Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Teachers, students, parents speak out from Ocean Beach rally
The strike by educators in San Francisco has exposed both the deep social crisis in public education and the immense power of teachers and school workers when they take collective action. Rallies have drawn broad support from parents and students, and the demand for decent wages, affordable healthcare and properly funded schools has resonated across the city.
That power, however, is now being channeled into a deal designed to contain and suppress it. The United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) bureaucracy is promoting a tentative agreement brokered by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mayor Daniel Lurie—an heir to the multibillion-dollar Levi Strauss & Co. fortune.
Their intervention shows that the strike has struck a nerve among the ruling elite of a city defined by staggering wealth inequality, where billionaires and multimillionaires coexist alongside underfunded public schools.
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A contingent of students from Ruth Asawa High School joined the rally at Ocean Beach in spite of the poor weather. “It’s super important to show our support as students because the teachers’ pay directly impacts us and the way that they teach us and the education we’re getting,” one student said.
“Teachers deserve our support. They’re striking so they can get a livable wage so they can focus on teaching us and giving us a good education. It’s sending a message to the district to have all of us students here,” another said.
San Francisco educators should reject with contempt the betrayal of their four-day strike and vote “No” on the austerity contract accepted on Thursday by the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) and brokered by American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten.
Educators should repudiate this deal and follow the powerful example of New York-Presbyterian nurses, who overwhelmingly rejected a sellout agreement on Wednesday.
The strike of the city’s 6,400 educators was greeted with massive community support. It must be expanded, not wound up. The issues—above all, the need for livable wages, healthcare and more support for special education—are not isolated to San Francisco. Los Angeles educators, 35,000-strong, voted by 94 percent to strike two weeks ago, with strike action also authorized in San Diego and two Sacramento districts.
Statewide, teachers are looking for a fight but have been hamstrung by the California Teachers Association (CTA) bureaucracy and its phony “We Can’t Wait” public relations campaign, which has sabotaged a unified struggle.
Now is the time to go on the offensive. Educators are in a position to link their struggle with the ongoing strike of Kaiser Permanente nurses and technical staff, New York City nurses and vast sections of the American working class entering into struggle, including refinery workers, autoworkers, logistics workers and more.
To properly evaluate the tentative agreement (TA), educators must demand that the full TA and all associated “memorandums of understanding” be posted online. Educators must be given adequate time to study it and discuss its terms at mass membership meetings. There must be no return to work without a vote.
However, it is already clear that the agreement is a slap in the face. Teachers are being offered an insulting 2 percent wage increase in each of the next two years (with additional paid work days to bring the deal up to 5 percent), and 8.5 percent for support workers over two years.
Supposedly, in exchange for maintaining low wages and giving up sabbaticals, educators will get relief on 2026 copays and full coverage for some family healthcare plans by January 1, 2027. However, given the elimination of hundreds of positions year after year, the district will likely “cover” any healthcare costs by cutting jobs.
The agreement fails to address another critical demand of educators: the need for support for special education (SPED). Since 2011, SPED has been under attack, with repeated rounds of paraeducator layoffs, chronic underfunding and rising numbers of students requiring services.
The claim that there is no money to provide livable wages and quality public education to everyone is a lie. In what universe should hard-working educators barely subsist in a district that is home to some 100 billionaires?
The strike has pit teachers in San Francisco directly against the Democratic Party, which runs both local and state governments.
Colluding from the beginning against the walkout were former Speaker of the House and centimillionaire Nancy Pelosi; San Francisco’s Democratic Mayor Daniel Lurie, part of the billionaire Levi Strauss family, who played an unusual and direct role in the talks by demanding fiscal austerity; and AFT President and longtime Democratic National Committee member Randi Weingarten, who flew into town to oversee negotiations. Weingarten herself is also part of the millionaires club, bringing home about $500,000 annually.
These figures have been backed by the Democratic Party machine, including California State Senator Scott Wiener and California Governor and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom, all of whom have cited San Francisco’s $114 million deficit and the “need” for cuts.
The high-level intervention against the strike exposes the ruling oligarchy’s fear at the eruption of a rebellion by teachers and the broader working class.
The San Francisco Unified School District’s “funding crisis” is entirely manufactured. While the ruling oligarchy enriched itself by another $1.5 trillion last year, and 905 billionaires in the United States now hold a combined $7.8 trillion, every social program is under attack and workers face steadily declining living standards.
San Francisco, like nearly every public school district in the US, has endured decades of underfunding at both the state and federal levels. Both political parties have colluded with the ruling elite to corporatize and privatize education while systematically cutting funds to public schools—from Bush’s “No Child Left Behind,” to Obama’s “Race to the Top,” to the Biden-Harris administration’s removal of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds.
The assault on public education is now being vastly escalated with Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education, the creation of national vouchers and cuts of hundreds of millions of dollars from critical programs.
Meanwhile, rising fixed costs plague schools struggling to maintain buildings, provide busing and lunches and pay staff. Enrollment numbers are down nationally, largely in tandem with the explosive growth in the cost of raising children and the devastating impact of ICE raids in immigrant communities.
These pressures, however, are profoundly exacerbated under conditions of San Francisco’s extreme social inequality, home to about 100 billionaires. Thirty-one percent of students attend private schools, significantly reducing the district’s per capita state funding. Moreover, the state education funding formula is based on the “California cost of living,” not indexed to San Francisco’s much higher local inflation in housing, healthcare and labor. Finally, there are disproportionate enrollment losses due to substantial “out-migration”—families who simply can no longer afford to live in the district.
The role of the Democrats and Governor Newsom, in particular, has been to keep San Francisco schools under state control and impose brutal austerity. Educators, parents and students in the district have been protesting threatened school closures and “portfolio” downsizing since 2021, with marches and rallies in targeted neighborhoods.
Hundreds of educators have been forced into early retirement, non-renewed or laid off. Over 500 positions were eliminated in 2025 under SFUSD’s Fiscal Stabilization Plan to meet state requirements, while more than 900 vacant positions were left unfilled in prior years. Since last May, Sacramento has placed the district under heightened oversight, including a hiring freeze and a requirement that state advisers approve any district plans to bring in new staff.
In a city that established itself as a cultural mecca at the turn of the 20th century, education, art and culture are being hollowed out and reduced to something only money can buy. The K-12 Academy, which shares a campus with the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA), is scheduled to close at the end of the 2025–26 school year. This follows the permanent closure of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), founded in 1871, and next year’s planned shutdown of the California College of the Arts (CCA), founded in 1907 and the Bay Area’s last nonprofit, independent art and design college.
The defense of educators—and public education itself—cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party officials who impose austerity or to the union apparatus that enforces it. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) calls on teachers to reject the tentative agreement and build rank-and-file committees—controlled by educators, together with parents and students—to take the struggle out of the hands of the UESF/AFT bureaucracy and into the hands of the working class.
The IWA-RFC urges teachers to hold discussions and demand mass meetings to review the content of the agreement before any vote. These committees should also link up with educators across schools and districts—including Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento—and prepare unified action. There must be no return to work without a democratic vote.
Teachers are not isolated. From Minneapolis to the Bay Area, workers and youth are increasingly raising the question of collective action and a general strike against widening inequality, repression and the drive toward dictatorship and war under the Trump administration. The working class is an immensely powerful force, but only if it is organized independently of the political parties and union officials tied to corporate power.
The defense of educators—and public education itself—must come from the working class. We urge teachers to draw the lessons of the role played by the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy and to take up the fight to build rank-and-file committees of educators, parents and students to lead this struggle.
The IWA-RFC will assist educators in establishing a rank-and-file committee.
3. DSA councilmember Nithya Raman enters Los Angeles mayoral race
Nithya Raman, a sitting member of the Los Angeles City Council and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, announced her candidacy for mayor of Los Angeles. Entering the race well into the election cycle, Raman is attempting to position herself as a “change agent” prepared to challenge the city’s political establishment.
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Her entry into the race also comes as other figures associated with the DSA, including Rae Huang, seek to posture as alternatives within the same political framework. The multiplication of nominally “socialist” candidacies reflects the Democratic Party’s effort to provide multiple outlets through which opposition can be channeled back into safe, electoral forms.
The political significance of Raman’s campaign lies in the anxieties gripping sections of the ruling elite. Mayor Bass’s record was marked by expanded police funding, intensified encampment sweeps and anti-worker measures, including the firing of city employees under the banner of fiscal responsibility, generating widespread discontent.
Bass’s handling of January’s wildfires further fueled public outrage, coming on the heels of budget cuts to the fire department and the failure to fill critical vacancies, which left the city ill-prepared to confront escalating climate-driven emergencies. In public addresses, Bass has combined language about compassion with law-and-order initiatives and budgetary austerity.
