Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Art and the Influence of Revolution
The greatest upheaval in modern times, the first stage in the world revolution, calling into question the existence of the capitalist system everywhere, shook American life as it did life in every corner of the globe. No serious understanding of twentieth-century cultural life, its greatest triumphs and greatest retreats, and our current challenges as well, is possible without considering the impact of the socialist movement and its decades-long struggle to raise the thinking and activity of the working class, culminating in the 1917 Revolution. Of course, the impact of the October Revolution was most direct and inseparable for the Russian-Soviet artists themselves, Eisenstein, Shostakovich, Gorky and others.*****
... The writers and filmmakers discussed here had widely different histories and aesthetic approaches, but they shared a commitment to realism, not as an artistic school, but as a philosophy of life; a deep feeling for the world “of three dimensions” as it is and a determination to bring out its most essential characteristics. Stendhal’s comment, “Now, above all, I want to be truthful,” served as the watchword for generations of artists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, Dreiser echoed it quite directly: “The sum and substance of literary as well as social morality may be expressed in three words—tell the truth,” while Fitzgerald insisted that an author’s main purpose is “to make you see.”
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... The White House lashes out nervously and insultingly against every popular musician or actor who dares to criticize the would-be Führer. The Israeli government has shown the way here, as it has in so many areas, by liquidating poets, photographers, visual artists, scholars, intellectuals, and journalists in Gaza by the hundreds, but the Trump administration and the rest, each in its own way, have declared war on progressive cultural life. The coming into existence of “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” whatever its ultimate fate, will forever be a monument to the present perilous condition for intellectual creation, endangered by the continued existence of the profit system.
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... “Pure art,” as Trotsky and André Breton suggested in the 1938 “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art,” too often “serves the extremely impure ends of reaction.” They insisted that their “conception of the role of art is too high to refuse it an influence on the fate of society.”
That is the question. Art is not mere self-expression. Neither is the artist an “empty machine” who exists for the sole or primary purpose of creating form. Nor is it true that art lies beyond rational criticism or influence because it speaks to the individual’s inner life, generated by the “tragic nature of human life as such.” Art is not politics, and an art work has to be judged in the first place by its own law, by the law of art, but if artists are not troubling themselves with the most insistent human problems, then, frankly, their undertakings will not have much value. They will be mere scribblings or playthings for personal diversion or that of the ruling classes.
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Art is, above all, concerned with investigating and reproducing men and women’s lives, their relations with one another and with the world around them from every possible point of view. The artist is a specialist in this, obsessed with this. The artist and the reader or spectator or viewer are living men and women capable of communicating with and understanding one another because of a shared psychology resulting from social and historical circumstances. Art is a function of social humanity inextricably bound to its life and environment. It is a form of social consciousness, one of the principal means by which people gain their bearings in the world. How could art remain indifferent to the social earthquakes we are living through? “The events are prepared by people, they are made by people, they fall upon people and change these people. Art, directly or indirectly, affects the lives of the people who make or experience the events. This refers to all art, to the grandest, as well as to the most intimate.” (Trotsky)
What Marxists have insisted upon since the 1917 Russian Revolution is that however they might accomplish the task, the artists had to come at least to general terms with the nature of their epoch, one of wars and revolutions. This wasn’t a demand or an “ultimatum” placed on them by the Marxists; it was simply a frank spelling out of what has defined the important artists at every point in history, that they rise to the fundamental challenges of the time if their work is to have a deep and enduring and meaningful character.
2. Union bureaucrats, Democrats cancel strike of 77,000 Los Angeles educators
At 2:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, only hours before tens of thousands of workers were set to strike, members of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99 received an email announcing a last-minute deal with the Los Angeles Unified School District. The move abruptly shut down the strike before it could begin.
The strike would have involved the entire workforce of 77,000 classified workers, teachers and administrators for the first time in the district’s history. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass intervened directly in the talks late Monday night, showing the Democratic Party was determined to prevent it.
The shutdown followed the Sunday betrayals by United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA). Workers were deliberately split apart in order to prevent a district-wide confrontation with LAUSD and the Democratic Party establishment.
Workers responded angrily to the sellout. An LAUSD school bus driver told a WSWS reporter that as of Tuesday morning he had not seen the contract details. But, he said, “With everything that’s going on—the war, price of gas, ICE raids, cost of living—there’s so much affecting all of us right now. And the classified workers are the lowest paid in LAUSD. We can’t afford to live like this. I think if we had gone on strike, it would have inspired everybody else facing the same things.”
A teacher said, “I think this is an unprecedented opportunity for UTLA and they are capitulating too soon. All three unions should be capitalizing on our solidarity and force the district to give us what we all deserve. These circumstances aren’t going to arise again anytime soon. Let’s not forget the over 5 billion dollar reserve, a superintendent in legal jeopardy and a 22 million dollar embezzlement scheme. I’m hearing the same sense of disappointment from other teachers at my school site as well.”
