Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. "Workers in America, in Germany, in Britain and in all the imperialist countries see their own future in the streets of Tehran. Within the United States, this foreign policy gangsterism is inseparable from the assault on democratic rights and the erection of a presidential dictatorship."
As the war enters its fifth day, the US-Israeli assault on Iran has assumed ever more openly the character of a war of annihilation and extermination.
The sinking of an Iranian vessel more than 3,000 kilometers from Iran—carried out in international waters on Wednesday—is the latest act in a boundless campaign of destruction that recognizes no legal or geographic restraint. The vessel had 180 people on board, and the Sri Lankan navy rescued 32 people, meaning that 148 people were killed.
In the opening days of the war, the United States and Israel murdered a large section of the Iranian leadership, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Tehran and other cities have been hammered by repeated air attacks. Hospitals have been hit. A girls’ elementary school in Minab was struck, killing over 150 children, part of a death toll that has already passed 1,000.
There is a repeated refrain in the media that President Trump “does not have a strategy.” This is a lie. There is a strategy: the obliteration of Iran as a state and a campaign of terror against the population. The methods pioneered by the United States and Israel in Gaza are now being scaled up from an enclave of 2 million people to a country of more than 90 million.
This is the next stage in an expanding global offensive—following the assault on Venezuela and the strangulation of Cuba—in which the United States, utilizing its bought-and-paid-for attack dog Israel, seeks to break up and subjugate any society that resists imperialist domination.
Civilian casualties are not a byproduct of “military objectives.” Mass murder is the aim. On Wednesday, the White House published a video that opens with imagery drawn from the Call of Duty video game franchise, then shifts into a remix of infrared strike footage—American bombs detonating across Iran—edited like a highlight reel. After the “kills,” a score flashes on screen. That is, the “success” of the US-Israeli operation will be determined by how many people are slaughtered.
Every statement made by Trump and his “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth is saturated with criminality and the language of fascism. On Wednesday, Hegseth gave a news briefing in which he gloated over the slaughter. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be,” he said. He promised “death and destruction from the sky all day long,” waged “decisively, devastatingly and without mercy.”
Hegseth sadistically tallied the dead: “Iran’s senior leaders are dead. The so-called governing council that might have selected a successor, dead.” And he made clear the killing will not stop: “We will find them, and we will kill them.”
Hegseth announced plans for a saturation bombing campaign against the entire Iranian people. “With complete control of the skies, we will be using 500-pound, 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound GPS and laser-guided precision gravity bombs, of which we have a nearly unlimited stockpile.”
He gloated over the sinking of the Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean, a clear violation of international law. In a Pentagon briefing the day before, Hegseth boasted that there will be “no stupid rules of engagement.” This is a statement that international law does not apply. It is a declaration of intent to wage war as the Nazis did.
The fascistic character of this war is being reinforced through the systematic infusion of Christian-nationalist propaganda. The Guardian reports that commanders are urging troops to be told that the war against Iran is “all part of God’s divine plan” and citing the Book of Revelation and “Armageddon.” According to one complaint from a soldier, troops were told that Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” i.e., to trigger apocalyptic events through systematic extermination.
The European powers are eager accomplices in this unfolding war of extermination. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, standing beside Trump at the White House Tuesday, declared: “We are on the same page in terms of getting this terrible regime in Tehran away.” Britain has deployed F-35 fighters. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte declared the bombing did not violate international law.
The Democratic Party, while quibbling over procedure, parrots the talking points of the Trump administration and facilitates this genocidal war. The Senate vote Wednesday on a War Powers resolution was a political charade from the start—designed not to stop the war but to provide a fig leaf for their support of it.
At a House Democratic Leaders press conference Wednesday, every speaker echoed the administration’s talking points. Representative Ted Lieu denounced “a murderous, theocratic regime.” Representative Chrissy Houlahan declared: “I don’t mourn those leaders.” Representative Maggie Goodlander called Iran “a brutal and determined enemy... a regime that has the blood of our fellow Americans on its hands.”
All of this demonstrates that the war against Iran is not an improvisation dreamed up in Trump’s head. It is the final iteration of a chain of imperialist wars launched over the last 35 years: the Gulf War; the decade-long sanctions siege of Iraq; the 2003 invasion and occupation; the war in Afghanistan; the destruction of Libya; the CIA-backed regime change operation in Syria; the expansion of US operations across the Middle East; and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
What unites these crimes is a single counterrevolutionary aim: to undo and reverse the setbacks suffered by imperialism in the 20th century as a result of the revolutionary and anti-colonial movements of the oppressed masses.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio spelled out this reactionary program three weeks ago. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, he declared that ever since the end of World War II—that is, since the defeat of the Nazis—the “great Western empires” had entered into “terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings.” The imperialist powers, he lamented, had been “shackled by guilt and shame,” and by casting off these restraints, the “West’s age of dominance” could be resurrected.
In his press conference on Wednesday, Hegseth ranted about “47 years”—a reference to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which overthrew a US-backed dictatorship and shattered Washington’s direct control over the Persian Gulf. American imperialism is now determined to exact “payback” against Iran by reasserting imperialist dominion over one of the world’s most strategic regions.
There is no “dividing line” that confines these methods to one battlefield or one people. The same methods will be employed everywhere imperialism encounters resistance: Cairo and Karachi, Nairobi and Lagos, Istanbul and Jakarta, Moscow and Beijing, Seoul and Manila, Mexico City and Johannesburg.
Workers in America, in Germany, in Britain and in all the imperialist countries see their own future in the streets of Tehran. Within the United States, this foreign policy gangsterism is inseparable from the assault on democratic rights and the erection of a presidential dictatorship. A government that claims the right to murder foreign leaders and wage war without law will not tolerate opposition at home. The methods of violence and murder—already employed in Minneapolis—are being readied for broader use against all resistance to the dictates of the corporate and financial oligarchy.
The very brutality of the assault expresses an element of desperation: A ruling class that cannot secure its aims through political means turns to mass murder to intimidate and break resistance. But this war will not crush the Iranian people. Each day this war continues deepens anger and outrage among workers and youth throughout the world—and within the United States itself.
Outrage, however widespread, is not enough. The decisive question is the development of a political perspective, a conscious program, and the independent mobilization of the international working class—the only social force capable of stopping the descent into barbarism.
The World Socialist Web Site will hold an emergency global webinar this Sunday, March 8, at 3:00 p.m. EDT to explain the origins of this war, the social forces driving it and the strategy required to stop it. We urge all readers to distribute this statement as widely as possible, attend the meeting, and help build a conscious, organized movement against imperialist war and dictatorship.
2. “The goal is for workers to take power”: Will Lehman explains campaign for UAW president
Will Lehman is a rank-and-file autoworker at Mack Trucks who is running for president of the United Auto Workers union in 2026.
To learn more about Will Lehman’s campaign for UAW president, visit his website: willforuawpresident.org.
3. Claude AI has selected over 1,000 targets in the US-Israeli war against Iran
Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence system—embedded in Palantir’s Maven Smart System on classified military networks—is being used by the US military to identify and prioritize targets in the criminal war of aggression against Iran launched by the United States and Israel on February 28. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Claude generated approximately 1,000 prioritized targets on the first day of operations alone, synthesizing satellite imagery, signals intelligence and surveillance feeds in real time to produce target lists with precise GPS coordinates, weapons recommendations and automated legal justifications for strikes.
This represents the first large-scale deployment of generative AI in active US warfighting operations. It is being used to wage a war that has already killed 787 Iranians, according to Amnesty International, including an estimated 150 schoolchildren in a missile strike on a school in the southern city of Minab on March 1, which UNESCO described as “a grave violation of humanitarian law.”
