Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. American imperialism and the oppression of Iran
The war that began on February 28 is the culmination of nearly a century of American imperialist intervention in Iran and cannot be understood apart from that history.
The struggle against war is an international question. It cannot be waged only within national boundaries, and it cannot be entrusted to any existing government. No amount of protest, however massive, directed at the existing capitalist states will stop the drive to war. The mass demonstrations of 2003 did not stop the invasion of Iraq. The worldwide outcry against the genocide in Gaza did not stop it. Appeals to the “rules-based order” will not stop the bombing of Iran. They will not stop the relentless escalation toward nuclear war.*****
The decisive question—the only question that ultimately matters—is the development of revolutionary leadership in the international working class. This is not a new insight. It was the central conclusion drawn by Leon Trotsky from the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century, and it has lost none of its force. In the founding document of the Fourth International, the Transitional Program of 1938, Trotsky wrote:
All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet “ripened” for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.
That assessment, written on the eve of the Second World War, defines with even greater precision the crisis of the present moment. The objective conditions for the overthrow of capitalism are not merely ripe, they are, as Trotsky warned, beginning to rot. The alternative is not reform or revolution, but revolution or catastrophe. The task of building the revolutionary leadership of the working class—the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections—is the urgent, overriding, and inescapable political task of our time.
2. United Kingdom: Fighting the right means stopping the Iran war!
Saturday’s Together Alliance march in London “to stop the far right” takes place under the shadow of a war on Iran led by the fascistic leaders of the United States and Israel, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. This is another illegal war in the Middle East supported by a Labour government, coming on top of its criminal role in the Gaza genocide.
Millions of lives are threatened by ultimatums demanding total surrender on pain of the destruction of critical energy infrastructure. Millions more worldwide have already been endangered by the disruption of critical fuel and fertiliser supplies. An ethnic civil war tearing apart a nation of 90 million people is being actively encouraged.
European governments are shoring up the walls of Fortress Europe against an anticipated new wave of refugees. The Islamophobia whipped up to facilitate the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq is being whipped up again, coupled with the noxious lie equating opposition to Zionism with antisemitism. Anti-war movements are threatened with the same police-state offensive deployed against the supporters of the Palestinians.
This context makes clear the stakes in the fight against the far right. As the World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board wrote Saturday: “Trump’s ultimatum is not merely a threat against Iran. It is a warning to the whole world of what the ruling class is prepared to do to maintain its power.”
These events show that the far right cannot be combatted outside of a struggle against imperialist war and for the defense of the democratic and social rights of the working class. At the heart of this movement must be a fight to demolish the capitalist system, which sets nation against nation in competition for profits and resources and worker against worker in competition for crumbs from the table of the oligarchy.
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A movement must be built in the working class, in total opposition to the Labour Party, based not on abstract statements of anti-racism and opposition to the far right, but concrete struggles against their sources: war, inequality, authoritarianism and the capitalist system underlying them all.
As the World Socialist Web Site argued recently of planned anti-Trump protests in the US, “Any movement that treats war as secondary, or avoids naming it directly, leaves intact the principal mechanism through which the ruling class is driving toward dictatorship and catastrophe.” The statement continued, “It must be built by bringing the fight against war into the workplaces and industries that make society run: the ports, logistics hubs, refineries, rail networks, schools, and hospitals.”
Reports of precisely timed bets on oil futures and war policies in predictive markets have exposed new depths of criminality by the financial elite and corruption of the US political system under the presidency of Donald Trump.
Media reports have documented cases in which war policy and presidential messaging have been transformed into private enrichment opportunities for those with direct access to inside information about US military operations and Trump’s media announcements.
In the early hours of March 22, the Financial Times reported that traders placed a huge, one‑way bet on falling oil prices just minutes before Donald Trump announced that he was pausing planned strikes on Iranian power plants and claimed there had been “productive conversations” with Tehran.
According to the FT, roughly 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate contracts changed hands between 6:49 and 6:50 a.m. in New York—about 15 minutes before Trump’s Truth Social post signaling a potential deescalation, a message that immediately sent oil sharply lower and lifted stock index futures.
The notional value of this position was approximately $580 million, meaning the trader or traders stood to reap tens or hundreds of millions in profit from a predictable collapse in prices that could only be known in advance by those with access to the content and timing of the president’s announcement.
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This pattern is now clear: Trump’s televised remarks and social media posts, ostensibly about the fate of millions of people in the Middle East, functioned as signals to markets that certain traders anticipated by minutes—an interval that, in electronic futures markets, is an eternity and a hallmark of inside information.
One portfolio manager told reporters that the timing of the trades was “really abnormal” and concluded, “Somebody just got a lot richer.” The criminality is so open that Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, denounced what he called “mind‑blowing corruption,” pointing to the confluence of Trump’s public statements, the timing of US military operations and the surge of speculative bets on war in both commodity and prediction markets.
