The two days since Trump proclaimed a “ceasefire” have been
characterized by continued violence in the Middle East, above all,
through Israel’s massive bombardment of Lebanon, and a deepening
political crisis in the United States. Trump has paired his ceasefire
announcement with open threats of renewed war against Iran, declaring
Wednesday night that the US military is “Loading Up and Resting” for its
“next Conquest.”
Under these conditions, the publication Jacobin,
semi-official house organ of the Democratic Socialists of America and
the Democratic Party, has responded with a series of articles whose
central theme is: There is nothing to worry about, and nothing needs to
be done.
*****
Bound up with the Democratic Party politics that determine Jacobin’s
policies, its central purpose is to demobilize opposition to war: Trump
has suffered a “debacle,” therefore the danger has supposedly receded.
It is certainly the case that American imperialism has suffered a major
setback and catastrophically misjudged the resistance of the Iranian
people. But the Trump administration’s response will not be retreat but
escalation—greater violence abroad and a deepening conspiracy for
dictatorship at home.
*****
As the World Socialist Web Site stated, Trump’s threat is a
historical watershed. His declaration that the United States is prepared
to annihilate an entire civilization of more than 90 million people
exposed the war’s genocidal logic and laid bare the criminal character
of the American state and its leaders. It shatters what remained of the
myth that US imperialism acts in defense of “democracy” or “human
rights.”
Such considerations are entirely foreign to the politics of Jacobin
and the DSA, which are oriented entirely to the electoral fortunes of
the Democratic Party and the prospects for political advancement (and
personal enrichment) this affords.
*****
The central aim of the Democratic Party and the DSA is to prevent the
emergence of a movement from below, which would not stop with opposition
to Trump. The Democrats fear any genuine popular mobilization because
it would immediately raise broader questions: the grotesque
concentration of wealth, the dictatorship of the financial oligarchy,
and the entire social order that both capitalist parties exist to
defend.
This is why, during the “No Kings” protests against Trump held on March
28, they and their political affiliates deliberately downplayed the war
against Iran. Those like Sanders who did raise the question of the war
offered no way forward for the struggle except appeals to Congress and
even to Trump himself.
What is entirely absent from the Jacobin articles is any
reference to the historical roots and fundamental driving forces of the
war against Iran. There is not a word about the strategic interests of
American imperialism, the long history of US intervention in Iran under
both Democrats and Republicans, or the connection between the assault on
Iran and the expanding conflict with Russia and China. Neither article
mentions “oil,” “imperialism,” “capitalism,” the ruling class or the
social forces represented by Trump.
This omission expresses a definite class standpoint. Jacobin,
speaking for the Democratic Party and the upper-middle class milieu
represented by the DSA, seeks above all to block the emergence of an
independent movement of the working class against war and the capitalist
interests from which it arises. Such a movement, Jacobin has stated elsewhere, constitutes “sectarianism.”
The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party
fight for the building of a mass anti-war movement based on the
independent political mobilization of the working class against the
capitalist system, which is the root cause of war. Only the
international working class has the social power to halt the imperialist
war machine and prevent the present crisis—or the next one—from
developing into a world war that would threaten civilization not only in
Iran but everywhere.
Reporters
from the World Socialist Web Site spoke to workers as they passed
through the factory gates, shortly after reports emerged that the US
government is moving toward automatic registration for a potential
military draft.
When President Trump signed the 2026 National Defense Authorization
Act (NDAA) into law last December—with critical votes supplied by the
Democratic Party—one provision was largely concealed from the American
public. The creation of an automatic selective service registration
system for all men aged 18 to 26, tied directly to state and federal
databases, was barely discussed.
Now, under conditions of the
widening US-Israeli war in the Middle East—and future wars being
prepared by US imperialism—the 2026 NDAA has a ready-made mechanism for
conscription that can be activated by a directive from the fascist in
the White House.
A filing by the Trump administration to the
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on March 30 has confirmed
both the operational readiness of the system and the administration’s
long-term strategy to prepare for a generation of imperial wars fought
by working class soldiers.
Under the NDAA provision, the Selective
Service System (SSS) will automatically register all males between 18
and 26 using existing data streams from state motor vehicle departments,
educational institutions and federal tax and immigration agencies
beginning in December 2026. The measure replaces the voluntary mail-in
or online registration system previously implemented by the Selective
Service Act going back to 1980 and the administration of Jimmy Carter.