As the World Socialist Web Site previously reported, last week the Trump administration blacklisted Anthropic and designated it a “supply chain risk to national security” after CEO Dario Amodei refused Pentagon demands for unrestricted access to Claude, insisting on two narrow contractual restrictions against mass domestic surveillance of Americans and the use of fully autonomous weapons.
On February 28, just hours before the war on Iran began, Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to phase out Claude, giving the military six months to complete the transition. This renders the entire spectacle of the blacklisting functionally meaningless. While Trump publicly punishes Anthropic for maintaining two narrow technical restrictions, the same administration is using Anthropic’s technology to select targets in an illegal war. As one military source told the Washington Post, “We’re not going to let [Amodei’s] decision-making cost a single American life.”
Amodei has not publicly opposed the use of Claude in the Iran war. His silence is revealing but not surprising. His stated “red lines” against domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons were never directed at the functions Claude is actually performing in Iran: target identification, intelligence assessment, weapons selection and battle simulation. These operations fall entirely outside his stated restrictions.
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Claude’s deployment in Iran is the product of a massive military-AI apparatus constructed over years with bipartisan support. Project Maven—the Pentagon’s flagship AI warfare program, now operated by Palantir under a contract that has grown to nearly $1.3 billion—serves over 25,000 users across every US Combatant Command. Anthropic itself placed Claude on these classified networks through its November 2024 partnership with Palantir and Amazon Web Services, followed by the launch of “Claude Gov” for national security agencies in June 2025. The company pursued military integration aggressively. It cannot now plausibly claim surprise that its technology is being used for exactly what military AI systems are designed to do.
The template for AI-driven mass murder was established in Gaza. As 972 Magazine documented, Israel’s “Lavender” AI system flagged approximately 37,000 Palestinians for assassination. The systematic shift from human target selection to algorithmic target generation with human rubber-stamping is now being deployed at scale against Iran, with Claude generating hundreds of AI-generated targets daily. As The New Republic observed, “Meaningful human control becomes a bureaucratic fiction rather than a genuine safeguard when hundreds of AI-generated targets are processed daily with inconsistent verification across military units.”
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Hours after the Anthropic blacklisting, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced an expanded deal to deploy ChatGPT on the Pentagon’s classified networks. The contract language stipulates: “The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes,” precisely the formulation Anthropic refused to accept.
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The public response to these developments reflects genuine popular hostility to the use of AI for mass surveillance and militarism. Across social media, there have been thousands of comments praising Anthropic for not completely caving in to the Pentagon and denunciations of OpenAI for doing so. The “We Will Not Be Divided” open letter, which calls on OpenAI to defend the same provisions that Anthropic did, has grown from roughly 650 to nearly 900 signatories from OpenAI and Google. Since last Friday, ChatGPT uninstalls have spiked 295 percent as a result of OpenAI’s brazen subservience to the Trump administration, while Claude rose from 42nd to 1st on the Apple App Store.
But this opposition has not taken the form of independent working-class political action. No strikes, protests or work stoppages have been reported at any AI company. The open letters appeal to corporate executives—the same executives who signed military contracts—to voluntarily adopt restrictions. The #QuitGPT movement channels opposition into consumer choices: switch apps, cancel subscriptions, sign petitions.
Deep popular opposition to the war exists. A University of Maryland poll found only 21 percent of Americans favored the attack on Iran, while 49 percent opposed it. A YouGov survey recorded 34 percent approval, the lowest for any US military action in modern history.
This mass opposition must be given conscious political expression. It will not find a vehicle in either the Democratic Party—which joined Republicans to pass the $901 billion defense budget funding these operations—or the Republican Party, or the trade union bureaucracies, or the pseudo-left organizations that function as political auxiliaries of the Democrats. It can only be organized as an independent movement of the international working class, fighting to put an end to imperialist war, mass surveillance and the threat of fascism.
Artificial intelligence is a revolutionary technology with the potential to advance human knowledge, eliminate drudgery and raise the material and cultural level of the entire world. Under capitalism, it is being transformed into an instrument of imperialist mass killing, a tool for the construction of a surveillance police state and a mechanism for the wholesale elimination of jobs and the further concentration of obscene wealth. The answer to this is the building of a revolutionary socialist movement of the working class to take political power and place this technology—along with the means of production as a whole—under public ownership and democratic control.
The World Socialist Web Site has developed Socialism AI—a unique application of artificial intelligence to the political education and preparation of the working class for this fight. Tech workers, who confront the daily transformation of their labor into instruments of war and repression, should use Socialism AI, study the history of Trotskyism and the Fourth International and take up the struggle for the independent political mobilization of the working class against imperialist war and the capitalist system that produces it.
4. Severe drought conditions imperil US Southwest, as states wrestle over water rights
The seven states of the Colorado River Basin failed to reach an agreement on how to redivide declining water supplies, blowing past another federal deadline on February 14. Negotiations have been ongoing for two years with no sign of compromise in sight, as several critical agreements between basin states and the US and Mexico expire this year.
Central to the impasse is disagreement on how states should share the burden of conserving water after a quarter century of drought, the worst in 1,200 years. Due to climate change and overallocation, the Bureau of Reclamation (BoR) estimates that the Basin states will need to reduce consumptive use by up to 4 million acre-feet, about a quarter of allocated volume (an acre-foot is roughly 326,000 gallons).
Consumptive use has largely exceeded annual supply for decades and over the past several years Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two largest reservoirs in the US, have declined to concerning levels. Lake Mead is currently one-third full, and Lake Powell is a quarter full. Conditions are expected to worsen, with Lake Powell predicted to receive only half the normal inflow this year—and potentially just 37 percent—according to the BoR.
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Through decades of overuse, the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea, destroying ecosystems and communities that once thrived in the Colorado Delta. Agricultural runoff into the Salton Sea has turned it into a polluted wasteland that releases toxic dust as it recedes. Prioritization of profit has stymied efforts to conserve agricultural water and encouraged the depletion of aquifers.
Rebalancing the demands on the Colorado River requires the scientific management and coordination of the entire basin in accordance with environmental realities and social need. This is incompatible with the prioritization of profit and the petty squabbling of capitalist governments desperate to defend their own resources at the expense of others.
5. DSA promotes Democrats’ fake opposition to Iran war
In a statement issued by the DSA on the first day of the US-Israeli attack, Saturday, February 28, the organization called for a “return to diplomacy on the part of the United States.” This is despite the fact that both last June’s unprovoked US assault and this week’s war were launched in the midst of negotiations, making it crystal clear that for Washington, “diplomacy” is a cover for military aggression. Iran has up to now rejected further talks with the gangster regime headed by Trump.
The statement when on to say:
We call on the American people to organize and participate in mass mobilizations against the attacks on Iran, contact their representatives in Congress and demand that they vote for the Iran War Powers Resolution. … A popular solidarity movement across the country can shift the political terrain and exact a political cost of warmongers.
What is the meaning of this proposal?
The DSA is well aware that mass protests against the war and the fascist Trump administration will emerge. But as far as it is concerned, this mass opposition from below must be channeled behind the Democratic Party and its anti-war posturing and rendered impotent by the delusion that popular pressure can force the ruling class and its government agents to abandon their policies of war, dictatorship and austerity.
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On the same day as the DSA statement on the war, February 28, Jacobin published an article by staff writer Branko Marcetic criticizing the launching of the war against Iran not from the standpoint of the Iranian and international working class, but on the grounds that it is harmful to the interests of US imperialism.
In line with Democratic Party critics of the war, Marcetic wrote: “There is no universe where this war serves the interests of the United States.”
There can be only one meaning in this context of the phrase “United States,” i.e., the economic and political establishment that rules the country. Marcetic and Jacobin imply that the US killing machine could be more productively employed against a different population, in which case it could have the support of the DSA.
