A wave of layoffs is sweeping California’s public education system
through the “March 15 Notice” process, the legal mechanism school
districts use to notify employees their services may not be required for
the following school year.
Under Assembly Bill 438, signed in
2021 by Governor Gavin Newsom, the process now applies to both
certificated employees (teachers and administrators) and permanent
classified workers. Because the state budget is finalized only in June,
districts routinely issue these preliminary notices based on
conservative financial projections.
This year the notices signal a
new and dangerous stage in the crisis of public education in
California, the largest school system in the United States. Districts
across the state are preparing layoffs of thousands of classified
employees, including special education aides, bus drivers, health
technicians, custodians and other support staff who form the backbone of
school operations.
At the same time, opposition is rapidly
developing among educators, school workers and students. Tens of
thousands of education workers across California have voted to authorize
strike action or are preparing contract battles as living costs soar
and working conditions deteriorate.
*****
Governor Gavin Newsom and the Democratic-controlled legislature
routinely present California as a progressive model. In reality, they
have overseen the steady erosion of public education and social
programs.
Year after year, schools are told there is “no money,”
even as billions are directed toward corporate subsidies, policing and
military spending.
*****
Equally significant is the role played by the major teachers’ and
public-sector unions. Assembly Bill 438 was promoted as a “protection”
providing “layoff parity” by extending March 15 notices to permanent
classified employees—essentially ensuring that layoffs would be applied
equally.
The measure was backed by the California Labor
Federation, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the
California School Employees Association (CSEA) and the California
Teachers Association (CTA).
United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA),
the SEIU, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees (AFSCME) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) present themselves
as defenders of public education. In practice, they function as partners
of the political establishment.
More than 100,000 workers,
including UC graduate students and LAUSD educators and staff, have voted
in favor of strike action. Yet union officials keep these workers on
the job without contracts instead of uniting the struggles into a
broader movement.
Over decades, the unions have repeatedly
isolated strikes, suppressed rank-and-file opposition and negotiated
agreements that fail to address the structural crisis confronting
schools. Their alliance with the Democratic Party prevents them from
waging a genuine fight against austerity.
Even now, as layoffs loom, union leaders limit their response to appeals to the same politicians responsible for the cuts.
*****
Across the United States, trillions of dollars are directed toward
war, weapons and corporate bailouts while public institutions
deteriorate. At the same time, immigration raids and authoritarian
policing threaten the democratic rights of millions of working class
families.
The defense of public education, democratic rights and
social equality cannot be achieved within the framework of the existing
political system. It requires the independent mobilization of the
working class—teachers, school staff, parents and students—against
austerity, repression and war.
Jacobin’s
Eric Blanc argues that Americans “feel powerless.” He counsels them to
wait for the 2028 election and keep the anti-war movement safely within
the Democratic Party.
The strike will be the first in the plant’s history involving some
3,800 workers. It would also be the largest strike of US meatpacking
workers since the bitter 1985-86 Hormel strike in Minnesota, which ended
in betrayal when the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)
intervened to decertify local P-9.
But today, the Greeley workers
join a major upsurge of the class struggle in the US and
internationally, including nurses in New York City, California and
Michigan, along with teachers and education workers throughout the US,
including 30,000 Los Angeles school workers who voted overwhelmingly to strike last month and 48,000 University of California student employees who did the same.
*****
There is no lack of bravery and commitment among the Greeley
meatpacking workers, but workers must be prepared to deal with the
inevitable sellout attempts by the union bureaucracy.
The fact
that the workforce is largely immigrant means that the struggle also
must be prepared to face down attempts to break the strike with ICE
raids and threats of deportation. In Colorado, ICE’s Aurora Contract
Detention Facility is quickly gaining notoriety for its inhumane
treatment of immigrant workers. A new ICE facility also planned in Weld
County, in the northern part of the state, is part of plans to expand
the activities of Trump’s immigration gestapo.
Through rank-and-file committees, workers can share information and
react quickly if ICE attempts to intervene in the strike. Greeley
workers should also reach out to workers across the region, both
immigrant and “native-born,” for mutual support against police attacks.
In the case of Minab, the preliminary inquiry states that CENTCOM
planners relied on DIA data and concluded that the school building
remained part of the Sayyid al‑Shuhada complex, leading to “insufficient
weight” being given to the obvious civilian presence.
In other
words, even in the Pentagon’s own language, US officers consciously
authorized a Tomahawk strike on a built‑up area that either they
believed included an active school or that they did not bother to verify
despite ample open‑source evidence that it was a school.
Furthermore, the Times
indicates that the base was struck again roughly two hours after the
initial barrage, implying that commanders had real‑time battle damage
assessments and were aware of the devastation in the vicinity. The
decision to continue the attack demonstrates that the killing of
civilians, including scores of schoolgirls, was not unforeseen but an
expected consequence of the military operation.
Given all of these
reported facts, the question must be asked: Were Hegseth and Trump
notified that the selected targets in Minab included a girls elementary
school? If they were notified, did Hegseth and Trump give the final
order to go ahead with the Tomahawk missile strike?
Confronted
with the evidence that a Tomahawk missile fired by US forces destroyed
the school, President Donald Trump has responded with a mixture of crude
deflection and brazen lying. At press conferences in the days following
the massacre, Trump repeatedly insisted that Iran itself might be
responsible, claiming that Tomahawk missiles are “generic,” widely sold
to “many countries,” and asserting—falsely—that “Iran also has some
Tomahawks.”
In one exchange, when asked about reports that “a
Tomahawk missile likely destroyed that Iranian girls’ school,” Trump
replied that Tomahawks are “one of the most powerful weapons around” and
are “sold and used by other countries,” adding that “whether it’s Iran,
who also has some Tomahawks … or somebody else,” the incident was
“being investigated.”
Defense analysts and fact‑checking outlets
note that only three US allies—Britain, Australia and Japan—have
purchased variants of the Tomahawk missile, all of them under tight
controls that exclude transfer to third countries such as Iran.
*****
Publication of the leaked details of the preliminary results of the Pentagon investigation is being used by the Times
to promote its own narrative of the US-Israeli war against Iran. This
narrative presents the girls’ school massacre as the outcome of
“outdated targeting data” and “human error.” This “analysis” is in fact
part of an ideological campaign that separates the specific war crime
from the war policy that produced it in the first place—a policy that
the Democratic Party and the editors of the New York Times both agree with.
While the Times
presents the strike as the tragic by‑product of a complex technological
system in which databases are imperfect, analysts overworked and
decision makers under pressure, the political significance of the
incident is minimized. What is excluded from this narrative is the basic
fact that the entire war against Iran is an illegal and criminal war of
aggression.
*****
In Gaza, as in Minab, each atrocity is justified as either a legitimate
act of “self‑defense,” an attack on alleged “human shields,” or an
unfortunate “mistake” resulting from faulty intelligence. The conscious,
systematic destruction of civilian life is cloaked in the language of
“precision strikes” and “collateral damage.” In both cases, the goal is
the same: to terrorize an oppressed population into submission, to
depopulate territories and clear the path for imperialist domination.
