Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. New York rally by Sanders, Mamdani and union officials covers up US war drive against Iran
... The function of organizations like the DSA, and figures like Sanders and Mamdani, is to police opposition from the left, ensuring that hostility to war and dictatorship never develops into an independent movement of the working class.
That political function was on display throughout Sunday’s event.
In his remarks, Mamdani, who has twice traveled to the White House seeking an alliance with Trump as the administration wages mass deportations at home and illegal war abroad, never once said the words “Trump,” “war,” “Iran,” “militarism,” “fascism,” “capitalism” or “strike.” Instead, he praised the assembled union bureaucrats, Sanders and his “deputy mayor for economic justice,” Julie Su, falsely describing Su as a “lifelong champion for workers.”
This is a lie. As labor secretary under Gavin Newsom and later as Biden’s deputy and acting labor secretary, Su repeatedly worked with corporations and the union bureaucracy to suppress workers’ struggles. She was involved in efforts to block or contain strikes and job actions by refinery workers, railroad workers, West Coast longshore workers, autoworkers and Boeing workers. She also helped slow-walk autoworker Will Lehman’s lawsuit over the 2022 UAW election, in which only 9 percent of the membership voted, shielding the bureaucracy from a serious challenge by rank-and-file workers.
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Weingarten followed the same script. Like Mamdani, she invoked “union density” while saying nothing about the illegal war against Iran, the genocide in Gaza or Israel’s ongoing military assault on Lebanon. Instead, she celebrated a tentative agreement reached by United Teachers Los Angeles as a victory, though its real purpose was to head off a broader joint struggle by educators in Los Angeles.
Sanders, for his part, delivered another version of his stale “Fighting Oligarchy” speech. He spoke of the wealth of the top 1 percent and denounced “big money” in politics, presenting the central problem as Citizens United and campaign finance. This fiction has been the stock in trade of Sanders for more than a decade. The problem is not one Supreme Court decision, but the capitalist system itself, which subordinates every aspect of social and political life to the interests of the financial oligarchy.
Sanders made the real purpose of the event explicit when he declared, “If the Democratic Party wants our support, it must become a party of the working class, not corporate America.” This fraudulent formulation sums up Sanders’ political role. The Democratic Party is not a neutral vehicle that can be pressured into serving workers’ interests.
It is a capitalist party, rooted in the defense of private property, imperialist war and the state apparatus. It can no more be transformed into a party of the working class than the Confederacy could have been transformed into an egalitarian society. Its defense of capitalism binds it to the financial oligarchy and the intelligence agencies Sanders falsely postures against, while ensuring that every movement he leads ends by subordinating workers and youth to their class enemies.
There is no genuine fight against the “oligarchy” that does not place at its center the fight against imperialist war. Sanders’ appeal for the Democratic Party to become a “party of the working class” is especially obscene under conditions in which that party is being mobilized to provide political legitimacy for the next phase of the war. What he presents as a vehicle for reform is, in reality, one of the principal instruments through which the American ruling class organizes imperialist violence abroad and suppresses opposition at home.
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Workers and youth looking for a way forward must stay far away from these bourgeois politicians. The fight against war, dictatorship and inequality requires a clean break from the Democratic Party, the trade union apparatus and the entire capitalist system they defend.
2. Pseudo-left “Marxism” conference in Australia suppresses any discussion of Iran war
Over the Easter long weekend, the Australian pseudo-left organization Socialist Alternative (SAlt) held its annual “Marxism Conference,” drawing an estimated 2,000 people.
Any of those attendees seeking a socialist perspective to fight the massive US-led assault on Iran and the broader threat of an imperialist world war left empty-handed. Over four days, not a single one of the conference’s nearly 150 panels was dedicated to the war on Iran.
That can hardly be ascribed to a pre-arranged schedule or an innocent error. It was an entirely deliberate decision to suppress discussion of the war, its vast global implications and what must be done to stop it.
A core theme of the Civitas report is that war cannot be fought by armies alone and is a “whole of society” effort: "This is the essence of the distinction we need to make between 'our armed forces learning to fight battles' and 'our country learning to fight war'", the authors declare.
4. Netanyahu government brutally represses opposition to wars against Iran and Lebanon
Police have cracked down aggressively on Israel’s small anti-Netanyahu government protests against the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the ongoing repression in Gaza and the West Bank and the imposition of the death penalty for Palestinians charged with terrorism.
The police have said the right to protest “is not absolute” and must be balanced with the “right to public order”. The army has limited gatherings in public areas to 150 people and refused protests in Tel Aviv, citing Iranian missile threats.
These authoritarian measures are the domestic requirement for pursuing a Greater Israel policy, as part of US imperialism’s broader political and military agenda to reorganize and control the resource-rich Middle East in preparation for wider wars against China and Russia. What are now often referred to as Israel’s own “forever wars” demand the suspension of the democratic right to oppose and protest.