Indeed, he goes on to suggest one such target:
In fact, Iran is just the latest in a series of relatively weak, WMD-less states that have come into Washington’s regime-change crosshairs in the twenty-first century, which include Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and, more recently, Venezuela and Cuba—all while the armed-to-the-teeth North Koreans remain safe from US attack and Trump writes love letters to its leader.
Further on, he writes:
So whose interest does this serve? The obvious answer is a war-hungry Israeli leadership … this really is an Israeli war, outsourced to Americans to fight and die for. Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to get the United States into this war for more than thirty years, including repeatedly when the feeble, ailing Joe Biden was in power. Yet it was only once Trump took office that he got his wish, proving to be an even bigger doormat for the Israelis to wipe their shoes on.
Jacobin and Marcetic doubled down on the line of the US waging a war dictated by Israel in an article published on March 4, headlined “The US Is Fighting Israel’s War on Iran.”
This assertion that Trump is a stooge of the Israelis, who are really calling the shots when it comes to US foreign policy, directly echoes the line of overtly antisemitic elements within the fascist MAGA movement that are denouncing the war as a Jewish conspiracy and accusing Trump of betraying the “America First” program. This faction includes such prominent far-right figures as Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
It also aligns with the pretext for the war given at one point by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said the US preemptively attacked Iran because it knew Israel was about to strike the country, prompting Iran to launch attacks against US forces and interests in the Middle East.
All such claims invert the real relationship between US imperialism, the center of world reaction and militarism, and its attack dog in the Middle East, the Zionist state of Israel.
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Those rank-and-file members of the DSA who joined the organization in good faith, who thought they were joining a movement for socialism, equality, democratic rights and an end to war, must take stock of what the perspective and practice of the DSA have produced: an alliance with the fascist right and defense of US imperialism.
The mass opposition to war that will emerge in the US and internationally in response to the military genocide underway in Iran must reject the treacherous pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist politics of the DSA and other pseudo-left tendencies.
The DSA and Jacobin never speak about the objective roots of Trump’s fascist politics, as though it were simply a matter of an evil and deranged individual who inexplicitly has come to occupy the most powerful political post in the world. That is because they seek to conceal the source of global war and political reaction, which is the capitalist system, and the need for the independent mobilization of the working class on a socialist and internationalist program to put an end to war and fascism by putting an end to capitalism.
6. US trade union bureaucracy silent as Trump launches illegal war against Iran
As the Trump administration unleashed a massive bombing campaign against Iran—in open violation of the Constitution and international law—the leadership of the American trade unions has mostly remained silent.
The AFL-CIO, the national labor federation whose affiliated unions claim more than 15 million members, issued no statement. The United Auto Workers, the Communications Workers of America, the United Steelworkers, the Teamsters, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the National Education Association and scores of other unions—nothing.
The social media pages of the AFL-CIO and the major unions are filled with promotions of Democratic Party politicians, reports of the latest strikes the bureaucracy is managing or has already betrayed, the promotion of anti-Chinese propaganda and graphics about Women’s History Month. But as the bombing began on February 28 and continued over the following days, the communications departments of these organizations did not issue a single post opposing the war.
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The cost of this criminal war is being imposed on the American working class, who are overwhelmingly opposed to it. Fuel prices are already rising. Food costs will follow. If ground troops are deployed to occupy Iran—and the logic of such an operation points precisely in that direction—it will be the sons and daughters of the working class, not the children of the corporate executives and financiers who profit from war, who are sent to fight and die.
The costs will be financed through savage cuts to Medicaid, Social Security, public education and every other social program workers depend on for survival. The same administration that has deployed paramilitary forces to round up immigrants and murder US citizens in the streets of Minneapolis intends to use wartime measures to criminalize political opposition to the war.
The silence of the union bureaucracy is a deliberate act of support and complicity. Those responsible include the “left-talking” sections of the apparatus—figures such as UAW President Shawn Fain, UAW Region 9A Director Brandon Mancilla, Association of Flight Attendants president and Democratic Socialists of America leader Sara Nelson, and the leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union and United Teachers Los Angeles.
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Knowing there is overwhelming popular opposition to the war, a small number of unions have broken the silence and issued critical statements. Yet the political character of their statements is as revealing as the silence of the majority. Statements by the National Nurses United (NNU) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) combine radical sounding phrases with appeals to Congress and the Democratic Party.
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Bernie Sanders, whose response to the attack was to declare that “the Senate must reconvene immediately and vote on a pending War Powers Resolution, which I will strongly support.”
On Wednesday, the resolution predictably failed in the Senate, after being blocked by nearly every Republican plus one Democrat, the predictable John Fetterman. It would have been vetoed by Trump even had it passed; another resolution in the House is non-binding.
The NNU apparatus maintains the closest institutional ties to Sanders. Several NNU leaders are fellows of the Sanders Institute, where they were trained in the rhetoric of “Medicare for All” and other reformist nostrums.
It should also be recalled that NNU’s affiliate, the New York State Nurses Association, betrayed the recent strike of 15,000 New York City nurses, even violating its own bylaws in a bid to force through a pro-corporate contract.
The American Federation of Teachers provides perhaps the most instructive example.
On February 18, the AFT leadership passed a resolution expressing solidarity with demonstrations against the Tehran government, protests primarily led by right-wing forces aligned with the son of the former Shah and backing US military intervention to facilitate a coup.
Adopted before the bombing campaign began, the resolution opposed US intervention only on tactical grounds, declaring that “an invasion can only aid the cause of the authoritarian theocrats in the Iranian state and delay the day when Iranians are finally free and able to govern themselves.” In other words, not because an invasion would be a war crime, but counterproductive to US imperialism.
After the bombs fell, AFT President Randi Weingarten responded not by condemning the war but by criticizing its constitutional irregularity. Trump, she said, “has repeatedly bypassed Congress to unconstitutionally engage in acts of war, including today. That is wrong.”
Weingarten personifies the merger of the union apparatus with the State Department. Weingarten regularly travels across the world in support of regime change operations by the United States. She traveled to Ukraine in 2014 to lend support to the right-wing Maidan coup and has been a vocal supporter of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia. She is also a staunch Zionist who issued hypocritical, noncommital statements on the genocide in Gaza months after it began.
Now she registers her objection to the bombing of Iran on procedural grounds. Had the Republican-dominated Congress formally approved the attack beforehand, she would have had no objection.
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The silence of the union bureaucracy is the expression of a social layer that long ago evolved—using the phrase of socialist leader Daniel De Leon—into “labor lieutenants of capital.”
The American trade union apparatus has a long record of supporting imperialist war.
The American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the AFL-CIO after their merger in 1955 backed US militarism through the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the wars of the past three decades in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
Only under immense pressure from rank-and-file workers radicalized by the Vietnam War did the UAW temporarily break with the AFL-CIO. Even then the rupture was partial and short-lived, quickly repaired once the immediate political danger had passed.Through the American Institute for Free Labor Development—funded by the CIA and major US corporations—and its successor, the Solidarity Center, the AFL-CIO participated in decades of covert operations aimed at undermining militant unions and installing pro-US governments abroad.
In Iran, the AFL’s international apparatus led by Jay Lovestone played a role in the events leading to the CIA-organized 1953 coup—Operation Ajax—that overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
The AFL-CIO’s fingerprints are likewise on the 1973 military coup in Chile that drowned the socialist government of Salvador Allende in blood. Its operatives have supported destabilization campaigns in Venezuela, Ukraine and elsewhere.
President Biden openly acknowledged this relationship when he told the AFL-CIO Executive Council in July 2024 that the federation was his “domestic NATO.”
None more so than UAW President Shawn Fain, who has openly promoted the World War II “arsenal of democracy” as the model for the union apparatus’ integration into wartime production today.