The ranch’s former manager, Brice Gordon—a New Zealand-born former
military veteran to whom Epstein left $2 million in his final will,
signed two days before his death—has been named a “person of interest”
by New Mexico legislators. In nearly seven years since Epstein’s death,
no law enforcement agency—not the FBI, not the Department of Justice—had
ever searched the property.
The search was triggered by the
January 30, 2026 release of roughly 3 million new pages of Epstein
documents by the DOJ, carried out under the Epstein Files Transparency
Act signed by Trump on November 19, 2025. Buried within those millions
of pages were two 2019 communications that the FBI had in its possession
for six years and never acted upon.
The first was an anonymous
email sent to Albuquerque radio host Eddy Aragon alleging that “two
foreign girls were buried” at the ranch. The second was an email from a
retired New Mexico State Police officer flagging a suspicious barn on
the property with what appeared to be a concealed incinerator. The FBI
received both communications, searched Epstein’s other known
properties—his Manhattan townhouse, Palm Beach mansion, and Caribbean
island of Little Saint James—and deliberately excluded Zorro Ranch.
It
took the forced public release of documents the government spent years
fighting to suppress to compel the first search of a property where
victims testified they were trafficked and assaulted. This speaks to the
essential function of the capitalist state in this case. The six-year
non-investigation of Zorro Ranch was a deliberate act of institutional
cover-up.
The anonymous email, sent in November 2019 from someone
claiming to be a former ranch staff member, was forwarded by Aragon to
the FBI. It alleged: “Somewhere in the hills outside the Zorro, two
foreign girls were buried on orders of Jeffrey and Madam G.”, presumably
Ghislaine Maxwell. The sender claimed the two girls died by
strangulation during rough sex and stated that he possessed seven videos
from Epstein’s home, including material depicting minors. Aragon says
he knows the sender’s identity and shared it with the FBI, which filed
the email away and took no investigative action.
Separately, a
redacted 2019 email from a retired New Mexico State Police officer
described a barn on the property with “a garage door that appears to be a
sally port, and there is a chimney,” warning that “the property could
potentially have an incinerator concealed within the barn.” Like the
“buried bodies” email, this communication was forwarded to the FBI,
included in the January 30 document release, and prompted no search and
no follow-up.
The FBI’s inaction was an active cover-up. A
December 2019 federal communication confirmed that agents had “not
searched the New Mexico property.” When New Mexico’s then-Attorney
General Hector Balderas launched his own state-level investigation, the
US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York ordered him
to “cease any investigation”—freezing the state probe for six years. The
FBI thus possessed tips alleging buried bodies and a possible
incinerator on the property and refused to conduct a search, while
federal prosecutors in Manhattan shut down the only state investigation
of the case.
This pattern of institutional protection is inseparable from the
broader question of whom Epstein served. When Alexander Acosta was being
vetted for the position of Labor Secretary during Trump’s 2017
transition, he reportedly told the transition team that Epstein
“belonged to intelligence” and that this was why he had approved the
lenient 2008 plea deal as US Attorney for south Florida. Acosta later
denied making the statement when questioned under oath during his Senate
confirmation hearings.
*****
As with all of Epstein’s properties, Zorro Ranch was made use of by
Democrats and Republicans. Giuffre testified that Maxwell instructed her
to give former Democratic Governor Bill Richardson a “massage” at the
ranch; released files show Richardson continued meeting Epstein after
his 2008 conviction. According to a housekeeper, Prince Andrew visited
the ranch for three days in 2001. Numerous other associates of Epstein
visited as well.
The corporate media continues to frame the
Epstein scandal as the story of an individual predator. It is not. It is
the story of a class—the capitalist oligarchy—and the institutions that
serve it. The first-ever search of Zorro Ranch is a politically
compelled concession, extracted by the forced release of documents the
state spent years burying.
Genuine accountability cannot be
entrusted to the FBI that suppressed the evidence, the DOJ that exposed
victims while shielding perpetrators, or the bipartisan political
establishment that enabled the operation for decades. The independent
mobilization of the working class against the capitalist system that
produces, protects, and profits from the depravity of its ruling elite
is the only basis for genuine justice.
On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron landed on the
nuclear-armed aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to announce that France
would lead a European naval group in the Middle East. Barely a week
after he admitted the US-Israeli war on Iran is “waged outside the
framework of international law,” he committed France and its European
allies to joining this illegal war.
As Macron had declared the war
to be illegal, one might imagine statements he could have made. But did
he announce that France would oppose it? Did he criticize crimes
committed by US and Israeli forces against the Iranian people, including
the massacre of 160 school girls bombed in Minab, the bombing of
hospitals, the poisoning of Iran’s skies by bombing Iranian fuel depots?
Did he announce that French air bases would be closed to US warplanes?
No, not at all.
Instead, he said that, alongside Spanish, Dutch,
Italian and Greek warships, the French aircraft carrier and its escorts
would “coordinate a larger operation … totally peaceful and defensive,
but which is our responsibility, which in this very disorganized context
to preserve freedom of navigation and participation in maritime
security.” While this would involve the Mediterranean and the Red Sea
first, he added, it would ultimately grow to “restoring, when the
conditions are correct, passage through and the calibrated opening of
the Strait of Hormuz.”
This is, in all but name, a declaration of war by France and its
European allies against Iran. While European warships’ initial
deployment would shield Israel and NATO bases in the Middle East from
Iranian retaliatory strikes against US-Israeli bombings, this is—from
the outset—intended to prepare an intervention into Iranian waters in
the Strait of Hormuz.
*****
Macron’s claim that this policy is “peaceful and defensive” is an
insult to the intelligence of the people of France and the world. As
Iran continues to fire volley after volley of ballistic missiles at US
and Israeli targets across the region, it is clear that crushing Iran
would require barbaric levels of violence.
In the war against
Iran, the NATO imperialist powers are applying the methods of the Gaza
genocide to a regional and ultimately global war. Israel’s relentless
bombardment of Lebanon is being carried out under an umbrella of
anti-air protection provided by US and European warships. Macron’s
pledge to send the Charles de Gaulle to the Red Sea referred to plans to
resume bombing Yemen, where Houthi militias have responded to the war
on Iran by launching strikes on Israel.
*****
For over a decade, and especially since the outbreak of the
NATO-Russia war in Ukraine in 2022, the European powers have
relentlessly attacked the workers to fund rearmament. Macron is
scrapping social concessions French workers won after the fall of Nazi
rule over Europe in World War II, to divert hundreds of billions of
euros from social spending to the war machine. In 2023, he slashed
pensions despite overwhelming opposition and mass strikes, relying on
the union bureaucracies and parties of the New Popular Front to shut
down and sell out the struggle.
Insofar as they are still
militarily too weak to confront Washington, the European powers respond
to US wars with cowardly complicity, seeking to assert their own
imperialist interests under the US umbrella and continue their class war
on the workers. Fearing the explosive discontent in their own
populations, they are deeply alarmed at the widespread opposition to the
Iran war in the American and international working class.
BP Whiting refinery workers must decisively reject the concessionary
agreement the company and the United Steelworkers (USW) bureaucracy are
attempting to impose. But rejection alone is not enough. The vote must
become the starting point of a broader movement uniting Whiting workers
with the 30,000 refinery workers covered by the USW national agreement
and the tens of thousands of contractors working in refineries across
the United States.