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Under conditions of extreme inequality, the ruling class fears that anger over housing costs, homelessness, low wages and decaying social services is erupting outside the carefully managed channels of official politics. Raman’s candidacy serves to construct a “left” safety valve within the Democratic Party, absorbing opposition while preventing it from developing into an independent movement of the working class.
Experience elsewhere underscores this dynamic. In New York, DSA member Zohran Mamdani entered office proclaiming progressive credentials. Yet almost immediately after being elected mayor, Mamdani declared his intention to pursue a “partnership” with President Donald Trump, signaling his willingness to collaborate with the very billionaires he had ostensibly opposed.
Raman’s own record underscores the hollowness of her claims. Though often described as a champion of tenants and unhoused residents, she supported the restructuring of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), a move that opens the door wider to private contractors and funnels public funds into corporate hands. The measure, backed by all DSA-aligned councilmembers, further entrenched the model of outsourcing social services to nonprofit and for-profit entities with minimal democratic oversight.
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Raman represents some of the city’s affluent districts. Her appeals to renters and working families are framed in technocratic language about metrics, efficiency and oversight rather than in any challenge to real estate speculation or corporate power. Despite branding herself as a reformer, she has consistently operated within pro-corporate parameters, promoting public-private partnerships and incremental adjustments instead of structural change.
The response from Yvonne Wheeler, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, which denounced Raman as a “political opportunist,” exposed the union bureaucracy’s fears that even a nominally “socialist” campaign could draw attention to the city’s underlying class divisions, its juxtaposition of tent encampments and luxury towers, of stagnant wages and concentrated wealth.
Los Angeles epitomizes contemporary American inequality. Entire neighborhoods are wracked by homelessness and precarious employment, while a thin stratum of 56 billionaires and 516 centimillionaires exerts decisive influence over municipal policy. Between 2014 and 2024, Los Angeles, now the fifth-wealthiest city in the world, saw its millionaire population grow by 35 percent.
The union apparatus, far from organizing a struggle against this order, functions as a partner within it. Its leaders negotiate concessions, police worker dissent and channel discontent back into Democratic Party campaigns.
Ongoing labor struggles across California underscore the fragility of this arrangement. Nurses, teachers, retail workers and graduate students have all mounted significant actions over wages, staffing and working conditions. A growing awareness of collective power threatens to extend beyond the cautious confines imposed by union officials. The denunciation of Raman is bound up with fears that political discontent could converge with industrial militancy.
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Raman’s campaign thus emerges at a moment of mounting instability. By presenting herself as both aligned with Bass and distinct from her, she attempts to straddle a widening divide. She invokes crisis and dysfunction while avoiding any critique of the capitalist framework that produces them. She emphasizes managerial competence to reduce systemic social breakdown to administrative failure.
But the real crisis confronting Los Angeles is not one of bureaucratic inefficiency. It is rooted in a social order that subordinates housing, healthcare and public services to profit. No rearrangement of city management, no rebranding of Democratic Party leadership and no proliferation of DSA-aligned candidacies can resolve the contradiction between immense private wealth and mass deprivation.
The working class does not require a new “change agent” within the same political machinery. It requires an independent political movement, grounded in genuine socialist principles, that rejects the subordination of social needs to market imperatives. The emergence of such a movement is precisely what sections of the ruling class and their allies in the union bureaucracy seek to forestall.
4. AI development and the contradictions of capitalism
At the very center of the scientific historical materialist method developed by Karl Marx is the understanding that the objective foundations of revolution are to be found in the contradiction between the growth of the productive forces and the social relations within which they have developed.
In the course of the past century and half since this foundational conception was first elaborated, this contradiction has erupted in the form of economic crises, wars, the intensification of the class struggle and social revolution, most notably the October 1917 Russian revolution.
The development of artificial intelligence (or more correctly augmented intelligence) AI and the growing concern that it has the potential to set off a major economic and financial crises shows that the contradiction identified by Marx is rapidly coming to the surface once again.
AI contains within it the potential for an enormous advance of the productive force in every area of economic activity, possibly the greatest in human history.
But it is running into a headlong conflict with the system of social relations—the capitalist market and profit system, based on private ownership within which it is encased. This conflict is expressed in the fears that while it will bring about vast increases in productivity, this very development will result in economic and financial crises and social devastation.
These fears are manifested in two basic forms. First, the possibility that the massive investments in AI data centres, running into trillions of dollars, will not generate sufficient revenue to return a profit. The second is that the application of AI to a whole swathe of economic and financial activity will simply wipe out a range of companies, many of which have existed for decades, and lead to a crisis for the financial institutions, particularly private credit, that have backed them.
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Concerns that the capital spending on AI is outrunning profit generation were seen in the reaction to an announcement by Amazon earlier this month. With news that its investment in 2026 would be $200 billion, up from the $130 billion last year, its share price fell. Amazon shares are now down 20 percent since their peak last November.
There have also been significant falls in the share price of Microsoft, Nvidia and Meta. As the Australian Financial Review noted in a recent article “suddenly, investors are very skeptical that the huge amounts being invested by the likes of Amazon will deliver returns.”
Aside from the issue of whether sufficient revenue can be generated there is the question of moral depreciation. That is, depreciation not through wear and tear, but because of the development of a superior product.
The history of technology shows that an innovation which enjoys superiority and greater profits at one point, can rapidly lose it. Not so long ago the Blackberry cell phone was all the rage—everyone had to have one because of the innovations it had made. But it was very quickly superseded and has largely passed into history.
Something similar is certainly possible in the development of AI, which is still very much in its infancy, with the result that the massive investments undertaken so far could become “stranded assets.” But while they could lose their value the debts used to finance them would remain.
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Events so far this month have seen the beginning of what is set to be a major transformation. The release by the AI firm Anthropic of its Claude Cowork platform, which has the capacity to develop codes, among other things, as well as automating functions such as customer support and legal services, sent a shock wave through the world of software firms.
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This month alone, the market value of two of the world’s largest software companies, Salesforce and ServiceNow, has fallen by a fifth, according to a report in the Financial Times.
There are major financial implications because the software market has been a target of private credit firms. It has been estimated that takeovers of software companies financed by private equity funds have accounted for about 40 percent of their trillions of dollars of deal-making activity in the past decade.
The global investment bank UBS has warned that in the worst-case private credit could see default rates rise to as high as 13 percent in the US by AI generated “aggressive” disruption among corporate borrowers. According to UBS analysts as much as 35 percent of the $1.7 trillion private credit market is exposed to the risk of disruption caused by AI.
This week markets were hit with another AI shock as the Los Angeles-based fintech firm Altruist announced the launch of a tax planning tool in its AI platform Hazel. The shares of financial services companies including Charles Schwab and Morgan Stanley were sold off.
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Karl Marx did not foresee the specific development of AI. But he did point to the objective logic that has brought it about. He noted in the Grundrisse, his “rough draft” for Capital, that capital “calls to life all the powers of science and of nature” and provides thereby the foundation for the development of humanity. But at the same time, it has confined these developments within the framework of a social system based on the exploitation of wage labor and profit.
“Forces of production and social relations—two different sides of the development of the social individual—appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky high.” (Marx Grundrisse p.706.)
This “blowing sky high” will take the form of economic and financial crises. It will bring an eruption of class struggle, the beginnings of which can be seen, in which the working class must fight on the basis of a socialist program.
It will be enormously strengthened ideologically and politically in that struggle because all the objections advanced by the bourgeoisie and its defenders about the “impossibility” of socialism—conscious planning of the economy cannot be undertaken, there is insufficiency of material resources to ensure genuine social equality, it is impossible to liberate human beings from degrading labour, the capitalist system is so complex that nothing other than a system based on the blind destructive force of the market is possible and so on—have been “blown sky high” by the advent of AI.
Workers at the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, the third largest beef plant in the US, voted 99 percent in favor of strike action this past week. The largely immigrant workforce endures extremely hazardous conditions for extremely low pay, with the constant threat of deportation by ICE agents.
At the beginning of the month, many of the immigrant workforce were scheduled to lose Temporary Protected Status (TPS), at the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, before a US District Court judge paused the termination on February 2. Many of the workers reported the presence of unmarked vans driving around voting sites which they believed contained ICE agents.
By voting in favor of strike action, the JBS workers are taking a highly courageous stand and joining a growing wave of resistance to both the international jobs bloodbath currently underway along with the Trump administration’s plans for war and dictatorship.
The final decision to strike is anticipated to take place on February 20, the one day JBS is willing to negotiate a new contract, according to union officials. The last contract for the UFCW workers expired in July, although the union and the company extended the contract. Should an agreement not be reached, the union could elect to end the extension with seven days’ notice, meaning that the workers could begin striking on February 27 under these terms.
In language intended to mask a sellout in the works, however, UFCW Local 7 President and Vice President of UFCW International Kim Cordova stated that “If JBS does not return to the bargaining table and they don’t resolve the unfair labor practices, then we will pull the extension.” Only last summer, Local 7 betrayed a powerful strike by Colorado grocery workers at both the Safeway and King Soopers chains, crafting concessionary agreements behind the backs of picketers.