In exchange for enforcing a no-strike pledge and converting unions into instruments of labor discipline in World War II, the Roosevelt administration instituted the automatic dues checkoff—what union accountants called “manna from heaven”—resolving the financial precarity of the labor bureaucracy at a stroke. The bargain then is the bargain now: the bureaucracy delivers labor peace and political loyalty; the state guarantees its institutional interests. The sons and daughters of the working class pay for this arrangement with their lives.
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Once again, pseudo-left organizations are promoting the lie that the union bureaucracy can be pressured into leading a movement against war. Left Voice, for example, calls for “an anti-war and anti-imperialist movement on the streets and from our workplaces and schools,” in which “labor needs to play a leading role given its strategic power to grind imperialism to a halt.
But it will not be the AFL-CIO bureaucracy that builds such a movement. A social layer that functions as a “domestic NATO” for the American ruling class, that has spent decades assisting US imperialism abroad and that responded to the mass bombing of Iran with complicit silence is incapable of leading a struggle against war.
The building of a mass anti-war movement falls to the working class itself—to the rank and file, to young people and students, and to all those who understand that this war, like every war of American imperialism, is fought in the interests of the ruling class at the expense of workers on both sides of the conflict.
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The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, which has begun building independent organizations for the self-determination of the working class in workplaces across the United States and internationally, provides the framework for such a struggle.
The urgent task is to transform the widespread opposition to this war—both in the United States and internationally—into an organized political force before the costs, measured in the lives of workers in Iran and the social devastation imposed on workers in America, grow any higher.
7. Merz kisses Trump’s ring: Berlin openly backs the criminal war of aggression against Iran
Before the cameras, Merz could not move quickly enough to assure US President Donald Trump of his full support for the illegal war of aggression waged by the United States and Israel against Iran. He began his opening statement with the words:
Thank you, Mr. President for having me here in this Oval Office for the third time now. ... I’m really happy to have the opportunity to speak with you in these challenging times. We are on the same page in terms of getting this terrible regime in Tehran away and we will talk about the day after what will happen then if they are out.
This is unmistakable. Berlin supports the US-Israeli campaign of destruction against Iran in order to secure its share of the imperialist spoils. Merz did not mention a single one of the war crimes already committed—including the attack on a girls’ school that killed more than 150 people. On the contrary, he repeatedly grinned approvingly at the cameras as Trump, in the manner of a fascistic strongman, boasted about the destruction of Iran and the targeted assassination of its political leadership.
The war has already developed far beyond the massive US-led onslaught on Iran into what increasingly appears as the beginning of a region-wide conflagration. The genocidal regime in Israel has launched widespread air strikes in Lebanon, including on the capital Beirut, after Hezbollah fired a handful of rockets into Israel in solidarity with Tehran. Residents living south of the Litani River have been ordered by the Israeli military to evacuate the area. Late Wednesday, the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon reported that Israeli troops had crossed the Blue Line and taken control of several Lebanese villages.
Responding to the unprovoked attack by the US and Israel, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corp has fired missiles and drones at American bases and facilities across the Gulf region. US bases in Bahrain and Qatar have been hit, together with US embassy or consulate buildings in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Speculation has grown that the despotic Gulf states, whose militaries have intercepted dozens of Iranian missiles and drones, could formally enter the war.
The possible expansion of the war to Turkey, a NATO member bordering Iran, came a step closer Wednesday when a missile was shot down by NATO air defenses as it approached the Turkish border.
The European imperialist powers are also being drawn ever closer into the war. French President Emmanuel Macron announced Tuesday evening the dispatch of the country’s only aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, to the eastern Mediterranean. Rafale fighter jets, air defense systems, and aerial radar units were also deployed to unnamed Middle Eastern countries. Macron revealed that French forces were involved in shooting down drones in the early stages of the war and warned of further action. He stressed that France has defense agreements with Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, as well as a strategic partnership with Cyprus, where a British airbase was struck by a drone earlier this week.
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Along with laying waste to Iran’s institutions, cities and infrastructure, the US and Israel are dusting off plans used to devastating effect in Iraq and Syria to incite ethnic and other sectarian divisions across the country. According to a CNN report Wednesday, the CIA has been supplying Iranian Kurdish groups based in northern Iraq with weapons for months to facilitate a Kurdish uprising in western Iran. The article noted,
One person familiar with the discussions said that the idea would be for Kurdish armed forces to take on the Iranian security forces and pin them down to make it easier for unarmed Iranians in the major cities to turn out without getting massacred again as they were during unrest in January.
Another US official said the Kurds could help sow chaos in the region and stretch the Iranian regime’s military resources thin.
This operation enjoys backing from Trump himself. CNN reported that he called the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government Sunday to demand that it facilitate the passage of weapons into Iran. Then on Tuesday, Trump had a call with the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran, one of the organizations that signed a recent coalition agreement with four other Iranian Kurdish parties aimed at securing backing from the imperialist powers for a Kurdish state.
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In a statement addressing the bankruptcy of the Kurdish nationalists’ pro-imperialist orientation, the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi, the Turkish section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, wrote of the potential carve-up of Iran,
A Kurdish statelet, landlocked and surrounded by hostile neighbors (Turkey, a rump Iran, and Arab-dominated territories), would be entirely dependent on the patronage of the United States or Israel for its survival—just as the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq has been, serving as an instrument of US policy while its population remains mired in poverty and its politics dominated by corrupt bourgeois-tribal cliques.
An Azerbaijani entity would become a satellite of Turkey or a prize in the competition between Ankara, Moscow and Western oil interests. An Arab entity in Khuzestan—controlling a significant portion of the world’s proven oil reserves—would immediately become a zone of imperialist plunder, contested by the Gulf monarchies, the US and global energy corporations. A Baloch entity would become a new front in the great-power struggle over the Indian Ocean, the Strait of Hormuz and the land routes connecting Central Asia to the sea.
The human consequences would be catastrophic. Iran’s ethnic groups are not neatly separated into distinct territorial zones. Millions of Azerbaijanis live in Tehran; Kurds, Lurs and Persians are interspersed across western Iran; Arabs and Persians coexist in Khuzestan. Any attempt to draw ethnic borders would produce mass displacement, ethnic cleansing and civil war on a scale dwarfing even the Yugoslav catastrophe.
As far as the financial oligarchy represented by Trump and his gang of fascists is concerned, this bloodbath would be a price worth paying if it enabled them to subordinate the region to colonial status. The plundering of oil and gas, control over trade routes and sidelining of rivals like Russia and China are their goals, irrespective of the cost in human life. Anyone who doubts this should recall the Gaza genocide.
The US Southern Command announced Tuesday the beginning of joint land operations with the Ecuadorian armed forces against drug cartels designated as “terrorist organizations.” The Pentagon released a declassified video of helicopter raids and US special forces operating with local commandos.
The operations mark an escalation of the Trump administration’s aggression across Latin America and globally, coming just days after the onset of its criminal war against Iran.
This first-ever US ground intervention ostensibly against cartels in South America expands Operation Southern Spear, the Navy-led campaign that has already murdered 151 fishermen in 45 strikes on alleged drug boats across the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean since last September.
US Southern Command chief Gen. Francis L. Donovan, fresh from Venezuela where Delcy Rodríguez’s puppet regime pledged a “joint security agenda” against trafficking, praised Ecuador’s military for its “unwavering commitment” against narco-terrorists.
While details on the scope and timeline were not offered, fascistic Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa signaled an indefinite operation targeting Los Lobos and Los Choneros—groups branded by Washington as terrorists. Quito confirmed an “offensive collaboration,” with raids hitting coastal zones, while Noboa’s government vows sustained action to “recover control” in cartel hotspots.