Nevertheless, protests and rallies have continued around the country. Last weekend saw the sixth consecutive week of protests by groups opposed to the Iran war, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption—his long-running trial has been delayed yet again for “security and political” reasons—and his fascist government’s bid to overhaul the judiciary and exempt ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students from military service.
With hours to go before a potential strike by 80,000 Los Angeles school workers, negotiations between SEIU Local 99 and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are continuing under intense pressure from city and political officials. As of this writing, this includes Mayor Karen Bass, who was directly involved in talks Monday night.
The last-minute negotiations follow the announcement Sunday of tentative agreements by United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA), moves that have already served to divide workers and weaken the prospect of unified strike action.
Taken together, these developments constitute a coordinated effort to prevent a joint walkout and impose a settlement before rank-and-file workers can act. This would also isolate a separate potential strike by 200 teachers in the Little Lake City School District in Southeast Los Angeles County, which is set to begin Thursday.
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What is taking place are not “negotiations” in the sense of two adversarial parties. It is a conspiracy of the Democratic Party, through the city government, LAUSD and the union bureaucracy to sabotage the class struggle, which terrifies them above all. The union bureaucracy, joined at the hip with management and the capitalist parties, is a full partner in this effort because a genuine struggle by workers would undermine these corrupt relations.
Similar betrayals have already taken place this year across America, including among nurses in New York City and at Kaiser Permanente, San Francisco teachers, the United Auto Workers’ blocking of a strike at Nexteer, and the shutdown of a strike at Bath Iron Works, a major defense contractor.
The intervention of Mayor Karen Bass recalls the role of San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in shutting down a four-day strike by educators earlier this year. Also involved in that intervention was American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who is also a top Democratic Party operative and former member of the Democratic National Committee. Soon afterward, the San Francisco school district announced layoffs as part of its “fiscal recovery program.”
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The struggle must be taken out of the hands of the union bureaucracy, which has sold out one struggle after another across the country.
Across all unions, workers should form independent rank-and-file committees to break the isolation, share information, organize from below and assert their democratic will. These committees can provide the means to overturn sellouts and ensure that decisions are made by workers themselves.
Educators and school workers must appeal to the broader working class, linking their struggle to a wider fight against inequality and in defense of the rights of immigrants and all workers. This requires the independent mobilization of the working class against the corporate oligarchy.
6. The Iran war, oil and the crisis of American imperialism
An essential aspect of Trump’s contradictory messages throughout the war—threatening to obliterate Iranian civilization one moment and calling a ceasefire the next—is that he is disturbed by the lack of success of the operation and the reaction of global markets to it. He is fumbling for ideas as he buys time. The spot price for physical oil cargoes has effectively doubled since the war began. US gasoline has crossed $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022. Stock markets have posted their worst quarter since 2022.
There is a panic in the ruling class that this war will yield a win for Iran, prompting Democrats, such as Pete Buttigieg on CNBC last Friday morning, to suggest a further escalation of the war to achieve regime change.
Within the oil and gas industry, the prevailing view is that markets and governments—worried as they may be—still do not understand the dimensions of the crisis now unfolding. As Bloomberg reported last week, after speaking with more than three dozen traders, executives and shippers, “The world still hasn’t grasped the severity of the situation.”
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Because oil tankers move slowly—around 10 to 15 knots, given their size—the last shipments that made it out of the Gulf at the end of February are only now arriving at their nearest destinations, primarily in Asia. The actual crisis in the physical supply of oil, gas and the other commodities that flow from the Gulf—fertilizer, petrochemicals, sulfur, helium—is only just beginning to be felt. It may take until May for its full force to arrive. Meanwhile, for every new day of a blocked Strait, the crisis deepens.
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Geographically, 85 percent of the fossil fuels flowing out of the Gulf are bound for Asia. It is there that the devastation will be most acute, especially in poorer importing countries like the Philippines, Cambodia and Thailand.
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Iran has discovered significant power in all of this.
A country being bombed and strangled is simultaneously operating as the gatekeeper of the world’s most important energy corridor. Trump, meanwhile, appears to have few cards left to play except to make good on his Hitlerian threats to turn Iran into the next Gaza—to starve and endanger millions through the systematic destruction of power plants, water systems and energy infrastructure.
The destruction of Iran’s civilian infrastructure would inflame opposition to American imperialism across the globe. It would mean the deaths of tens of thousands, directly and indirectly. It would constitute a barbaric assault on one of the world’s oldest civilizations: a country of more than 90 million people.
Yet what other path forward does Trump see?
Iran possesses vast, high-quality oil and gas reserves—the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves and second-largest proven gas reserves—both still only partially developed. It is, in that sense, a potential treasure trove for American imperialism and its allies. Much of this oil, and much other Gulf oil besides, flows eastward to China and Asia. And control over the Strait of Hormuz means control not just over Iran’s oil, but this entire flow. Yet outside of a sustained, massive ground invasion, it is far from clear how the United States could seize and hold the strait, let alone the oil and gas fields themselves.