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Even with injuries and deaths common in US factories, the JBS Greeley plant itself stands out as a particularly notorious example.
In 2020, at least six workers at the plant died from COVID-19, with management refusing to shut the plant down. The first Trump administration had issued an executive order to keep meat processing plants open despite rampaging infections and deaths. JBS then rejected hundreds of workers’ compensation claims despite numerous fatalities and cases of Long COVID.
Since then, workers have regularly sustained severe injuries at the plant, including lost limbs and even deaths, as the company imposes longer hours with fewer breaks. Whenever workers would complain about such harsh conditions, the company retaliated severely, with the UFCW doing nothing to defend either union or non-union plant workers.
The strike vote also follows a class action lawsuit filed against JBS in December. The suit alleges that the workers, especially those migrating from Haiti, were hired under false pretenses. Workers were lured to immigrate to the US in late 2023 via social media with promises of steady, good-paying work and free housing. Instead, they were forced to cram into small motel rooms without heat in the winter time, while working long hours on the processing line, and were denied food and bathroom breaks.
The workers hired from Haiti were assigned the “B” shift at night, which processes around 440 head of cattle per hour versus the usual 390 head processed in the daytime “A” shift, itself an obscenely fast speed. Workers on the B shift were not only unable to take adequate breaks, but weren’t able to even pause and collect themselves for a second or two on the line as they were forced to cut beef non-stop.
Many found themselves no longer able to fully extend or close their fingers as they had to tightly grasp hooks and knives throughout the entirety of their shifts, which officially last 8.5 hours but which are commonly longer to accommodate production quotas. The denial of even bathroom breaks sometimes led to instances of workers soiling themselves on the line.
JBS also paid a $5.5 million settlement in 2021 for discriminating against Muslim employees at the Greeley plant by denying them breaks for prayer. The company also turned off water fountains during the month of Ramadan so that the employees could not drink water while fasting. The company also knowingly hired a vendor that utilized child labor, Packer Sanitation Services, putting minors at risk of working at a plant filled with lethal blades and hazardous chemicals.
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JBS workers in Colorado earn between $17 and $25 per hour, which means that the meat processing workers cannot afford the area’s cost of living. The company’s latest proposal includes a mere 90 cent wage increase along with a pension plan that it knows workers will not last long enough to vest, given the extremely hazardous conditions present in the plant and deportation threats for the immigrant workforce.
This is despite the company’s beef division having made record revenues in the third quarter of 2025 of $7.2 billion with a net profit that same quarter of $644.1 million. The company is a major supporter of the Trump administration, donating $5 million to his second-term inaugural committee.
While workers are determined, the UFCW bureaucrats will do everything they can to limit the struggle. The union is filled with officials who make a line worker’s income several times over, including Local 7 president Kim Cordova, who made nearly $250,000 in 2025. Infamously, the UFCW allowed the meatpacking industry to operate even during the initial COVID shutdowns in 2020. In Waterloo, Iowa, the union even worked out an “attendance bonus” at a plant, where managers ran a betting pool on how many workers would get infected.
JBS workers should be prepared to combat this initiative by organizing to ensure democratic, rank-and-file control over the strike. This means the formation of rank-and-file strike committees that give workers the ability to prevent any attempt to prevent or shut down a strike until their demands are met. Workers must also organize to protect themselves from potential ICE raids and appeal for support from workers across Colorado and the US.
6. UPS preparing to offer second driver buyout, as it plans 30,000 layoffs in 2026
During a quarterly earnings meeting on January 27, UPS Chief Financial Officer Brian Dykes announced that the company plans to cut another 30,000 jobs this year and implement a second driver buyout program to accelerate the process. The Teamsters responded on Monday by announcing they were filing a lawsuit against the buyout.
The opposition of the Teamsters apparatus is entirely hypocritical and self-serving. The core of the lawsuit is not a defense of the membership but a defense of the bureaucracy’s own position and privileges. Conspicuously absent from the Teamsters’ statement is any mention of the broader context: The buyout is part of a massive wave of layoffs.
In early 2024, just months after the supposedly “historic” UPS contract, the company announced 12,000 layoffs of middle and lower management and plans to close 200 facilities through automation. The following year, UPS announced plans to eliminate another 20,000 jobs. Actual cuts were far higher: 48,000 layoffs and 93 facility closures in 2025, with 34,000 coming from operations and 14,000 from management—about 10 percent of the company’s workforce.
If UPS continues with these reductions at the current rate, layoffs will reach at least 90,000 by the end of this year.
This jobs massacre is never mentioned by the Teamsters in their complaint against the buyout plan. They are far more concerned that their challenge to the first buyout last summer is awaiting arbitration, and that a second buyout would cause “damage to the Teamsters”—by which they mean damage to the bureaucracy—by sidestepping its role as bargaining agent.
In their statement, they write that the buyout “would give drivers a one-time lump sum payment in exchange for Teamsters legally committing to never work for UPS again” and to “waive their rights to union representation.” Unlike a similar program last summer that targeted drivers near retirement, this program would aim at a broader section of the UPS driver workforce.
They further allege that UPS is committing “at least six violations of its National Master Agreement ... including direct dealing of new contracts with workers, elimination of union jobs when UPS contractually agreed to establish more positions, and erosion of the rights and privileges of union shop stewards, among other charges.”
Nowhere is the assault on tens of thousands of jobs mentioned.
If the buyout violates contractual promises to create jobs, wouldn’t the layoffs do the same? In fact, no—and neither does the buyout. Based on the contract rammed through by the Teamsters apparatus, UPS is not obligated to create jobs. Section 22 of the master agreement merely states that “UPS will offer part-time employees the opportunity to fill at least 22,500 permanent full-time job openings,” and this commitment “shall include the obligation to create at least 7,500 new full-time jobs from existing part-time jobs.”
There is nothing in the contract that requires the company to create jobs above prior employment levels. Nor is there any protection against mass layoffs. UPS can create new positions and then eliminate several times that number with impunity.
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Today, the interests of the rank and file and the union bureaucracy could not be further apart. While workers face intensifying attacks on jobs, wages and working conditions, bureaucrats like Sean O’Brien are cozying up to the fascist Trump in search of a favorable role for themselves within his developing dictatorship. Those officials who criticize Trump are paralyzed before his attacks, more afraid of provoking a rank-and-file rebellion than of confronting him.
This is why the Teamsters say and do nothing to stop layoffs but hypocritically clutch their pearls over a buyout at UPS. Moreover, as servants of the system that sustains their own social position, the would-be reformers in Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) fall into line, enthusiastically endorsing O’Brien while silencing dissent in their own ranks. The “rebels” of yesteryear are today’s loyalists.
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If left unchallenged, the Teamsters apparatus will steer workers into disaster. Layoffs in the US last year exceeded 1.1 million, and January saw 108,000 job cuts—the highest figure since 2009, outside the initial COVID-19 lockdowns.
Opposition to these conditions is widespread. Thousands of nurses have struck in New York and California this year, and calls for a general strike against the ICE occupation of Minneapolis–St. Paul met enthusiastic support from millions. A movement against attacks on jobs, working conditions and democratic rights cannot be left in the hands of the union bureaucracy. In fact, the Teamsters refused to support the call for a general strike in Minneapolis.
UPS workers must take matters into their own hands and organize independent action through rank-and-file committees in every workplace. They must fight for an end to mass layoffs, workers’ control over automation, higher pay, expanded opportunities for part-time workers and more.
7. Trump administration rescinds EPA Endangerment Finding: Corporate America’s license to kill
The Trump administration on Thursday finalized its rescission of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, the scientific and legal determination that carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases endanger public health. It has served as the legal basis for nearly all federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plants, oil and gas wells and every other industrial facility for the past 17 years.
The move eliminates all federal greenhouse gas emission standards for vehicles of model years 2012 through 2027 and beyond, ends all vehicle emissions measurement and reporting requirements, and strips the EPA of its authority to track, report and limit emissions that contribute to global warming from any source.
The rescission is a declaration by the American capitalist class that there will be no restrictions on its ability to pollute the environment, no matter the consequences in human lives. People will die as a result of this action, in large numbers and over an extended period. An estimated 100,000 Americans already die every year from air pollution, whose primary cause is the burning of fossil fuels, and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) estimates the rescission will kill another 58,000 on top of that by 2055.
Its research also estimates that the higher pollution will induce an additional 37 million asthma attacks in that time frame, causing up to 92,000 hospital and emergency room visits and costing workers and youth 15 million lost school and work days. The total cost borne by the working class will be upwards of $500 billion.
The scientific basis of the endangerment finding was the accumulated evidence going back as far as 1896 that certain chemical compounds in the atmosphere, above all, carbon dioxide, play a critical role in warming Earth’s atmosphere.