*****
Notifications and classification statuses would be delivered
electronically through federal and state portals, while appeals or
deferment requests may be filed online through a centralized system.
Framed by the Trump administration as a “modernization” of the draft
infrastructure, officials claim the process will “reduce administrative
burden” and “increase equity in compliance.” However, the main goal is
to eliminate non-registration, centralize control and ensure readiness
for immediate mobilization once a national emergency requires the draft.
*****
The scale of US casualties in the initial months of the war against
Iran has already sparked renewed discussion in Washington about manpower
shortages and the exhaustion of volunteer enlistments. Recruitment has
plummeted for the third straight year, forcing the administration to
expand eligibility criteria and reopen previously closed avenues of
enlistment.
The lies provided by the US government justifying the
wars launched over the past three decades—from the false claims about
“yellow cake uranium” prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the
obviously made-up claim by Trump that Iran was “weeks away” from having a
nuclear weapon—have no doubt played a role in the decreasing numbers of
enlistments to the all-volunteer US army.
*****
Strategists within the National Security Council have spoken
bluntly about the draft plan. “Iran is not the end,” one senior defense
official told Politico in March. “It’s the first test of a
broader geopolitical reorientation. We’re rebuilding the capacity to
project power simultaneously in multiple theaters—Eurasia, the Pacific,
and the Middle East.” Behind this language is the unmistakable logic of
international imperialist war for markets and resources.
The NDAA
provision also mandates that automatic registration will apply to lawful
permanent residents, asylum seekers, Deferred Action (DACA) recipients
and undocumented immigrants identified through state or federal data.
While
Trump and his fascist and xenophobic supporters have vilified
undocumented immigrants as a national threat and unleashed violence,
detention and death upon them, the new SSS system shows that those same
“illegal” immigrants will be compelled to serve and die alongside
American youth in US wars of conquest.
By linking data from the Department of Homeland Security, ICE and state
records, the administration ensures that all young men residing within
US borders—regardless of their immigration status—will be entered into
the federal registry. Now, the immigrant workers will not only face
deportation and being hauled off to concentration camps in El Salvador
or elsewhere. They will also be forced onto the battle fields to die for
the interests of the American financial oligarchy.
*****
The system’s reliance on state-level data also contradicts local laws.
Several states, including California and New York, maintain strict
privacy laws governing the use and transmission of resident data to
federal agencies. By demanding direct data pipelines to the Selective
Service System, the Trump administration’s new plan seeks to override
these restrictions.
*****
Alongside the selective service overhaul, Trump’s Pentagon also
quietly raised the maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42, a change that
was made public only in an internal directive earlier this year. Defense
officials have said the adjustment is about “greater longevity and
fitness levels,” but the underlying motivation is obvious. The wars the
US is now fighting require many more soldiers.
The volunteer army
has long faced a crisis of recruitment amid stagnant pay, poor
conditions and widespread public distrust of government motives. The
enlistment age increase widens the conscription base to include millions
of older working-class men—those who are struggling with income
instability, medical and college loan debt, or unstable employment—and
for whom military service may be seen as the only path out of a crisis.
The
reactivation of the draft shows that the global strategic aims of the
Trump administration require the mobilization of the youth to fight and
die in its wars of aggression and conquest. This is a central component
of the drive by US imperialism to turn the clock back and abolish the
gains by the working class in the 20th century.
April 10 marks the first 100 days in office of New York City’s
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) mayor, Zohran Mamdani. They have
been characterized by a betrayal of the aspirations of the million New
Yorkers who voted for him and the tens of millions across the US who
supported him. He has retreated from implementing his major campaign
promises, given the New York Police Department (NYPD) license to spy on
and repress antiwar and anti-ICE protesters, is preparing massive cuts
to social services and education and has made a political alliance with
the fascist in the White House, Donald Trump.
In his latest
retreat from the minor but popular reforms he proposed during his
election campaign, Mamdani has all but admitted that his promise of free
bus service is dead. In an interview with Politico on
Wednesday, after the interviewer noted that no proposal had been made to
include funding for the program in the state budget, from which mass
transit for the city is funded, Mamdani could only respond lamely: “It
continues to be part of budget negotiations,” and “We’re encouraged by
the conversations we’re having with the governor.”
