Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. “Progressive” Democrats seek collaboration with fascist critics of Iran war
On X/Twitter Tuesday night, Democratic California Representative Ro Khanna posted a statement thanking far-right politicians and political commentators after Trump announced a two-week ceasefire in the war against Iran.
In a 45-second video, Khanna noted that Congress had done nothing to prevent Trump from waging an illegal war against Iran. After stating that he was “relieved” Trump had accepted the “ceasefire,” Khanna said, “Let’s be clear, this did not happen because of Congress, which barely made a whimper.”
Khanna did not mention that Congress’s silence was bipartisan. That is because many Democrats support the illegal war against Iran, just as many supported the genocide in Gaza. Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the House, deliberately delayed a war powers resolution Khanna filed jointly with Republican representative Thomas Massie last month.
Khanna claimed the “ceasefire” happened “because of the force of the American people, not just progressives and liberals, but conservatives like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and even Ann Coulter spoke out against the horror of threatening genocide against another people.”
That some of Trump’s biggest backers, including Carlson and Coulter, who still publicly support him, and Greene, a supporter of Trump’s January 6 coup and his 2024 presidential campaign, voiced opposition to the illegal war against Iran is not a sign they have become anti-war.
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Many on the far-right seek to channel popular opposition to the Iran war along antisemitic lines, claiming that the Trump administration has been hoodwinked into fighting “Israel’s war” by Netanyahu and the “Jewish lobby.” They argue that if Jewish influence were excised from Congress and the military, a genuinely American foreign policy would emerge.
While American and Israeli interests are closely linked, and the Zionist state plays a deeply reactionary role in the Middle East and beyond, it is false to claim that Israel dominates in the formulation of American imperialist foreign policy, including the war against Iran. Such claims amount to an alibi for US imperialism, which has been oppressing Iran for more than a century.
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The phony opposition of Carlson, Greene and Coulter to Trump’s threats to destroy Iran is aimed at corralling the mass opposition in the United States to the war back into capitalist politics and the Republican Party.
That Khanna promotes these figures’ opposition as genuine exposes his “progressive” pretenses and defines him as an enemy of the working class.
Khanna’s statement included overtures to the fascist right with a call for a “broad populist social movement.” He said:
This tells me one thing. The only thing that will save this country, the only thing that will save our democracy, is a broad, populist social movement, anti-Epstein class, anti-war and pro-working class.
Khanna’s appeal for unity with the far right is aimed at blocking an independent socialist movement in the working class against both capitalist parties. What he is proposing has a definite historical and political character. It is a form of what has long been known as a “red-brown” alignment: a convergence in which forces speaking in the name of the “left” seek common cause with the nationalist right and even openly fascistic elements.
Such alliances do not express the interests of the working class. They arise from the politics of privileged middle-class layers, sections of the labor bureaucracy and other petty-bourgeois forces whose essential aim is the preservation of their own social position amid deepening crisis. Terrified by the growth of mass opposition to capitalism from below, they look for ways to channel popular anger into forms compatible with bourgeois rule, even if that means adapting to the language and personnel of extreme reaction.
The classic and most disastrous example was provided in Germany during the final crisis of the Weimar Republic. Following the Stalinist line, the Communist Party of Germany rejected Trotsky’s call for a united front of the workers’ parties against Hitler and instead treated the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as the main enemy. This policy led not only to the division and paralysis of the working class, but at key moments to direct political convergence with the Nazis against the SPD, most notoriously in the 1931 Prussian referendum. After Hitler’s victory, Stalinism swung to the opposite extreme, promoting the anti-fascist “Popular Front,” which subordinated workers to alliances with liberal democratic sections of the bourgeoisie.
Leon Trotsky opposed this as another mechanism for disarming the proletariat. In France and Spain, the Popular Front subordinated revolutionary struggles to capitalist governments in the name of defending democracy, strangling the independent movement of workers and opening the way for fascist reaction.
The essential lesson is that the working class cannot fight fascism, war or dictatorship through alliances either with the far right or with liberal sections of the bourgeoisie. Every form of class collaboration serves, in the end, to weaken the workers and strengthen the class enemy.
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Under conditions in which, less than two weeks ago, some 8 million people marched in opposition to the immigration Gestapo, Trump’s budding dictatorship and the illegal war against Iran, the “progressive” Democrats are doing everything they can to keep this movement trapped within the Democratic Party and subordinated to capitalist politics, rather than developing into a revolutionary class struggle. This includes making alliances with fascists who played an instrumental role in Trump’s political ascension.
2. Fuel shock sends inflation soaring while the oligarchy grows richer
While gasoline prices have been higher in absolute terms before, they have never risen this quickly over the course of a single month. In California, where workers already face some of the highest fuel costs in the country, the statewide American Automobile Association (AAA) average stood at $5.92 a gallon on April 10, with county averages reaching nearly $6.91. Across the United States, the sharp rise in fuel prices is falling directly on the backs of the working class.