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Oil futures markets allow traders to buy or sell standardized contracts for future delivery of crude oil at a fixed price. Each Brent or WTI contract typically represents 1,000 barrels, so a move of just $10 per barrel translates into $10,000 dollars per contract in profit or loss. Because these markets are highly leveraged—requiring only a small margin deposit—large institutional investors can control enormous positions with relatively modest capital outlays.
In the Iran war context, a trader who correctly anticipates a sharp move driven by a presidential announcement can scale this leverage to staggering proportions. A position of roughly $580 million in futures exposure, established just minutes before Trump’s deescalation post and liquidated after a $10–$15 per barrel drop, would yield profits easily in the hundreds of millions.
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Alongside the futures markets, the January US attack on Venezuela and the launching of the war on Iran have been turned into lucrative opportunities on prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. A January report said that Polymarket hosted a contract on whether the US would attack Venezuela by the end of the month, with trading volume reaching over $100 million on the question as tensions escalated and US forces prepared strikes.
The Kalshi platform ran parallel markets on regime change and leadership outcomes in Caracas, with millions wagered on who would become the next Venezuelan leader after a US intervention.
The scale of the Iran bets is even more grotesque. Reuters, cited by Canadian media, found that $529 million had been wagered on Polymarket contracts linked to the timing of US and Israeli attacks on Iran. It is also a grisly fact that an additional $150 million was bet on whether Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would be “removed from power.”
Analytics firm Bubblemaps identified six accounts that made roughly $1.2 million in profit by placing large positions just hours before the February 28 strikes on Iran, purchasing “yes” shares priced at around 10 cents that paid out at a dollar once the bombs fell.
Kalshi and Polymarket are the two dominant prediction markets today, representing the fusion of speculative finance, crypto assets and political gambling. Kalshi, regulated as a designated contract market in the US, is nominally based in New York but has aggressively expanded into global political and war‑related contracts.
Polymarket operates on the blockchain, which means that the core functions of the platform are implemented and recorded on a public, cryptographic ledger rather than in a private database controlled solely by the company. By managing its records in this manner, Polymarket has tried to place much of its infrastructure outside of US jurisdiction so that it can manage an international betting platform that has hosted markets on everything from elections to nuclear detonations. This is a tech feature of capitalism in its death agony: high stakes gambling on matters of life and death facing masses of people like a form of sports betting.
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Market professionals have been blunt in rejecting the idea that these trading patterns can be explained by ordinary speculation. The Kobeissi Letter—a widely followed macro and commodities newsletter cited by Business Insider—argued that Trump is following the same “playbook” he used during the China trade war, issuing alternating threats and conciliatory messages designed to trigger violent swings in energy and equity markets.
It noted that the Iran talks announcement fit a recurring pattern in which presidential communications are used to manipulate financial conditions, fueling a highly profitable “TACO” trade (Trump Always Chickens Out) that cannot be navigated without privileged insight into policy decisions.
Marko Kolanovic, former head of quantitative strategy at JPMorgan, has repeatedly warned that such manipulation is a “net negative for markets” and that “manipulation will cause liquidity to disappear and real problems will stay.” Commenting on the Iran war swings, Kolanovic urged investors to ignore official statements and focus on the physical reality—whether oil is flowing through the Strait of Hormuz—because the content of pronouncements has been corrupted by manipulation. His conclusion is that these markets are being moved by actors who know in advance what Trump will say and do.
Further confirmation of the criminal manipulation of markets is the recent departure from the Securities and Exchange Commission of Enforcement Division Director Margaret A. Ryan. Although the official reason given is that Ryan resigned without explanation, multiple reports say she left after clashes with SEC leadership over how to handle politically sensitive cases, including those linked to Trump’s circle.
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The convergence of oil futures manipulation, war gambling on Kalshi and Polymarket, Trump family profiteering and the pardoning of financial criminals demonstrates that the US government is run by criminal elements. Trump’s statements on Iran—talk of the war ending “very soon,” hints of “productive conversations,” threats to obliterate power plants—are not only reckless and criminal, but tools for moving markets in ways that benefit those with inside access.
These developments expose financial speculation on war in ways that were previously impossible. The timing of airstrikes, the opening of ceasefire talks, even the survival of political leaders have been commodified as tradable events, with billions in market capitalization and trading volume riding on the outcome.
The logic of finance capital, in which human tragedy is converted into an “asset class,” has been fused with the Pentagon war machine and the imperialist policies of the Trump White House. The result is a system in which the ruling class is making billions from arms manufacturing and US military contracts and then literally betting on death and destruction and using state power to ensure that these bets pay off.
4. “We negotiate with bombs”: US moves to deploy 82nd Airborne to Iran
On Tuesday, as US President Donald Trump declared that the United States had “won” its undeclared and illegal war against Iran and claimed negotiations are ongoing, US media reports made clear that the military buildup targeting the country is expanding.
CNN reported Tuesday that approximately 1,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, including the division commander Major General Brandon Tegtmeier and his staff, are “expecting to deploy” to the Middle East in the coming days. The New York Times reported Monday that the 82nd Airborne’s “Immediate Response Force”—a 3,000-strong rapid-deployment brigade—could be sent to capture Kharg Island, the terminal through which 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports pass. Politico reported Tuesday that a written deployment order was expected within hours.