That research has been affirmed again and again throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The Keeling Curve was first published in 1958 to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Various atmospheric models were developed in the 1980s, including by oil companies, such as Exxon (now ExxonMobil), which fairly accurately predicted that the global average surface temperature of Earth would increase by about 1.0 degree Celsius by 2020. In 2021, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for pioneering work in understanding climate change.
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The rescission is part of a systematic campaign. In January, the EPA moved to exclude health impacts of fine particulate matter and ozone from regulatory cost-benefit analyses, reducing the value placed on human life to zero. The administration has eliminated the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, is cutting the entire agency’s workforce by 25 percent and terminating over a thousand scientists. It has stopped publishing greenhouse gas emissions data, abolished the Clean Air Act Advisory Committee, halted offshore wind projects and ordered coal plants scheduled for closure to continue operating.
Both the rollback of environmental regulations and the gutting of the workforce to enforce the regulations is the outcome of a conscious policy of, by and for the corporate oligarchy. According to the advocacy group Climate Power, the oil and gas industry spent $450 million to influence Trump and the 119th Congress, including $96 million directly to Trump’s campaign. Zeldin received over $410,000 from the industry, with additional undisclosed funds channeled through dark money organizations.
Such expenses are now going to be paid back in full and with colossal interest. The official announcement of the rescission claimed that “over $1.3 trillion” will be saved as a result of the deregulation. In other words, $1.3 trillion that would have otherwise been spent on keeping the atmosphere clean and saving lives is now going into the pockets of the oil executives and their patsies.
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The enrichment of the oligarchy and the impoverishment of the working class, which the endangerment finding rescission will massively accelerate, are two sides of the same process. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” hands the richest 1 percent $117 billion in tax cuts in 2026, while the Congressional Budget Office projects the lowest 10 percent of earners will see incomes fall by 3.1 percent. The same legislation phases out clean energy tax credits while expanding oil drilling on public land. Elon Musk, who added $187 billion to his fortune in 2025 while leading the DOGE effort that gutted the EPA, has seen his net worth surpass $800 billion.
The denial of climate science that underlies this action is not confined to the Republican Party. It is the same systematic assault on science that characterized the response of both the Republicans and Democrats to the COVID-19 pandemic, in which public health was subordinated to corporate profit. More than 1.5 Americans and at least 30 million worldwide have died and billions more face the continued ravages of this now totally unchecked pathogen.
Addressing climate change has always been rejected by the American ruling elite. The Clinton administration pointedly refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Its participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement was grudging under Obama, immediately revoked under Trump’s first term, rejoined by Biden as a public relations exercise and revoked again. Even the touted “Green New Deal” of the pseudo-left, championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), was always based around accommodations to the oil and gas industry.
The irrationality of the attitude of the capitalists is demonstrated by the fact that renewable energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels. Utility-scale solar and onshore wind have been the cheapest forms of new power generation for 10 consecutive years. Battery storage costs have declined 93 percent since 2010. Solar panel prices have fallen 90 percent since 2009. China invested $627 billion in clean energy in 2025 and installed more than 430 gigawatts of wind and solar—more than the rest of the world combined.
The technology for a full transition to clean energy exists, but the American ruling class is blocking it. The United States is now producing a record 13.6 million barrels of oil per day. Tariffs of 175 percent on Chinese solar panels and 100 percent on Chinese electric vehicles prevent American workers from accessing the cheapest clean energy technology on the planet. The government hands the fossil fuel industry $30 to $35 billion per year in direct subsidies. In the first quarter of 2025, $7.7 billion in clean manufacturing projects were cancelled.
Record US oil production began under Biden, who pledged, “No more drilling on federal lands, period” and then presided over record drilling on those same lands. The Inflation Reduction Act was passed only by mandating 2 million acres of federal land for oil and gas leasing before any renewable lease could be issued. The war in Ukraine, backed by both parties, transformed the US into Europe’s primary gas supplier—LNG exports to the EU nearly quadrupled—entrenching fossil fuel dependency for decades.
There is an objective logic to this. At an earlier period, American capitalism felt it had enough wealth to concede certain social programs, including environmental protections, in response to the surge of the class struggle in the 1960s and 1970s. Like every other gain won by the working class, these concessions are now being clawed back. The crisis of the capitalist system has reached the point where the drive to increase the rate of profit is incompatible with any restriction on corporate activity, no matter the human cost.
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The technology for clean energy exists. The science is beyond dispute. But the defense of the environment, the defense of public health, the fight against climate change and the fight for a scientific understanding of the world—these fall to the international working class. What stands in the way is the private ownership of the means of production by a corporate oligarchy that will destroy civilization before it accepts any limitation on its wealth.
The expropriation of the fossil fuel industry, the transformation of energy production into a publicly owned utility under the democratic control of working people and the rational reorganization of the global economy must be critical parts of a political struggle by the international working class to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism.
8. German Parliament President Klöckner “embedded” in Gaza: Berlin endorses Israel’s genocide
Berlin has provided political cover and actively supported with arms deliveries the genocide that has turned the Gaza Strip into a wasteland and cost the lives of well over 70,000 people. Now Klöckner has openly declared her solidarity with the fascist Netanyahu regime and traveled to the scene of the crime.
German Bundestag (Parliament) President Julia Klöckner (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) became the first leading European politician Thursday to visit the Gaza Strip since the start of the military onslaught, accompanied by Israeli military officials. In doing so, she underscored the role of the German government and the German ruling class in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
Berlin has provided political cover and actively supported with arms deliveries the genocide that has turned the Gaza Strip into a wasteland and cost the lives of well over 70,000 people, the majority of them women and children. Now Klöckner has openly declared her solidarity with the fascist Netanyahu regime and traveled to the scene of the crime “embedded” with the Israeli military.
The visit followed a clear script. It served not to enlighten, but to conceal—not to end, but to continue the mass murder. While Klöckner was in Israel, the far-right Israeli security cabinet decided on sweeping measures to extend control over the occupied West Bank, thereby initiating its formal annexation.
The propagandistic nature of the trip was so obvious that it was reminiscent of the absurd spectacle staged by the Nazis during a visit by a delegation from the International Red Cross to the Theresienstadt ghetto on 23 June 1944.
At that time, the commission was guided along a precisely planned route. Accompanied by the camp commander and the so-called Jewish elder, it was presented with a carefully rehearsed performance featuring selected prisoners in front of an artificially constructed backdrop. The aim was to conceal the Holocaust and to deceive the world public into believing that this was a “normal” Jewish settlement area.
Preparations included renaming the ghetto “Jewish settlement area,” establishing a semblance of “self-government” with its own bank and worthless banknotes, and opening shops selling stolen belongings. Suddenly there was a children’s playground and a coffee house.
In the course of this “city beautification,” prisoners who “no longer looked good” were removed from view—that is, deported to Auschwitz and murdered. The delegation was presented with a “city population” of strong, healthy inmates. Streets were decorated and apartments were refurbished.
After the visit, the representative of the International Red Cross, Dr. Maurice Rossel, wrote a report in which he described the living conditions in the ghetto as “adequate” and “satisfactory.” This assessment played directly into the hands of Nazi propaganda.
Klöckner’s statements were less openly euphemistic. She acknowledged that there was a lack of medical care in the Gaza Strip and that the civilian population was living “under harsh conditions.” But her visit served the same political purpose: it normalize the crime and strengthened a regime that systematically starves, bombs and expels the population.
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The images of Klöckner wearing dark sunglasses, a steel helmet and a bulletproof vest, surrounded by soldiers armed to the teeth in the ruins of Gaza, were so militaristic that even parts of the mainstream media and individual representatives of the Left Party, the Greens and the Social Democrats felt compelled to offer symbolic criticism. The trip sent “a fatal signal,” wrote Der Spiegel. The Left Party spoke of “disaster tourism.”
This tame outrage is deeply hypocritical. The same parties and media outlets have accompanied Israel’s campaign of destruction with propaganda and political support from the outset.
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Berlin’s support for Israel’s war of annihilation does not stem solely from ideological delusions. It is an expression of definite imperialist interests. For Washington, Berlin and Brussels, Israel serves as a military bridgehead for enforcing their economic and geostrategic goals in the Middle East. The escalation against the Palestinians is part of a broader war offensive that currently has Iran in its sights and aims to subjugate Russia and China.
German imperialism does not want to be left on the sidelines in this new redivision of the world. It strives to massively expand its military and political influence and to rise to become a global power. And it is prepared to commit barbaric crimes to achieve this, as it did in the First and Second World Wars—even genocide. That is the real significance of Klöckner’s trip.
By rejecting a rotten tentative agreement that the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) tried to impose on them, the striking NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital nurses have taken a decisive step forward in their fight for safe staffing and secure working conditions.