Iran does not need a functioning power grid to threaten the Strait of Hormuz. So long as it can send out even a handful of speedboats, the chokepoint can become effectively impassable for commercial shipping. No insurer will cover tankers and cargoes worth hundreds of millions of dollars if there is a chance they will be struck.
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Everywhere, this war is opposed. Two-thirds of Americans tell pollsters they want it ended quickly, even if that means abandoning the administration’s stated goals. Large majorities oppose the deployment of ground troops—and yet the White House has refused to rule it out, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt saying Trump “keeps his options on the table.” In late March, the Selective Service System submitted a proposal to begin automatically registering all eligible men for a potential draft by December.
The Trump administration’s response has been to make Americans pay for it. On April 2, at a private Easter luncheon, Trump told guests it was “not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare—all these individual things. We have to take care of one thing: military protection.” The next day, the White House released the largest defense budget in U.S. history — $1.5 trillion, a 44 percent increase — while proposing $73 billion in cuts to education, health, housing, and domestic programs.
The war is also deepening divisions within the US-led imperial order. Trump has told allies to “learn how to fight for yourself” and to “go get your own oil.” He has threatened to withdraw funding from Ukraine if European states refuse to participate in the conflict. European leaders remain, for the most part, complicit lapdogs, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the resentments building within the European ruling class as it increasingly bears the consequences of American policy.
The crisis is accelerating European rearmament and giving new substance to long dormant ambitions for an independent European great-power politics—with disastrous implications for the European working class.
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The clearest beneficiary in all this is the Chinese state. While developed-market sovereign bonds have sold off sharply, Chinese government bonds have begun to function as a global safe haven, with foreign yuan bond issuance tripling year on year in March to record levels.
As the WSWS has emphasized, oil and natural gas imports are regarded as one of China’s central geopolitical vulnerabilities. Yet Beijing, understanding its vulnerability, has spent years building the largest strategic petroleum reserve in world history—an estimated 1.2 billion barrels—which will provide significant insulation from the shock, both for itself and, potentially, its neighbors.
As John Calabrese of American University writes, “As America fights, Asia turns to Beijing.” This can, for example, be seen in the Philippines, where the crisis is strengthening pro-China sections of the ruling elite.
The irony is bitter, because the strategic logic of the war was precisely to help repair the US’s declining hegemonic status and prepare for war with China. It should be noted that a key bombing target for the US and Israel has been Iran’s railway system, whose most important connection is to China.
But instead of strengthening Washington’s hand, the war has accelerated the conditions eroding American imperial power.
It is precisely for this reason that the Democratic political establishment is tactically opposed to Trump’s foreign policy—not because of the illegal murder of thousands of Iranian civilians, which they would be willing enough to carry out themselves given enough spin; not because they reject the drive to subordinate Iran to American interests; but because they recognize in Trump’s approach a tactical blunder that ruins their game.
The administration has charged at this problem with the intelligence of a bull, surrounded by an ultra-Christian nationalist echo chamber of fascists better suited to an asylum than to public office.
But Trump’s disastrous decisions do not make him, or American imperialism, less dangerous—They make the situation more dangerous. Here, the effort by the left flank of the Democrats, i.e., the DSA, to dismiss Trump’s threats to destroy Iranian civilization as mere “bluster” works to disarm opposition at a crucial moment when working class opposition to war must grow.
The war is not some bad policy slip or an isolated blotch. It is the culmination of decades of American policy aimed at dominating Persian Gulf energy—a strategic, bipartisan drive stretching from the 1953 CIA coup against Mossadegh, through the loss of Iran in 1979, to the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of Libya.
But simultaneously, it is one front in a broader strategic offensive that includes the NATO confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, the genocide of the Palestinian people, and most crucially, escalating economic and military pressure targeting Beijing. In the words of a UPS worker interviewed in January, “World War 3 is brewing.” At the heart of this drive is the effort by the United States and its allies to use violence to stave off their accelerating economic and political decline.
With Trump, and this debacle, what is new is not the objective but the desperation, and thus confusion, with which it is being carried out.
Shakespeare had fitting words for this. In Henry VI, the future Richard III, lost in scheming ambition, declares:
I,—like one lost in a thorny wood,
That rends the thorns and is rent with the thorns,
Seeking a way and straying from the way;
Not knowing how to find the open air,
But toiling desperately to find it out,—
Torment myself to catch the English crown:
And from that torment I will free myself,
Or hew my way out with a bloody axe.Indeed, the only way forward for Trump in this situation is to “hew” his way out “with a bloody axe.”
And this is not a personal or psychological issue. Trump’s madness is the historic madness of American imperialism in decline.
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The war will accelerate the political, economic and social processes driving the implosion of US imperialism, ushering in an era marked not by Chinese supremacy but by a fracturing political and economic order, the constant threat of war and crimes against humanity, and, with all this, profound revolutionary consequences for the working class everywhere.