The attack on Whiting is a test case for the
entire industry. If BP succeeds here, every oil company will follow the
same playbook. This is why the International Workers Alliance of
Rank-and-File Committees calls for this fight to be transformed into a
common struggle of refinery workers everywhere, drawing behind them
workers in other industries.
Achieving this unity requires
initiative from workers themselves. Whiting workers should establish a
rank-and-file committee to organize the struggle, independent of the USW
apparatus. This committee should reach out directly to refinery workers
at other plants, share information about the contract fight and prepare
coordinated action to defend wages, safety and jobs throughout the
industry, up to and including nationwide strike action.
*****
The USW international has deliberately left Whiting workers isolated
despite the national implications of this struggle. Across the rest of
the industry, the bureaucracy is rushing to impose the national
“pattern” agreement announced last month. That deal provides wage
increases of just 15 percent spread over four years, contains no
meaningful improvements to safety and includes no protections against
job losses through automation or artificial intelligence. It allows the
companies to continue working refinery employees to the bone while
preparing sweeping technological changes that threaten thousands of
jobs. Moreover, this deal was reached in open defiance of the clear
instructions given by the membership when it voted on the National Oil
Bargaining Program last year.
*****
This is also a war contract. For the second time in a row, the
USW bureaucracy has negotiated a deal that would guarantee labor peace
just as the oil giants stand to reap enormous profits from rising energy
prices driven by war. In January, the Trump administration carried out
the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and the United
States has now launched a major, criminal and unpopular war against Iran
that is shaking global energy markets. As always, it is the workers
that will be made to foot the bill, through rising prices and,
especially in the event of a ground invasion, with the lives of their
sons and daughters.
The previous refinery contract was negotiated
right at the start of the war in Ukraine, which sent oil prices soaring
to $120 a barrel. At the time, former USW president Tom Conway openly
boasted that the agreement would not contribute to inflation. By this he
meant above all that the 11 percent wage increases over three years
would make workers poorer in real terms.
The contract was reached
following intensive closed-door discussions between Conway and
then-president Joe Biden. Today the USW is headed by Roxanne Brown, a
longtime political lobbyist for the union who never worked in a refinery
or steel mill, underscoring the intimate ties between the union
bureaucracy and the government.
The BP agreement will likely be rejected, particularly since Local 7-1
itself has called for a “no” vote. But the decisive question remains:
How can this struggle be won?
*****
The central task facing Whiting workers today is to break the isolation
of their struggle. A rank-and-file committee should establish lines of
communication with refinery workers across the country, as well as with
the steelworkers throughout northwest Indiana and workers across the
broader Chicagoland region. The outcome of this fight will set a
precedent for steelworkers as well, whose contracts are set to expire
later this year.
*****
This struggle must be organized from below. Workers should build a
rank-and-file strike committee to assert democratic control over the
fight, ensure transparency in bargaining and counter the deliberate
efforts of the USW apparatus to sabotage opposition.
Refinery
workers are in a powerful position to advance demands that meet their
needs, not those dictated by corporate profits. These include a
four-year contract, wage increases that keep pace with
inflation—including automatic cost-of-living adjustments—strong
protections against job losses through automation and genuine workers’
control over safety conditions in the plants.
In the Detroit auto plants, there is widespread concern over higher
fuel prices, a potential economic recession and new job losses on top of
recent mass layoffs, including 1,100 workers at GM’s Factory Zero in
January. But the concerns go beyond the immediate economic impact, with
workers expressing anger at the mass killing of Iranian civilians and
concern that Trump is using the war to accelerate his plans to establish
a dictatorship.
Outside of the Stellantis Detroit Assembly
Complex-Jefferson plant, a worker said that US wars are “always about
money and controlling power. There is a war going on in Iran now, but I
think the war is actually going to be fought at some point here on
American soil. I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to put us under lock
and key right here in the United States.”
Referring to the murder
of US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by Trump’s immigration Gestapo
in the streets of Minneapolis, she said, “The ICE agents are
terrorists. What police officers run around with masks on? They are
criminals who don’t want their identity to be known. I am absolutely
nervous about that.”
She added, “I feel like a lot of us won’t be
having jobs anytime soon, or we’ll have jobs making missiles. Maybe
we’ll be like Rosie the Riveter in World War II,” she said, referring to
the conversion of the auto industry during the war to make bombers,
tanks and other weapons.
It is noteworthy that United Auto
Workers President Shawn Fain has pointed to wartime labor relations
during World War II, which included a ban on strikes and ruthless
speedup in exchange for the automatic dues deduction system, as a model
for the UAW bureaucracy today.
*****
“This is all directed against the global working classes to maintain
all power in a system that will always send workers to their death via
wars fought for profits. The working class faces two options under
capitalism: work and die in a collapsing society that has been stripped
of all dignity and semblance of humanity and fairness, or terrorize the
world in an expanding war to oppress the weak and the greater working
class.”
Pointing to the way to stop this onslaught, the worker referred to the Turkish coal miners who had seized their mine and the campaign by Will Lehman, the socialist and internationalist candidate for UAW president, who was one of the speakers at the online rally.
“When
workers in Turkey broke through a police line and seized the mining
corporation and started running it themselves, they declared that to run
that company they were providing the working class a blueprint for the
greater revolution of the global working class. This is the message that
Will Lehman brought to the webinar and that we will be fighting for in
the campaign for him to be president of the UAW in this year’s
election.”
Having backed and now joined an illegal war in which the US and
Israeli governments are pulverising Iran and Lebanon, killing thousands
of people, the Albanese Labor government is rushing a bill through
parliament this week to block anyone trying to flee to safety.
The
clear intent of the legislation is to keep ordinary people trapped
under the bombing, while offering visas to selected individuals, such as
members of the Iranian women’s soccer team, essentially for a pro-war
propaganda purpose.
This further exposes Labor’s claims to be
supporting the war, and sending a warplane, missiles and troops into it,
to free Iranians from oppression or protect people in the Persian Gulf
region.
The bill hands extraordinary political powers to the home
affairs minister, in collaboration with the prime minister and foreign
affairs minister, to bar entry to people from any designated country,
even if they hold a valid visa to visit Australia, whether for holidays,
study, cultural or sporting events or business.
No country has
yet been nominated to be subject to an “arrival control determination”
but outraged refugee organisations have said the measures are intended
to bar entry to thousands of people from Iran and Lebanon who may
already have visitor visas.
*****
Asylum Seeker Resource Centre chief executive Kon Karapanagiotidis
described the bill as appalling. “Australia and the US are sending our
military to the Middle East in the names of liberating the people of
Iran, while at the same time legislating so they can shut the door to
those very same people who need our protection—even when already have a
visa to travel to Australia,” he said in a media release.
Refugee
Council of Australia co-CEO Paul Power said the legislation would
“seriously undermine Australia’s commitment” to the principles of the
1951 international Refugee Convention. Drafted after the horrors of the
Holocaust and World War II, that convention enshrined the basic right to
flee persecution and obtain asylum.
A saga this week, involving the defection of six members of the
Iranian women’s soccer team to Australia, has been an exercise in
political cynicism and staggering hypocrisy on the part of the country’s
Labor government.
Labor has breached the most basic diplomatic
protocols, incited a media hysteria and exploited the women, in an
attempt to put a gloss on its active participation in an illegal US war
aimed at regime change and the annihilation of Iranian society.