The 82nd Airborne is the US Army’s rapid-deployment division, trained to parachute into hostile territory to seize airfields and key objectives. Its deployment is a qualitative escalation beyond the Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) already en route, which are smaller, amphibious forces designed for coastal operations. The combination of airborne and amphibious forces points to an operation involving both a seaborne assault and an inland insertion—far larger than a single island seizure.
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Nearly four weeks of bombing have killed thousands of Iranian civilians, destroyed residential buildings, struck schools and hospitals and reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble. Amnesty International has confirmed that a US strike on a school in Minab killed at least 170 people, most of them schoolgirls.
The supreme leader, the intelligence minister, the head of the Supreme National Security Council and dozens of other senior officials have been assassinated in strikes on densely populated residential areas of Tehran. Iran’s telecommunications have been destroyed, cutting off 90 million people from the outside world for more than three weeks.
The human rights organization HRANA has documented at least 1,443 civilian deaths, including 217 children—and the true toll is certainly far higher given the near-total communications blackout now in its 23rd day. Iran’s 90 million people have been cut off from the outside world since February 28; the blackout costs the economy $35.7 million a day. On Monday, a strike on a residential building in northern Tehran killed a university professor and his two children. Gas facilities in Isfahan were struck and partially damaged. Strikes on the South Pars gas field have disrupted heating and cooking fuel across the country. Fourteen American service members have been killed.
In Lebanon, Israel has launched a full-scale ground invasion of the south under cover of the Iran war. At least 1,072 people have been killed and 2,966 wounded since March 2, including 118 children and 40 medical workers. More than 1.2 million people—one in five Lebanese—have been driven from their homes.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered the “acceleration of the demolition of Lebanese houses in border villages” following what he called the “Beit Hanoun and Rafah models”—a direct reference to the methods of destruction Israel employed in Gaza. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for making the Litani River “our new border with the state of Lebanon.” Among the dead was Taline Shehab, five years old, killed by an Israeli airstrike as she slept. Her father was also killed. Her mother is in a coma.
Israel has bombed five bridges over the Litani River, severing the south from the rest of the country. Katz declared that “hundreds of thousands of residents of southern Lebanon who evacuated northward will not return south of the Litani River.” On Monday, Israeli strikes killed at least three people in Beirut, including a three-year-old girl. Hussein Bazzi, a chemistry professor at the Lebanese University, was killed by an airstrike. Three Christian young men in the village of Ain Ebel were killed while repairing a satellite dish—the Israeli military claimed they were installing surveillance equipment; residents denied any connection to Hezbollah. The Lebanese government has ordered the expulsion of Iran’s ambassador.
5. Hundreds of contract faculty at New York University begin strike
The cost of living in New York City, long unaffordable for workers and their families, is skyrocketing. In 2026, living costs in New York City are approximately 75 percent higher than the national average according to Salary.com, with single adults needing to earn over $150,000 annually to live comfortably. New York is home to Wall Street and the corporate-financial oligarchy who live like royalty while workers in New York struggle every day to survive even on the outskirts of the city, where most now reside.
Meanwhile, New York City faces a record-high 26 percent poverty rate (2.2 million people), twice the national average. Workers labor at between $17 and $25 an hour when a living wage in the city is estimated at well over $40 per hour.
Expressing the sentiments of millions of workers across the country and internationally, contract faculty are determined to reverse their increasingly dire circumstances. These workers make up around half of the full-time faculty at NYU, doing the bulk of teaching for significantly lower pay and fewer rights and benefits.
Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the United States, has constructed an elaborate system designed to extract maximum productivity from its workforce while insulating the corporation from legal accountability to the workers who generate its profits. A core element of this system is the Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program—a sprawling network of nominally independent subcontractors through which Amazon controls the lives of hundreds of thousands of delivery drivers without, it claims, employing a single one of them.
The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke with Manny, who has been a part-time worker in Amazon’s Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program in Massachusetts for five years. He also works the afternoon shift at a manufacturing company and is a student as well.
His account lays bare the grueling physical demands, relentless surveillance and calculated division of workers that define life inside Amazon’s delivery operation.
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Amazon launched its DSP program in 2018. As of early 2024, the company counted some 3,500 to 4,400 DSP companies operating across 19 countries, employing an estimated 275,000 to 390,000 drivers and delivering more than 20 million packages daily. Amazon markets the arrangement as an opportunity for “entrepreneurs” to build thriving small businesses, but the reality—as workers across the country can attest—is something far less glamorous.
Manny described the structure: “A DSP is a driver associate program, where Amazon pays people to do last-minute driver delivery service for them. It’s a system where they use Amazon branded vehicles, such as the smaller sprinter vans and the large CDL [commercial driver’s license] vans, and where we have to deliver packages as if we were part of Amazon.”