But those consequences will not find progressive expression on their own.
“It is not enough to be appalled,” stated David North in response to Trump’s April 1 speech.
Horror, left to itself, exhausts itself in impotent frustration or isolated episodes of individual resistance. What is required is the development of a mass working class socialist movement, which is guided by an internationalist socialist program, infused with genuine revolutionary morality, and opposed in every respect to the depravity of the ruling class.
We call on all workers and young people who oppose the imperialist onslaught in Iran to join the call of the Socialist Equality Party and get involved in the fight for socialism and the end to capitalist barbarity.
7. Australia: Fair Work Commission orders partial end to punitive “junior rates”
While workers aged 18–21 in the retail, fast food and pharmacy sectors will eventually receive full adult wages, the ruling still allows junior rates as low as 40 percent for younger workers.
8. IMF meets as war brings greater global economic and financial disruption
In 2025 the IMF met in the immediate aftermath of the “reciprocal tariffs” launched by Trump against the rest of the world. This year the situation is even more serious as the US intensifies the war against Iran with a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz following the inevitable collapse—the US had never intended that they would succeed—of ceasefire talks at the weekend.
In a speech last week, setting the stage for this week’s discussions and reports, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva made clear there would be a downgrade of the global growth forecast even in the event of an end to the war. In the days since then the dangers have intensified.
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She warned policymakers not to make things worse through actions such as export and price controls that could upset global conditions. And she cautioned central banks not to rush in and immediately raise interest rates in response to rising prices.
But if the working class responds to the persistence of inflation with major wages struggles, then central banks should act forcefully, even if this brought about a recession.
“If inflation expectations threaten to break anchor and ignite a costly inflation spiral, then central banks should step in firmly with rate hikes,” she said. “Rate hikes, of course, would further dampen growth—that’s how they work.”
Central bankers around the world and leaders of global financial institutions are all disciples of Paul Volcker, the Federal Reserve chief of the 1980s who used massive interest rate hikes, resulting in a deep recession and economic devastation to crush the wages movement of the working class.
On April 9, the Russian Supreme Court declared “Memorial,” for decades the most important institution for uncovering biographical and other information about the Stalinist Great Terror, an extremist organization. The Kremlin also appears to have shut down the organization’s vast database of over three million victims of the Great Terror. As of this writing, it is no longer available online.
The assault on Memorial is a blow against the ability of workers and youth the world over to come to grips with the crimes of Stalinism, which, for generations, have undermined the struggle for socialism.
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Over one million people were murdered during the Great Terror. Among them were thousands of Old Bolsheviks and socialist opponents of Stalinism from the Trotskyist Left Opposition, scientists, writers and intellectuals. The mass slaughter culminated in the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico by a Stalinist agent. Termed a “political genocide” by Soviet historian Vadim Rogovin, the Terror was aimed at politically decapitating the Soviet and international working class and wiping out the living memory of the 1917 Revolution.
The Supreme Court’s ruling was reached in a closed session and came into effect immediately. Several diplomats from European countries who tried to attend the session were refused entry. Memorial is expected to appeal the ruling.
The organization was already outlawed in December 2021, on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the time, the Supreme Court ordered the liquidation of Memorial and all of its subdivisions.
However, despite the ban, Memorial, now run largely from outside of Russia, de facto continued operation. Its website remained accessible and staff answered queries about victims of the terror and their descendants. The organization also continued to issue a bulletin with articles centered on the Terror. Now, anyone who is involved with the organization may be subject to criminal persecution in Russia.
In its ruling, the court argued that Memorial was “aimed at the destruction of the basic foundations of Russian statehood, the violation of its territorial integrity, and the relativization of historical, cultural, spiritual and moral values.” As evidence, the court cited that fact that six individuals affiliated with the organization have been previously sentenced for calls for terrorist activities and the discrediting of the Russian armed forces, likely in connection with the war in Ukraine.
The history of Memorial reflects the problems bound up with the struggle for the historical truth about Stalinism and the October Revolution in the former Soviet Union. The organization was founded in the last years of the Soviet Union when newly released documents about the Terror and the inner-party struggle of the 1920s shook Soviet society. Many victims of the Terror, especially Trotskyists, were only now being rehabilitated. Trotsky was never fully rehabilitated.
Although heterogeneous, historically, Memorial has been close to the liberal and anti-Communist sections of the intelligentsia. Along with victims of the Terror, its co-founders included several prominent dissidents whose orientation became increasingly anti-communist and right wing. The most prominent liberal dissident Andrei Sakharov became the organization’s first head. Many of its staff and supporters, while committed to historical truth, had drawn the most pessimistic conclusions about the crimes of Stalinism.
When the Putin regime invaded Ukraine in February 2022 after years of provocations by NATO, Memorial condemned the invasion not from the left, but rather from the right. Yet no matter how reactionary this orientation toward anti-communist and pro-imperialist forces, the historical work that Memorial and its staff have accomplished over the past decades has been invaluable and must be defended.