This burden is especially severe because driving is not optional for millions of workers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 26.6 percent of civilian workers are in jobs that require driving. This includes delivery drivers, truckers, ride-share and app-based workers, home healthcare workers, contractors, electricians, plumbers and countless others whose jobs depend on access to a vehicle. These workers are being forced to absorb soaring operating costs without any corresponding increase in wages.
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Despite the “ceasefire” announced earlier this week, the energy shock triggered by the war in Iran and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz has not abated. The continuing disruption of fuel supplies is already provoking social unrest internationally. As The Guardian reported Friday, protests over fuel prices and shortages have spread from Ireland to Norway, with truck drivers, farmers and logistics workers entering into open conflict with governments imposing emergency measures.
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While millions of workers struggle to survive on poverty wages, the financial oligarchy has never had it better. A March analysis of the boom in billionaire wealth by the New York Times found that the richest Americans saw their net worth soar by 120 percent from 2017 to 2025, under the first Trump and the Biden administrations. This growth in wealth far outstripped the 45 percent increase recorded over the previous comparable period. As a result, the number of billionaires in the United States jumped by 50 percent, to more than 900 by some estimates.
This immense transfer of wealth to the top is rooted above all in the rise of the stock market and the concentration of financial ownership. Federal Reserve distributional data show that the top 1 percent held about 50.2 percent of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares in the third quarter of 2025. Put differently, a tiny layer of the population controls roughly half of one of the main sources of wealth accumulation in the United States.
The enrichment of the oligarchy is not separate from the impoverishment of the working class, but its other side. Corporations and financiers used the pandemic to drive up prices and keep them elevated long after supply bottlenecks eased as workers were forced to return to disease-ridden job sites. Now, under conditions of an illegal imperialist war, the same class is profiting again while workers are made to pay more for gasoline, food, rent and every other necessity.
Inflation is not an accidental malfunction of the economy, but a social expression of capitalist class rule. Monopoly power, war, speculation and the dictatorship of profit over production ensure that every crisis is paid for by the working class. The fight against inflation is therefore inseparable from the fight against the capitalist system itself.
3. Trump says the US is “loading up the ships” with weapons during ceasefire talks
On Friday, during a phone interview with the New York Post, President Trump said US warships were being reloaded with weapons to be used against Iran in anticipation of a failure of the ceasefire talks taking place in Pakistan.
When asked if he thought the negotiations would be successful, he said, “We’re going to find out in about 24 hours. We’re going to know soon.” Trump’s remarks are an unmistakable indication that the two-week pause in the US air assault on Iran he announced on Tuesday has resolved nothing and is being used to prepare the next stage of the war.
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There are major conflicts within the US ruling establishment over whether the talks will produce any results because of Israel’s continued attacks on Lebanon. Iranian officials have warned that time is running out, while US officials are trying to preserve the ceasefire before it expires on April 22.
However, based on Trump’s comments to the New York Post, it is likely the Israeli attacks on Lebanon are being used to deliberately sabotage talks that function as a cover for preparations to restart the war on a far higher level.
The truce discussions are taking place in Islamabad, with Pakistan mediating and a large US delegation involved, including Vice President JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Marco Rubio and Adm. Brad Cooper, alongside officials from the National Security Council, State Department and Pentagon.
On the Iranian side, reports say the delegation arrived in Islamabad and is headed by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and other senior officials also included. Reuters described the meeting as “make-or-break,” and other reports say the two sides remain far apart on core issues.
The official line is that the talks are meant to translate the ceasefire into a longer standing arrangement, but there is no agreement over whether Lebanon is covered. Pakistan and Iran have said that the ceasefire framework includes Lebanon, while the White House and Israel have denied it.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who previously said there is “no cease-fire in Lebanon,” agreed on Thursday to start direct negotiations with Lebanon after Trump urged restraint by Israel, and the European imperialist leaders warned that the attacks on Lebanon threatened to collapse the ceasefire with Iran.
Recent reporting says that more than 1.2 million people have been displaced since the beginning of the conflict, with the UN citing evacuation orders covering 14 percent of the country. On Wednesday, Israeli strikes killed at least 303 people and injured more than 1,000, the deadliest day so far in the war that began on March 2.
The scale of destruction is also being measured in infrastructure collapse. Reports cite strikes on roads, bridges, hospitals and commercial districts, with aid delivery badly disrupted and parts of the south rendered non-functional. Like the Gaza genocide, this is not a limited border operation; It is a systematic campaign to make areas of Lebanon uninhabitable.
The correspondence of interests between Washington and Tel Aviv were expressed when Trump said on Wednesday that he had spoken with Netanyahu and that Israel would “tone it down” in Lebanon. Knowing full well the Iranian position on the Lebanon, Trump added, “I just think we need to be a bit more low-key,” and claimed Netanyahu would “ease up” and be “totally fine” on the Lebanon issue.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s latest statements make clear that Israel’s objective is not a pause but a political-military restructuring of Lebanon. He has said the talks with Lebanon will focus on “disarming Hezbollah” and establishing “peaceful relations” on Israeli terms, while also insisting that Israel will keep striking until its security conditions are met.