The
team was in Australia for the Asia Cup tournament. During their opening
match against South Korea on March 2, several team members did not sing
the Iranian national anthem.
The Australian media trumpeted that
as a “silent protest,” and claimed that the women would face dire
repercussions if they returned to Iran. When the women sang the national
anthem in their next two matches, the media portrayed it as even more
alarming, suggesting, without evidence, that they had been pressured to
do so.
The transparent aim was to create a hothouse atmosphere. Right-wing
elements of the Iranian diaspora mobilized, protesting outside the Gold
Coast hotel where the women were staying and calling for them to defect.
Politely described by the press as “human rights activists,” the most
prominent among the protesters were supporters of the Shah, the
US-backed dictator overthrown by the 1979 Iranian revolution. These
layers enthusiastically support the bombardment of Iran.
Alongside
the Iranian fascists in campaigning for the defections were Australian
federal agents, mobilized by the Labor government.
*****
On Tuesday morning, amid the whole saga, Labor formally joined the
war against Iran, announcing the deployment of air-to-air missiles, an
advanced command warplane and 85 troops to the United Arab Emirates. It
had already been among the most enthusiastic supporters of the war and
was a de facto participant, including via the presence of Australian
personnel on a US attack submarine that torpedoed an unarmed and
defenceless Iranian vessel off the coast of Sri Lanka last week.
Openly
joining the war, however, was a significant step, which Labor knew
would provoke already substantial anti-war sentiment. In that context,
the defections provided it with an opportunity to posture as a
“humanitarian” defender of Iranian women, even as it was committing to
joining the blitzkrieg of Iran.
An official media that is wholly complicit in the illegal war has
dutifully performed its role, hailing the defections and expressing not a
shadow of doubt that Burke and co. were motivated solely by a
passionate concern for the welfare of the Iranian women.
In addition to the orchestrated and pro-war function of the defections, the media has not raised any of the obvious questions.
To
the extent that the women did not want to return to Iran, it may not
solely have been for fear of the country’s repressive regime, but also
because of the blanket bombardment that is underway.
And what of the Labor government’s attitude to asylum seekers,
including of Iranian descent? The latest available Home Affairs figures,
from last September, show that 78 of the 1,025 people held in
Australia’s “immigration detention” centres are Iranian nationals.
Another 46 are in “community detention,” for a total of 124.
These
people are deprived of all of their basic rights and are in a state of
permanent and unending limbo. Given that they cannot return to Iran, the
majority have no prospect of release. That is, the Labor government is
imprisoning 20 times more Iranians than the six soccer players it
offered refuge to. Burke, as the Home Affairs minister, is the political
leader who holds the prison keys.
*****
Yesterday, the Sydney Morning Herald published a guest
opinion piece by Reza Pahlavi which declared that “Australia did
something important this week,” presenting Labor’s orchestration of the
defections as a benchmark for governments around the world to match in
their provocations and war against Iran.
The Herald
respectfully described Pahlavi as “Iran’s exiled crown prince.” He is
the son of the Shah, the brutal US-backed dictator ousted in 1979.
Pahlavi junior has lived as a ward of the American state for most of his
life, continuously agitating for US-led regime-change and revelling in
the bombardment of his homeland that is underway.
After his first
agitated social media post about the Iranian team, Trump reassured his
followers that the Labor government would “take care” of the situation
and was “doing a good job.”
The son of a dead dictator, pining for
his “right” to rule despotically over the Iranian people on the back of
US bombs and missiles, and the war criminal in the White House, who is
not only setting the world ablaze, but is seeking to establish his own
dictatorship through the overthrow of the American Constitution. That is
the company that Albanese, Burke and the Labor government keep.
The
task is to build a socialist movement of the working class against all
of these monstrous forces, including the Labor government, whose lurch
to the right is a symptom of a capitalist system hurtling to the abyss.
Only such a movement can put an end to war, authoritarianism and
establish the fundamental social rights of the working class, to peace,
equality and the right to live anywhere in the world, free from
oppression and persecution.
It has been nearly two weeks, since the contracts for more than 40,000
academic student employees and graduate student researchers across the
University of California (UC) system expired on March 1. But the United
Auto Workers union, headed by UAW President Shawn Fain, has forced
workers to stay on the job despite the unbearable working conditions and
poverty wages they confront.
The academic workers, who are members of UAW Local 4811, are
determined to overturn these conditions, which are the product of the
UAW bureaucracy’s sellout of previous struggles in 2022 and 2024. In a
clear demonstration of their determination to fight, 93.3 percent of the
membership, which also includes Student Services and Academic
Professionals-UAW (SSAP-UAW) and Research and Public Service
Professionals-UAW (RPSP-UAW), voted in favor of a strike.
Despite
this clear strike mandate, the UAW International and UAW Local 4811
officials have run roughshod over the notion of “no contract, no work.”
In doing so, the bureaucracy has blocked at least for now a powerful
strike by UC workers, which would have broad implications for the
development of the class struggle in California and the US, and the
fight against Trump and US imperialism’s wars abroad and war against the
working class at home.
Because the UAW bureaucracy is in a de
facto alliance with Trump and his illegal trade war measures and
maintaining a complicit silence over the Iran war, the last thing it
wants is to unleash the power of the UC academic workers. The graduate
student workers have repeatedly demonstrated their courage and
willingness to fight not only for an improvement of their immediate
conditions but over broader political issues concerning the entire
working class, including against war and state repression.
*****
Will Lehman
In a statement
to UC workers, Will Lehman, a Pennsylvania Mack Trucks worker and
socialist who is running for president of the United Auto Workers in
this year’s election, said:
UC academic workers voted
overwhelmingly to authorize strike action to fight the poverty wages
and exploitation imposed on you by the university system, its powerful
and wealthy backers and Democratic-controlled state government. But the
UAW bureaucracy has ignored this mandate from the membership and
prevented you from using your collective power.
The UAW apparatus
may think it can override your democratic decision but the final word
is in the hands of the rank-and-file yourselves. I urge UC workers on
every campus to organize rank-and-file committees consisting of academic
and other campus workers, along with students, to enforce the will of
the membership and prepare a university-wide strike.
A strike by
more than 40,000 UC workers will give a powerful impulse to the growing
movement of educators, healthcare workers and other sections of the
working class across California and the US against the corporate and
financial oligarchy that the Trump administration speaks for. The
fascist cabal in the White House, with the complicity of the Democratic
Party, is waging a criminal war against the people of Iran and a war at
home against the social and democratic rights of the working class.
It
will be the working class in the United States that pays for this
illegal war of colonial conquest: in the form of massive cuts to public
and secondary education and other core social programs to finance the
ever-expanding global war, and the lives of working class youth sent to
fight and die for American imperialism. And, as you know very well, the
war abroad will be used to accelerate Trump’s plans to impose a fascist
dictatorship in the United States.
UAW President Shawn Fain has
said absolutely nothing about the war because the UAW bureaucracy
supports it. The same is true for the Democrats. But among workers and
young people there is deep opposition to war and state repression. To
take forward this struggle, I am fighting for the abolition of the UAW
apparatus and the transfer of power to rank-and-file workers in the
factories, universities and other workplaces.