This rejection opens a new stage of the struggle. It demonstrates that nurses are determined to win their demands and will not be browbeaten into accepting a contract that leaves unsafe conditions intact. The central question now is leadership and strategy. The strike must be taken out of the hands of the NYSNA apparatus and placed under the democratic control of rank-and-file nurses themselves.
The New York Healthcare Workers Rank-and-File Committee calls for the consolidation and expansion of rank-and-file leadership in every hospital. Such committees must serve as the means through which nurses override future underhanded maneuvers, prevent snap votes, ensure full transparency in bargaining and voting, and enforce the principle that no agreement is valid without genuine democratic approval. The strike must continue and be expanded until nurses’ demands are met in full and all unjustly fired workers are reinstated.
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The issues at stake in this strike extend far beyond a single hospital system. This struggle is unfolding in New York City, the center of global finance. Trillions of dollars flow through Wall Street every year while millions in the city struggle to survive. During the recent cold snap, at least 26 people died across the country from exposure and related causes. Enormous wealth exists, but it is hoarded and squandered rather than used to meet urgent social needs.
These same hospitals were at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Nurses at the very same hospitals where nurses launched their strike were forced to reuse protective equipment and, in some cases, resort to wearing trash bags because proper PPE was unavailable. The pandemic exposed in graphic form the consequences of a profit-driven healthcare system that had been hollowed out for decades.
Conditions have deteriorated further. Hospitals are closing, including Mount Sinai Beth Israel last year. Nationally, there are roughly 200,000 fewer hospital beds than before the pandemic. Preventable diseases, such as measles, are spreading again after having been effectively eliminated. At the same time, hospital networks whose CEOs collect compensation packages worth tens of millions of dollars per year claim there is “no money” to hire the nurses required to ensure safe staffing.
But vast sums are available for speculative finance, corporate subsidies, police repression and war. When nurses demand enough staff to keep patients safe, they are told that resources are limited. The ruling elite regards investments in public health as an unacceptable drain on profitability. The logic of profit—or in the parlance of the hospital networks, “net income”—takes precedence over human life.
This is why the strike has won such broad support. Workers throughout the city understand that they face the same underlying problem: immense social wealth concentrated at the top, combined with relentless attacks on living standards and social services. Many are asking how to fight back on a broader scale, which is why the question of a general strike is now being raised nationwide.
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The New York Healthcare Workers Rank-and-File Committee proposes a strategy based on three fundamental principles.
First, rank-and-file control over the strike. The bargaining team that sought to impose a substandard agreement should be replaced by representatives elected directly from the shop floor and accountable to the membership. All negotiations must be transparent. Full contract language must be provided with sufficient time for discussion before any vote. Balloting must be overseen by rank-and-file nurses to ensure its integrity. Strike pay must be provided from the union’s substantial assets so that nurses can withstand management’s attempts to starve them back to work. There must be no end to the strike without a contract that meets nurses’ demands.
Second, the mobilization of the broader working class. The strike must be resumed at all four hospitals and expanded to the 11 hospitals where strikes had been canceled. The struggle must be linked up with the 31,000 healthcare workers striking at Kaiser Permanente facilities in California and Hawaii and with nurses at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital in Michigan. Appeals should be made to transit workers, educators, logistics workers and others facing layoffs and concessions. Expanding the strike is the most powerful answer to the divide-and-conquer tactics of management and the bureaucracy.
Third, a rejection of the supposed “right” to profit. Healthcare is a social right, not a commodity. Resources must be allocated based on the needs of nurses and patients, not the financial calculations of executives and trustees. This struggle is part of a broader fight for the redistribution of wealth to fund high-quality public healthcare, infrastructure and social services. It requires the complete political independence from both corporate parties, which defend the interests of the financial and corporate elites.
The rejection of the tentative agreement has created an opportunity. By asserting their own democratic control, expanding the strike and advancing a clear political perspective, NewYork-Presbyterian nurses can impose a genuine defeat on management and set a powerful example for healthcare workers and the entire working class.
10. US military prepares “sustained, weeks-long” war against Iran
The US military is preparing for “sustained, weeks-long operations” against Iran if US President Donald Trump orders an attack, Reuters reported Friday, citing US officials. The planned campaign would mark a far larger US assault on Iran than anything previously carried out.
In a sustained campaign, the US military could hit “Iranian state and security facilities, not just nuclear infrastructure,” one of the officials said. The United States “fully expected Iran to retaliate, leading to back-and-forth strikes and reprisals over a period of time.”
Such a war could entail massive loss of life and have incalculable global consequences. It would be illegal under international law and take place in defiance of the popular will, with 85 percent of the American population opposed to a war against Iran, according to a YouGov poll.
Last June, the US launched “Midnight Hammer” in coordination with a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign that together killed over one thousand Iranians. Iran staged a limited retaliatory strike on a US base in Qatar. What is now being planned is qualitatively different—an air and missile campaign targeting the Iranian state itself, with the expectation of extended back-and-forth combat.
The buildup takes place just weeks after the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest and newest aircraft carrier, took part in the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3. The Ford, which has been at sea for more than 200 days, has now been ordered from the Caribbean to the Middle East, where it will join the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group already in the region. The same carrier used in the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela is being redeployed to wage war against Iran.
Trump, speaking to troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina on Friday, said it had “been difficult to make a deal” with Iran. “Sometimes you have to have fear,” he declared. “That’s the only thing that really will get the situation taken care of.” Asked if he wanted regime change, Trump responded: “Seems like that would be the best thing that could happen.”
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Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have warned they could retaliate against any US military base in the region. The US maintains bases in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Turkey and on Diego Garcia. Ali Shamkhani, an adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, warned: “We will respond decisively to any adventurism—our military readiness is high.”
The military buildup coincides with the Munich Security Conference, whose organizers titled their annual report “Under Destruction.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz opened the conference by declaring: “This order, as flawed as it has been even in its heyday, no longer exists.” He warned that “a divide has opened up between Europe and the United States.”
But while European leaders condemned Trump’s tariffs and threats against allies, they have fully supported the US posture toward Iran. On January 29, the EU unanimously designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization—all 27 member states voting in lockstep with Washington’s escalation.
The Munich conference withdrew its invitation to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, with Germany’s foreign ministry declaring his participation inappropriate. In his place, exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah overthrown in 1979, was given a platform. Pahlavi called for “humanitarian intervention” and an “equalizing factor”—that is, US military strikes to “neutralize the regime’s instrument of repression.” He told the conference that “help is on the way” from Trump and positioned himself as the leader of a post-regime transition.
Democratic Socialists of America Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke at the Munich Security Conference on the subject of “The Rise of Populism.” In her entire appearance at the conference, she did not say a single word about Trump’s preparations for war against Iran—the most significant military escalation of his presidency.
What she did say is revealing. She warned that Trump is “looking to withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarianisms, of authoritarians... where Putin can saber rattle around Europe and try to bully around our own allies there.”
This is not opposition to war; rather Ocasio-Cortez condemned Trump as being insufficiently aggressive against “Putin”—i.e., being insufficiently committed to the war in Ukraine.
The Democrats have been silent as the administration amasses approximately 50,000 troops and the largest concentration of military firepower in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Their earlier statements on Iran amounted to endorsements of regime change in response to the emergence of localized protests against the government last month. Senator Mark Warner declared on January 11, “The Iranian regime is awful, and I stand with the Iranian people.” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that month, “The Iranian government’s violent crackdown on demonstrators is horrific.”
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In the space of weeks, the Trump administration has kidnapped the president of Venezuela, threatened to annex Greenland, backed the Israeli genocide in Gaza and is now preparing a sustained bombing campaign against a country of 88 million people. Each of these operations targets nations whose resources Washington seeks to control as part of its escalating confrontation with China—Venezuela’s oil, Iran’s oil and natural gas and the Strait of Hormuz through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes daily.
The working class cannot entrust the fight against imperialist war to any faction of the political establishment. The same administration threatening to devastate Iran is attacking immigrants, gutting social programs, and constructing a police state at home. Opposition to war must come from the independent mobilization of the international working class against the capitalist system that produces war, inequality and dictatorship.
On two occasions over the past week and a half, members of the pseudo-left Socialist Alternative (SAlt) organisation have sought to obstruct campaigns by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at Victoria University in Melbourne.
SAlt’s actions go far beyond the bounds of legitimate political discussion or debate. They have been attempts to prevent the IYSSE from discussing a socialist perspective with students at working-class campuses, where it has been an affiliated club for a decade. The modus operandi has been provocation, harassment and lies.
Both incidents occurred at orientation events marking the beginning of the academic year, the first at Footscray Nicholson campus on February 5, the second at Footscray Park campus last Thursday.
On the first occasion, three members of SAlt came over to the IYSSE’s stall, interrupting discussions with students and hurling false allegations. They repeatedly returned, despite being asked to leave. On the second, two members of SAlt did the same, but desisted when an IYSSE member filmed them and demanded they leave its club alone.