These remarks should be understood alongside the fact that the bombing of Lebanon continues. Israel is using negotiations as a cover to press its military campaign, not as a genuine path to de-escalation. Israeli strikes continued Thursday killing dozens more, with between 17 and 24 killed in specific strikes by Israel.
This is in fact the same modus operandi of the Trump administration itself. The “talks” in Islamabad are but a respite as the White House considers its next move to militarily impose the requirements of US imperialism onto the Iranian people.
The World Socialist Web Site has consistently maintained that this war is part of the imperialist effort by Washington to subordinate the region to American interests. The US is pursuing “the obliteration of Iran as a state and a campaign of terror against the population,” and that the assault on Iran is tied to control over energy resources and preparation for wider a conflict, including against China and Russia.
As an anonymous senior defense official told Politico in March, “Iran is not the end. 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.”
This analysis identifies the present war as a warning of what is coming next. The aim of US imperialism is the domination of Iran as a major opening act in a broader global escalation. The Middle East war is the sharpest expression of the world crisis of capitalism.
4. USPS moves to suspend pension payments amid deepening financial crisis
The United States Postal Service (USPS) has suspended payments to its employees’ pension program, amid a mounting liquidity crisis.
Postmaster General David Steiner told the House Oversight Committee in March: “At our current rate we will be out of cash in less than 12 months,” Steiner warned. “So in about a year from now the Postal Service will be unable to deliver the mail if we continue the status quo.”
In response, USPS leadership has initiated an emergency cash conservation plan. Beginning April 10, the agency will temporarily suspend its biweekly employer contributions to the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS), which covers approximately 99 percent of career postal workers.
These payments, typically about $200 million every two weeks, amount to roughly $400 million per month. By halting them, USPS expects to free up approximately $2.5 billion through the end of the fiscal year, providing a temporary buffer to sustain operations.
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What is being presented by officials as a sudden fiscal emergency is, in reality, the culmination of decades of policy decisions that have systematically weakened the public postal system. In 1971, following a massive national wildcat strike against the Nixon administration, the post office was demoted from a cabinet-level department of the federal government to a self-funding independent agency, USPS.
This has been used to justify repeated rounds of cuts, including the most recent “Delivering for America” restructuring program. This aims to adopt an Amazon-style logistics model prioritized for package delivery while expanding a 'non-career' workforce characterized by low pay and precarious job security.
The program has been a disaster for workers. New and renovated facilities, designed to exploit workers to the limit, are unsafe and have led to a series of workplace fatalities. This includes the deaths of Nick Acker in Michigan and Russell Scruggs in Georgia last November. The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee responded to their deaths by launching an independent investigation into workplace conditions at the post office.
At the heart of the funding crisis is a fundamental shift in USPS’s revenue model. The agency is legally required to provide universal service to 168 million addresses, six days a week, regardless of profitability. Yet its most core revenue stream, First-Class Mail, has declined dramatically.
Since 2007, First-Class Mail volume has fallen by more than 50 percent, driven by the rapid digitization of communication. This collapse has not been offset by growth in package delivery, which, while expanding, operates on thinner margins and faces intense competition from private carriers.
The financial consequences are that USPS reported a $9 billion net loss for fiscal year 2025, continuing a pattern of persistent deficits that management now cites to justify sweeping operational and workforce changes.
To address the impending cash exhaustion, projected for as early as February 2027, the USPS management is considering other schemes, such as a 4-cent increase for First-Class Mail Forever stamps to 82 cents. It is also courting large corporations for delivery contracts, undermining the agency’s universal service mandate.
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While paying lip service to the threat of privatization, the APWU apparatus promotes the very fiscal framework used to justify the assault on the workforce. Even as it claims to urge workers to 'get ready for the fight to come,' the union bureaucracy offers no concrete strategy to oppose mass layoffs, the suppression of wages, or the relentless expansion of a precarious, 'non-career' workforce.
For rank-and-file workers, “getting ready for the fight to come” means organizing independently of the union bureaucracy through a network of rank-and-file committees to prepare action from below. Such committees will provide the framework to unite postal workers across facilities, job classifications and appeal to workers across the country for support.
A key objective must also be to link up with postal workers worldwide, where similar cuts are taking place. Workers at Canada Post are preparing to vote on sellout contracts that would pave the way for thousands of job cuts.
The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee, in line with postal committees in other countries in the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, has been founded to advocate and encourage this strategy among postal workers.
By claiming a victory over the buyouts, the Teamsters apparatus is signaling to UPS that, as long as the bureaucracy is included, the destruction of UPS workers' livelihoods can proceed.
6. Artemis II mission concludes after astronauts travel to the Moon and safely return to Earth
By the parameters set for it, the mission has been a success. Initial medical reports indicate the astronauts are healthy and will soon be back on land. The various scientific experiments conducted, largely focused on the impacts of radiation on humans beyond low Earth orbit, were completed and will be more carefully studied in the coming months to inform future missions. An international team of thousands of engineers, scientists and other workers across NASA and its contractors, from designing, building and testing the spacecraft to operating it and communicating with it during the past 10 days all contributed to this massive effort.