The working class,
in the United States and internationally, has the power to halt and
dismantle the military machine and the US government’s apparatus of
state repression. Only in this way can society’s resources be redirected
to guarantee high-quality, free education from pre-school to
post-graduate studies, for everyone and provide economic security,
healthcare and dignified working conditions for all academic workers.
The
UAW bureaucracy and in particular the members of the Democratic
Socialists of America in Fain’s inner circles and in the leadership of
several academic workers’ union locals are well aware of the hostility
of their members to war, austerity and dictatorship.
While Fain
and the UAW International remain silent, officials from UAW Locals 4811,
872 and 2478 issued a joint statement opposing the war against Iran on
February 28, the day the war started and the day before contracts
expired for UC workers.
Their statement said that the Trump
administration’s “unprovoked attack on Iran is a disaster for working
people everywhere” and acknowledged that “working people in the U.S. do
not want another illegal regime change war.” Pointing to the slashing of
funding for “education and lifesaving biomedical research,” “brutal
immigration crackdowns” and the administration’s proposal to increase
the military budget by over 50 percent, it declared, “Until it is
brought under control, the White House will continue to destroy lives
abroad and impoverish the public at home.”
But the local union officials do not propose a single measure to
mobilize the working class against this criminal war abroad and the
bipartisan war against the working class at home. Instead, they urge
academic workers to appeal to Democrats in Congress to “restrain” the
president.
Our representatives in Congress must find
the political will to restrain the White House before more lives are
lost. ... Academic workers at UC, USC, and Caltech call on the
California Congressional delegation to do everything in their power to
stop Trump’s military intervention abroad.
These are
the same bipartisan warmongers who have backed the criminal sanctions
and regime change operations against Iran, voted for a $1 trillion-plus
military budget and are baying for war against Russia and China. As for
the esteemed California Congressional delegates, they answer to Silicon
Valley, aerospace and defense contractors, and the entertainment and
telecommunications conglomerates, not the working class.
*****
The same opposition to genocide which sparked the 2024 strikes by UC
grad workers will resurface again with ever greater intensity. Strikes
and rebellions from the rank and file are on the agenda, but this
movement must be fused with a political strategy to fight for workers’
power and socialism.
Medvedev graduated from Leningrad State University in 1951 and
received his doctorate from the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences in
Moscow in 1958. He worked as a teacher, school director, and editor
before turning to historical research. It was in the ferment that
followed Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress of
the CPSU in February 1956 that Medvedev began the research that would
occupy him for the better part of a decade. Khrushchev’s denunciation of
Stalin’s “cult of personality”—however partial, self-serving, and
politically motivated—opened a space, if a narrow and precarious one,
for a re-examination of Soviet history. It was within this space that
Medvedev began gathering testimony from survivors of the camps,
unpublished memoirs, party documents, and the accounts of hundreds of
witnesses to Stalin’s crimes.
The resulting manuscript, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, was completed in 1968 and circulated through unofficial channels in samizdat. Its existence became widely known when Andrei Sakharov referred to it in his essay Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.
Sakharov had been in close contact with Medvedev, and the two exchanged
manuscripts; Medvedev helped distribute copies of Sakharov’s essay
through the samizdat network. In 1969, Medvedev was expelled from the
Communist Party for views deemed incompatible with party membership. The
first English-language edition of Let History Judge was
published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1972, and the full Russian
text appeared in New York in 1974. The book was eventually translated
into fourteen languages and published in twenty countries. In the Soviet
Union itself, publication was impossible until the era of glasnost (“openness”) in the late 1980s.
The book was immediately recognized as a landmark. Harrison Salisbury, reviewing it in The New York Times,
declared that on the basis of Medvedev’s work, every existing history
of Russia from Lenin’s death to Khrushchev’s fall would have to be
revised. Edward Crankshaw described it in The Observer as a one-man attempt to rescue Soviet history from the party hacks and to salvage the honor of the revolution.
The significance of Let History Judge requires careful
calibration. Medvedev was not the first serious internal critic of
Stalinism; there were many others within the Soviet Union who, from the
1950s onward, had arrived at critical assessments of the Stalin era and
its legacy, and who continued to be suppressed. What distinguished
Medvedev’s work was that it was the first major critical study of that
period to be allowed to reach publication abroad since the Great Terror
had silenced virtually all independent voices. In that sense, its
principal significance was as a signal—an indication that within Soviet
society there existed a search for a left-wing alternative to Stalinism,
and that this search was being conducted with a degree of scholarly
seriousness and archival rigor that had not been seen for decades.
*****
For all its merits, however, Let History Judge was constrained
by serious political and theoretical limitations—limitations rooted in
the very milieu from which Medvedev emerged. Medvedev was, in essence, a
man of the Twentieth Congress. His critique of Stalinism never
transcended the boundaries established by Khrushchev’s Secret Speech.
That speech attributed the crimes of the Stalin era primarily to the
personal defects of Stalin himself—his paranoia, his lust for power, his
cruelty—while insisting that until approximately 1934, Stalin had been a
faithful Leninist who had correctly led the struggle against the
various oppositions. Khrushchev’s schema thus preserved the fundamental
Stalinist falsification of the inner-party struggles of the 1920s: the
claim that the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, and the various other
opposition currents had been enemies of socialism whom Stalin had been
right to defeat.
Medvedev, while going considerably further than Khrushchev in
documenting the scale and horror of the terror, essentially operated
within this same framework. He treated Stalinism as a problem of
“personality” and of deformations within an otherwise sound system,
rather than as the product of a definite social process—the bureaucratic
degeneration of the workers’ state, rooted in the material conditions
of Soviet backwardness, international isolation, and the defeats of the
world revolution. This was the central theoretical weakness of his work,
its inability or unwillingness to provide a class analysis of the
phenomenon it described.
*****
Medvedev’s treatment of Trotsky requires careful examination. He
rejected the most grotesque of the Stalinist fabrications and did not
maintain that Trotsky was a counter-revolutionary, an agent of fascism,
or a traitor. He acknowledged Trotsky’s leading role in the October
Revolution—a partial rehabilitation within a Soviet context in which the
very mention of Trotsky’s name in anything other than the language of
denunciation had been a punishable offense. But the closer one examines
Medvedev’s treatment, the more apparent it becomes that his approach was
characterized not by scholarly objectivity but by persistent political
hostility—a determination to counter, undermine, and reject any claim
that Trotsky represented a viable and politically superior alternative
to Stalin.
*****
Medvedev’s reluctance to engage honestly with Trotsky’s historical
role was inseparable from his failure to address the central theoretical
issue in the conflict between Trotsky and Stalin: the theory of
permanent revolution versus the doctrine of socialism in one
country—that is, the question of proletarian internationalism versus
national reformism. This was not a peripheral or abstract doctrinal
dispute. It was the axis upon which the entire political life of the
Soviet Union and the Communist International turned in the 1920s, and
its resolution in favor of the Stalinist position had consequences of
world-historical magnitude.
