Autoworker, socialist, and working class hero Will Lehman
On Saturday, April 25, UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman
introduced this resolution at a meeting of UAW Local 677 in Macungie,
Pennsylvania. Local 677 includes the Mack Trucks plant at which Lehman
works. The meeting was attended by members of the local apparatus. In
order for resolutions to be presented at the upcoming Constitutional
Convention, they must first be approved by local unions.
When the vote was taken, the resolution was voted down 7–1, with Will Lehman casting the only vote in favor.
This
outcome stands in sharp contradiction to the sentiments of
rank-and-file workers. There is enormous opposition among autoworkers
and workers throughout the UAW to the war, to the attacks on democratic
rights at home, and to the diversion of trillions into militarism while
living standards are slashed. But the UAW apparatus has aligned itself
with the war drive of the government and the corporations, enforcing
nationalism while workers are told to “sacrifice” for policies that
benefit only the financial oligarchy.
Will Lehman—a rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker and socialist
candidate for UAW president—introduced a resolution opposing the war
against Iran at a meeting of UAW Local 677 on Saturday. Lehman proposed
that the resolution—“Against the US-Israeli Imperialist War on Iran; For the Independent Mobilization of the Working Class”—be taken up at the 39th UAW Constitutional Convention, scheduled for June 15–18 in Detroit.
The
resolution was put to a vote at UAW Local 677 and was defeated 7 to 1.
Lehman cast the only vote in favor. The seven who voted it down were not
rank-and-file workers but local officers and their associates—a tiny
bureaucratic clique convened without the 2,400 Mack Trucks workers.
Their vote is entirely typical of the pro-war UAW apparatus that has,
from the national leadership on down, either actively promoted the war
drive or maintained a cowardly silence in the face of it.
The
resolution proposed by Lehman is a powerful statement outlining a
strategy for the working class to stop the war. It denounces the war as
criminal, drawing on the Nuremberg precedents established after World
War II, and documents its staggering human costs and implications.
The
resolution also directly connects the war to the attacks on the
democratic and social rights of the working class at home. The same
government that bombs Iranian cities is deploying militarized federal
agents against immigrant workers, killed Renée Nicole Good and Alex
Pretti, and is building what the resolution characterizes as “the
largest immigration prison system in American history.”
*****
The resolution lays out a program of action rooted in the independent
initiative of the rank and file. It declares that the war “can be ended
only by the independent mobilization of the working class,” not by
appeals to Congress, lobbying the Democrats, or reliance on “capitalist
politicians of any stripe.” It therefore calls on UAW members to
“actualize” the resolution through the formation of rank-and-file
committees in every local—independent of and not subordinate to the
union bureaucracy, elected in open meetings, accountable solely to the
membership, and subject to immediate recall.
The resolution
specifies what these committees would be charged with: taking the
resolution into every workplace and convening the membership to discuss
and act on it; organizing the defense of immigrant coworkers against ICE
raids and deportations; opposing the conversion of auto and auto parts
production to military output; and preparing to oppose conscription and
defend any worker or young person who refuses to fight in an imperialist
war. It further calls for establishing direct lines of communication
and coordination with rank-and-file committees in other UAW locals,
other unions, and with workers internationally, including in Iran.
Finally,
it links these organizational measures to concrete industrial and
political action. The committees are instructed to convene assemblies,
prepare the membership for “industrial and political action up to and
including work stoppages and strike action,” and report back “regularly
and openly” on progress. The resolution underscores that implementation
cannot be left to “officials, staff, or apparatus,” but depends on “the
conscious, organized, and independent action of the rank and file.”
The vote against Lehman’s resolution by the Local 677 apparatus is
politically significant not for its tally—7 to 1 in a meeting designed
to exclude the membership—but for what it reveals. A handful of
officials, acting as a closed bureaucratic clique, moved to suppress any
expression of opposition to an illegal war and prevent even a
discussion among the 2,400 Mack workers they nominally “represent.” In
this sense, the vote is a concentrated expression of the role of the UAW
apparatus as a whole.