In other words, Trump and Noboa have agreed to an indefinite deployment of US troops to wage war on broadly defined “terrorists,” after 67 percent of Ecuadorians voted to reject the building of US bases in the country in a referendum last November.
The Ecuadorian ground operations take place on the heels of the bombing of Caracas to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and amid the ongoing Cuban fuel siege, US bombings in Nigeria, and the sinking of an Iranian warship near Sri Lanka in the spillover from the expanding US-Israeli war in the Middle East. This is no isolated “anti-drug” campaign but a component in the initial stages of a third world war.
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The US-Ecuadorian operations hark back to the Pentagon-CIA orchestration of 20th-century coups and dictatorships crushing Latin American workers. This includes the Ecuadorian military dictatorship that ended in 1979 after the 1971/1975 general strikes that demonstrated the power of the urban proletariat. More recently, the Pentagon has used Plan Colombia and Plan Mérida in México to train and arm local armed forces, which perpetrated bloodbaths without denting drug trafficking.
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The US deployment in Ecuador is a harbinger for similar operations to pressure regional elites against China, directly install puppets, secure key infrastructure and participate in the repression of the working class. In Mexico, government officials have acknowledged that they ordered the killing of top cartel leader Nemesio Oseguera, alias “Mencho,” after concluding that the Trump administration was about to carry out a unilateral military operation in the country. Panama moved to expel a Chinese port company from the Canal after Trump threatened to invade.
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US troops on Latin American soil revive School of the Americas-style terror, but today’s working class—vast, and linked by transnational production—controls the strategic levers of the economy. Ecuador’s troops killed workers, youth and peasants dubbed “terrorists” for protesting against inequality.
The working class must reject any appeal for “national unity” behind the capitalist state, and instead form rank-and-file committees linking with their counterparts across the Americas and globally via the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
The only alternative to fascist dictatorship and the imperialist slaughter is world socialism. All workers who agree in Ecuador must commit to building a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution.
10. Bosch in Germany: IG Metal trade union cracks down on opposition workers
The struggle against the IG Metall apparatus is coming to a head at the Bosch auto supplier plant in Schwäbisch Gmünd. Last year, around 200 employees—mainly from production—organized themselves against the IGM-led works council under Claudio Bellomo because they were not prepared to accept the negotiated job cuts. They drew up their own alternative list for the works council election. IG Metall and the works council have responded by using all means possible to prevent the list from participating in the election on March 11.
11. “We shouldn’t be bombing people, period”: Detroit autoworkers denounce war against Iran
The war against Iran, launched in defiance of US constitutional and international law, is deeply unpopular among workers in the United States. Fifty-nine percent of Americans oppose the decision to strike Iran, with only 16 percent strongly approving, according to a CNN poll taken shortly after the US-Israeli onslaught started. Although Trump has threatened to put “boots on the ground,” only 12 percent favor sending US troops into Iran.
The United Auto Workers (UAW), like the national AFL-CIO and majority of unions, has not issued any statements on the illegal war, which has already killed more than 1,000 people in Iran. This signals the support and complicity of the labor bureaucracy with an imperialist war, which Trump intends to make the working class pay for with their lives and livelihoods.
Supporters of the Socialist Equality Party distributed copies of the SEP National Committee statement, “Stop the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran!” to workers at the Ford Dearborn Truck Plant and Stellantis Warren Truck Assembly Plant in metropolitan Detroit earlier this week.
Most workers were appreciative to hear opposition to the war and hundreds readily took copies of the SEP statement as they rushed in and out of work during their shift changes.
Workers rejected Trump’s lies that the unprovoked attack was aimed at protecting the American people. “I hate war,” one Ford worker said. “This doesn’t benefit us, we got problems here,” another commented.
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The World Socialist Web Site has also received comments from working and young people who oppose the war from throughout the world.
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A commenter from Canada said:
I am absolutely horrified by this unprovoked attack on Iran just like the NATO proxy war on Russia. We have been lied to. We are being lied to. We will be lied to. This is the modus operandi of Western governments. Here in Canada, Prime Minister Mark “Carnage” Carney applauds the illegal attack on Iran and defends Israel’s so-called right to defend itself.
Once again, do not be fooled by his speech at DAVOS as he manufactures consent for war here in Canada with a massive military budget of 5% in accordance with the Trump regime’s demand of NATO nations. Canadian soldiers are serving side by side with American forces wreaking death and destruction on innocent people and they will be traumatized and suffer the grave moral injury of war. This war will likely come home to all of us here in North America and Europe before it ends and hopefully not in mushroom clouds. However, one cannot be sure with these people who belong in an insane asylum for the criminally insane!
12. First primaries held in US mid-term election campaign
The first primary contests of the 2026 US mid-term election campaign took place on Tuesday, with the two parties of the financial aristocracy, the Democrats and Republicans, pouring tens of millions of dollars into contests in Texas, North Carolina and Arkansas.
Texas was the main focus of both parties, as well as the corporate media, which portrayed the outcome of a handful of tightly contested races as a clear signal that the Democratic Party will make significant gains in the general election on November 3. The Republican Party holds narrow majorities in both houses of Congress, 218-214 in the House of Representatives, with three seats vacant, and 53-47 in the Senate.
More than $100 million was spent on the primary campaigns for the Texas seat in the US Senate now held by four-term Republican John Cornyn. The incumbent Republican accounted for two-thirds of this, an estimated $65 million-$70 million, raised from billionaire oligarchs in the oil industry, military contractors and financial institutions.
This sum dwarfed that spent by his two opponents, state Attorney General Ken Paxton and Representative Wesley Hunt, who both sought to appeal to the party’s fascist base, attacking Cornyn as part of the Washington establishment. Paxton made a name for himself on the fascist right through legal persecution of abortion clinics, as well as leading the effort by Republican attorneys-general to overturn the 2020 election. But he raised only $4 million, and was regarded as damaged goods, impeached by the Republican-controlled state House on corruption charges in 2023 but retaining his office when the state Senate refused to convict him.
Despite the disparity in resources, Cornyn won only a narrow plurality in the primary and faces a runoff in May against the fascist Paxton, who finished second. President Trump had declined to endorse any of the three candidates before the primary, but Paxton had the support of Trump’s 2024 campaign manager Chris LaCivita and his best-known fascist media advocate, Steve Bannon.
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In the Democratic primary there was a similar disparity in fundraising, with state Representative James Talarico, a former seminarian with the backing of the party leadership and business interests, raising $25 million, while his opponent, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, raised barely $5 million.
As in the Republican race, the better-financed candidate won, although in the Democratic contest it was a decisive outcome, with Talarico receiving 52 percent of the vote compared to 46 percent for Crockett, who conceded defeat. Talarico has emphasized his religious education, claiming it will make him more acceptable to Christian fundamentalists who have voted for Trump.
Voter turnout was high for a mid-term primary election, with a New York Times analysis suggesting that more voters chose to cast ballots in the Democratic primary than in the Republican primary for the first time in many decades when there have been contests in both parties.
The biggest shift was among Hispanic voters, particularly in the counties in the Rio Grande Valley, which Trump won in 2024 after losing by landslide margins to Hillary Clinton in 2016. In five majority-Latino counties, more voters turned out to vote in the Democratic primary Tuesday than cast ballots for Kamala Harris in the presidential election, according to an analysis by Politico.
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The Democratic race included nearly $4 million in ads supposedly supporting Crockett, but paid for by the campaign of Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who viewed Crockett as the weaker of the two candidates in November. This is a further instance of the cynical interventions by the two capitalist parties across nominal party lines. In 2024 this was done mainly by the Democrats, who funded ads to support the most extreme-right candidates in several Republican primaries.