Both obstruction attempts were led by James McVicar, a prominent member of SAlt, who is also the education officer of the National Union of Students. McVicar’s role, and the fact that SAlt members staged similar provocations against the IYSSE last year, including at Western Sydney University, indicates a nationally-coordinated attempt to hinder the IYSSE approved by SAlt’s leadership.
In each incident, the playbook was the same. McVicar and other SAlt members began shouting that the IYSSE was “pro-sexism” and endorsed “sexual assault,” and demanding to know whether students engaged in discussion with the IYSSE held those positions also. The claims are offensive and inflammatory lies. As the youth wing of the Socialist Equality Party, the IYSSE opposes all forms of exploitation and oppression.
In attempting to justify their allegations, all that McVicar and the other SAlt members could state was that the IYSSE “opposes the MeToo movement” as though that were a damning and unanswerable indictment.
In fact the IYSSE has made no secret of its opposition to the discredited and largely defunct MeToo movement, which was a campaign orchestrated by powerful sections of the ruling class to attack core democratic rights and to pollute political consciousness.
SAlt is attempting to take advantage, not only of the politically reactionary atmosphere on university campuses, where anti-Marxist identity politics have been promoted for decades, but also to exploit the fact that most young people beginning university today likely know little or nothing about MeToo, including its origins, class character and political aims.
MeToo was launched in 2017 by the New York Times and the Democratic Party, two ruling-class institutions of American imperialism. Overnight and seemingly apropos nothing, both insisted that the primary issue in society was sexual misconduct by men against women, particularly in Hollywood, the arts and other privileged circles.
That assertion was aimed at deflecting a growing opposition to the fascistic Trump administration into the most reactionary channels. It was based on the fraudulent claim that gender, not class, was the fundamental division in American society and that redress could be found through the public vilification of “powerful” men.
Most significantly, MeToo explicitly opposed the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial. These cornerstones of democratic rights, established over centuries of struggle against tyranny and despotism, had to be dispensed with entirely. The criminal burden of proof was to be overturned, on the basis of the fantastical assertion that it was necessary to “believe women” on all occasions and in all circumstances.
MeToo succeeded in destroying careers and even lives. But it resulted in virtually no criminal prosecutions. The attempt by sections of the media to transplant MeToo to Australia was similarly a failure on that front. While highly-talented and significant figures such as Geoffrey Rush were drummed out of their industries and vilified, the legal actions that ensued were successful defamation claims won by those targeted by the MeToo witch hunters.
The anti-democratic modus operandi expressed the class essence of MeToo. The defense of democratic rights is vital to workers and the poor, who are the primary targets of state persecution and harassment. But MeToo had nothing to do with the defense of the oppressed. Instead, its social base consisted of a grasping and affluent layer of the upper middle-class, seeking to gain greater privilege, including through the weaponized deployment of gender politics.
SAlt is promoting MeToo years after it entered a state of dormancy. Under conditions where unsubstantiated accusations were increasingly being refuted, and where they were supporting Joe Biden, himself the subject of sexual assault allegations, as presidential candidate, the Democratic Party, the New York Times and their periphery turned off the MeToo tap as abruptly as they had turned it on, demonstrating its confected character.
It should also be noted that in the years since, it has become clear that many of MeToo’s promoters in the media and political establishment were either aware of, or even involved in, the network maintained by Jeffrey Epstein, based on the industrial-scale trafficking and sexual exploitation of vulnerable young women and girls. The response of the MeToo champions to the Epstein revelations is largely a shrug or an embarrassed silence.
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The other claim made by McVicar makes clear the essentially right-wing character of SAlt’s attacks on the IYSSE. During the first provocation, he declared that the IYSSE “supports the Putin regime in Russia.”
That is another lie. The IYSSE has a long-documented record of implacable opposition to the Russian government, which represents a corrupt oligarchy spawned by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the final crime of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
McVicar was referring to the fact that the IYSSE opposes, from the standpoint of socialist internationalism, the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. We have exposed American imperialism’s role in provoking Russia’s reactionary invasion, and the manner in which it has been used by NATO to press ahead with longstanding plans for a direct assault on the Russian landmass aimed at dismembering it and stealing its resources. The IYSSE has fought for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers, against the US, NATO and all of the oligarchic regimes, on the basis of a socialist program.
SAlt, by contrast, has promoted the imperialist line of support for Ukraine, under conditions where it has been transformed into a garrison state of the US and NATO. The Ukrainian government has annulled elections, ruling as a dictatorship, and is literally dragging young men off the streets to send them to the frontlines to serve as cannon fodder.
McVicar’s claim, that the IYSSE “supports Putin,” has been used to persecute our comrades in Ukraine, including the courageous socialist youth leader Bogdan Syrotiuk, who has been imprisoned for over a year for his principled opposition to the war.
On the issue of MeToo, SAlt is drawing from the playbook of Joseph McCarthy. On the issue of Ukraine, it is in a de facto alliance with the CIA against anti-war socialists.
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All defenders of democratic rights and socialist-minded youth should insist that SAlt immediately desist from obstructing the IYSSE’s campaigns. It is doing the work of right-wing university managements, governments and the intelligence agencies for them.
12. Liberal leadership spill underscores Australian political crisis
The fracturing of the opposition Liberal-National Coalition in Australia continued yesterday when the Liberal Party’s shrunken number of parliamentary representatives voted by 34 votes to 17 to depose party leader Sussan Ley, from the Liberals’ center right faction, and replace her with Angus Taylor, a figurehead of the party’s right wing.
This marks another desperate lurch to the right to try to divert the growing discontent over falling living standards, widening social inequality and government attacks on dissent and basic democratic rights under the Albanese Labor government into nationalist and anti-immigrant scapegoating.
Taylor’s installation highlights the deepening breakup of the parliamentary establishment as a whole. In the most immediate sense, it is a bid by the Liberals, one of the mainstays of capitalist rule in Australia since World War II, to stave off political oblivion. At his media conference yesterday, flanked by six Australian flags, Taylor said: “If an election was held today, our party may not exist by the end of it.”
Taylor alluded to the historic character of the political crisis. “The Liberal Party is at the worst position it has been since 1944, when the party was formed,” he said. The big business party was able to base itself on small business and other middle-class layers during the post-war boom, but that base has been shattered by the stark growth of oligarchic billionaire wealth at the expense of the rest of the population.
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An editorial in today’s Australian, the national Murdoch flag-bearer, anxiously backed Taylor’s bid to “lead Liberals’ existential battle.” It welcomed his calls for cutting social spending while boosting the military, and his anti-immigrant rhetoric. But it concluded nervously by saying, “we wish him well” in reversing the Liberals’ collapse and enabling it to “survive as an alternative government.”
The editorial primarily reiterated the intensifying drumbeat in the corporate media for much deeper austerity and much greater military spending from the Labor government, urging Taylor to campaign on that basis.
The Albanese government has already inflicted the biggest reversal to working-class living standards in history. That is now being deepened by resurging inflation and rising home loan interest rates. Labor is also channelling One Nation by cutting immigration and international student numbers, while allocating hundreds of billions of dollars for AUKUS and other preparations for a US-led war against China.
There is an increasing parallel with the political crises in the US, the UK and European countries. In the UK, the Labour government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, elected in July 2024 solely on the basis of mass hostility to the Conservative Party, is imposing sweeping austerity and a rapid militarisation, provoking widespread opposition.
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For now, the ruling capitalist class depends on Labor to implement its requirements. This means intensifying the assault on working and living conditions, accompanied by an offensive against basic democratic rights, as seen in the violent police attacks on anti-genocide demonstrators in Sydney this week.
There is no answer for the working class within this entire reactionary and rotting establishment. A mass socialist movement must be built, against all the parliamentary parties, to defeat the capitalist program of war, austerity and authoritarianism.
Australian documentary filmmaker James Ricketson was attacked and arrested by New South Wales (NSW) riot police outside Sydney Town Hall on Monday night. The 76-year-old was among scores protesting the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog who were assaulted by police.
In June 2017, Ricketson was arrested in Cambodia and falsely accused of spying for unspecified “foreign states” while filming poverty in Phnom Penh. Imprisoned for 15 months, he was found guilty after a three-week trial in August 2018 and sentenced to six years’ jail. Ignored for months by the Australian government, Ricketson was freed only after more than 100,000 people signed a petition demanding Canberra intervene.
Ricketson spoke with the WSWS this week about the brutal police assault on the Sydney Town Hall demonstrators.
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Ricketson:
"The police quickly went from being reasonable to being vicious dogs. They must have received an order from somewhere in the chain of command to create chaos, which, of course, was required for [NSW Labor Premier] Minns and the police commissioner to justify having hundreds of cops there.
...the objective was, first, to retrospectively justify the huge police presence and second, to create an atmosphere in which they hoped protesters would be blamed for the violence. They operated just like ICE officers in the US."