The critical distinction, he explained, lies in who bears the costs and who holds the power. The DSP operates Amazon-branded vehicles, enforces Amazon rules, and manages Amazon’s delivery routes—yet is responsible for vehicle maintenance, workers’ compensation and health insurance out of its own pocket. “Amazon may subsidize repair,” Manny said, “but the responsibility of upkeep and maintenance mainly falls on the DSP contractor.”
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“Amazon determines all the rules and enforces them through the DSP,” Manny said, “but they never pay for any of the cost in terms of maintenance, workers’ compensation, health insurance and stuff like that.” When asked who ultimately controls the operation, he was unequivocal: “Amazon holds all the decisions.”
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Amazon drivers are monitored by a four-camera AI system that scrutinizes them for even the most minute alleged lapses of safety and efficiency, recording every moment of drive time and flagging drivers for deviating from a preset route or remaining too long in any one area. Manny confirmed the omnipresence of this surveillance: “The Amazon-branded vehicles have a camera that watches you all the time. It’s on you all the time, which is very intrusive.”
He recalled, “I’ve gotten docked because the camera saw my lips move as I was singing along to a song. And so, they said that was distracted driving. I got docked for that.”
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Manny was direct about what makes the job most punishing: not any single hazard, but the sheer accumulation of demands within a fixed window of time. “Amazon really does not have a limit as to how many packages and stops that they give workers,” he said. “Some workers have gotten 200 stops, or have to deliver 400 packages. I myself have had a point where the vans are essentially stuffed and where there is no path from the back, so you essentially have to use the front to organize and sort and deliver packages until you can work your way in to actually have some space.”
Amazon’s injury rate is dramatically higher than the warehousing industry average. A 2023 study found that 70 percent of Amazon workers surveyed reported having to take unpaid time off to recover from pain or exhaustion, and 40 percent reported having been injured on the job. For delivery drivers working at the pace Manny describes, injury is not a remote possibility—it is a statistical near-certainty over time.
The “rescue” system compounds the pressure. When a driver falls behind, a faster driver who has completed their own route is dispatched to absorb the remaining stops. “What was a 170-stop job turns into a 190-stop job because you have to take 20 stops for them in order for that person to finish,” he said. “It feels like you’ve finished your work, and then you have to help someone out, so you can’t go home yourself.”
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Amazon’s mandated half-hour break exists on paper. In practice, its usefulness is limited by a prohibition on leaving the designated route. “We’re not allowed to go off route and there aren’t really any bathrooms,” Manny said. “Sometimes we get lucky—if there was a construction site nearby, I would generally just use the porta potties, if they’re around.”
Winter conditions in Massachusetts and New Hampshire make an already strenuous job dangerous. “It gets darker quicker, so you’re basically delivering packages mostly in the night, and it’s generally hard to see houses, see hazards,” Manny said. The holiday peak—Cyber Monday, Christmas—coincides precisely with the shortest days and most dangerous driving conditions.
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If a driver fails to complete their route within the allotted window, Amazon’s response is punitive and immediate: “If you overstep the time limit, you will receive less days of work.”
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Amazon’s turnover rate has been reported at approximately 150 percent annually—meaning the company churns through more workers each year than it actually employs at any given moment. High turnover is not a failure of Amazon’s business model but a deliberate feature of it, used to suppress seniority, instill fear and keep labor costs down.
The DSP structure itself is a weapon of labor control. By fragmenting the workforce across thousands of nominally independent small businesses—each responsible for hiring, firing, paying and insuring its own drivers—Amazon diffuses the collective power that workers might otherwise build. In addition to this, there are Amazon Flex workers who make deliveries out of their personal vehicles, similar to Uber or other rideshare apps.
“The fact that they have Flex drivers, in addition to the DSP, it’s all to keep us divided and from essentially organizing. Amazon has within their buildings posters saying why joining a union is bad, and that if you were to join a union, you have to pay the union bosses and everything—generally everything against social organizing. They were telling DSP owners to report if there was someone trying to unionize the DSP drivers. If the DSP drivers do get unionized, then Amazon will shut down the DSP. They’ve done that before.”
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The isolation built into the job reinforces the division. “You don’t have much time to talk to people,” Manny said. “It’s very rapid and fast paced. It’s just eight to 10 hours delivering packages.”
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When asked to connect his daily experience to the broader political situation facing the working class, Manny made the following comparison:
“With Amazon, it’s pretty much a surveillance state,” he said. “You’re watched constantly all the time. Every little thing that you do serves as a violation, and then it comes back later when they try to discipline you. Amazon will send an alert to the DSP, and then the DSP will chastise you for a violation. If you rack up too many violations, then you are taken off the road.”
Workers at Amazon are exploited to their physical limits through computerized and AI-driven oversight. They are monitored by AI-powered devices—handheld scanners, badges, and cameras—that track and time workers and penalize them for excessive “Time off Task,” against which Amazon’s algorithms count even bathroom breaks.