Trotsky’s theory held that in the
epoch of imperialism, the democratic and national tasks of backward
countries could be resolved only through the seizure of power by the
working class, and that the resulting workers’ state could sustain
itself only as part of an advancing international revolution. Stalin’s
doctrine, first promulgated in late 1924, inverted this perspective,
arguing that the Soviet Union possessed within itself sufficient
resources to build a complete socialist society. This doctrine provided
the theoretical foundation for the bureaucracy’s nationalist
degeneration, its transformation of the Comintern into a tool of Soviet
foreign policy and its betrayal of revolutionary movements from China in
1925–27 to Spain in 1936–39.
Medvedev, in all his major works,
simply declined to engage with this question in any serious way. He
acknowledged, in passing, that there had been disputes over “socialism
in one country,” but he never subjected the doctrine to critical
analysis, never examined its theoretical premises, and never traced its
catastrophic practical consequences for the international workers’
movement. This omission was not accidental. To have examined the
question honestly would have meant acknowledging that Trotsky’s critique
of Stalinism was not merely a set of specific policy objections but a
comprehensive theoretical and political alternative, rooted in the
classical Marxist understanding of the world-historical character of the
socialist revolution. It would have meant recognizing that the struggle
between Trotsky and Stalin was, at its core, a struggle between two
irreconcilable social programs—one that sought to extend the revolution
internationally on the basis of the independent mobilization of the
working class, and another that sought to consolidate the privileges and
power of the national bureaucracy at the expense of both the Soviet and
the international proletariat.
*****
On the Moscow Trials and the Great Purge of 1936–38, Medvedev’s
contribution was more substantial. He documented with considerable power
the fraudulence of the show trials, the baselessness of the charges,
the torture and coercion employed to extract confessions, and the
staggering scale of the repression. He showed convincingly that the
defendants—Old Bolsheviks, military leaders, party cadres,
intellectuals, and ordinary citizens by the hundreds of thousands—were
innocent of the crimes attributed to them. He demonstrated that Stalin
was not a madman but a calculating and ruthless political actor obsessed
with the consolidation of personal power.
Yet Medvedev’s analysis of the purges suffered from the same theoretical
deficit that afflicted his treatment of the earlier period. He could
describe the what of the terror with great force, but he could not
adequately explain the why. If Stalinism was merely the product of one
man’s pathological personality grafted onto an otherwise healthy body,
why did the party, the state, and the security apparatus prove so
utterly incapable of resistance? Why did the terror assume the specific
political form that it did—targeting, above all, those who had any
connection, however tenuous, to the traditions and ideas of the October
Revolution and to the program of international socialism?
*****
The contrast between Medvedev’s work and that of Vadim Zakharovich
Rogovin (1937–1998) illuminates with particular clarity the political
and theoretical issues at stake. Rogovin, a Marxist sociologist and
historian at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of
Sciences, produced between 1992 and his death in 1998 the seven-volume Was There an Alternative?,
a monumental study of the Trotskyist opposition to Stalinism covering
the period from 1923 to 1940. Rogovin approached the same historical
terrain as Medvedev, but from a fundamentally different standpoint—that
of revolutionary Marxism, informed by and broadly sympathetic to the
perspective of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International.
Rogovin’s own understanding of the struggle waged by Trotsky was
considerably deepened by his relationship with the International
Committee of the Fourth International, which began in 1993. Following
his initial discussions with representatives of the ICFI, Rogovin
revised the first volume of his history. The subsequent volumes were
written during the years of his close collaboration with the ICFI.
Where Medvedev treated the inner-party struggles of the 1920s as
regrettable but essentially secondary episodes in the consolidation of
Soviet power, Rogovin demonstrated that they were the central political
drama of the epoch—that the conflict between Stalinism and Trotskyism
was not a mere factional squabble but a struggle over the fate of the
revolution itself, with world-historical implications. Where Medvedev
presented Bukharin as the authentic alternative to Stalin, Rogovin
showed, on the basis of extensive archival research, that it was the
Left Opposition—with its program of planned industrialization,
inner-party democracy, and proletarian internationalism—that represented
the viable revolutionary alternative, and that the principal function
of the Great Terror was the physical annihilation of this opposition and
the eradication of Trotsky’s political influence.
*****
Medvedev wrote as a reformer, addressing himself to the more enlightened
elements of the Soviet bureaucracy; his political program was the
democratization of the existing system without a revolutionary
transformation of the social relations upon which it rested. Rogovin
wrote as a revolutionary Marxist, animated by the conviction that the
historical process opened by October had not been completed but merely
arrested, and that the Trotskyist movement embodied the possibility that
the Soviet Union might have developed along a profoundly different and
more progressive path.
*****
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 represented a
decisive test for the various currents of Soviet political thought, and
Medvedev’s response to it is deeply revealing. During the glasnost
period, Medvedev had been rehabilitated. His books were published in
the Soviet Union for the first time, he rejoined the Communist Party in
1989, was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, and served as a
member of the Supreme Soviet. In September 1991, he opposed the banning
of the Communist Party and did not recognize the dissolution of the
Congress. He briefly co-chaired the Socialist Party of Working People.
But
as the catastrophic social consequences of capitalist restoration
became apparent, Medvedev did not move toward a revolutionary socialist
critique. On the contrary, he turned sharply to the right and became
thoroughly corrupted politically—a trajectory characteristic of
virtually the entire layer of the official dissident movement. He did
not return to the archives to deepen his work on the Terror. Instead, he
devoted himself to increasingly uncritical biographical studies of
Russian political leaders that served, in practice, to legitimize the
new Russian state power.
*****
The trajectory of Medvedev’s life—from dissident critic to recipient of
the FSB’s literary prize and supporter of Putin’s authoritarian
regime—would have been entirely comprehensible to Trotsky, who warned
that the bureaucracy’s monopoly of power, if not broken by the working
class, would lead to capitalist restoration and new forms of
authoritarian rule. The work of Vadim Rogovin represents the alternative
historiographical tradition—rooted in classical Marxism, approaching
the Soviet experience not as a cautionary tale against revolution but as
a confirmation of the necessity of revolutionary leadership,
international socialist strategy and workers’ democracy. It is within
this tradition that the most important questions raised by the history
of the Soviet Union will continue to find their most penetrating
answers.
Like scientific, political and philosophical argumentation, the
meditation—or what came to be called the personal essay—can be traced
back millennia. Seneca’s essays, for example, such as the small “On
Noise” and the grand “On the Shortness of Life,” are delightful. The
name most closely associated with the modern essay form is the 16th
century’s Michel de Montaigne, who blended the philosophical with the
autobiographical and revived the Western tradition of short prose pieces
conveying a central insight, usually one that is counterintuitive, and
that is generally answerable to reason, which dominates the genre today.
Montaigne’s “On Cannibals” is a blueprint for centuries of essays that
followed.
American essayists, then, were joining a well-developed
tradition. Still, the energy of the American 19th century made its mark
on world literature and thought. The published oratory of Frederick
Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, the philosophically idealist and
aphoristic essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the equally aphoristic if less
idealist writing of Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau, the powerful
polemics of another friend of Emerson’s, Margaret Fuller, these led a
parade of American personal and political essayists. Abolitionists,
feminists, social reformers, education theorists and, later, muckraking
journalists, all drove a vibrant national conversation in prose of
distinctive moods and voices.
If there has been a significant
evolution in the American essay in the 21st century, it has largely been
along the unhealthy lines of academic postmodernism and its pernicious
offspring or sibling, identity politics. Truth, if it came into the
picture at all, became a matter of subjective narrative.