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The attempt to completely destroy Memorial and make its work inaccessible is a central component of intensified attacks on democratic rights and the rehabilitation of the worst crimes of Joseph Stalin, in the words of Trotsky, “the gravedigger of the revolution.” Over the past year, the Kremlin has dramatically limited access to vast documentation of the terror in Russian state archives. Thus, the holdings of the Communist International, housed at the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, have been effectively closed off to researchers.
The main museum dedicated to the history of the GULAG and Stalinist repressions in Moscow was shut down and replaced with a museum dedicated to World War II and the “genocide of the Soviet people.” The Kremlin is also about to launch a new textbook on history for school children which has been reported to promote Russian chauvinism and minimize the crimes of Stalin. Across the country, monuments have been built in honor of Stalin.
Behind the systematic assault on the historical consciousness of the crimes of Stalinism lies a deliberate class policy.
Having emerged from the Stalinist bureaucracy, which consolidated its rule through the destruction of generations of revolutionaries in the Terror, the Putin regime is highly sensitive to any signs of a left-ward shift within the working class and a resurgence of the class struggle. The oligarchy’s principal fear is that, amidst the escalation of a global conflict and intensifying class tensions, a growing layer of workers, intellectuals and youth will turn again toward the revolutionary and internationalist traditions of the October Revolution. With the aggressive promotion of Russian nationalism and ever more violent suppression of historical truth about the crimes of Stalinism, it seeks to deal a preemptive blow against the resurgence of internationalist Marxism within the Russian and international working class.
10. Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz: The next phase in the Iran war
The blockade is an act of war and an act of international piracy. The World Socialist Web Site condemns this criminal action, directed against Iran and against the working class of the entire world, which will pay the price in soaring energy costs, food shortages and the ever-present danger of a wider military conflagration.
The ceasefire has proven to be an opportunity, using Trump’s own phrase, to “reload” for the next phase of the war. Every ceasefire Trump has announced in the Middle East—from Gaza in January 2025, to Iran in June 2025, to the April 7 Iran ceasefire followed hours later by Israel’s strike on central Beirut that killed more than 250 people—has been a pause to regroup for the next attack.
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The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is, in practice, an act of economic warfare against China as much as against Iran. Nearly half of China’s oil and more than a third of its liquefied natural gas flow through the Strait of Hormuz. The blockade places America’s hand on the energy supply of its principal rival, and on that of its “allies”—Japan, South Korea and the states of the European Union, which depend on the same flows.
Trump hinted at the thinking of US military strategists at a press briefing Monday: “We don’t need this trade. We have our own oil, gas, much more than we need. … So we don’t need it, but the world needs it, and many ships are heading to our country right now, as we speak, to load up.”
The blockade is part of a broader US campaign to seize the world’s strategic chokepoints—the Strait of Hormuz, the Panama Canal, the approaches to Greenland. American imperialism, in long-term economic decline, is attempting to offset that decline through military domination of global trade routes, securing the world’s waterways and raw materials for itself and denying them to its rivals, above all China.
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The same class being asked to pay for the war in cuts to essential programs is the one being called on to fight it. Automatic draft registration for all men aged 18 to 26 takes effect in December 2026, signed into law by Trump as part of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. The children of steelworkers and warehouse workers, of miners and migrant farmhands, will be sent to die on the destroyers and on the beaches of the Persian Gulf—to secure China’s energy supply for American imperialism.
11. After massive no vote, UAW extends Nexteer contract behind backs of rank and file
United Auto Workers officials in Saginaw, Michigan, have kept 1,300 Nexteer Automotive workers on the job nearly two weeks after workers overwhelmingly rejected a concessions-laden contract pushed by the UAW International and UAW Local 699.
After workers rejected the deal by 96.2 percent, union officials conspired with management behind their backs to extend the previous five-year agreement. When pressed by workers why a strike had not been called, UAW officials said it was “illegal” to walk out under the terms of the contract.
According to a post on the UAW Local 699 Facebook page, the 2021 contract was extended “indefinitely” on April 2, the very same day workers decisively defeated the UAW-backed tentative agreement. This was carried out without any membership meeting, discussion among workers, let alone a democratic vote by workers. The union bureaucrats have such contempt for workers that they did not even bother to provide an excuse for trampling over the democratic rights of the workers they claim to represent.
The rejected contract would have created a new layer of “third-class employees” among new hires, who would start at $19.05 an hour—compared to $22.50 for current workers and $24.75 for legacy workers hired before May 2021. After four years, wages for new hires would rise only to $20.89. The deal would have also sharply increased out-of-pocket healthcare costs for workers hired after May 2021, with weekly contributions for a married couple with children more than doubling from $26.50 to $53.34.