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Amazon’s methods of surveillance, high turnover and subcontracting have become a template for corporate America as a whole. The use of such techniques is now referred to in boardrooms as “Amazonization.” Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and largest individual shareholder, has accumulated a fortune estimated between $234 billion and $254 billion—wealth that has ballooned by thousands of percent over the past two decades on the backs of its workers.
“Workers need to organize for a mass general strike,” Manny said. “Clearly, the company doesn’t have your back. I doubt your job will be waiting for you afterwards. So, I would say that workers, despite the risks from Amazon and other companies trying to keep us stratified, we need to organize and have a planned system for a general strike—gathering resources, linking up with workers at other companies and setting a timetable for an indefinite general strike that will essentially grind this country to a halt. Because that’s the only thing that would stop them.”
Under the escalating drive of American militarism, the same workers that the ruling class demands build its warships at breakneck speed are denied wages that keep pace with inflation, affordable healthcare or any meaningful retirement security.
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In light of the Trump administration’s war against Iran, Manny commented on the role of Amazon as a military contractor, particularly its $581 million data center contract for the Air Force:
“This seems more like an excuse for the US government to give $581 million to Amazon. Amazon isn’t really a tech company, or a civil engineering company, and they don’t advertise about how they build data centers, and it was a no-bid contract, too. None of the workers who work for Amazon will see even a dime of that contract money. We drivers and package handlers are more productive than the US Air Force. Our jobs don’t involve sending bombs that cost $43 million to kill people who, like me, will never make that much money in their lifetime.”
The World Socialist Web Site urges Amazon DSP drivers and all logistics workers to make contact with us to share your experiences and connect with workers across the industry who are fighting back against the same conditions. The building of rank-and-file committees, independent of the corporate-controlled union bureaucracies, is essential to transforming that fight into a conscious and coordinated movement of the entire working class.
More than 620 shipyard workers at Bath Iron Works (BIW) in Bath, Maine walked off the job at midnight Monday after overwhelmingly rejecting a contract offered by General Dynamics, the massive military-industrial conglomerate that owns the facility. The strikers are members of the Bath Marine Draftsmen’s Association (BMDA), UAW Local 3999, and include designers, engineers, clerks and technicians whose labor is essential to the production of guided-missile destroyers for the United States Navy.
Under the escalating drive of American militarism, the same workers that the ruling class demands build its warships at breakneck speed are denied wages that keep pace with inflation, affordable healthcare or any meaningful retirement security.
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On February 9, so-called Secretary of War Pete Hegseth descended on Bath Iron Works as part of his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour, a nationwide propaganda circuit of defense contractors intended to whip up nationalist fervor for accelerated war production.
Speaking before roughly 850 assembled shipyard workers, Hegseth delivered a red-meat speech, calling BIW “the birthplace of American shipbuilding” and promising that the Trump administration would push production of Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers—also known as DDGs—to the absolute limit. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this yet, but we’re maxing out on DDGs,” he told the crowd, which was met with chants of “USA!”
Hegseth also used the occasion to attack what he called “distractions and debris”—his euphemisms for diversity programs and protections for LGBTQ+ workers. “No more DEI. No more dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship, social justice or political correctness,” he declared from the stage. The speech was a naked attempt to bind workers’ identities to the military and its employer, General Dynamics, rather than to their class interests as workers.
The Trump administration has floated plans for a new “Trump class” of warships—described as longer and larger than any current Navy vessel outside of aircraft carriers and fitted with missiles, rail guns and lasers still under development. Bath Iron Works has signaled its eagerness to design and build them. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s recently signed defense appropriations law directed $1 billion toward a new Arleigh Burke destroyer, $450 million for shipyard infrastructure modernization, and $300 million in so-called “wage enhancements” to be split between BIW and Mississippi-based Huntington Ingalls Industries.
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The escalating military production at Bath Iron Works does not exist in a vacuum. Each Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the backbone of the Navy’s surface fleet, costs approximately $2 billion and takes six years to build. They are the instruments of a government now openly conducting an intensified military campaign in Iran, expanding its naval posture across the Pacific, and funding proxy conflicts around the world. The workers of Bath Iron Works are being asked to sacrifice their wages and their health to produce the hardware of American imperialism.
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The contradiction between General Dynamics’ billions in profit and the poverty wages of the workers who produce its destroyers is not an anomaly of one company or one shipyard. American capitalism in 2026 is a system that can conjure up trillions for military procurement and stock buybacks while telling workers there is nothing left for them.
Workers at BIW need to take a stand against the US‑Israeli war against Iran, which is being financed and sustained by the same ruling class that demands discipline and concessions from workers while diverting billions to the military and shrinking social services at home.
8. Australia: University staff strike in Newcastle
Stoppages at the University of Newcastle and University of Technology Sydney show the need for a unified struggle against the Albanese government’s funding cuts and pro-corporate restructuring.
9. Explosion rocks Valero’s Port Arthur, Texas refinery
This is the second major incident at a US refinery in the past five months, following an explosion at the El Segundo Chevron refinery which rocked much of the Los Angeles area last October.
