants, including demands for land reform and ending the war. A faction closely tied to the old regime and other imperialist powers also attempted to impose counterrevolution. The existence of the Bolshevik Party, armed with a Marxist program and led by Lenin and Trotsky, allowed the Russian working class to assert political independence from the bourgeoisie, win the leadership of the peasantry, and seize power in October 1917.
In Mexico, by contrast, no such party existed. The working class was subordinated to the “Jacobin” wing of the bourgeois Constitutionalists through organizations like the Casa del Obrero Mundial (COM), which aligned with the Constitutionalist government against the peasant armies. The COM channeled workers into “Red Battalions” used to crush Zapata and Villa. Lacking its own party and program, the proletariat could not transform the revolution into a socialist one. The Mexican Revolution thus vindicated Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution in the negative: where a revolutionary Marxist leadership is absent, the national bourgeoisie inevitably betrays democratic tasks.
Today’s Mexico—integrated as a cheap-labor platform in the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), peppered with maquiladoras, and dominated by transnational supply chains—is the historical product of this uncompleted revolution. The country’s resources and labor power are harnessed to US imperialism’s drive for global hegemony, including preparations for world war against China.
After several years of export-led expansion, the economy has begun to slow, with job losses recorded for the first time in 17 years. This will intensify pressure for social austerity and cuts to AMLO’s limited social programs. At the same time, the very sectors driving growth—near-shored automotive, electronics, aerospace and logistics tied to US capital—will demand higher productivity, automation, and harsher exploitation of Mexican workers.
Trump’s threats loom large. He has publicly threatened to use military force and punitive tariffs against Mexico under the pretext of fighting cartels; boasted of the 1846–1848 conquest of half of Mexico as a “great victory” and model; and laid out openly annexationist aims toward the Panama Canal and Greenland, combined with the attack on Venezuela and threats to impose puppet regimes across the region. This strategy is akin to Hitler’s Anschluss—the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany—used as a springboard for wider wars of conquest.
Under these conditions, Sheinbaum’s administration comes under mounting pressure from above by US imperialism and from below by an incomparably larger and globally interconnected working class than existed in Madero’s time. Her current high approval ratings are no guarantee of stability. The recent Constitutional reform formally reducing the workweek from 48 to 40 hours—which will not come into effect until 2030, under the next administration—is a cynical maneuver to burnish “pro-labor” credentials while postponing any real impact.
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Facing Trump’s pressure, Sheinbaum has already capitulated. Thousands of Mexican troops have been deployed to hunt and repress migrants, helping drive arrivals at the US-Mexico border to historic lows. Most recently, her government halted oil shipments to Cuba—despite being Havana’s main supplier—after Trump threatened tariffs, turning Mexico into a key accomplice in the US campaign to strangle the Cuban economy and force complete capitulation.
Historically, the training of foreign troops has been one of US imperialism’s principal methods for cultivating loyal factions within national militaries, to be activated in future coups against “unreliable” governments—precisely the mechanism used against Madero in 1913 and replicated across Latin America throughout the 20th century.
These developments confirm that Sheinbaum’s government represents the interests of the venal Mexican bourgeoisie, bound hand and foot to US imperialism. There is nothing progressive in such a regime, whose closest historical precedent is not Madero, but Porfirio Díaz, reviving his legacy of subordination to foreign capital.
Against Trevilla’s calls for “loyalty” to the capitalist state, the working class must take heed of Trotsky’s insistence that workers owe no loyalty to “their” bourgeoisie in the name of national defense or anti-imperialism. Trotsky stressed that the task of the proletariat is to overthrow it and unite internationally with workers of all countries to end capitalist rule everywhere.
The Foundations, like its counterparts around the world, shows that the outcome of modern Türkiye’s history requires the working class to secure its political and organizational independence from all representatives of the ruling class and to mobilize on the basis of an international socialist program in the struggle for democracy and social equality.
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This document, discussed and unanimously adopted at the founding congress of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi held on June 13–15, 2025, is the product not only of the decades-long struggle of Trotskyists in Türkiye, but also of their comrades in the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It traces the important historical events and political experiences of the working class and the Marxist-Trotskyist movement, which stretch back over a century, and lays out the theoretical and political foundations of the struggle for socialism.
Today’s world is marked by wars of aggression, neo-colonialism, genocide, dictatorship, fascism, social inequality, and capitalist attacks on the working class, all characterised by the volcanic eruption of US imperialism. Ultimately, all of these phenomena, stemming from the contradictions of the capitalist system, represent the resurgence of the major unresolved problems of the past century in an even more violent form. Every worker, intellectual, and young person seeking a solution to these problems must learn the necessary lessons from the historical experience of the Marxist movement and participate in the construction of a revolutionary leadership.
The 1917 October Revolution and Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution, which guided it, are of particularly critical importance. The Foundations offers a unique insight into the connection between the 1917 October Revolution, the War of National Liberation in Anatolia (1919–1922), and the founding of modern Türkiye. This is critical not only for understanding the past century but also for understanding the present.
As stated in the document, “the Turkish bourgeoisie, by its very nature, was incapable of fulfilling the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution. It was not possible for this class to achieve full independence from imperialism, establish a democratic regime, provide a radical solution to the land question to the detriment of feudalism, and resolve the Kurdish question and other minority problems. Nor could they recognize the basic rights of the working class, such as the right to organize, engage in collective bargaining, and strike.”
These are, to a significant extent, among the main problems still facing the working class today. Türkiye’s “democratic history” is riddled with anti-working-class laws; the denial of the rights of minorities, the Kurds, and the Alawites; coups and police-state practices. Türkiye’s ruling class, like its counterparts around the world, is rapidly moving towards authoritarian rule as a whole. Attempts to “solve” the Kurdish question based on the interests of the Turkish and Kurdish bourgeoisie and subordinated to imperialism, far from fulfilling aspirations for peace and democracy, are leading to new disasters. While the living standards of the working masses decline and social inequality grows, the interests of a handful of capitalist oligarchs dominate the economy and politics.
The Foundations, like its counterparts around the world, shows that the outcome of modern Türkiye’s history requires the working class to secure its political and organizational independence from all representatives of the ruling class and to mobilize on the basis of an international socialist program in the struggle for democracy and social equality. This means breaking away not only from pro-imperialist, capitalist “opposition” parties, but also from the various middle-class “left” political tendencies that line up behind them and prevent the development of a truly independent revolutionary alternative.
In this context, the document comprehensively addresses the shift of “left” politics, which developed under the influence of Stalinism in Türkiye from the mid-1920s onwards, towards Kemalism; the petty-bourgeois radicalism that emerged from the late 1960s onwards; and the historical role of Kurdish nationalism. It establishes an independent Trotskyist perspective.
22. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Ghana:
Unions call off strike by university staff in Ghana
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Europe
Germany:
Thousands of outsourced hospital staff in Berlin strike for equal pay, terms and conditions
Greece and the wider Mediterranean:
Port workers strike against war and austerity
Netherlands:
Customs and Excise officers in work-to-rule protest against pay freeze
Northern Cyprus:
Public sector doctors strike over working conditions
Romania:
Thousands of teachers and lecturers protest against cuts to education budgets5United Kingdom:
Strikes continue at some universities over jobs cull, attacks on pensions and pay
Special needs teaching assistants at Lift Schools Academy in Essex strike over payMicrobiology workers at Yorkshire hospital walk out over pay banding
Egypt:
Jade Textile Egypt workers strike for higher wages
Israel:
“National Day of Disruption” protests organized crime against Arab communities
23. 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.