The extended 2021 contract maintained starting wages barely above $16–$18 an hour and imposed years-long “progression” to inadequate top rates, all while inflation is steadily eroding purchasing power. Workers rejected that framework then, and they have rejected it again today.
In a cynical maneuver, union officials circulated a survey for workers to list their most pressing demands, echoing UAW President Shawn Fain’s bogus claims that the “membership has the last word.” In fact, everything the union apparatus has done since the resounding defeat of its pro-company contract has been against the rank and file, not corporate management.
This demonstrates the long-proven fact that the UAW bureaucracy cannot be pressured into changing its ways or reformed. It must be abolished and power and decision-making transferred from the union apparatus to workers on the shop floor.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain held a livestreamed “kickoff” rally for American Axle workers in Three Rivers, Michigan, ahead of the May 31 contract expiration. The event, staged alongside Democratic Party politicians including Michigan Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilchrist and gubernatorial candidate Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson, was aimed at containing growing rank-and-file opposition.
Timed to coincide with ongoing negotiations between UAW Local 2093 and American Axle & Manufacturing, the rally featured assurances from Fain and Region 1D Director Steve Dawes that the union “has workers’ backs.” Notably absent, however, was any acknowledgment of the UAW’s role in imposing wage cuts of up to 50 percent in 2008 or sanctioning the mass layoffs that followed.
Workers at the Three Rivers facility and across the auto parts industry confront conditions shaped by decades of concessions. In 2008, wages at the plant were slashed in half with workers making up to $35 an hour. Now top pay is $22 an hour. While Fain & co. talk about “corporate greed,” many workers contacted by the World Socialist Web Site exposed the role of the UAW in sabotaging any effective rank-and-file resistance.
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Fain used the rally to denounce “corporate greed” while offering empty assurances. While referencing 18 years of “injustice,”—workers losing their homes and lives—he left out the role of the UAW in helping management force through the very concessions contracts responsible for these conditions.
In one revealing moment Fain asserted, “I was national negotiator for Chrysler during the recession, the same thing you all went through. And when the company wanted to take everything from us, and they damn near did.” Fain thus all but admits that he oversaw the 2009 restructuring of the auto industry under the Obama-Biden Auto Task Force that devastated workers’ lives. In attempting to “sell” the 2009 concessions Fain had told Chrysler workers in Kokomo where his home local was based that the restructuring would soon be a bad memory like 1979 when workers saw massive job and wage cuts.
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Fain went on to promote the 2023 Stand Up strike strategy—where only a handful of selected plants were called out—while many of the more profitable plants continued operating, producing profits for the companies. Any genuine struggle would have required collaboration with auto parts workers, which have the potential to shut down the entire automotive industry. Since the phony “Stand Up” strike thousands of workers have lost their jobs across the auto industry and wage tiers have continued. Fain has collaborated with both Biden and the fascist Trump to ensure the “competitiveness” of US auto companies against the threat of Chinese domination of electric vehicle production. This involved not only promoting Trump’s tariffs and trade war, but endorsing preparations for shooting war against China and other rivals of USA capitalism. This was behind Fain’s campaign for turning the auto plants into the “arsenal of democracy” and Biden’s boast that the unions were his “domestic NATO.”
The ideological and class origins of Fain, Dawes and all of the so called reformers are rooted in the nationalist and class collaborationist program of the UAW codified by Walter Reuther, which subordinated the interests of workers to an alliance with the Democratic party and defense of capitalism. Reuther initiated the 1950s McCarthyite purge of militant and socialist-minded workers who led the sit-down strikes. Former UAW President Owen Bieber—from West Michigan, began his long UAW career at that time.
In a critical shift, in 1979 UAW President Douglas Fraser rammed through the first ever concessions contracts with Chrysler. In 1982 the UAW imposed the first concessions at General Motors, lowering wages by 3 percent and all but eliminating cost of living adjustments. In 1984 Fraser’s successor, Bieber, openly adopted the program of corporatism and union management partnership, tying the union at the hip to the auto companies through a web of joint structures, which in addition served as a conduit for 100s of millions and billions of dollars into the UAW treasury.
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The prominent role of Democratic Party politicians at the rally expressed the union bureaucracy’s function as a key bulwark for capitalism, tying workers to a party responsible for overseeing the economic and geopolitical interests of American capitalism. No one on the platform mentioned the vastly unpopular war in Iran nor the Trump administration’s brutal attacks on immigrants or assault on the Constitution. Sheriff Swanson admonished workers to remember “1936 and ‘37” in Flint, without noting that police and sheriff’s deputies had been mobilized alongside national guard troops and fascists like the Black Legion to smash the strike. He went on to praise the “successes” of the Stand Up strike, calling for “unity on the shop floor,” in other words to unite behind Fain and the UAW apparatus.
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The Democratic Party has played a particularly foul role in stoking nationalist and anti-Chinese sentiment. In Saginaw, Michigan, Democratic Senator and ex-CIA intelligence officer Elissa Slotkin recently joined with UAW officials and management at auto parts maker Nexteer for a public meeting defending “American manufacturing,” against Chinese “espionage.”