Yet the Artemis II mission has been conducted largely in the background of US capitalism in terminal crisis. The Trump administration's war against Iran, now in its fifth week, has killed thousands, destroyed historical sites, driven up fuel and commodity prices, and brought the world to the edge of a broader conflict. On April 8, with Orion on its return trajectory, Vice President JD Vance threatened that the US possessed tools in its “tool kit” it had “so far” not chosen to use, strongly implying the possible use of nuclear weapons. The following day, Trump issued the genocidal threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” The current two-week “ceasefire” was almost immediately broken by Israel, which launched a murderous bombardment on Lebanon that has so far cost 303 lives.
Even the bourgeois press has been forced to note this context. Philip Kennicott, writing in the Washington Post during the mission, observed that Artemis II was proceeding “without any of that larger framing, or soaring rhetoric” that characterized the Apollo era, as the world watched the US president use “the language of genocide and apocalypse to threaten a country that posed no imminent danger to the United States.” He concluded that Artemis II felt like “an echo of a world that has passed” as Trump promises “to return an entire people to the Stone Age.”
From the outset, the mission has been framed in terms of geopolitical competition, above all with China. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, the billionaire entrepreneur appointed by Trump, was present in person at the naval retrieval of the astronauts. He said afterwards that the US is “back in the business of sending astronauts to the Moon.” And despite the explicit exclusion of China and Russia in future US missions, Isaacman cynically claimed the mission was designed to send “ambassadors from humanity to the stars.”
As for Trump himself, he claimed in an earlier conversation with the astronauts that, in part because of Artemis II, “America is the hottest country in the world right now.” He continued that, “America will be second to none in space.”
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The logic of the modern space race makes clear that the fight for a progressive expansion by humanity into space is bound up with the fight against war and against capitalism as a whole. There can be no genuine scientific exploration of the Moon and beyond while space travel is subordinated to corporate profiteering and military conflicts. Such efforts will only flourish when the international working class has swept away the current outmoded social order and established society on socialist foundations.
6. Australia: UWU boss posturing as “rank-and-file” candidate in union election
The phony “rank-and-file” Members First campaign points to mounting discontent among United Workers Union members over previous sellouts and growing opposition to the Labor Party, of which the UWU is an integral part.
7. Oppose the draft! Build a working class movement against imperialist war!
The Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality warn workers and young people throughout the United States: the American ruling class is laying the foundations for the reimposition of the draft. The oligarchy wants cannon fodder for its illegal and expanding wars of aggression.
8. Indiana University postdoctoral fellow Youhuang Xiang sentenced to time served and ordered deported
After over four months of detention, Xiang was coerced into pleading guilty to trumped-up federal charges of smuggling innocuous E. coli plasmid DNA into the United States.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is useful in that it brings together a number of the reactionary responses to the development of technologies such as AI.
Dark, grim, gloomy, foreboding, static, the film speaks to the thoughts and feelings of sections of the American petty bourgeoisie, overwhelmed by present-day developments, informed intellectually by a healthy leftover dose of “New Left”-—whether the filmmakers are aware of it or not. The problem is squarely the rotten, materialistic, lazy population: “It’s all your fault … everyone from your time. You’re all equally complicit.”
There’s not a hint here that the problem isn’t technology in the abstract, but the current economic organization of society. There’s not a hint here that AI and other extraordinary developments could improve life if not under the control of profit-driven conglomerates.
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Yes, of course, it’s a comedy, and Verbinski-Robinson are pulling our collective leg. Up to a point. However, the portrayal of a population benumbed by their phones, “lost forever in a world of entertainment and distraction,” isn’t simply an exaggeration, a heightened version of what actually exists, a pointed if painful warning. It misrepresents reality in a malicious fashion—in fact, it turns things largely upside down. Far from being unthinking robots, thousands of high school students have walked out against ICE, in the face of concerted repression. Tens of millions in the US and worldwide have shown their outrage over genocide, war and dictatorship. Much of this, incidentally, has been organized through social media.
There’s not a hint in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die of dialectics either or any kind of nuanced thinking, for that matter.
What’s missing: technology is a conquest of humanity. Although it serves as an instrument of oppression, it is the basic requirement for the liberation of humanity.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a rather stupid and backward film, all in all.
10. The International Bolshevik Tendency: Pseudo-left apologists for the union bureaucracy and Stalinism
New Zealand’s trade unions have refused to call a single strike or industrial action against the genocide in Gaza, the attack on Venezuela and the expanding war against Iran. These are pro-war organizations. The country’s largest union openly supports increased military spending to “build a modern, combat-ready defense force,” preparing NZ to join a US-led war against China.
The IBT is well aware of these facts but keeps quiet about them. Its most recent statement on the Gaza genocide—published on October 17, 2025—called for “coordinated joint action within the trade unions and across Mediterranean ports” to stop weapons getting to Israel. It failed to mention that union leaders internationally have been the central force blocking precisely such actions.