10. Trump’s handpicked board of trustees votes to close Kennedy Center for two years
The closure, which Trump said is to coincide with the nation’s celebrations of its 250th anniversary of independence, comes as artists and performers cancel events at the national cultural institution of the United States capital.
11. G7 states condemn Iran and prepare entry into the war
The G7 statement marks the European imperialist powers’ final departure from international law in favor of the principle that "might makes right.”
12. Australia, New Zealand solidify pro-US military alliance against China
The two imperialist powers are moving to establish a combined “Anzac force” that will support US-led wars and dominate impoverished Pacific countries.
13. Purge of military, government advances US regime change operation in Venezuela
The Chavista regime in Caracas headed by Washington’s proxy, acting President Delcy Rodríguez, carried out a sweeping overhaul of the government and military command in recent days dressed up fraudulently as an expression of “national sovereignty.”
After Washington restored diplomatic relations and reopened its embassy in Caracas earlier this month, what is unfolding is the consolidation of the US‑orchestrated coup d’état launched with the January 3 bombing campaign and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.
Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice president, has named a new defense minister and new chiefs for all branches of the National Bolivarian Armed Forces, including the operational command, army, navy, air force, National Guard and the militia.
Just this month alone, she has carried out replacements in the ministries of Defense, Transport, Hydrocarbons, Electric Energy, Labor, Housing, Higher Education, Tourism and Culture. She had already changed the heads of the ministries of Industry, Communications, Ecosocialism and Water, and the Office of the Presidency.
The bulk of these reshuffles were announced on March 18, with Rodríguez having now made 13 cabinet changes—nearly half of the 32 portfolios. Two days later, on March 20, she announced “new commanders of the Strategic Regions of Integral Defense” (REDI), reshaping the territorial military leadership across the country.
Rodríguez claims that these changes are aimed at guaranteeing “sovereignty, peace, stability and territorial integrity.” But the real aim is to consolidate a new power structure directly subservient to US imperialism.
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The swearing in of the new military chiefs took place just one day after Rodríguez met with a delegation from the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, alongside Laura Dogu, the chargé d’affaires of the US Embassy who has effectively overseen the regime’s transformation step by step.
In addition to that delegation, top‑level US political, military and intelligence figures have streamed through Caracas since January 3, including senior State Department officials responsible for Latin America, Pentagon representatives involved in Southern Command planning, the CIA chief and other and high‑ranking members of the intelligence community tasked with “stabilization” and “security cooperation” in Venezuela.
These appointments are not only about purging “unreliable” elements and reshaping the internal balance among rival Chavista factions; they are also meant to reassure global capital with a reliable guarantor of property rights and repression against the working class.
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The vast reshuffling of the state and the parade of investors show that the bourgeois nationalists who built their entire project on denouncing the “sellout” (“entreguista”) layers of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie are now handing over the country’s key resources to imperialism. The World Socialist Web Site does not defend “national sovereignty” in a positive sense as a defense of the bourgeois nation‑state, but condemns the current handover of the economy to Washington from the standpoint of the independent interests of the working class.
Workers must not cede to any faction of the ruling class the struggle against imperialism or, for that matter, the defense of a given country against foreign domination. The bourgeois nationalist cliques in power use control of resources above all to exploit workers and maintain their security forces as the ultimate line of defense—not for the people, but for capitalist rule.
The current accommodation of the Chavista establishment to Trump vindicates in the negative the Theory of Permanent Revolution. In the epoch of imperialism, the bourgeoisie in belatedly developed countries is incapable of resolving the basic tasks of democratic development—national independence, land reform and democratic forms of rule—because it is organically tied to world finance capital and terrified of the revolutionary aspirations of “its own” working class. These tasks fall to the proletariat, which must take power on the basis of an international socialist program whose fate, like that of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, depends on the extension of the struggle to the advanced capitalist centers.
This question is of burning urgency today. The drive to “abolish the 20th century” and reimpose colonial shackles on oppressed nations across Latin America, Asia and Africa—through wars, coups, blockades and “shock therapy”—is inseparably linked to explosive economic turmoil, sweeping attacks on social and democratic rights, and the turn toward fascist forms of rule in the United States and other imperialist centers.
The program to fight the US‑Chavista regime‑change operation in Venezuela is not a return to the bankrupt nationalist illusions of “Bolivarian socialism,” but the conscious, independent mobilization of Venezuelan workers, together with their class brothers and sisters throughout the Americas and internationally, for workers’ power and the socialist reorganization of society.
14. Brazilian JBS workers speak out on wages, degrading conditions and the Greeley strike in US
Last Friday, reporters for the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) visited the JBS Jaguaré plant in São Paulo to speak with Brazilian workers about the historic strike by their fellow workers at the company’s plant in Greeley, Colorado—the largest work stoppage in the US meatpacking industry since the 1950s, now entering its third week.
The WSWS team distributed a Portuguese language version of the statement “Organize the working class to support the JBS meatpacking strike!” which calls for the international unification of JBS workers as the only effective path to confronting the transnational company and winning real improvements in working conditions and wages across all the countries in which it operates.