3. Cancellation of Los Angeles schools strike latest in string of union betrayals
Under the cover of darkness early Tuesday morning, the trade union bureaucracy reached a last-minute deal to avert a strike in the Los Angeles school district that was set to begin just hours later. It would have been the first time that the entire workforce—an estimated 80,000 teachers, administrators and support staff—walked out simultaneously in the second-largest school district in the United States.
The deal is the culmination of a betrayal carried out before a strike even began. At 4:00 a.m. Sunday, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) announced an agreement covering teachers. The Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA) followed suit shortly thereafter. Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99 announced the final deal Tuesday, following overnight talks involving Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
As it always does, the union bureaucracy shouted that these were “huge victories,” a miserable cover for the agreements’ actual wretchedness. Teachers and administrators will receive an average of 11.65 percent in wage increases over two years, with some teachers getting as little as 8 percent.
Workers in SEIU Local 99 will receive only 24 percent over three years, half of which consists of retroactive back pay, since workers have been kept on the job without a contract for two years. This falls well short of the nearly 30 percent SEIU initially demanded and leaves support staff in extreme poverty. Already, 99 percent of these workers cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment.
The deals pave the way for a wave of austerity measures that will dwarf whatever nominal “gains” are contained in them. These cuts are already outlined in the district’s “fiscal stabilization” plan, under which 3,200 workers have already been given layoff notices this year.
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The World Socialist Web Site calls on workers to reject these deals. The struggle must be continued, now organized under rank-and-file control. We urge the formation of committees of trusted workers at all schools to prepare the strike action for which workers have already overwhelmingly voted. An appeal should be made to the broader working class, along with preparations for a national movement in defense of public education.
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The United States is on the cusp of colossal social struggles. The year began with strikes by 46,000 nurses and healthcare workers on both coasts and mass demonstrations against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) occupation of Minneapolis, in which the call for a general strike was widely raised. Over the course of the year, opposition has deepened and become more radical, especially as the consequences of the war with Iran have mounted. The campaign of murder and threats to annihilate Iranian civilization has exposed the government and the entire ruling class as criminal.
The economic consequences of war are driving workers—already struggling with inflation and mass layoffs—to the brink. School districts are being eviscerated by deficits in the hundreds of millions, while hundreds of billions more are funneled into the military and trillions into speculative ventures on Wall Street. The crisis is being escalated by Trump’s existential attack on public education and drive to convert schools into centers of nationalist and religious indoctrination.
There is extreme sensitivity and fear within ruling circles of the potential growth of the class struggle, under conditions where the entire political establishment is discredited and hated. The Democrats refuse to fight Trump because they are a capitalist party committed to the same basic policies of war and austerity, taking issue only with Trump’s methods in carrying them out.
The union bureaucracy, bound by a thousand threads to the political establishment, primarily through the Democrats, functions as the corporate oligarchy’s industrial police force. The bureaucracy’s role in war is to discipline workers on the “home front,” summed up in 2024 when then-President Biden called the AFL-CIO his “domestic NATO.” As the war against Iran escalates, the union officials are seeking to prevent any expression of working class struggle.
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But regardless of partisan allegiance, the bureaucracy as a whole plays the same class role. This recalls the words of Leon Trotsky, who, writing in 1940, said:
The labor bureaucrats do their level best in words and deeds to demonstrate to the “democratic” state how reliable and indispensable they are in peace-time and especially in time of war. By transforming the trade unions into organs of the state, fascism invents nothing new; it merely draws to their ultimate conclusion the tendencies inherent in imperialism.
“Our mission is to unite postal workers worldwide to build collective power, protect our rights, and improve wages, benefits and working conditions through solidarity, transparency and democratic action to actively counter the efforts of the 1 percent.”
5. UAW President Shawn Fain unveils “Stand Up Slate” for 2026 election: New label, same bureaucracy
Far from representing a break with the corrupt, pro-corporate apparatus, the slate is a merger of the same bureaucratic factions that have spent decades collaborating with management to impose concessions.
6. Trump’s NLRB rules against Henry Ford Genesys Hospital nurses as strike enters 8th month
The struggle against the hospital’s strike-breaking and refusal to address staffing issues requires a fight against management and the Teamsters union bureaucracy, which has isolated and diverted the fight into the dead end of appeals to the NLRB and the Democratic Party in Lansing.
7. IMF warns of major downturn in global growth
Under what it called a “severe scenario” the IMF said global growth could fall to as low as 2 percent close to the development of a world recession.
8. Whistleblower who exposed Australia’s war crimes in Afghanistan still behind bars
David McBride remains the only person convicted and jailed for Australia’s war crimes in Afghanistan, not for committing them but for exposing them.