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"My sign on Monday night said, “I’m not antisemitic, I’m anti-genocide.” Even a sign like that could soon be construed as antisemitic. The thing to keep in mind is all this is about intimidation, to frighten people away from protest. The only answer is solidarity, organization and a willingness not to be bullied into silence.
My concern is not what happened to me, but who gave the orders for the police to do this, and that there are serious consequences for all those responsible for the police violence. It’s just been announced that there’s going to be an official Law Enforcement Conduct Commission investigation. This will be a cover-up. There needs to be a completely independent investigation of what happened—nothing to do with the police, nothing to do with the government. Unless that occurs, it will happen again with even more dangerous consequences."
14. Oil workers: Reject the national agreement! Mobilize to prevent isolation of BP Whiting workers!
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees urges refinery workers across the United States to reject, by the widest possible margin, the national pattern agreement announced by the United Steelworkers (USW). We call on workers to organize from below to fight for a contract that meets your demands, taking all necessary action, up to and including a national strike.
In particular, workers must organize to prevent the isolation of their 800 brothers and sisters at BP Whiting, where management is attempting to take the facility off pattern in order to impose even deeper cuts.
In August, USW members voted to ratify a bargaining program under the National Oil Bargaining Program that called for 25 percent wage increases, meaningful job protections against the introduction of AI, and improvements to healthcare. According to the USW’s own policy book, the bargaining program is “mandatory.”
Instead, the bargaining team took those demands and tossed them in the garbage. The tentative agreement provides only 15 percent over four years, with no protections against automation and no changes to healthcare.
The wage offer is all the more insulting because the last contract provided only 11 percent over three years. As one worker put it, “Our wages have decreased so significantly over the past 5 years due to inflation.” The oil companies—which together made more than $100 billion in global profit last year, including $41 billion for ExxonMobil and Chevron alone—try to portray refinery workers as entitled. But, as another worker said, “it still feels like lower middle class” working “at a job that’s basically a bomb,” referring to the ever-present danger of catastrophic fires, chemical leaks and explosions.
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AI and automation are major issues. Properly used, these technologies could dramatically improve safety, including through drones and crawlers for inspections and AI systems to assist operators at control panels. Instead, as on the railroads, in logistics and elsewhere, they are being used to cut jobs on top of what has already been slashed. According to government statistics, there were 160,000 refinery jobs in 1987. Now there are only 63,000, and many of those positions are held by super-exploited, nonunion contractors.
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All this is more than reason enough to vote the contract down. But worst of all, USW officials are demanding that workers abandon the BP Whiting workers to their fate. This is emboldening management, which is demanding a six-year contract and that workers waive legal rights regarding automation. “Regardless of what was agreed upon at the national level between Marathon and the international USW, the Whiting Refinery is, in no way, obligated to follow the ‘pattern,’” a company spokesman arrogantly declared.
BP workers are determined and have voted by 98 percent to strike. But if they are left isolated, BP will be able to wear them down and impose concessions.
According to one Whiting worker, “They’re doing exactly what they did at Beaumont” in the 2021–2022 lockout, which brought a major facility out of the national pattern. A strike at Chevron’s Richmond refinery in 2022 was similarly isolated. “Every oil company is looking at BP right now to see what happens.” If they can take the biggest refinery in the Midwest off pattern, “get ready because the next one is you, and it will happen.”
If they can take one facility off pattern, then nobody is safe: management will divide and conquer workers facility by facility. Reports have already been received that the Ineos plant in Texas City is also attempting to go off pattern.
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A new leadership is necessary. USW bureaucrats take their orders from management, not the workers. Their disregard for the bargaining program shows that they operate outside any democratic accountability.
The bureaucracy also functions on behalf of the government. During the last contract, the late USW president Tom Conway met with Biden behind closed doors during negotiations. He then openly bragged that the new contract—11 percent over three years—did not contribute to “inflation.” In other words, it made workers poorer as prices rose.
The oil and gas industry is backed by the entire political establishment, which wages wars around the globe for control of oil and critical resources. The last contract was settled on the eve of the US-NATO war in Ukraine, which was used to cut off Russian oil and gas exports. This time, negotiations are taking place amid the Trump administration’s escalating attacks—from the attack on Venezuela to the massing of warships against Iran.
Refinery workers must fight to mobilize a different social force: the working class. Workers everywhere are fighting exploitation and defending democratic rights. There have been strikes by Kaiser and New York City nurses and by educators in San Francisco. There have also been mass walkouts by high school students and protests against ICE raids, raising the question of a general strike.
A refinery strike would meet with broad support and would have a galvanizing effect on the entire working class. The strikes of 1934 and 1937, during the Great Depression, sparked a wave of struggle that built the industrial unions. A similar situation is emerging today. Millions are looking for a new way forward, and refinery workers can provide leadership.
But everywhere, union bureaucrats are trying to break this momentum, isolating one hospital in New York City by sending three others back to work. In San Francisco, they ended a strike with a deal brokered by Nancy Pelosi and the mayor, a scion of the billionaire Levi Strauss fortune.
15. Millions of Indian workers join one-day protest strike against Modi’s class war assault
Millions of workers—including bank employees, defense industry and other manufacturing workers, government employees and agricultural laborers—joined Thursday’s all-India protest strike against the Narendra Modi-led BJP government’s class-war assault. In some parts of India large numbers of small farmers also participated in protest rallies.
Thursday’s action was a further indication of the mass social anger against Modi’s far-right, Hindu supremacist government and the state of Indian society more generally.
In response to mounting great-power conflict and increasing global economic turbulence, including Trump’s trade war, the Modi government has dramatically accelerated its drive to intensify worker-exploitation in recent weeks.
The government is pushing through a sweeping labor law “reform” that guts minimum wage, occupational health and safety and other workplace standards; promotes precarious contract employment; eviscerates protections against mass layoffs; and establishes a vast array of new restrictions aimed at robbing workers of the legal right to strike.
In December, the government announced the end of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee program (MGNREGA), abolishing the statutory right of one member of every rural family to 100 days of menial minimum-wage work per year. While chronically underfunded and oversubscribed, the MGNREGA has provided a critical lifeline for tens of millions of rural poor for the past two decades. The BJP rural relief program that will replace the MGNREGA has two main objectives: slashing government expenditure and depressing rural wages.
At the start of this month, the government presented the budget for the fiscal year beginning April 1. It continued a years-long social spending austerity drive, offered still more subsidies for business and boosted India’s military spending a further 15 percent to US $88 billion. Since 2000, India’s annual defense budget has increased more than five-fold. Expanding India’s military might has been a key objective of New Delhi, under BJP and Congress Party governments alike, and is a central element of its anti-China “global strategic partnership” with US imperialism.
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While they thunder against Modi, the unions have systematically isolated and suppressed one militant worker struggle after another. Led by the twin Stalinist parties and their CITU and AITUC, the unions have worked to channel the opposition to the BJP government and the would-be Hindu strongman Modi behind the Congress Party, till recently the Indian bourgeoisie’s preferred party of national government, and its right-wing ethno-nationalist and caste-ist allies. Their goal is to shackle the working class to the Congress-led INDIA electoral coalition and the prospect of bringing to power an alternate right-wing capitalist government—one no less committed to “pro-investor” reform and the Indo-US alliance than Modi’s—at the next election not slated until 2029.
Millions of workers did join Thursday’s strike, seeking a means to fight back.
But reports suggest—contrary to the Stalinist leaders’ boasts—that the overall participation in Thursday’s strike was less, possibly considerably less, than in other recent JPTCU-called national strikes.
For example, few if any workers joined the strike in two of the country’s largest industrial and auto-manufacturing hubs, the Gurgaon-Manesar industrial belt, which lies on the outskirts of Delhi, and the Sriperumbudur–Oragadam Industrial Corridor, near Chennai.
This is not because of any lessening of workers’ opposition to the Modi government, but because of diminishing confidence in the pro-capitalist unions and fears of state-supported management reprisals.
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Supporters of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and World Socialist Web Site intervened in Bengaluru (Bangalore), Karnataka’s largest city. They distributed a Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) statement supporting the strike titled: “To defeat reaction and secure social equality, workers must forge their independent class power!” A subhead read: “Build rank-and-file committees! Rally the rural toilers in a mass counter-offensive against Indian capitalism and all its political representatives, from the BJP, Congress and the DMK to the Stalinist CPM!”
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Participation in the proscribed Bengaluru march was modest. Small groups of women, Anganwadi (public health) workers and employees from companies like Bosch and Afran joined. The limited turnout underscored the unions’ failure to mobilize against state repression. As one aerospace worker, Jadesh Kumar, told the WSWS, both BJP and Congress governments “serve the same capitalist interests.” Kumar asked, “Why do we need these labor Codes? It is to further enhance modern-day slavery. Workers won’t be given any permanent jobs and will be kept as contract employees always. And the so-called problematic worker will simply be removed by management without any explanation now.”