Of course, these are broad strokes, and a great deal of talent has
produced a great deal of good writing in the US the past 25 years.
Writers on science and technology, for instance, have made for
fascinating reading. But to the extent that any new conceptual ground
has been broken by the popular American essay, it has been the infertile
ground of personal “identities,” promoting categorizations endowed with
stereotypes and resting on blinkered history such that a whiff of Third
Reich thought recalling “Jewish music” and “Aryan music” could be
detected in the magazine section of Barnes and Noble.
*****
There are other reasons that the last decades of American history
have produced a frustratingly impoverished literature. These have been
decades of relentless war, foreign and domestic depredations by an
unfettered finance capitalism, of stagnant wages, rising prices and
deteriorating working conditions. The nation is close to $40 trillion in
debt while the chasm between the rich and the working class has never
been more obscene. These are conditions ripe for working class
rebellion, and the American culture machine of Marvel movies, sports,
celebrity and other distractions has been working at full capacity.
Writers
have at times raised their voices against symptoms—poverty, wildfires,
the COVID pandemic—but as struggling members of a precarious middle
class, they have tended not to draw conclusions or connect dots. Nor
would politics that stepped beyond the cordon guarded by the Democratic
Party have been welcomed by the publishing houses or university presses.
*****
The US and the world are entering a period that will see
social upheavals. For writers, nonfiction prose is one of the most
expeditious forms for responding to events. BAE 2025 offers a
glimpse of the awakening of writers to the changing of the epoch, and
the well-reasoned essay will undoubtedly play a role in that process.
Scientists have developed an AI model capable of reading, analyzing
and generating genetic code across all known domains of life—a
development with vast implications for understanding human disease,
designing new treatments and advancing biological knowledge on a scale
previously impossible.
The model, called Evo 2, was published in the journal Nature
on March 4 by a team of researchers at the Arc Institute, a nonprofit
biomedical research organization based in Palo Alto, California. Unlike
commonly used AI models such as ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, which
are built from text written in human languages, Evo 2 was trained
entirely on DNA sequences—approximately 9 trillion base pairs drawn from
bacteria, plants, animals and every other domain of life.
*****
The potential applications of such a model are revolutionary. A tool
that can predict which genetic variations cause disease, generate
plausible new DNA sequences, and identify the functional properties of
genes across all of biology could dramatically accelerate the
development of new medicines, gene therapies, and diagnostic tools. It
could transform the understanding and treatment of cancer, genetic
disorders, autoimmune diseases and infectious diseases. Under conditions
of rational, scientifically planned social organization, such
capabilities could be made available to all of humanity.
Under
capitalism, however, the benefits of such breakthroughs are inevitably
channeled toward profit. The pharmaceutical giants and biotech firms
already developing applications on the basis of open biological AI
models will patent the downstream treatments and price them to maximize
shareholder returns—not to improve public health. The working class,
which produces the social wealth that makes such research possible, will
be largely denied access to the life-saving treatments that emerge from
it.
*****
Evo 2 successfully predicted that mutations in critical areas of DNA
would be highly damaging—a well-known biological fact, but one that the
model was never explicitly programmed with. This ability emerged
entirely from patterns in the raw sequence data.
The model also
accurately predicted whether human genetic variants—a term scientists
now prefer to “mutation,” since not all variations cause disease—would
lead to illness. For insertions and deletions in DNA sequences, Evo 2
outperformed all existing tools. For simpler, single-letter changes in
the genetic code, it performed comparably to the best tools that had not
been trained on labeled examples, though it fell short of specialized
models trained on curated datasets.
The distinction is important:
Evo 2 is an “unsupervised” model, meaning it learned solely from raw DNA
sequences without being told what to look for. Models that are trained
on data that has been labeled by scientists—so-called “supervised”
models—have a built-in advantage for specific tasks. That Evo 2 can
match or exceed such models on many tasks, despite learning from raw
data alone, is a significant achievement.
Evo 2 also accurately
identified a range of features within genomes. In bacteria, it correctly
identified which genetic elements were capable of moving from one
location to another in the genome. In humans, it accurately identified
the boundaries between introns and exons—the segments of a gene that are
cut out or retained when DNA is transcribed into the messenger RNA
(mRNA) that serves as the template for building proteins. Not all such
boundaries are known in the human genome, so an automated tool like Evo 2
has the potential to greatly advance biological knowledge in a short
period of time.
Its ability to recognize these features emerged
spontaneously from patterns in the sequence data—evidence that the model
has independently developed something akin to an internal understanding
of how DNA encodes RNA and proteins.
*****
Because Evo 2 is also a generative model, it can produce new DNA
sequences using a shorter sequence as a starting prompt—analogous to how
ChatGPT generates text in response to a written prompt.
The
scientists tested this capability by providing Evo 2 with the first
portion of a gene and asking it to complete the rest. In tests across
six diverse species, the model generated between 70 and nearly 100
percent of the remaining gene accurately.
*****
The collaborative character of the work that produced Evo 2 is
striking. The DNA sequences at its foundation were contributed freely by
scientists around the world, compiled from public databases spanning
all domains of life. The AI architecture that made it possible was
publicly available. And the finished model and its curated dataset were
released back to the research community.
Yet this collaborative
labor did not take place outside the profit system. Evo 2’s largest
model was trained on 2,048 NVIDIA H100 GPUs using NVIDIA’s DGX Cloud
platform on Amazon Web Services—resources provided through a formal
partnership between the Arc Institute and NVIDIA, whose employees are
among the paper’s co-authors.
The Arc Institute itself was
founded with $650 million from Silicon Valley billionaires, including
Patrick Collison, the CEO of the $65 billion payments company Stripe,
who is both a co-founder of the institute and a co-author on the Evo 2
paper. Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, contributed to
the project’s underlying architecture during a sabbatical. Both
Collison and Brockman have ties to the Trump administration and the
Israeli government, the chief perpetrators of the ongoing Gaza genocide
and the imperialist war against Iran.
The contradiction is clear:
the most advanced biological AI model in existence was produced through
collaborative, non-proprietary scientific labor—yet it was incubated
within corporate and philanthropic structures that are themselves
products of the capitalist accumulation of wealth. The pharmaceutical
and biotech companies that will utilize Evo 2 for commercial
applications face no obligation to make the resulting treatments
affordable or universally accessible and will not do so.
Tools
like Evo 2 have the potential to revolutionize medicine—accelerating the
discovery of treatments for cancer, genetic diseases and conditions
that currently have no cure. They could extend healthy life expectancy
globally, transform diagnostics and make personalized genomic medicine a
reality for billions of people. But under capitalism, such advances are
destined to enrich a privileged few. Already, the wealthiest layers of
society have access to concierge medicine and bespoke healthcare
services that the vast majority of the population cannot afford.
AI-driven breakthroughs in genomic medicine will deepen this chasm
unless the working class intervenes to reorganize society on a socialist
basis.
Israeli military officials have said eliminating Hezbollah will take
months of ground operations inside Lebanon and is likely to continue
beyond the end of the war against Iran.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has called up 100,000 reservists. It
has deployed tanks, infantry-fighting vehicles and mine-clearing
bulldozers to the border, while ground forces have pushed into southern
Lebanon, seizing hilltops near the border. This signals a return to the
Israeli occupation that lasted from 1982 to 2000.