9. Union-initiated Australian parliamentary report covers up Labor’s university restructuring agenda
Another official inquiry makes no mention of Labor’s Universities Accord, which is driving the further corporate transformation of Australia’s public universities.
10. Big realtors in New York City demand massive concessions from residential building workers
Roughly 34,000 porters, doorkeepers and maintenance workers, members of Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, who work in residential apartment buildings in New York City, will vote on whether to strike today. The current four-year contract with the Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations (RAB) expires on April 20. Without a deal before midnight the next day, workers will strike across 3,600 residential buildings with about 600,000 units and 1.6 million residents. Workers have told the World Socialist Web Site that a vote for the strike is likely to pass overwhelmingly.
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The RAB claims that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promise of a four-year rent freeze on 1 million rent-regulated apartments is creating an “existential crisis” for landlords. Howard Rothschild, president of the RAB, stated that the “likelihood of zero percent rent increases... will significantly limit the industry’s ability to support wage growth.”
While some landlords own rent-regulated buildings with both regulated and unregulated units, these are generally older structures that do not command the highest market rents. The RAB’s claim of an existential crisis is spurious.
But whatever the RAB claims about Mamdani’s rent-freeze policy, 32BJ officials have long tied workers to the Democratic Party by presenting capitalist politicians as allies against the landlords. In the 2025 mayoral race, they promoted Mamdani in exactly these terms. Mamdani spoke at the 32BJ union hall in November, before his election, and former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander campaigned for him as a surrogate in October 2025. Before the mayoral election, 32BJ bureaucrats told workers that an “ally” like Mamdani would help them take on the billionaire landlords.
Mamdani has said that he supports “building workers’ quest for a fair contract that honors their contributions to our neighborhoods and our city,” and a building worker spoke from the podium at the Mamdani-Sanders rally on Sunday.
This is all hot air. Mamdani has signaled both before and after his election that he is no threat to the ruling class and will actively work in its interests. He has met with some of the richest New Yorkers, including real estate magnates, as well as with one of the most dangerous representatives of the oligarchy, Donald Trump.
Mamdani’s meetings with financiers, landlords and Trump are not just photo opportunities. They express his real role: containing social opposition and helping shut down workers’ struggles before they can threaten the profit interests of the ruling class. Mamdani called on striking nurses at four major New York City hospitals this winter to settle their contract and return to work. His mistitled Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice, Julie Su, played a central role in shutting down the nurses’ strike and forcing them back to work with none of their major demands, especially safe patient-staffing ratios, met. When Su was Joe Biden’s deputy secretary of labor in 2022, she was instrumental in formulating strikebreaking legislation that outlawed a rail workers’ strike.
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Building workers will have to break free of the Mamdani administration and the 32BJ bureaucracy if they are to defeat the RAB’s conspiracy to slash wages, benefits and working conditions. They must form a rank-and-file strike committee to lead the strike and prepare to expand it. Workers in thousands of buildings are deeply connected to other sections of the working class across the city through critical industrial and service supply chains.
Porters, for example, are the first to handle garbage and recycling, which are then removed by New York City Department of Sanitation workers and private sanitation workers. Building maintenance workers occupy a key position in the chain of labor connected to water, gas and electrical systems.
Porters and maintenance workers also work with thousands of, usually small, companies involved in wallpapering, flooring, tile cutting, window installation and cleaning, and boiler maintenance. They interact with plumbers, sewage and drain cleaners, heat pump and water system specialists, and Con Edison workers who supply buildings with gas and electricity. They also work alongside fire alarm technicians, elevator mechanics, inspectors, repair workers and cleaners. All of these workers have a common interest in fighting alongside building workers.
Doorkeepers, finally, are the last link in logistics, shipping and handling. They are, in effect, “last-meter” delivery workers, an extension of the “last-mile” delivery phenomenon that has grown over the past two decades, especially with the rise of Amazon and the gig economy. According to the New York City Comptroller’s Office, there are about 45,000 last-mile delivery workers in New York City.
Doorkeepers have seen an enormous increase in daily package volume. Package rooms have become cramped warehouses, and in new buildings with 500, 1,000 or more apartments, they are often so large that dedicated “package-room doormen” are assigned to them full time. Sorting and organizing deliveries from UPS, the Postal Service, DHL and FedEx has itself become a full-time job.
All of these are workers whom a Building Workers Strike Committee must mobilize to defeat the real estate titans. Local 32BJ will seek to isolate the strike and shut it down. But a mass struggle uniting these sections of the New York City working class, based not only on the needs of building workers but of all workers, will be an unstoppable force.
11. Turkish coal miners march to Ankara for their unpaid wages
Following the arrest of Independent Miners’ Union leader Başaran Aksu, miners have launched their march to the capital.
12. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