This cover-up stems from the IBT’s class orientation. Far from being Marxist or socialist, it is one of several pseudo-left formations that reflect the interests of definite layers of the middle class, including the union bureaucracy, whose aim is not to overthrow capitalism, but to secure a more comfortable position for themselves within the capitalist system.
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The middle class nationalist politics of the IBT are deeply rooted in its history. The organization originated in a series of splits in the early 1980s from the Spartacist League, itself founded in the 1960s in opposition to the ICFI. The current IBT leaders in New Zealand, Bill Logan and Adaire Hannah, previously held leading positions in the Spartacist League in both Australia and Britain until the late 1970s.
The IBT defends the positions advanced by the Spartacists in the 1960s and 1970s, claiming that they “upheld the banner of revolutionary Trotskyism.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Spartacist tendency was an adaptation to Pabloism, a revisionist current that emerged in the Fourth International following World War II, led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. Pablo repudiated Trotsky’s conclusion that the Stalinist bureaucracy had become a counter-revolutionary force in the Soviet Union and internationally, which had to be overthrown by the working class in a political revolution in order to preserve and extend the gains of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky had founded the Fourth International in 1938 as the world party of socialist revolution, to lead the working class in an uncompromising struggle against Stalinism, social democracy and bourgeois nationalism.
Drawing deeply pessimistic conclusions from the temporary stabilisation of capitalism after World War II, Pablo claimed it was not possible to build independent Trotskyist parties and that Stalinist regimes, under mass pressure, could carry out revolutionary tasks. He instructed Trotskyists to enter “the mass movement as it exists,” including Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois nationalist organizations.
In 1953, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) was founded to defend orthodox Trotskyism against Pabloism’s liquidationist program, which directed national sections to dissolve into Stalinist, reformist and bourgeois nationalist movements on the false premise that such forces could be pushed leftward.
The American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) initially led the international struggle against Pabloism. A decade later, however, the ICFI waged an intense battle against the SWP’s opportunist decision to reunite with the Pabloites in the United Secretariat.
Two oppositional groupings arose within the SWP: the American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI), aligned with the ICFI in defense of orthodox Trotskyism, and the Spartacist League, led by James Robertson, which concentrated on US tactical questions rather than the international struggle against revisionism.
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The International Bolshevik Tendency originated in the “External Tendency,” formed in 1982 by members in the US, Canada and Germany who had been expelled or who split from the Spartacists during a series of factional crises in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The US-based External Tendency, which had renamed itself the Bolshevik Tendency, fused with the New Zealand Permanent Revolution Group—led by former Spartacists Logan and Hannah—to form the IBT in 1991.
The IBT still glorifies the Spartacist League of the 1960s and 1970s but claims that during the 1980s it degenerated in a “Stalinophilic direction” and Robertson’s leadership took on “hyper-centralist, paranoid and personalist characteristics.”
The IBT’s differences with the SL, however, were limited and tactical, rather than principled. It retained the same pro-Stalinist orientation. The IBT distanced itself from some of the Spartacists’ crudest apologetics, such as the slogan “Hail Red Army!” which glorified the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979. While saying that the slogan was too uncritical of the Soviet bureaucracy, the IBT still called for “military support to the Stalinists,” backing the invasion—which was a reactionary response to the US funding of the mujahadeen rebels against the Moscow-aligned regime.
The IBT portrayed the invasion as progressive, based on the Pabloite and Spartacist argument that the Red Army was defending “socialized property forms” and opposing imperialism. In fact, the war—paid for by the Soviet working class through brutal attacks on living conditions and thousands of deaths—accelerated the economic crisis that culminated in the bureaucracy’s decision to dissolve the Soviet Union.
Similarly, the IBT gave its “unconditional military support” to the Stalinists to crush the mass strike movement of Polish workers in 1981, which it smeared as “counter-revolutionary.” It merely criticized the Spartacists’ pledge to “take responsibility in advance for whatever idiocies and atrocities” the Soviet troops committed.
As the Soviet bureaucracy under Mikhail Gorbachev was preparing the imminent dissolution of the USSR and restoration of capitalism, the IBT insisted that it was the “duty” of socialists to back rival Stalinist factions who attempted a military coup in August 1991. The coup plotters agreed that capitalism should be restored, but feared that the rapidity of the transformation would spark an uncontrollable movement in the working class.
In the case of China, the IBT continues to deny the obvious fact that capitalism has been restored. It refers to China as a “deformed workers state” and on this basis defends its repression of workers and portrays its military as a progressive force.
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The claim that workers in Cuba, or any oppressed country, can defend themselves by siding with China in a military confrontation with US imperialism is both dangerous and delusional. Insofar as this perspective is taken seriously, it can only undermine the essential task of unifying the international working class—including workers in the United States and China—in a socialist, anti‑war movement.
In reality, Beijing is responding to Washington’s far-advanced war preparations against China by desperately seeking an accommodation with the imperialist powers. At the same time, in response to provocations by the US and its allies in Taiwan and the South China Sea, China is staging its own military exercises, playing into the hands of the US and heightening the danger of a catastrophic nuclear war.