This is the
same governor, right-wing Democrat Kathy Hochul, who fled an appearance
at an auto exhibition in Manhattan later that day after being besieged
by protesters. One demonstrator shouted at her, accurately, “You’re a
millionaire protecting billionaires.” On Thursday, Hochul canceled an
appearance in Queens, no doubt out of concern that she might be run out
of the borough as well.
Hochul, whom Mamdani endorsed in February
for governor in her reelection bid and whom he refuses to confront on
any issue, has been adamant that she will oppose his proposed 1 percent
tax increase on incomes over $1 million and 3 percent tax increase on
corporations.
Two of the three major promises Mamdani made during
his election campaign, free bus service and universal pre-K, simply
cannot be fully funded on any long-term basis without these taxes, which
were never in the offing. Even so, Mamdani and the DSA continue to
promote the illusion that Hochul is willing or able to persuade the
billionaires to give up even a tiny fraction of their wealth.
*****
Mamdani has said little in recent weeks about his third major election
proposal: freezing rents on the 1 million rent-regulated apartments in
the city. While he appointed six of the nine members of the Rent
Guidelines Board (RGB), which has the power to set rent increases, in
February, there is no guarantee they will vote for a 0 percent increase,
although most observers think this is likely. On Thursday, however, the
RGB itself reported that the annual Price Index of Operating Costs,
which landlords pay for building upkeep, had risen 5.3 percent.
*****
The fate of these three programs, central to Mamdani’s supposed
effort to make New York City “affordable” for most of the population
through minor reforms, must be seen in the context of much broader cuts
to social programs and education that are almost certainly coming as
Mamdani tries to close the city’s $5.4 billion budget gap, as he is
legally required to do by July.
While he has floated an either-or
scenario of, on the one hand, pressuring Hochul and the state
legislature to pass the millionaires’ tax or, on the other, increasing
the city’s property tax by 9.5 percent—a move that would devastate
millions of working class and middle class homeowners and tenants, as
well as small businesses—it has been clear from the outset that this was
a nonstarter and that the only real option before Mamdani is to cut
vital social programs.
*****
The DSA has now been in power in America’s largest city for 100 days.
Not only has its mayor shown his willingness to meet with the city’s
leading billionaires and seek to balance the city budget without
touching their wealth; no DSA leader, least of all Mamdani himself,
seriously entertains the prospect of significantly increasing taxes on
them. Instead, the DSA is preparing to impose the full burden of the
fiscal crisis on the working class.
To do so, the repressive
apparatus of the capitalist state must function without restraint. The
immense economic pressure bearing down on the working class in New York,
nationally and internationally has combined with widespread dissent,
first in opposition to genocide and now in opposition to war and
dictatorship. Mamdani’s willingness to assure the ruling elite that he
could govern the financial nerve center of world capitalism was signaled
not only by his meetings with the city’s billionaires after receiving
the Democratic Party nomination in June, but above all by his two
cordial meetings with Donald Trump and his pointed refusal to criticize
Trump by name—even as Trump threatened to destroy Iranian civilization.
*****
He has allowed NYPD officers to arrest striking nurses—after working
behind the scenes to shut down the nurses’ strike at four major
hospitals in February—and has continually backed away from his promises
to disband the Strategic Response Group (SRG), the NYPD’s anti-terrorism
unit, which beat and arrested George Floyd protesters in 2020 and
pro-Palestinian demonstrators and others beginning in 2023.
While
Mamdani has repeatedly said that the SRG would be disbanded, SRG
officers arrested protesters on Monday at “Passover Seder in the
Street,” a Jewish-sponsored event, after demonstrators sought to block
the doors of Palantir’s Manhattan headquarters. Palantir is a tech
company that provides data aggregation and relationship-mapping software
to ICE. Significantly, Mamdani had attended the protest earlier while
it was rallying in Union Square in Lower Manhattan.
The week
before, at a press conference at 1 Police Plaza in Manhattan alongside
Jessica Tisch, Mamdani stepped back from his campaign pledge to disband
the Criminal Group Database, better known as the Gang Database, which
contains thousands of names, including minors, of people the NYPD merely
suspects of gang affiliation. Mamdani cited the record low murder and
shooting statistics from the first quarter of 2026 as proof that the
NYPD’s current policing strategies, including reliance on the database,
were working.