The IDF
instructed all residents south of the Litani River, many of whom had
been displaced multiple times during earlier Israel’s bombardments, to
evacuate to the north. It then ordered the evacuation of Beirut’s
southern suburbs that together have resulted in the displacement of
nearly 760,000 people. More than 10 percent of the country’s six million
population have now been displaced and the true number is likely
higher, as many families have fled without registering.
*****
Lebanon’s Sunni elite are collaborating with Israel. On March 2, Nawaf
Salam, Lebanon’s prime minister, declared “all Hezbollah’s security and
military activities” illegal, effective immediately and demanded it hand
over its weapons to the state, a call that Hezbollah rejected. This was
a remarkable escalation against the party which has been cast adrift
following the US-aligned, former Jihadist Ahmed al-Shara’a’s takeover in
Syria and the US-Israeli war on Iran. Hezbollah’s longtime ally, Nabih
Berri, the speaker of parliament who heads the Shi’ite Amal party,
supported the move that leaves it politically isolated.
The
IDF has carried out hundreds of air strikes on Beirut, targeting the
densely populated southern suburbs, killing more than 600 people and
injuring at least 1,000, as well as hitting Tyre and other southern
towns and cities. It claims it has killed 200 Hezbollah fighters. It has
also bombed Hezbollah’s Al-Qard al-Hasan financial institution that
provides interest-free loans and other financial services to the Shi’ite
community, aimed at severing Hezbollah’s links with its support base.
An
IDF drone attacked a seafront hotel popular with tourists in Raouche,
killing at least four people and wounding 10, according to health
officials. Israel said the attack had killed five senior commanders of
Iran’s elite Quds Force, the overseas operations arm of the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Human Rights Watch, the New York-based
rights group, issued a report Monday stating it had evidence that
Israel had fired white phosphorus munitions over a residential area in
southern Lebanon’s Yohmor, with fires breaking out in at least two homes
on March 3. White phosphorus use in war against civilians is outlawed.
Israel used white phosphorus missiles in the 2006 war on Lebanon, as
well as more recently in the 2023-24 hostilities, even firing within 100 meters of a United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) base,
injuring 15 peacekeepers, after an incident where Israeli tanks had
broken into the base.
Israel’s
warplanes carried out waves of attacks across southern Lebanon and the
Bekaa Valley, east of Beirut, while the military ordered residents of
Tyre and Sidon to evacuate cities north of the Litani River, ahead of
“imminent” strikes on alleged Hezbollah infrastructure.
*****
The war now unfolding across Lebanon, Iran, and the wider Middle East
is the expression of a deepening crisis of imperialist domination in a
region whose ruling classes—whether in Beirut, Riyadh, Doha, Cairo, or
Tel Aviv—are all tied by a thousand threads to global finance capital
and the strategic imperatives of Washington.
Israel’s assault on
Lebanon is inseparable from the broader effort by the US to reassert
control over a region destabilised by decades of war, sanctions and
economic collapse as it prepares to take on its economic rival China.
The Gulf monarchies, whose wealth rests on the exploitation of migrant
labour and the recycling of oil revenues into Western markets, have
aligned themselves fully with this project. Their support for the
Lebanese Armed Forces, their pressure on Beirut to curb Hezbollah and
quiet coordination with Israel reflect the interests of a regional
bourgeoisie whose survival depends on the suppression of all social and
political opposition.
The working class and rural poor of the
Middle East—Lebanese, Palestinian, Iranian, Iraqi, Egyptian, Kurdish,
Syrian, and beyond—bears the full weight of war, displacement,
unemployment, inflation and the destruction of social infrastructure.
The mass displacement of Lebanese civilians is a continuation of the
same imperialist logic that has produced the devastation of Gaza, the
ruination of Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and the
immiseration of millions across the region.
What is emerging is a
unified imperialist-led front—Washington, Israel, the Gulf monarchies,
and the comprador elites of the Arab world—against the masses of the
Middle East. Their aim is to redraw borders, crush resistance, and
secure the region for global capital. The rivalries between them are
secondary to their shared class interest in suppressing any movement
that threatens their rule.
The only force capable of halting the descent into a region‑wide
catastrophe is the working class. The struggles of Lebanese workers
against austerity, the mass protests in Iraq and Iran, the Palestinian
resistance to occupation, and the growing discontent across the Arab
world all point to the same conclusion: the fight against war is
inseparable from the fight against the capitalist system that produces
it. A unified, internationalist movement of the working class across the
Middle East—independent of all bourgeois factions, sectarian parties,
and imperialist powers—is the only viable path to ending the cycle of
war, occupation, and exploitation.
The trip by German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul to Israel and the
Gulf region underscores that the German government, despite all
concerns about the political and economic consequences of the war,
firmly backs the US-Israeli offensive against Iran. As the first Western
government representative to travel to the region since the start of
the illegal US-Israeli war of aggression, Wadephul demonstrated Berlin’s
political alignment with the warmongers.
At a joint press
conference with Wadephul, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar seized
the opportunity not only to justify Israel’s large-scale bombing
campaign in Iran but also the genocide in Gaza, Israel’s war against
Hezbollah in Lebanon and the massive attacks on Beirut with the familiar
war lies.
Wadephul did not contradict these statements in any
way. Instead, he explicitly thanked Sa’ar, repeated key propaganda
claims and demonstratively sided with the warmongers. “The greatest
danger comes from the Iranian regime,” he declared. “You have always
said that, and today and here it becomes very clear why.” Iran, he
claimed, with its “increasingly aggressive behavior and its ever more
advanced military arsenal … is a danger to the region and to Europe.”
Germany stood “at the side of Israel,” and “Iran’s indiscriminate
attacks, also on civilians, must finally stop.”
These statements
turn reality completely on its head. It is Israel and the United States
that are indiscriminately bombing hospitals, schools and residential
areas and killing thousands of civilians. In the bombing of a girls’
school in the Iranian city of Minab alone, more than 150 students were
killed.
What is unfolding in the region is a declared war of
annihilation reminiscent of the Nazis. US President Donald Trump has
openly threatened the destruction of Iran. Israel is pursuing a similar
scorched-earth policy in Lebanon. At the same time, the genocide in
Gaza—which has reduced the Gaza Strip to a landscape of ruins and cost
the lives of more than 70,000 people, the majority of them women and
children—is now being extended to the entire region.
*****
The escalation against Iran and Lebanon is part of a broader war
offensive aimed at bringing the entire region under imperialist control
while simultaneously preparing the ground for even wider wars against
Russia and China.
German imperialism intends to play a leading role in this new
division of the world. As long as Berlin is not yet in a position to
openly challenge the United States, it seeks in Washington’s wake to
massively expand its military and political influence and establish
itself as a global power.
In pursuing this aim, Germany’s ruling
class is once again prepared to support—and itself commit—barbaric
crimes, including illegal wars of aggression and genocide, such as those
that Europe, and above all German imperialism, unleashed in the First
and Second World Wars. This is precisely what Wadephul’s trip and his
demonstrative alignment with the far-right Netanyahu regime signify.
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.