The overriding fear of the Chinese ruling elite is that the worsening global economic crisis and approaching war could trigger a movement in the working class against its capitalist police-state regime. The IBT has indicated where it will align in such a confrontation: when millions of people protested in Hong Kong in 2019 to demand democratic rights and an end to police brutality, the IBT smeared the demonstrations as “pro-imperialist” and called for “the suppression of the leadership of the movement and its most intransigent adherents.”
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The restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist regimes was only the most dramatic response to the unprecedented globalization of production during the 1980s, which fatally undermined the basis for all national-reformist political programs. It was part of a global rightward shift by all the parties—whether Stalinist or social democratic—that workers had previously looked to to defend their interests.
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The IBT continues to heavily promote racial and gender identity politics, which serves both to divide workers and to subordinate them to sections of the upper middle class and the capitalist political establishment. In New Zealand, the IBT supports “the movement for Māori autonomy” based on the Treaty of Waitangi, a colonial document which has been used by successive governments as a mechanism to hand out multi-million dollar settlements to the Māori bourgeoisie.
It also uses the issue of transgender rights in order to boost the unions, the Green Party and other middle class groups, based on the claim that elements of “the ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie or reformist workers’ parties can at times be convinced” to support access to healthcare for transgender people and anti-discrimination measures, even if “these reforms are reversible under capitalism.”
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The IBT’s promotion of Stalinism and “left” capitalist parties, and its defense of the union bureaucracy, are two sides of the same nationalist perspective, rooted in the rejection of the fight to mobilize the international working class under the leadership of the Trotskyist movement.
In a March 2025 article, the IBT was forced to admit that “the unions have failed to fight, even in limited ways, when workers needed it,” but attributed this to mistaken policies that can be corrected through pressure. It called on “communists” to “struggle for a militant pole, for open discussion of strategic differences, and to challenge the leadership.”
A February 28 article calling for workers to strike against the US-Israeli war on Iran similarly stated: “The current leadership of the organized labor movement is too beholden to their respective ruling classes to launch such actions, but there is hope that the rank-and-file may push for sanity.”
This position—that the union leadership can be “pushed” to fight—echoes that of the Spartacist League, which attributed the wave of working class defeats in the 1980s to the union leaders’ failure to “play hardball to win.”
As the ICFI noted, this explained nothing. The corrupt and reactionary character of the union leaders could only be understood as “the subjective expression of more fundamental objective processes.” Globalization had “undermined the viability of trade unions as nationally-based defensive organizations of the working class. This process is expressed in the decay of these organizations and their transformation into appendages of the employers and the state.”
As organizations which “arose historically on the soil of the national economy and the growing power of the national state,” the unions had no progressive response to globalization. For more than 40 years their role has been to sabotage strikes, enforce mass redundancies and assist in lowering workers’ living standards to defend the “international competitiveness” of the national bourgeoisie.
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Today, subordinating workers to the unions means aiding these organizations in the defense of the bourgeois state and imperialism—most starkly exposed in the unions’ refusal to call strikes against the Gaza genocide and the war against Iran.
The explosive struggles in the US in January 2026 also demonstrate that any serious mass movement against fascism must develop in opposition to the union apparatus. The demand for a general strike to stop the reign of terror by ICE and Donald Trump’s drive to dictatorship gained popularity in the working class independently of the unions, which are deeply hostile to such a strike.
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Sharp political lessons must be drawn from the record of the IBT and the Spartacists. All the theories they advanced about the “progressive” role of Stalinism, and the possibilities of “transforming” the unions and “broad left” capitalist parties into “revolutionary” organizations, have been shattered by events.
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The urgent task facing socialist-minded workers and young people is to build the revolutionary leadership required for the coming mass struggles of the working class. This in turn requires a political fight to differentiate Trotskyism—the program of world socialist revolution—from every variety of pseudo-left politics, which seeks to corral workers and young people behind illusions in bourgeois parties and regimes and the unions. As the crisis of the capitalist system continues to deepen, the pseudo-lefts will be brought forward as the last line of defense for bourgeois rule.
The ICFI alone provides the necessary strategic perspective for this fight, due to its principled struggle to defend the Trotskyist program against Stalinism, Pabloite liquidationism, and all forms of nationalist politics.
11. IYSSE (Sri Lanka) meeting discusses socialist strategy to stop the war against Iran
On April 7, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) and the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) held the second in a series of anti-war public meetings titled “Stop the US-Israel illegal war against Iran” at the Orient Education Institute in Hindagala, near the University of Peradeniya. Students, workers, university academics and party supporters attended the meeting. The SEP also livestreamed the event on its Facebook page, where, at the time of writing, viewers had shared it more than 325 times and watched it over 4,800 times.
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Most participants in these discussions expressed anger and opposition to the war and sought clarity on how it could be stopped. This demonstrated a strong interest in understanding the root causes of the imperialist war drive and its implications in the context of the deepening global crisis of the capitalist system. More than one hundred copies of the booklet Stop the Criminal US-Israeli War on Iran, containing Sinhala and Tamil translations, were sold during the campaign.