The suppression of strikes and the enforcement of labor discipline at home are inseparable from preparations for war. The auto industry is a key component of the US industrial base and could be converted relatively quickly to military production as it was in WWII. The union bureaucracy functions as a labor police force, ensuring uninterrupted production while diverting workers’ anger into controlled protests and electoral politics.
California’s high court intervened to stop Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco’s ballot seizure after warrants revealed the probe relied on debunked election denial claims and false quotes generated from Artificial Intelligence.
Professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, formerly UC Hastings, Dorit Reiss:
What we know is that our health agencies have been pummeled down, and they are not likely to recover anytime soon even if Kennedy is gone tomorrow. They were hurt first by losing enormous numbers of personnel. Institutional memory and expertise were lost, and those cannot be quickly restored. The agencies have also been hurt by funding cuts and by a fundamental change in their sense of mission. It used to be a norm that the FDA’s policy direction was guided by politics to some degree, but its decisions on individual products were not. That is no longer true. The ACIP used to be constituted based on expertise, not ideological alignment. That is also no longer true. Our agencies are badly hurt, and fixing them will require time, possibly statutory intervention from Congress, and will be far from straightforward.
The second thing we know is that states are increasingly detaching themselves from the federal government on public health. I do not think that this can easily be reversed. The states that have distanced themselves from ACIP guidance are going to remain cautious about trusting a process that has proven so vulnerable. That means we will have far less centralized coordination and information sharing than we did before. States cannot license vaccines or pharmaceutical products on their own—there are limits to how far they can go—but where they can act independently, many of them will.
Third, we are going to see a real-world experiment unfold, with some states following the new skepticism toward vaccines and suffering corresponding outbreaks. Those outbreaks will not stay neatly within state borders; people travel. But I think we will see a clear pattern in which states that have weakened their public health frameworks see more cases and more preventable suffering.
15. Hungary: Which way forward after Orban’s electoral defeat?
“Democracy has won” was the headline of German magazine Die Zeit’s comment on the Hungarian elections. Numerous other European media outlets and politicians reacted in a similar vein, describing the election victory of Peter Magyar’s Tisza Party alternately as a “victory for democracy” and a “victory for Europe.” Yet this assessment has little to do with political reality.
Viktor Orbán, who described his own regime as an “illiberal democracy” and served as a role model for numerous authoritarian politicians—from Donald Trump to Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni—did indeed suffer a heavy defeat after 16 years in power. With a record turnout of 78 percent, Orbán’s Fidesz secured just 38.3 percent of the vote, while Tisza won 53.2 percent. As only one other party—the far-right Our Homeland—managed to enter the new parliament, Tisza will even hold the two-thirds majority of MPs required for constitutional amendments.
Yet for the working class—that is, the vast majority of the Hungarian population—the change of government in Budapest will make little difference. Election winner Magyar not only hails from Fidesz’s inner circle of power, but during the campaign he also constantly appealed to disaffected members of Orbán’s party and refrained from any criticism of its political line. He intends to stick to both their inhumane refugee policy and their discrimination against ethnic minorities and LGBTQ people; at least, he gave no indication to the contrary during the campaign. Magyar attempted to outdo Fidesz’s nationalism by constantly waving a Hungarian flag at campaign rallies.
Magyar’s sole campaign issue was the rampant nepotism and corruption that now pervades the country like a cancer and is covered up by a judiciary and media placed firmly under state control. While such allegations of corruption had previously bounced off Orbán, they are now having an effect due to the economic crisis. In terms of per capita consumption, Hungary now ranks last among the 27 EU member states. The population has been in decline for some time due to the bleak outlook for the future. During Orbán’s time in office, it fell from 10 million to less than 9.5 million.
16. Peru: Far right to dominate runoff for ninth president in a decade
At the time of writing, with 56 percent of ballots processed, early results from Sunday’s Peruvian elections point toward a runoff dominated by far-right candidates.
Keiko Fujimori, leader of Fuerza Popular and daughter of the former dictator Alberto Fujimori, leads with 16.94 percent. She is closely followed by Rafael López Aliaga, the ultra-right former mayor of Lima, and Jorge Nieto of the Partido del Buen Gobierno. Exit polls place the “Castillista” Roberto Sánchez in contention for second place, buoyed by support in remote rural regions whose votes may take longer to count.
These figures do not express any genuine popular enthusiasm for the far right. Rather, they reflect the depth of social despair and the absence of any independent political alternative for the working class.
*****
The elections unfold within an escalating geopolitical struggle in which US imperialism is escalating its efforts to oust Chinese influence in the hemisphere.