The distribution took place against the backdrop of the rapidly escalating global capitalist crisis and the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran. The war on Iran has already triggered a sharp rise in oil and fuel prices worldwide, directly striking Brazilian workers. Donald Trump’s tariff offensive is deepening trade tensions and intensifying the assault on the living standards of the working class in both countries. The same pressures that drove Greeley workers to launch a strike are present, with equal force, at JBS plants in Brazil.
Despite the Greeley strike having continued for two weeks, most workers the WSWS spoke with at the Jaguaré plant were unaware of its existence. This news blackout is not accidental.
15. Your Party Scotland adopts separatism
Last month, a Your Party Scotland founding conference attracted just 200 people and significantly deepened Your Party’s political debacle.From the first, Your Party has been bogged down in vicious factional fighting between Jeremy Corbyn’s “The Many” faction and Zarah Sultana’s “Grassroots Left”, incorporating much of the British pseudo left.
Both factions put forward social reformism under capitalism.
Corbyn and his supporters, led by longtime Labour Party and trade union apparatchiks, advocate the mildest collection of social improvements. They conceive of the party as an instrument to pressure the Labour Party, which Corbyn never wanted to leave.
Sultana offered a more left-sounding agenda, with occasional mentions of “workers’ control of the economy” and more trenchant criticisms of the Labour government’s social and war policies.
Thus riven, Your Party’s membership has fallen to 41,000 members, of whom 2,500 were delegated to attend the founding conference, and 25,000 voted in the party’s leadership elections.
Neither Corbyn’s nor Sultana’ s vision of social concessions and opposition to imperialist war under capitalism are remotely viable. Both are completely at odds with the trajectory of British and world capitalism, in which the globally integrated world economy is organized by competing cliques of the capitalist oligarchy based on the most brutal exploitation of the working class. All the social reforms of previous eras are being rapidly destroyed, along with democratic rights, fueling an eruption of militarism and war.
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Developments in Scotland have deepened the factional fissures. Your Party in Scotland is dominated by the nationalist pseudo left, with the Socialist Party Scotland (SPS), the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Scottish Socialist Youth (SSY) and a clutch of former Greens all supporting Sultana’s Grassroots Left faction. All see Your Party as a vehicle in which to revive their campaign tail ending the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) drive for a second Scottish independence referendum. In a 2014 vote, Scottish secession from the UK was rejected by 55 to 45 percent.
In line with this, the Dundee conference voted by a substantial majority to set up an “autonomous nation” Your Party Scotland (YPS). This was presented by Philip Stott of the SPS as an opportunity to walk away from “the collective mistakes, the bureaucratic and top-down measures which have dominated the first seven or eight months of the existence of Your Party...”
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The main debate at the founding conference, ignoring all else, was on Scottish independence.
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Fundamental points must be made on this unequivocal embrace of nationalism and separatism by YPS.
Firstly, there is no national question in Scotland. As the Socialist Equality Party noted in its 2014 statement “Vote “no” in the Scottish referendum—Fight for a socialist Britain”:
Scotland is not an oppressed nation, but part of an imperialist state. Its ruling elite has committed countless crimes and shared in the brutal exploitation of millions the world over. Waving the Saltire [Scottish flag]in people’s faces is meant to conceal the basic fact that workers in Scotland are not oppressed because of their nationality, but because of their class position within capitalist society. This is just as reactionary as the waving of the Union Flag by their opponents.
The Act of Union in 1707 provided the framework for the development of capitalism and a vast growth in the productive forces. This in turn formed the basis for the emergence of the first industrial working class in the world. Since then, working people in England, Scotland and Wales have fought side by side in epic struggles, including the great revolutionary Chartist movement for democracy and equality, the general strike of 1926, the mass strike movement that brought down a Tory government in 1974 and the year-long miners’ strike of 1984-85.
Secondly, social reformism under capitalism is bankrupt everywhere in the world. The prospects of a meaningful and sustained increase in living standards being secured by carving out a new and tiny capitalist state from the UK are non-existent.
Scottish separatism, and the various left garbs in which it is cloaked, serve definite class interests opposed to those of the working class on both sides of the border.
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No doubt Corbyn’s faction considered it useful to their relations with Labour and their internal factions to sabotage their “comrades’” election campaign north of the border. The dispute makes it more likely that, sooner rather than later, Your Party Scotland will split from the organization in England, hastening the collapse of both.
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A new mass socialist party of the working class is urgently needed. But Your Party is not that party. Its accelerating collapse testifies to the outmoded character of its program and perspective, based on national reformism and the maintenance of the capitalist system.
Under today’s conditions of globally integrated production, with a massive expansion of the working class globally, only a party which seeks to resolve the contradiction between world economy and the nation state system by directing every social and democratic struggle of working people towards the struggle for world socialism can find a way forward.