The SEP and IYSSE also held a lunchtime picket prior to the meeting, calling for an end to the war against Iran through the building of a conscious and active international anti-war movement of the working class. The protest was witnessed by thousands of commuters using public transport, and several news websites reported on it favorably.
Sakuntha Hirimutugoda, a leading member of the IYSSE in Sri Lanka, chaired the meeting, while SEP General Secretary Deepal Jayasekera delivered the main report. In his introductory remarks, Hirimutugoda said that the period following the first US-Israeli attack on Iran had demonstrated the homicidal, brutal and violent character of the war. Every other imperialist power, he noted, was backing the onslaught.
Hirimutugoda referred to the threats by Donald Trump to send Iran “back to the Stone Age,” declaring that “the whole of Iran will be destroyed overnight,” and targeting Tehran’s energy system. He warned:
If he attacks the energy system, there will be dangerous consequences. Immense destruction has already been caused. Already, 2,000 people in Iran have died. Trump is threatening to destroy a country with a population of 90 million. Such threats can be equated with the actions of the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s. However, when they spoke of the Holocaust, it was done secretly, behind the backs of the people. Trump is making such threats in broad daylight, on social media and in press conferences. This exposes the total bankruptcy and advanced stage of collapse of the capitalist system.
12. Australia: Key issues buried at Brisbane rally against arrest of anti-genocide protester
There was no mention of Labor’s own “hate crime” laws and wave of arrests at a protest over the prosecution of a Palestine solidarity activist for using the prohibited anti-genocide slogan “from the river to the sea.”
13. Protests and strikes erupt in Brazil in turbulent run-up to presidential election
Since the beginning of this year, a series of protests and strikes have erupted in Brazil against the privatization and austerity policies of the Workers Party (PT) administration of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The SUTNA union, led by the Partido Obrero, is chaining the Fate tire workers’ plant occupation to nationalist appeals to Peronist factions and other bourgeois politicians.
15. Turkish independent union leader Başaran Aksu arrested
Başaran Aksu, Organizing Coordinator of the independent rank-and-file union Umut-Sen (Hope Union), was arrested Thursday by a court because of a public statement he had made. Aksu, who also serves as an organizing specialist for Bağımsız Maden İş (Independent Mine Workers’ Union) and is based in Soma, had his family home in Hopa, Artvin raided by police on Monday.
He has played a leading role in workers’ struggles and wildcat strikes emerging in opposition to the union bureaucracy in Türkiye, most recently being detained during the Polyak miners’ strike in İzmir. He has long been in the crosshairs of the corporations and the state.
Ulaş Sevinç, chairman of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International), condemned this political arrest in a statement on X, calling on workers to defend Aksu:
Başaran Aksu, like BİRTEK-SEN Chairman Mehmet Türkmen, was arrested in line with the ruling class’s conscious offensive against the working class.
These workers’ leaders, unlike the dominant union bureaucracy, do not act as an extension of the state and corporations. They are seen as a major threat precisely because they have been at the forefront of the initial steps of a re-emerging labor movement—because they have given expression to the revolutionary potential of the working class.
The working class must recognize that Başaran Aksu, Mehmet Türkmen and Esra Işık are class war prisoners, defend them, and mobilize for their immediate release.
Aksu had publicly protested on social media against the arrest of Esra Işık. Işık, a leader of the villagers’ resistance against the “emergency expropriation” decree issued for Akbelen Forest in Milas, Muğla—a case still before the courts—and against the Limak Holding of Nihat Özdemir, was arrested on Tuesday, March 31, after protesting an inspection team.
The prosecution questioned Aksu over a statement, in which he said, “Having Esra Işık arrested on Nihat Özdemir’s orders represents the highest level our independent judiciary can reach. Arrest all the Akbelen villagers, you shameless people! May those who show even the slightest sign of submission to you be disgraced.”
In his defense, Aksu stood by this statement, saying: “I believe Nihat Özdemir is an influential figure in the Muğla region and that he played a role in what happened in Akbelen. The detention of Esra Işık, the daughter of the Akbelen village headwoman, without any evidence, is the most concrete proof of this.” Özdemir, the head of Limak—one of Turkey’s largest holding companies—is one of the country’s wealthiest businessmen.
Aksu was arrested on charges of “spreading misleading information” and “inciting the public to hatred and enmity.” The political character and arbitrariness of the arrest is underscored by the claim that Aksu’s union activities, which meant he was not permanently residing at his registered address, gave rise to his “escape risk.”
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As Aksu was being taken into custody pending the remand hearing, he declared: “In Türkiye today, it is impossible to state the truth without committing the crime of ‘spreading misleading information,’ and impossible to expose the bloody exploitation regime in Türkiye without committing the crime of ‘inciting hatred and enmity.’ This regime rests on holding companies and yellow unions. The judiciary and the police are part of this process. They are very powerful; they are running a vast operation of robbery, plunder and extortion.”
As he was being taken to prison, Aksu defiantly challenged this unlawful ruling, stating: “This is the state of the judiciary in Türkiye—they do whatever the holding companies tell them to. We will continue to make life difficult for the holding companies.”