His collaboration with the NYPD has become so blatant that the New York Times
published an interview with him on Thursday largely to allow him to
make excuses for not disbanding the SRG, for keeping the Gang Database,
and to show that he was in command, allowing him to declare: “I hold the
final decision.”
The fact that a so-called “socialist” mayor
feels compelled to say this about the largest police force in the
country only demonstrates that, after 100 days, his administration has
only one response to the relentless pressure and power of the capitalist
state—whether in the form of Trump, the NYPD or their Wall Street
masters. The DSA in power in New York City is a regime of surrender to
these forces.
The continued practice of state-sanctioned murder in the United States
remains a brutal reality of American capitalism. Even in this gruesome
landscape, however, the construction of a remote-controlled firing squad
chamber in Idaho stands out for its calculated, technological savagery.
As the ruling establishment struggles to maintain its “assembly line of
death,” five states—Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and
Utah—have turned to the firing squad in a desperate effort to keep the
state killing machine moving.
*****
In Idaho, this retrogression has met with significant opposition.
Protesters, including local faith leaders and anti-death penalty
advocates, have gathered in Boise to deliver petitions to the private
corporations complicit in designing this facility, among them the
engineering firm Cator Ruma and Associates, whose employees have been
drawn into the machinery of state murder through routine contracting
work.
The chamber itself, a “retrofit” of the F Block execution
unit at the Idaho State Maximum Security Institution, stands as a
testament to the cold, bureaucratic character of state killing. Internal
emails between contractors reveal a chilling “business as usual” tone,
with technicians discussing floor drains to “mop/squeegee liquids” and
soundproofing measures to ensure other incarcerated people do not hear
the shots. The project will utilize a remote-operated firing mechanism
specifically designed to “minimize correctional staff
involvement”—allowing the state to kill a human being with the push of a
button.
*****
The drive toward this mechanical slaughter was accelerated by the
state’s own previous incompetence in killing a condemned prisoner. In
2024, Idaho attempted to execute Thomas Creech by
lethal injection. In a torturous procedure, the execution team failed
eight times to establish an IV line, probing Creech’s hands, feet and
legs for nearly an hour before abandoning the attempt. The grotesque
spectacle did not prompt a reconsideration of the death penalty itself.
Instead, the legislature responded by passing House Bill 37, clearing
the path for the chamber now under construction.
*****
Idaho’s embrace of the rifle follows the trail blazed by South Carolina,
which carried out three firing squad executions in 2025—the first such
executions anywhere in the United States since Utah put Ronnie Lee
Gardner to death in 2010.
*****
The grim record of what the firing squad does to a human body was established in vivid detail when Utah executed Ronnie Lee Gardner just
after midnight on June 18, 2010, at a prison in Draper. Gardner, 49,
was seated in a straight-backed metal chair raised on a platform, his
hooded head secured by a strap across his forehead, harness-like straps
constraining his chest, his handcuffed arms hanging at his sides. A
small white cloth square bearing a black target was affixed over his
heart.
*****
Defenders of the firing squad promote it as a reliable and even humane
alternative to the botched chemistry of lethal injection. The historical
record of this method offers a definitive judgment on that claim: the
firing squad has historically been used most widely in war: as
punishment for desertion and mutiny, in mass killings of civilians and
as retribution for political opponents of repressive and colonial
regimes.
Irish socialist James Connolly, along with 14 other leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 against
British colonialism, were shot by firing squad. The rebellion began on
April 24, 1916, and was suppressed within a week, with the leaders
surrendering on April 29-30. Their trials, along with those of dozens of
others, were conducted under the Defense of the Realm Act and British
military law. They were swift, secret and afforded the accused no
meaningful opportunity to defend themselves.
The 15 men were shot by firing squad between May 3 and 12,
1916, at Kilmainham Gaol. Connolly, military commander of the Rising,
had been so badly injured during the fighting in Dublin that he could
not walk or stand unsupported, and had to be tied to a chair to be shot.
Some
of the most harrowing examples of civilian death by firing squad were
carried out by the Nazis. The following are only three examples of such
atrocities:
On December 18, 1939, following the Nazi invasion of Poland, 56 Polish
citizens were massacred in Bochnia, near Kraków, in one of the first
mass reprisal executions of the occupation. The victims had committed no
crime against the German military. They were murdered as a
demonstration of power and terror, a message to the occupied population
that resistance or even the suspicion of resistance would be met with
collective death.