As the SEP stated in our 22 October 2025 Open Letter to Your Party supporters:
Yes, a mass socialist party of the working class is needed urgently. Such a party must be international, linking British workers with their class brother and sisters worldwide; it must be based on the political independence of the working class from the capitalist class and its servants in the labor and trade union bureaucracy; and it must encourage the growth of rank-and-file organizations in every workplace and neighborhood to mobilize the working class to expropriate the wealth of the oligarchy, break the resistance of the state, and place economic and political power in the hands of the working class, the overwhelming majority of the population.
Such a party will only develop in a determined fight to develop socialist political consciousness in the working class against the reformist, pro-capitalist politics of Corbyn, Sultana and their backers in the pseudo-left. A party capable of defeating imperialism requires a leadership grounded in the lessons of history, based on the century-long struggle of the Trotskyist movement for the strategy of world socialist revolution. That party is the Socialist Equality Party, the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
What has been accepted on a de facto basis by the Unite apparatus—including the axing of the WRCO role-- must be challenged by rank-and-file workers to prevent a final sell-out.
17. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Chile:
Canada:
More union locals authorize strike action Nova Scotia long-term care workers push for all out fight
Mexico:
Administration workers strike 20 college campuses in greater Mexico City
United States:
University of Illinois Springfield faculty votes to strike
18. Defending political and artistic dissent: Why Banksy’s anonymity matters
For more than twenty years, the British artist known as Banksy has stood as a rare figure in contemporary culture for his exposure of state violence, imperialist war and social inequality.
Banksy’s work, when it hits the target, is genuinely powerful. His stencilled art appears on walls around the world; his efforts have raised tens of millions for humanitarian causes; and his political interventions can sometimes slice through the fog of official propaganda.
Banksy’s appeal has been broad and enduring. In 2017, a national poll ranked Girl with Balloon as the UK’s favorite artwork, and the current touring exhibition The Mystery of Banksy – A Genius Mind—one of several ventures he has criticised for their commerciality—has traveled through 36 cities across Europe, attracting more than 3.5 million visitors.
That such a figure has survived this long without being absorbed, neutralized or destroyed by the state media apparatus is in part a testament to the importance of the anonymity he has sought.
Banksy’s anonymity has acted as a democratic shield. It has allowed him to indict the crimes of the powerful in a mass popular medium without facing immediate legal sanction, corporate blacklisting, far right threats and state surveillance. It has helped make dissent possible in an increasingly authoritarian political environment. And it is precisely this shield that the ruling class—through its media, its courts and its security agencies—is now determined to tear away.
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Reuters’ insistence on Banksy being made subject to “scrutiny” and “accountability” is a barely concealed demand that political expression must be brought under state oversight. This becomes explicit in the treatment of Banksy’s Royal Courts of Justice mural, which appeared on 8 September 2025—four days after the High Court moved to uphold the proscription of Palestine Action, and two days after nearly 900 people were arrested for protesting the crackdown.
The mural showed an unarmed protester lying on the ground. A judge, in black gown and white wig, stands over him, beating him with a gavel. The protester’s right hand is empty. His left holds a blood-spattered placard.
The mural was removed within 48 hours, supposedly to protect the Grade I listed building, and the government has since spent £23,690 on the clean up. For a period, the removed mural still appeared as a shadow and continued to attract attention. This prompted the state to fence off and conceal the shadow behind a boarded structure with a padlocked gate!
Nevertheless, the British authorities have proceeded with caution regarding Banksy himself. The Metropolitan Police has not brought charges, which can carry up to 10 years’ imprisonment if the damage exceeds £5,000; they are still “making inquiries”. A prosecution would require Banksy to appear under his legal name.
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Media institutions play a vital role by generating hysteria, framing dissent as deviant, and carrying out unmaskings in the name of civic duty.
Reuters specifically foregrounds Banksy’s pro Palestine work—murals on the separation wall in Bethlehem, the Walled Off Hotel in the West Bank, donations to Palestinian hospitals—defining solidarity with an oppressed people as a mark of subversion.
Working near Horenka in Ukraine, Banksy produced murals in bombed-out buildings. Even regarding this work on a war armed and financed by the imperialist powers, Reuters questions “how an anonymous British artist could access a frontline zone.”
The witch-hunt of Banksy extends seamlessly to Robert Del Naja, the singer-songwriter of Massive Attack. Although the report concedes he is not Banksy, as has been previously claimed, it highlights his own graffiti past and presence in Ukraine at the same time, tainting him by association. He has been repeatedly attacked by Israeli media and pro-Israel commentators.
Reuters is not simply asking who Banksy is. It is asking why he is not being policed, monitored or punished like other dissenting voices. It treats the state’s escalating repression of protesters as the baseline, and Banksy’s ability to continue making political art as the aberration.
The right-wing press has seized on this opening with predictable ferocity. A Spectator article, “The Vandalism of Banksy,” dispenses with the language of public interest and moves straight to denunciation.
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All such attempts to target Banksy for seeking to maintain his anonymity must be strenuously opposed. Ultimately, the defense of dissenting artists requires organized, independent political action by the working class to secure democratic rights. This is inseparable from the struggle against imperialist war and austerity and constructing a political movement capable of challenging the capitalist social order.
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.