Peru has become a critical node in global supply chains, particularly linking copper mining to China’s electric vehicle industry. This relationship took concrete form with the inauguration of the Chancay megaport in November 2025 by Boluarte and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
*****
Peru’s political history has been shaped by various forms of left nationalism and radicalism with significant international influence, from the bourgeois nationalism of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre’s APRA to José Carlos Mariátegui’s indigenous nationalism dressed as “Marxism,” the military reformism of Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado, and the Maoist guerrillaism of Sendero Luminoso.
By the mid-1970s, the limits of nationalism were exposed. A CIA-backed coup brought Francisco Morales Bermúdez to power, aligning Peru with IMF austerity and Operation Condor. Mass protests and a general strike toppled the regime in 1977.
The subsequent decades saw the discrediting of all political tendencies. The APRA government of Alan García ended in hyperinflation and repression. The United Left provided a “left” cover for bourgeois rule, while Sendero Luminoso’s guerrilla strategy devastated rural communities.
This collapse paved the way for Fujimori’s dictatorship in the 1990s, marked by the 1992 “self-coup,” mass repression and sweeping neoliberal reforms. His regime ultimately fell amid corruption scandals, but its legacy persists through Keiko Fujimori.
Since then, every “left” populist government—from Ollanta Humala to Castillo—has followed the same pattern: campaigning on reformist promises, then implementing right-wing policies and repressing opposition.
*****
Peru’s elections express a historic crisis of bourgeois rule. The repeated collapse of governments, the consolidation of authoritarian power and the deepening social crisis all point toward explosive class struggles ahead.
The decisive question posed is the building of an independent political leadership—a Peruvian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International—capable of giving these struggles a genuine socialist and internationalist orientation.
17. University of Michigan subreddit censors WSWS articles on suicide of Chinese researcher
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has previously documented its blacklisting by major Reddit communities. In August 2020, moderators of the r/coronavirus subreddit banned WSWS articles to protect the ruling class policy of mass infection. Similar politically motivated bans have been imposed on r/politics and r/railroading.By censoring WSWS posts on the persecution of Chinese researchers and the suicide of Danhao Wang, the Reddit moderators are aiding and abetting the government witch-hunt, if not directly working in conjunction with the witch-hunters. The US military and intelligence apparatus considers the persecution of Chinese scientists a major component of its war-mongering foreign policy.
This was underscored this past Sunday when Nikki Haley, US ambassador to the United Nations during Donald Trump’s first term and current chair of the right-wing Hudson Institute, called for an escalation of the war against Iran and stepped-up confrontation with China on the CNN interview program “State of the Union.” Haley made a point of promoting the witch-hunt against Chinese researchers, saying, “We knew the students were coming to our universities, working in research, sending information back… We can’t take our eye off of China. There’s a reason they’re helping Iran.”
This is also the agenda of the Democratic Party, exemplified by Michigan Representative Haley Stevens. At a March 26 hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce titled “US Universities Under Siege: Foreign Espionage, Stolen Innovation, & the National Security Threat,” Stevens championed her bipartisan US Research Protection bill. The bill, which amends the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, broadens the legal definition of partnership with so-called “malign foreign talent programs” to include any program that provides “indirect benefits” to targeted nations such as China. This transforms routine academic exchanges, access to international laboratories, shared research data, or even the co-authorship of scientific papers into potential grounds for federal prosecution, detention and deportation. The hearing was held one week after the suicide of Danhao Wang.
As for the U-M administration, its filthy collaboration with the Trump administration was spelled out by interim President Domenico Grasso at the same March 26 hearing. Grasso boasted of the university’s collaboration in the witch-hunting of Chinese researchers.
18. Video: Dearborn residents oppose bombing of Lebanon at candlelight vigil
On April 10, hundreds of people gathered in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest Lebanese population in the United States, for a candlelight vigil organized by community members with family ties to Lebanon in honor of the victims of the Israeli bombing.
Last week, the Israeli military dropped 160 munitions across over 100 sites in just 10 minutes, killing over 300 people and leaving a further 1,150 wounded. The massacre came less than 24 hours after US President Donald Trump announced a temporary ceasefire with Iran.
Since October 2023, the US and Israel have waged war in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. The combined death toll across the region runs into the tens of thousands.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke with attendees about why they came to the vigil.
19. United Kingdom: Doncaster bus drivers at First South Yorkshire extend strike over pay parity
The struggle cannot be left to a Unite union apparatus that has tolerated gagging orders, intimidation, and repeatedly isolated disputes. Leadership must be taken into the hands of democratically elected rank-and-file committees.
20. “Everyone dies”: Grenfell Tower, regulation, and what the ruling class want from Reform UK
Simon Dudley, less than a month after his appointment as Reform’s housing spokesman, said that the 2017 inferno that claimed 72 lives, was a “tragedy” but “everyone dies in the end.”
21. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Bolivia:
Brazil:
Canada:
Workers at 22 Nova Scotia long-term care homes go on strike
Guatemala:
Students take over San Carlos University
United States:
Newsroom workers carry out one-day strike against ProPublica
22. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The sign says: "Peace for the world! Down with war!"