The Texas contest is one of a half-dozen seats which the Democratic Party has targeted in its effort to win back control of the Senate, along with Alaska, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio. The Democratic nominee in North Carolina was also chosen Tuesday, former Governor Roy Cooper, who had the full backing of the party establishment and only nominal opposition. He will face former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, who was handpicked by Trump, first for the RNC and then as the Republican candidate to replace retiring Republican Thom Tillis.
Democratic and Republican nominees were also selected for 56 seats in the House of Representatives. Republicans hold all four Arkansas seats, 10 out of 14 seats in North Carolina, and 27 out of 38 in Texas. North Carolina and Texas were heavily gerrymandered by Republican state legislatures for the current election, with the aim of gaining five seats in Texas and one or two seats in North Carolina.
The result has been forced retirements among Democrat representatives and one member vs. member primary, in which Representative Al Green—who was ejected from Trump’s State of the Union speech this year and last—narrowly trailed a much younger black Democrat, Christian Menefee, with a runoff set for May.
Trump successfully purged the only member of the Texas Republican delegation who vocally opposed his claims of a “stolen election” in 2020 and condemned the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Representative Dan Crenshaw was defeated by a Trump-endorsed state senator.
In the media coverage of the election result, there was little discussion of the likelihood that the November election will be held under conditions of military occupation of major US cities, or with armed and masked federal agents supervising the polls.
But a preview of sorts was on display in Dallas County, the second-largest in the state, where the Republican-controlled county government changed precinct structures so that Democrats and Republicans had different polling stations, leading many Democrats to be turned away because they went to the wrong station.
The Democratic Party went before a local judge, who ordered polling stations to stay open an additional two hours to accommodate those who had been denied the opportunity to vote. But at the end of that time, the Texas Supreme Court, acting at the request of Republican state Attorney General Paxton, overturned the local order and told election officials in Dallas to set aside all the ballots cast during that period.
13. Asian markets take major hit from war against Iran
So far the reaction on the European and US stock markets to war on Iran has been described as “benign.” But yesterday saw a very different situation in the Asian markets most dependent on supplies of oil from the Middle East and heavily impacted by the price spike resulting from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes one-fifth of global supply.
South Korea was at the center of the storm. South Korean stocks fell by 12 percent yesterday in the largest one-day drop recorded, eclipsing falls in the 2008 crisis. Since last Friday, the fall in the Kospi index has been 20 percent, after it had risen by 50 percent since the start of the year on the back of the belief that South Korea, and its chip-making firms, would benefit from the development of artificial intelligence (AI).
The spike in oil prices had a major effect because South Korea is the world’s eighth-largest importer of crude. The downturn was led by market heavyweights Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, two of the world’s biggest chipmakers, which account for nearly 40 percent of the Kospi index. Another factor appears to be forced selling as a result of the unraveling of leveraged bets—stock purchases financed by debt—which had been made to try to ride the previous market surge.
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The selloff was not confined to South Korea. Thailand’s market dropped 8 percent for the day. The fall was so sharp that at one point trading was suspended for 30 minutes. Thailand is sensitive to higher energy costs as many of its manufacturing firms, facing stiff competition from rivals, operate on low profit margins. The Thai tourist industry, a key component of the economy, is also threatened by the disruption to airline travel.
The market selloff went across Asia. The Japanese market was down 3.7 percent, Taiwan by 4.4 percent and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index fell by nearly 3 percent.
Major economies of the region—such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan—are highly vulnerable to any disruption to the flow of oil and natural gas from the Middle East, now under threat of being severely restricted because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
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These figures and yesterday’s market reaction in Asia underscore one of the strategic objectives of the US war against Iran. The war is not just directed against Tehran. US imperialism aims to take control of Middle East oil supplies as part of its preparation for military conflict with China and to assert its global dominance.
Markets in Europe and the US have yet to react violently to the launching of war. There has been some turbulence, but so far less than that experienced last April, when US President Trump launched his sweeping so-called “reciprocal tariffs.”
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The main focus of Wall Street is on Blue Owl Capital, which last month permanently restricted cash withdrawals from one of its funds. Since then, in the words of a recent article in the New York Times, it has “been trying to convince investors that its $300 billion portfolio of investments and loans is actually worth what Blue Owl says.”
Not with a great deal of success, it appears. Its share price has fallen below the initial issue price of $10 when the asset manager went public in 2021, bringing the loss to 50 percent over the past 12 months.
The share prices of other asset management firms, including Blackstone, Apollo, KKR and Ares, are also down, with the Apollo chief Marc Rowan warning of a “shake-out” in the private markets.
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There are two underlying problems. The first is that the money which flowed into private equity funds from major financial institutions, including insurance firms, has been drying up in the recent period and they have had to rely more on so-called retail investors.
Unlike institutional investors, who tend to lend long in line with the investments of the private equity firms, these investors want quick and easy access to their money, setting up the classic scenario for financial problems where money is supplied short-term but used for long-term investments which cannot be easily liquidated.
The second problem is even more significant. Much of the investment by the private equity funds has been in the software sector, financing deals, mergers and takeovers. It has been estimated that such deals have accounted for almost a third of all private loans over the past decade.
But software firms and their backers in private equity are under threat from the development of AI. Some of them may collapse.
Last month, analysts at UBS warned that private credit could see default rates rise to as high as 15 percent, if AI triggered an “aggressive” disruption for corporate borrowers.
Reporting on this analysis, Bloomberg said warnings about the $1.8 trillion market had “been building, with some comparing to the 2008 financial crisis.”
Others have dismissed the analysis as overdone. The head of the Ares group, Mike Arougheti, said the UBS warning on the possibility of a 15 percent default rate was “absolutely wrong,” but did acknowledge that some firms may not survive.
“If you’re talking about 15 percent default rates, which again I think is not possible, but if you’re there, everything else in your portfolio, I assure you, is going to be completely torched,” he said.
No one has a crystal ball of prediction, but the UBS analysis points to inherent instability of the financial system, and yesterday’s dramatic plunge in the Korean stock market, which had been the world’s highest performer so far this year, indicates how fast things can change.
14. Wifredo Lam at New York’s Museum of Modern Art: “When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream”
Politically engaged modern artist Wifredo Lam (1902–1982) is receiving his first full-career retrospective in the US. Lam was a Cuban artist of African and Chinese descent who was active during the period of the rise of fascism, World War II and the Cold War. In Europe, Lam absorbed modernist trends and befriended major artists and poets such as Pablo Picasso and André Breton. On his return to Cuba, he forged a style in which African and Cuban culture was an integral, not merely “exotic,” component. Throughout his career, Lam sympathized with Marxism and took an active part in struggles against dictatorship and imperialism.
The exhibition, titled “When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream,” will run through April 11 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The curators emphasize Lam’s stated project of “decolonization,” but he meant by that a political and social struggle against imperialist domination. In our day, “decolonization” has largely been turned into a program of incorporating the elites of various minorities or ethnicities into governments, corporate boardrooms, academia, etc.
The curators also stress Lam’s engagement with African identity and religion, omitting entirely his relationship with Marxism and socialism. Not surprisingly, the exhibition obscures the more fundamental political and class issues that are essential to a full appreciation of Lam’s work.
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Lam’s mother was the daughter of a Congolese former slave and a Cuban mulatto. His father was a well-educated Chinese immigrant who had established a carpenter’s shop. Lam’s upbringing was modest, but as a child, he was exposed to Chinese calligraphy and African sculptures, the latter of which became a lifelong source of inspiration for him. His family practiced Catholicism and African traditions, he was exposed to the tradition of ancestor worship and his godmother was a noted Santería priestess. Growing up among former slaves contributed to the artist’s sympathy with peasant laborers.