On June 2, 1941, German paratroopers prepared to execute Greek
civilians in the village of Kondomari, on the island of Crete, following
the Battle of Crete. The villagers were rounded up in retaliation for
armed resistance. Photographs survive of the men of Kondomari being led
out of the village, assembled in a field and shot.
In September
1941, on the Eastern Front, German soldiers raised their rifles against
Soviet civilians accused of being partisans. A line of men were shot
down, falling into a pit already dug.
These
examples define the social and political meaning of this method of
killing. It is a demonstration of the state’s monopoly on violence, an
assertion of absolute power over the lives of those it has judged
expendable—whether a condemned prisoner in a South Carolina execution
chamber or a Polish farmer in a town square in December 1939.
The revival and acceleration of the firing squad in the United States
cannot be separated from the broader political context in which it is
occurring. On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025, President Trump signed
an executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting
Public Safety,” which rescinded the moratorium on federal executions,
directed the attorney general to pursue capital punishment in all
applicable federal cases, specifically mandated the death penalty for
murders of law enforcement officers and for capital crimes committed by
undocumented immigrants, and called for efforts to overturn Supreme
Court precedents that limit state and federal authority to impose
execution.
*****
Lethal injection was introduced in the 1970s precisely because the
ruling establishment needed a method of killing that appeared less
violent to observers. But the record of lethal injection has been one of
continuous failure and horror: inmates who have groaned and writhed on
the gurney, lungs filled with frothy, bloody liquid as they experienced
the agonizing sensation of drowning; prisoners removed from the
execution chamber alive, only to face another date with the executioner;
states unable to obtain the necessary drugs because European
pharmaceutical companies have refused to sell them for use in capital
punishment.
The return to the firing squad is another iteration of
this search—the state’s perpetual attempt to find a method of killing
that looks clean and defensible, however savage the reality....
*****
Meanwhile, states like Alabama have simultaneously moved to adopt
nitrogen asphyxiation in the gas chamber, pursuing every available
avenue to keep the machinery of death operational. The diversity of
methods is not evidence of a search for humanity but of a system
determined to keep killing, by whatever means remain available.
There
is a direct line between this domestic violence and the violence the US
state inflicts around the world. President Trump’s recent threats to
destroy Iran’s entire civilization are the fascistic and desperate
statements of an oligarchy in extreme crisis. The imperialist brutality
expressed in the Pentagon’s military operations is reflected in the
treatment of the working class at home. From murders carried out by ICE
agents in immigrant communities to the execution of death row inmates
whose crimes stem from lives of poverty and abuse, capital punishment is
an expression of a system that holds human life in total
contempt—whether that life ends in a jail in Dublin in 1916, a Greek
field in 1941, or a retrofitted execution chamber in southern Idaho in
2026.
The case of Rosa María Carranza, a 67-year-old immigrant from El
Salvador, lays bare the devastating human consequences of the assault on
social rights unfolding in the United States. Her experience is a
concentrated expression of a broader policy targeting hundreds of
thousands of immigrants, including those who have lived and worked in
the country for decades, paid taxes and complied with every legal
requirement imposed upon them.
Carranza has spent more than 30
years in the United States. She built her life through socially
essential labor, working as a caregiver and educator before co-founding a
Spanish-immersion outdoor preschool in Oakland. Like millions of
workers, she paid into Social Security and Medicare throughout her
working life. Over 24 years, she contributed tens of thousands of
dollars into these programs with the expectation that she would receive
benefits in retirement.
That expectation has now been shattered.
Under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act
engineered by Trump and supported by the Democrats, Carranza and an
estimated 100,000 other lawfully present immigrants will be stripped of
access to Medicare, even if they have contributed to the system for
decades. The law excludes broad categories of immigrants, including
Temporary Protected Status holders, refugees, asylum seekers and certain
visa holders. Those already enrolled face disenrollment, with coverage
set to terminate in early 2026.
*****
Medical professionals have repeatedly warned that forced exclusion
from health coverage leads to predictable outcomes. When seniors delay
treatment, minor conditions escalate into serious illnesses and reliance
on emergency services increases. The policy does not even eliminate
costs. It redistributes them in a more destructive and socially
detrimental form: war and repression.