The SEP statement explained the need for the working class to adopt a new strategy, based on class struggle and socialist internationalism:
For decades, the Stalinist parties including the CPM, under the pretext of fighting Modi’s Hindu supremacism, have systematically propped up the Congress Party as a supposedly “secular” alternative to the BJP. In doing so, they have subordinated the working class to a faction of the same capitalist establishment responsible for deepening social inequality, communal divisions and pro-market “reforms.” By blocking the independent political mobilization of the working class—the only social force capable of defeating both Hindu supremacism and the capitalist system that breeds it—they have politically disarmed workers. This class collaboration has paralyzed opposition, enabling the BJP and Hindu communal forces to expand their influence and consolidate power. Only an independent movement of the working class, armed with an international socialist program, can put an end to communal reaction and capitalist exploitation alike.
16. Proscription of Palestine Action ruled unlawful in blow to UK Labour government
The Starmer government’s proscription of Palestine Action (PA) as a terrorist organization has been ruled unlawful by the High Court.
The anti–Gaza genocide direct action group was banned in July 2025, with then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper telling Parliament its peaceful protests particularly targeting weapons manufacturers met the statutory definition for terrorism under the Terrorism Act and posed a threat to national security. Just 25 MPs voted against the order.
Since that time, nearly 3,000 people have been arrested for merely indicating support for the organization. Police have broadcast warnings not to do so at mass demonstrations.
The “terrorist” label has seen individuals accused of participating in Palestine Action protests prior to the ban subjected to lengthy and draconian imprisonment on remand ahead of trial for criminal damage against Israeli arms suppliers and one UK military plane. Eight young people risked their lives in hunger strikes protesting the ban and their treatment by prison authorities.
This was politically criminal—a dictatorial attempt to intimidate and repress popular opposition to the Israeli state and its genocide of the Palestinians, and the support given by British imperialism. Now the UK’s highest court has been forced to admit it was unlawful.
Current Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said she was “disappointed” with the ruling and disagreed “with the notion that banning this terrorist organization is disproportionate.” She will appeal the decision and PA remains proscribed at least until a hearing later in the month.
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... [T]his is... a tremendous defeat for the Labour government. It has spent vast amounts of money and political capital in the course of its anti-democratic campaign spearheaded by the outlawing of Palestine Action.
Hours of screen time and reams of articles have been used by ministers and their flunkies in the press to demonize the organization. Millions have been spent on policing operations which have seen footage widely broadcast of elderly and disabled protesters being bundled away for quietly holding placards. The government has ignored letters of protest from international human rights organizations and United Nations officials.
This crackdown was supposed to have been rubber stamped by the courts. Clearly the Justices’ sympathies are with the government. However, they have intervened to sound a note of caution that its attacks on democratic rights are brazen and are seen as such—at a time when Labour is massively unpopular and mired in crisis over its links with the criminal oligarchy, embodied by the Mandelson-Epstein affair.
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With multiple PA-protest trials set to go ahead this year, the threat of more acquittals was real. Under these conditions, the magistrates set to try the large numbers of people accused simply of expressing support for Palestine Action would be under enormous pressure, and the legal system would be brought into disrepute by such nakedly political prosecutions.
What is taking place in the courts is the tip of an iceberg of popular hostility to the Labour government, its support for Israel and its draconian agenda. It must now find broader expression.
Mass opposition has been kept passive by the leadership of the movement against the Gaza genocide, the Palestine Coalition, which has limited action to routine protests and moral appeals, while championing supine Corbynites, Labour “lefts” and trade union bureaucrats as anti-war leaders—even those like John McDonnell openly supporting NATO’s efforts in Ukraine.
Resistance has therefore largely taken the form of defensive actions like legal cases and the actions organized by civil rights group Defend Our Juries. This must now pass over into a counteroffensive against the government’s attack on democratic rights and support for oppression around the world—one which fuses the spirit of urgency and self-sacrifice which has animated PA protesters with a perspective for the broad mobilization of millions.
The immediate demands of that movement must be:
- Drop all charges against pro-Palestine activists and supporters, with formal apologies and financial recompense given.
- End the proscription on Palestine Action and all measures to suppress free speech.
- Make public all documents relating to the decision to proscribe Palestine Action, including discussions with Israeli officials and the US Trump administration.
- Remove from their positions all ministers and government officials responsible for violating democratic rights.
- Repeal all laws infringing the right to protest, beginning with the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (2022), the Public Order Act (2023), and the whole suite of “counter-terror” legislation.
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World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to some of those gathered outside the court. Please visit the original article to read what they had to say and view videos provided there.
17. Comrades in Art: How Stalinism ruined the Artists’ International Association
Andy Friend’s 2025 book Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933–1943 underpins the current Tate Britain display Artists’ International: The First Decade and will form the basis of a larger exhibition at the Towner gallery Eastbourne, Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism, running from May 7 to October 18, 2026.
Comrades in Art traces how artists in Britain responded to a decade of political and cultural upheaval—the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Cold War.
At the centre of Friend’s narrative is the Artists’ International Association (AIA), founded in Britain in 1933 by a small group of radical, largely working‑class youth, refugees and exiles. In its early phase many members genuinely looked to revolutionary change—an orientation that was later crushed by the rise of Stalinism and the Popular Front policies it imposed on the communist parties and their periphery.
Friend reconstructs the AIA’s emergence. Cartoonist James Holland recalled that the collapse of patronage after World War I and widespread impoverishment compelled artists to “use their abilities to discredit a system that makes art and culture dependent on the caprices of the money markets.” Many of these young artists saw in the Soviet Union the only existing society attempting to reorganise culture on a non‑capitalist basis.
Yet the trajectory Friend ultimately records is not the AIA’s revolutionary promise but its political capitulation to the Popular Front—the direct outcome of the Stalinist bureaucratic counter‑revolution. Rooted in Russia’s economic backwardness, the isolation of the Soviet state after the defeat of revolutions abroad, the devastation of civil war, and the rise of a privileged bureaucratic caste, Stalinism—with its stated goal of building “socialism in one country” as an alternative to the perspective of world socialist revolution—transformed the Bolshevik Party and the Comintern from organs of proletarian internationalism into diplomatic and political instruments for defending bureaucratic interests.
The Comintern enforced class‑collaborationist Popular Front alliances with “progressive” bourgeois forces and suppressed independent revolutionary currents, a process Leon Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the Fourth International fought in the face of ferocious repression.
Culturally, this political turn meant dissolving explicitly revolutionary artistic groupings into broad, politically diluted coalitions; subordinating experimentation to propaganda; and elevating ideological conformity over critical and creative integrity.
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After 1935 the AIA expanded rapidly—from roughly 30 founders to nearly a 1,000 members, including establishment figures such as Augustus John, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, and Laura Knight. The slogan “Unity of Artists against Fascism, War and the Suppression of Culture” was adopted.
This rebranding coincided with the organizations full alignment with the Popular Front strategy. Its tragic consequences were revealed most starkly in Spain: the deaths of volunteers such as AIA member Felicia Browne—whose drawings of Republican militia appear in Comrades in Art—and the collapse of revolutionary proletarian resistance under cross‑class alliances stand as reminders of the human cost when anti‑fascism is channeled into class‑collaborationist politics.
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In 1937, the AIA’s Unity of Artists exhibition and its Artists’ Congress in Support of Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development were hailed as major anti‑fascist mobilisations but exposed the full consequences of the Popular Front turn. The AIA was now a broad, politically diluted coalition that had abandoned any residual independent socialist perspective and craved establishment approval. The Congress echoed Popular Front resolutions, ignoring the dangers of class collaboration. Guernica in Spain was destroyed by Nazi bombers the day after it ended.
The twists and turns of Stalinist foreign policy had extraordinarily disorienting effects. The abrupt announcement of the Stalin–Hitler Pact in 1939 led the AIA to define the Second World War as an inter-imperialist conflict. But after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 the war was recast as a patriotic “People’s War” in alliance with Britain, France and the United States.
Wartime cultural mobilization—seen in Fitton, Rowe, Binder and others turning toward morale‑boosting imagery—culminated in the 1943 Art for Liberty exhibition, which adopted President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms as its theme, a set of “universal” rights he claimed would shape the post‑war world while legitimizing emerging US hegemony. The AIA’s wartime incorporation into establishment propaganda fed directly into post‑1945 reconstruction and the stabilization of British capitalism, a trajectory that continued until the organizations dissolution in 1971.
Friend’s book restores neglected artists and episodes to view, but it sidesteps the central narrative of Stalinist degeneration and Popular Front opportunism that defined the 1930s. The Popular Front did not advance socialist revolution; it demobilized the working class, drawing artists into cross‑class projects that upheld capitalist property relations and the state, thereby betraying the revolutionary horizons many early AIA members had imagined.
18. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:
India:
New Zealand:
Sri Lanka:
19. 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.