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Lam showed precocious talent as a draftsman, but when he was a teenager, his parents sent him to Havana, where they hoped that he would study law. Instead, he began studying art and visiting the Botanical Gardens. Lam’s early paintings earned him local recognition, and he received a grant that allowed him to pursue his studies in Madrid.
Beginning in 1923, Lam received academic training in Spain. He disliked this training and simultaneously studied more modern and experimental approaches. He found inspiration in the works of masters like Francisco Goya and Pieter Bruegel the Elder and in those of contemporaries such as Picasso, whose work he called “not only a revelation, but … a shock.” “Sol” (1925), a painting in the MoMA exhibition from this period, is a self-portrait of the artist wearing elaborately decorated Asian robes as he sits in a lush, moonlit garden.
Through artist acquaintances who had traveled to Paris, Lam learned about Surrealism, an artistic school whose stated aims were to liberate the unconscious and resolve the contradictions between dream and reality. While in Spain, Lam also married his first wife Eva Piriz, with whom he had a son. Tragically, he lost them both to tuberculosis in 1931.
Through letters from home, he closely followed the dictatorship of General Gerardo Machado y Morales in Cuba, which he opposed. Friends introduced Lam to left-wing politics and ideas. Though he did not join any party, the artist did engage with various democratic, anti-imperialist and anti-fascist organizations.
Lam was still in Spain when General Francisco Franco launched his rebellion against the Second Spanish Republic in July 1936. He joined the Republican effort not only by designing propaganda posters but also by assembling anti-tank bombs in a munitions factory. He became poisoned through his intensive work handling explosives and was sent to recover in 1937.
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On the eve of Franco’s victory, Lam fled to Paris. There, he met Picasso, whom he described as an “instigator of freedom.” The two became good friends, and Picasso introduced Lam to other modernists such as Henri Matisse and Joan Miró. He boosted Lam’s career by introducing him to art dealer Pierre Loeb, who gave Lam his first exhibition in 1939. In this period, the influences of African art and Cubism grew stronger in Lam’s work.
Before long, Lam met leading Surrealists such as Breton and artist Victor Brauner. He admired not only their work but their opposition to fascism and imperialism as well. They were also hostile to Stalinism and sympathetic to Leon Trotsky’s fight against the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy.
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Poetry was infusing Lam’s work with broader aesthetic and cultural currents. Poets such as Breton and René Char fortified Lam’s orientation toward European modernism. At the same time, meeting poets such as Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas, who were exponents of the Négritude movement, enriched Lam’s understanding of the African diaspora and its cultures.
In 1941, Lam, Breton and others fled France for Martinique, where they were quickly imprisoned. After 40 days, Lam was released and allowed to return to Cuba. The artist’s long absence helped him see the country and its Afro-Cuban traditions anew. He believed that these traditions were being degraded into a picturesque spectacle for tourists.
A new sense of purpose took hold of Lam. “I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the Negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks,” he said. “In this way, I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters.”
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Lam’s distinctive style began to emerge. He painted figures that were part human, part animal and part vegetable—figures that seem to change shape before our eyes. Dense fields of sugarcane and palm leaves became recurring motifs. They alluded not only to Cuba but also to agricultural labor in general. African mythology and masks became still more prominent in Lam’s paintings.
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Lam’s mature style crystallizes in “The Jungle” (1943), his best-known work. It depicts four hybrid figures standing in a dense field of sugarcane. The creatures’ faces seem to draw equally from Cubism and from African masks. In this emphatically vertical composition, figure blends with ground. Breasts, buttocks, lips and outstretched hands stand out amid the verticality, and an open pair of scissors offsets these sensual features with the threat of violence. The silvery blue palette with highlights of green, pink and orange evokes moonlight. The setting is nonspecific and dreamlike. Some have interpreted the painting as an evocation of Cuba’s plantation economy and slave labor. Others see a criticism of the exoticization of the Caribbean.
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In 1946, the artist returned to Europe for the first time after World War II. Seeing the war’s effects on Paris greatly affected him. The trip also heightened Lam’s awareness of European imperialist exploitation of the Caribbean. Back in Cuba, he began simplifying his forms and adopting a rich, dark palette to incorporate the formal elements of African art into his style. He evoked African religions more overtly. His paintings became more austere and dramatic; they began to incorporate horned heads, birds, horseshoes, rhomboids and knives.
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After Fulgencio Batista’s 1952 military coup, Lam left Cuba permanently, first settling in Paris. Three years later, he exhibited paintings at Havana University to show his support for the students’ protests against the new dictatorship.
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After the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro, Lam created a painting for the presidential palace and co-organized art exhibitions in Havana. But the exhibition mentions neither Lam’s opposition to Batista nor his sympathy for Castro’s left nationalist regime.
In the 1970s, Lam began experimenting with ceramics, and several of his highly textured plates and vases are on display. In Europe, Lam also renewed his collaborative graphic work with poets such as Char and Édouard Glissant.
In 1979, Lam showed Aimé Césaire a series of dreamlike color etchings of active, fantastical figures in pursuit and in flight. Images of genitals and eggs recur throughout the series. The draftsmanship is crisp, and the palette is dark with luminous whites. Inspired by these etchings, Césaire wrote a suite of poems on the theme of genesis. Lam’s etchings and Césaire’s poems were published in a portfolio titled “Annunciation” (1982) in the year of Lam’s death.
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Lam was among a generation of artists and poets from former colonial countries who integrated indigenous imagery into new and personal modernist styles. The Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo, for example, rooted their work as much in pre-Columbian color and iconography as in modernism. The Négritude poets such as Césaire, Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor were the literary expression of this tendency. These artists’ trajectories were shaped by a period of economic crisis, world war and the European imperialist powers’ loss of their overseas possessions and also often, as noted, by illusions in various bourgeois nationalist trends.
By bringing African masks and deities into his work, Lam sought to confront ahistorical and mystifying depictions of African culture. His sugarcane fields and blades place the African diaspora and its culture in the historical context of plantation violence. Lam’s rebellion against this exploitation is expressed in the undercurrent of violence and menace that runs through much of his work; it is more allusive than explicit.
Although he drew heavily on African religion and Santería for his imagery, Lam was not religious. Rather, the spirits and deities in Lam’s paintings reflect the cultural vocabulary that he developed through his childhood exposure to these rituals. He deployed this religious imagery for political purposes; it was a symbolic language that Afro-Cubans developed under slavery and that reflected cultural resistance. Moreover, Lam’s treatment of these beings is not traditional but altered and fractured through Cubist and Surrealist sensibilities.
15. Australia: Worsening conditions for Aboriginal workers and youth in latest “Closing the Gap” report
The [most recent] “Closing the Gap” report provides another stark picture of the deepening social crisis confronting Aboriginal workers and youth. While the Albanese Labor government has presented the report as evidence of small progress and record “investment,” the data points to a very different reality.Nearly two decades after the “Closing the Gap” program was first introduced by the Rudd Labor government in 2008, only four of the 19 national targets are on track to be met by the 2031 deadline. Most are improving only marginally, while four key indicators are moving decisively backward.
These findings again underscore the widening gulf between official rhetoric and the lived conditions facing Indigenous people.
Moreover, by presenting inequality as a “gap” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, the annual reports divert attention from the broader erosion of wages, housing and public services affecting the working class as a whole. These are conditions produced by the capitalist system, which concentrates wealth in the hands of a minority while imposing deprivation on the majority.
16. Adelaide University: Labor government’s pro-business Universities Accord in action
The 2026 academic year at the newly-created Adelaide University, a merger between the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia, has begun amid chaos and course cuts.
Students and staff have taken to social media to express their frustrations and concerns. The dominant mood is distrust of managerial promises, of opaque processes and of the official channels for redress. Many students fear the merger will lengthen degree pathways, add extra compulsory micro‑credentials or bridging units, and therefore increase their fee debts.