The psychological toll is
equally devastating. Carranza has described her situation as “a complete
nightmare.” The loss of health coverage intersects with broader
insecurities surrounding immigration status, housing and retirement. A
prior bureaucratic error that temporarily cut off her Social Security
benefits left her unable to pay rent, forcing her to work in exchange
for housing. What was once a temporary disruption now threatens to
become a permanent condition.
Her
experience exposes a fundamental contradiction. Workers are compelled
to contribute to social programs throughout their lives, yet access to
those programs is not guaranteed. For immigrants, decades of labor and
tax contributions provide no protection against sudden exclusion. In
fact, this is a form of mass expropriation, the seizure of funds paid by
workers for their own future survival.
*****
Immigrants, including undocumented workers, contribute billions
annually to the very programs from which they are excluded. In 2022
alone, undocumented immigrants paid $6.4 billion into Medicare and $25.7
billion into Social Security. Yet they have historically been
ineligible for these benefits. The new measures extend this framework to
growing sections of legally present immigrants, deepening what amounts
to legalized theft.
This exposes the fraudulent claim that
immigrants are a burden on public resources. They are a net source of
funding. The real aim is the redistribution of resources upward, away
from the working class. The stripping of benefits already paid for is
not a cost-saving measure but a transfer of wealth.
*****
Immigrants, including undocumented workers, contribute billions
annually to the very programs from which they are excluded. In 2022
alone, undocumented immigrants paid $6.4 billion into Medicare and $25.7
billion into Social Security. Yet they have historically been
ineligible for these benefits. The new measures extend this framework to
growing sections of legally present immigrants, deepening what amounts
to legalized theft.
This exposes the fraudulent claim that
immigrants are a burden on public resources. They are a net source of
funding. The real aim is the redistribution of resources upward, away
from the working class. The stripping of benefits already paid for is
not a cost-saving measure but a transfer of wealth.
*****
At the state level, conditions offer no relief. In California, the
Democratic Party-dominated government has frozen enrollment in certain
health programs for immigrants, citing budget constraints. The state
estimates that replacing lost federal coverage would cost approximately
$1.1 billion annually, a sum it refuses to allocate.
Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2025–26 budget includes
roughly $5 billion in cuts to vital social programs, including
Medi-Cal. These cuts disproportionately affect undocumented adults,
seniors, people with disabilities and youth in foster care. Federal and
state policies reinforce one another, leaving vulnerable populations
without alternatives while normalizing the rollback of social rights.
The
claim that such measures are unavoidable collapses under scrutiny. The
same legislation that strips healthcare from immigrant seniors allocates
massive resources to the military and domestic repression. The “One Big
Beautiful Bill” is a multitrillion-dollar package that ensures
continued funding for the Pentagon and immigration enforcement agencies.
The
role of the Democratic Party is decisive. Far from opposing these
measures, key Democratic leaders negotiated and supported the bill,
ensuring its passage. Their actions reflect the interests of a ruling
class determined to preserve its global dominance and suppress social
opposition at home.
Carranza’s case illustrates the human cost.
After decades of socially necessary labor, she now faces old age without
access to basic healthcare. More broadly, the legislation signals a
shift toward dismantling the social safety net. It undermines the
principle that labor entitles workers to social rights. Instead, access
to essential services is increasingly conditioned on political
calculations that favor the wealthy.
There are few more bitterly contested and less clearly understood
historical experiences than the general strike of 1926, despite it being
a decisive moment in the history of the British and international
working class.
Begun on May 3 and officially lasting nine days, it
was the first and remains the only general strike ever to have taken
place in the UK.
The action was launched in response to a massive
attack on the wages of Britain’s 1.2 million coal miners, amid a period
of widespread labour unrest. Overseeing the strike, the Trades Union
Congress (TUC) was terrified by its revolutionary potential and worked
to bring it to an end, succeeding on May 12 and enforcing a crushing
defeat.
The Socialist Equality Party is holding a series of meetings around the country (Sheffield, Inverness, Manchester, London and Glasgow)
aimed at arming workers with the lessons of this experience for the
political battles they face today: against a right-wing Labour
government of austerity and war, and trade union bureaucracies
suppressing a struggle against it.
The
German government and ruling class have officially welcomed the
“ceasefire” in the Iran war. But behind the diplomatic phrases lies no
departure from previous war policies.—on the contrary, their
continuation by other means.