While Aksu’s arrest was widely protested, the trade union confederations—including the ostensibly oppositional DİSK (Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions)—completely ignored the arrest, doing nothing to mobilize workers in his defense.
The Istanbul Bar Association issued a statement stressing that the arrest order was in violation of the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights. The bar noted that arresting someone solely on the basis of critical public statements “without concrete and sufficient evidence” amounted to “courts becoming instruments for the suppression of trade union organizing activities,” adding that “this situation produces a chilling effect on the legitimate actors in the struggle for trade union rights.”
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The real reason behind the arrests of Aksu, Türkmen and Işık is that they have exposed the savage exploitation of the working class and natural resources, the obscene wealth extracted through that exploitation and the structure of class rule designed to protect and perpetuate these capitalist relations of exploitation—and the role they have played in the growing independent workers’ movement rising against this order.
It is no accident that the Erdoğan government’s offensive has intensified in recent months. During this period, the United States, Türkiye’s NATO ally, together with Israel, launched its imperialist war of aggression against Iran. At the same time, there has been a significant upsurge in class struggles, including wildcat strikes amid a mounting inflation and economic hardship. While the overwhelming majority of the population—over 90 percent according to polls—opposed this unjust war against Iran, the Erdoğan government adopted a stance completely contrary to the will of the people and even condemned Iran’s right to defend itself against the aggression.
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Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker who ran for the presidency of the United Auto Workers (UAW) under the slogan “transfer of power to the rank-and-file” and a leading member of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), pointed out in his solidarity statement with Türkmen to the connection between escalating authoritarianism, imperialist war and the growing workers’ movement. He explained:
Türkmen’s arrest is part of a broader offensive against a growing movement of workers in Turkey...
The response of the Erdoğan government, as with Trump in the US, is repression. As Turkey is increasingly drawn into the expanding war in the Middle East, the government is determined to give no quarter to any form of social or political opposition—above all from the working class. A government preparing for war cannot tolerate workers who organize independently, strike for their wages, and refuse to be silenced. The assault on democratic rights and the assault on workers’ living standards are two sides of the same process, and both are intensified by the drive toward militarism and war.
The World Socialist Web Site calls on its readers to defend the class war prisoners in Türkiye—Başaran Aksu, Mehmet Türkmen and the other detainees—and to demand their immediate release.
16. Starmer visits Gulf states amid fracturing “special relationship” with US
The US/Israeli war on Iran has provoked an escalating crisis for all the European powers, none more so than the Starmer government in Britain.
Foreign policy precepts that have determined the actions of UK governments for decades are being torn apart—centered on the worsening breakdown of the “special relationship” with the United States.
Starmer in opposition promised a “reset” with the major European powers, after Britain’s fractious and economically catastrophic exit from the European Union—as demanded not just by dominant sections of British capital but also by the Biden administration, which wanted a restoration of the UK’s role as a reliable voice for Washington within the bloc.
But by the time Labour came to office, Donald Trump occupied the White House, forcing Starmer to try to agree a vital pro-Brexit trade deal with a US government that was openly hostile to the EU.
A trade deal was eventually reached, but entirely on Trump’s terms—with Britain hit a little less hard by tariffs than other European powers.
The second major bone of contention was military spending, with Starmer posturing, ever more unsuccessfully, as the European power most receptive to Trump’s demands for 5 percent of GDP spending by NATO powers.
The Iran war has brought US-UK and US-European tensions to fever pitch, with Trump repeatedly berating Starmer and other European leaders for placing face-saving restrictions on US flights and for not sending ships to the Strait of Hormuz. Starmer was “no Winston Churchill”, Trump declared, and the Royal Navy’s warships were “toys”, fronted by “two old broken-down aircraft carriers”.
Within hours of Trump announcing a ceasefire in the US war against Iran, Starmer announced a visit to the Middle East “to meet leaders of countries who have been in the front line and will set out his full support for the newly agreed ceasefire”. Talks would center “on ensuring the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz remains permanent, with the United Kingdom continuing to lead international efforts.”
Once again, however, Starmer’s diplomatic visit unravelled spectacularly.
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When asked about Trump’s threat to pull the US out of NATO, Starmer made an appeal for a continued alliance: “It is in America’s interests. It’s in European interests” that “the single most effective military alliance the world has ever known” is preserved, he said, adding that he had been making the case for Europeans to do more, as Trump has demanded, “for the best part of two years”.
The Starmer government’s dilemma is that of British imperialism as a whole: whether to continue efforts to restore the relations with US imperialism on which it has relied for decades, placating Trump to keep NATO alive, or whether to shift more decisively towards the creation of an at least semi-independent economic and military block with Germany, France and others to counter the “America First” anti-European agenda now dominating Washington.
Both demand a massive escalation in military spending, austerity cuts of unprecedented savagery, and an ever-deeper turn to authoritarian rule. Amid the continued drive by all the imperialist powers to redivide the world between them, both routes lead to bloody wars internationally and class war at home.
17. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
Philippines:
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.