There is confusion over timetabling, compressed or shifted teaching blocks, and last‑minute changes that disrupt planning, assessment and part‑time work. There is also widespread anxiety that humanities, social sciences and smaller specialized courses will be cut or marginalized in favor of vocational STEM and industry‑aligned programs.
Academic and professional staff describe workloads as dramatically increased, with fears of forced redundancies, higher casualization and pressure to absorb extra teaching without commensurate staffing or pay. Many staff members challenge management claims that the merger will improve outcomes, arguing instead that it primarily serves cost‑cutting and business-industry alignment.
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Under the merger arrangements, the management committed to “no compulsory redundancies or retrenchments as a consequence of creating the new institution” until mid-2027. Even this limited commitment is not worth the paper it was written on. The commitment was made before the Albanese Labor government placed increased financial pressure on universities through its cuts to international student enrollments, which has intensified the destruction of thousands of jobs throughout Australia’s public universities over the past 18 months.
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While university managements frame mergers as efficiency drives, the Adelaide merger is being used to cut courses, expand vocational micro‑credentials and steer resources toward industry, particularly areas linked to the military and “national security.”
The two universities had over 5,000 courses last academic year. In 2026, there will be less than 3,000. Specialist courses such as the Bachelor of International Development have been discontinued, with students moved into a more generic Bachelor of Arts degree.
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The merged institution is pursuing deeper industry and military ties. The university’s research strategy aims to “build a national defense industry research center, featuring world-class facilities to co-locate Adelaide University, industry and government in a secure space to develop innovation-led learning and create sovereign capability and the workforce of the future.”
One example is a new “whole-of-university strategic partnership” agreement with Saab, a global aerospace and armaments conglomerate. According to the media announcement, it will focus on “future capabilities including distributed command and control, autonomous systems and hypersonics,” and feature student “internships” and “work-integrated learning.”
The partnership will “utilize the Sovereign Combat Systems Collaboration Centre at Mawson Lakes which was established in partnership with the Australian Government to develop and integrate sovereign capabilities at speed.”
Such partnerships with weapons manufacturers demonstrate the higher education sector’s growing alignment with the military‑industrial complex.
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Former Labor leader Bill Shorten and other pro‑business figures have openly called for a “re‑imagining” of universities to supply the skills demanded by the AUKUS military pact, which is directed against China, and the development of a war economy.
17. Trump warns Starmer: Fall into line over Iran, or else
US President Donald Trump has delivered the most extraordinary public rebuke of a British prime minister in the post-war period, insisting that he and NATO allies fall fully into line behind the US-led war on Iran.
Speaking from the Oval Office Tuesday, Trump denounced Keir Starmer for initially refusing to permit US forces to use two British bases, including Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, for strikes on Iran.
Trump declared Starmer’s stance “shocking”, complaining he had been “very, very uncooperative with that stupid island that they have”. Because of this, he claimed, “It’s taken three or four days to work out where we can land. It would have been much more convenient landing there as opposed to flying many extra hours. We are very surprised.”
Referencing Britain’s World War Two leader, he stated, “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.”
Starmer reversed course on Sunday evening, allowing US access to the bases, for what Downing Street described as a “specific and limited defensive purpose” targeting Iranian missile silos. But as far as the fascist in the White House was concerned, this was too little, too late.
The Times reported Wednesday Trump administration figures saying the partial reversal of policy didn’t wash with the White House or the Pentagon.
Trump launched his Oval Office attack while seated beside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whom he praised for backing the US position. In the same appearance, he denounced Spain for refusing access to its military bases and for failing to meet the 3.5 percent of GDP defence spending target he is demanding through NATO.
“Some of the European nations have been helpful, and some haven’t… Spain has been terrible,” Trump said. “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain.”
The threat to Britain was unmistakable.
This was Trump’s third public denunciation of Starmer in as many days in what can only be understood as the initial stages of a far-right regime change operation against the Labour prime minister.
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Whatever Starmer’s protestations, Britain—connected to the US war machine by a million threads, including hosting US nuclear weapons—is already embroiled in [Trump's] illegal war.
Shaken by this offensive against Starmer, the Guardian, a trusted pro-war political conduit of the Labour government, reported Wednesday that according to “western officials… Britain has not ruled out participating in future strikes against Iranian ballistic missile launch sites”.
The moves against Starmer are in line with the declared policy of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, which pledges to “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” and hails “the growing influence of patriotic European parties” as their desired replacement. This refers to far-right formations such as The National Rally in France, Alternative for Germany, Vox in Spain, Brothers of Italy, and in Britain, to Reform UK and its periphery.
18. More than 2.1 billion of world’s 3.6 billion workers are in the informal economy
The International Labour Organizations Employment and Social Trends 2026 report paints a stark picture of the conditions facing most of the world’s workers.
More than 2.1 billion of the world’s 3.6 billion workers—around 60 percent—labor in the informal economy. They work on a casual basis for low pay, often in hazardous conditions and without legal rights, job security or social protection, including sick pay, medical or disability insurance, unemployment benefits or pensions.
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Precarity is not confined to the less-developed economies. Platform work is expanding fastest in high-income countries among young workers, migrants and those already excluded from stable employment, reinforcing a global reserve army of labor whose insecurity underpins the labor market today.
The industries and sectors most reliant on casual labour include:
Agriculture, by far the largest global employer of informal labor, where seasonal and family labor are unregistered.
The construction industry, characterized by long subcontracting chains and the widespread evasion of what little safety regulation exists.
Mining, which involves 45 to 50 million artisanal and small-scale miners (ASM) who work in 80 countries worldwide, with an additional 270 million dependent on ASM indirectly (services, supply chains, local economies), according to the World Bank. This is far more than in the formal mining sector, as corporate-controlled mines are highly mechanized.
The clothing and textile sector, where global supply chains depend on informal home-based work and small workshops.
Retail and wholesale trade, including street vendors, market traders and small shops, which form the backbone of distribution in many countries.
Transport and logistics, where informal taxis, moto-taxis, trucking and delivery services substitute for the lack of affordable public transport.
Domestic work and the care economy, one of the most feminized informal sectors.
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While workers’ incomes have stagnated or fallen, formal firms have seen profits rise. Lower labor costs, greater flexibility in hiring and firing, and the ability to outsource compliance with labor regulations have all contributed to this shift. Global supply chains depend on casual labor hidden at the bottom of the production hierarchy, where value is created under informal and precarious conditions but realized by domestic intermediate firms in less-developed countries and by multinational corporations in the advanced economies—often routed through tax havens.
The ILO reports that labor’s global share of value added stands at just 52.6 percent in 2025, below the 2019 level of 53 percent, despite continued growth in output. Declining for decades, this is likely the lowest level ever, but certainly since records began in the early 1990s.
Crucially, this means that the corporate and financial elite expropriate almost half the value created by the labor power of the working class and peasantry, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. And this amount is increasing annually. It signifies a historic shift in class power to the financial oligarchy.
Real wages for most workers—especially in low-income countries—have grown slowly, erratically or not at all once informality is considered. This is a long-term trend spanning decades. The modest growth in global real wages has fallen far short of what would be required to offset the losses during the surge in inflation between 2022 and 2024.
19. Workers Struggles: Africa & Europe
Africa
Liberia:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Europe
Belgium:
Firefighters hold strike and demonstration in Brussels against cuts
Germany:
Public transport workers strike for improved pay and conditions
Greece:
Seafarers strike over crews stranded in Gulf war zone
Italy:
United Kingdom:
Health visitors at Welsh health board continue stoppage over pay grading
Academic staff at universities strike over pay and job losses
20. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