From
North Lake in Michigan to Camp East Montana in Texas, repeated deaths,
ignored grievances and documented abuses expose medical neglect as an
institutionalized feature of ICE detention.
Evoking
the fascist anti-immigrant demagogy of the Trump administration,
far-right Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has called a provincial
referendum for next fall with the aim of whipping up animosity to
immigrants and providing “popular” sanction for stripping them of
rights.
Amid
sky-rocketing energy prices, the recently elected right-wing Bangladesh
Nationalist Party has rapidly jettisoned its election promises to
improve living standards and ensure basic democratic rights.
The
UAW’s “support” for Mexican tire workers promotes appeals to Trump’s
Labor Department and the Mexican government and ruling class while
pitting US autoworkers against their Mexican class brothers.
While
the government insists that 2,000 Fire and Emergency NZ workers must
take a pay cut, the opposition Labour Party, with the support of the
union leaders, is seeking to divert workers’ anger behind its election
campaign.
Universities Australia (UA), the peak body representing the country’s
university managements, has reiterated its commitment to delivering the
Albanese government’s big business and pro-military agenda, while
partially documenting Labor’s funding cuts, which are driving
restructuring and the destruction of thousands of jobs.
Socialist, autoworkerWill Lehman is discusses his United Auto Workers (UAW) Union Presidential campaign in a Turkish broadcast
Will Lehman, a rank-and-file worker at the Mack Trucks plant in Pennsylvania, US, announced
his candidacy for president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) elections
earlier this year. His campaign is based on the abolishing of union
bureaucracy and the transfer of power to the rank and file, grounded in
an international socialist program. As a leading member of the
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC),
Lehman’s campaign addresses not only American auto workers but workers
globally, advancing an international strategy.
Lehman, who closely follows class struggles in Türkiye, issued a statement
protesting the arrest last month of Mehmet Türkmen, chairman of the
independent rank-and-file textile union BİRTEK-SEN. He also declared his support for the wildcat strike by Polyak coal miners in Izmir.
During his first UAW presidential campaign in 2022, Lehman gave an interview to Mukavemet TV, a YouTube channel broadcasting from Türkiye.
The World Socialist Web Site has received messages of support for Lehman’s campaign from
workers at the Kadıköy, Maltepe, and Şişli municipalities in Istanbul, a
city of 16 million.
Israeli airstrikes killed at least seven people in the town of
al-Abbassieh in southern Lebanon on Thursday, as the bombardment of the
country entered its second day since the proclamation of a US-Iran
ceasefire.
Thursday’s strikes followed Wednesday’s onslaught—the
deadliest single day in Lebanon since the full-scale war began on March
2. The Israeli military deployed 50 fighter jets that dropped 160
munitions across more than 100 sites in 10 minutes, destroying
residential buildings, shops and offices from central Beirut to the
southern suburbs. At least 303 people were killed and more than 1,150
wounded, including children. Several strikes hit busy neighborhoods
during rush hour without prior warning. Lebanon declared a national day
of mourning. At a mosque in the capital, funeral prayers were held while
tented settlements for the internally displaced stood across the
street.
The massacre came less than 24 hours after US President
Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran. The deal was
brokered by Pakistan. When Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif made
the announcement Tuesday evening, he said the ceasefire covered
“everywhere, including Lebanon.” Hours later, Trump and Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Lebanon was not covered by the
deal. Trump dismissed the war in Lebanon as “a separate skirmish.”
*****
The Strait of Hormuz remained effectively shut on Thursday. The New York Times
reported that only a handful of vessels had crossed since the truce
began, with shipowners, insurers and others wary of safe passage.
In
Washington, the ceasefire produced sharp divisions. Significant
sections of the US political establishment argued that the United States
had agreed to pause military operations before achieving any of its
stated strategic objectives. Iran had not dismantled its nuclear
program. The Strait of Hormuz remained under Iranian control. Hezbollah
had not been disarmed.
*****
On Wednesday, Trump met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the White House. Politico
reported that Trump berated Rutte over NATO’s refusal to provide
airspace and military bases for the US war on Iran. Trump called the
alliance “very disappointing” and demanded that NATO allies send
warships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within days.
Just
as they did during the pandemic, the Britain's trade union apparatus is
preparing to suppress strikes, enforce wage restraint and collaborate
in austerity under the guise of “protecting the economy”.
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.