UAW President Shawn Fain has positioned the
apparatus as a reliable prop of the war drive. He has issued no
statement opposing the Iran war, while reviving the poisonous mythology
of the World War II “Arsenal of Democracy”—the corporatist arrangement
under which auto production was converted to armaments, workers were
stripped of the right to strike, and the union bureaucracy was rewarded
with state sanction and institutional privileges in exchange for
enforcing “labor discipline.”
Fain’s embrace of Trump’s economic
nationalism and tariff war flows from the same logic: divide workers
along national lines, subordinate their struggles to the “national
interest” of American capitalism, and prepare the union to police the
workforce as war and austerity escalate.
The World Socialist Web Site calls on autoworkers and all UAW members to take Lehman’s
resolution into every plant and every local, circulate it on the shop
floor, and implement the strategy that it lays out. As the resolution
states, the working class possesses, through its position in production,
transportation and the universities, the social power to halt the war
machine. The issue is organization and leadership: whether workers’
collective strength is consciously mobilized, or strangled by officials
whose privileges depend on keeping workers politically disarmed and
isolated.
As the strike by members of the Harvard Graduate Student Union–United
Auto Workers (HGSU–UAW) begins to enter its second week, their class
brothers and sisters in the Harvard Academic Workers-UAW
(HAW-UAW) union have reached a critical turning point in their
struggle. The fight by 4,000 non-tenure-track faculty and researchers
for a first contract with the Ivy League university is a focal point in
the struggle of academic workers across the country.
The primary
obstacle to victory is not merely the recalcitrance of the Harvard
administration, but the sabotage of the UAW bureaucracy. UAW
International and Region 9A officials have moved to strangle the strike
before it could become a united counter-offensive by academic workers
and graduate student workers.
In a flagrant violation of
democratic principles, the HAW-UAW bargaining committee has unilaterally
called off plans for a spring strike, overriding a clear mandate from
the membership. As reported in the Harvard Crimson, during a
general membership meeting, 53 percent of attendees voted to close the
strike authorization vote and begin striking immediately. Rather than
implementing this decision, the committee engaged in “bureaucratic
gaslighting,” citing “procedural confusions” and “notification windows”
to justify an abrupt about-face that rules out any strike action for the
remainder of the semester. This maneuver is a deliberate attempt to
protect the university’s “reading period” and commencement operations at
the expense of the workers’ primary leverage.
This betrayal is a
gift to the Harvard administration. By preventing a unified front with
Harvard Graduate Student Union (HGSU-UAW) members who are already on
strike for living wages, the HAW-UAW leadership has effectively enforced
the “divide-and-conquer” strategy of management. While graduate workers
face $3,500 median rents in Cambridge on a pittance wage as little
as $18 per hour, the HAW-UAW bureaucracy is ensuring that the
non-tenure-track faculty remains isolated, stripped of their power to
shut down the university.
The UAW International apparatus functions as a policing mechanism for
the financial oligarchy. Under the leadership of Shawn Fain, the
bureaucracy has perfected the use of corporatist “red tape” to stifle
the initiative of workers. The HAW-UAW bargaining committee’s claim that
a strike was “logistically unfeasible” is a political fiction designed
to obscure their role as management’s enforcers.
*****
As [the World Socialist Web Site has] previously reported, the most important figures on the Board include:
Penny Pritzker: Billionaire; Former Commerce Secretary (Obama); Boards of Microsoft & Icertis.
Timothy Barakett: Founder, TRB Advisors; Appointed to KKR Board (March 2025).
Mariano-Florentino
Cuéllar: Former NSC Senior Director (Obama); President of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, a major thinktank for the military-
intelligence apparatus.
Michael Chae: Vice Chair and CFO of Blackstone (World’s largest commercial landlord).
Sylvia Mathews Burwell: Former Health and Human Services secretary; Chief of Staff to Robert Rubin (Architect of deregulation).
The
administration has weaponized a narrative of “financial distress,”
citing a projected $365 million deficit to justify wage suppression.
This is a strategic accounting lie. Harvard sits on a $53.2 billion
endowment and recently raised $629 million in current-use gifts. The
“crisis” is a political choice made under the pressure of the Trump
administration’s scorched-earth campaign against academic freedom and student anti-genocide protests.
With
Education Secretary Linda McMahon placing Harvard under “heightened
cash monitoring” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth freezing $2.2
billion in grants, the Harvard Corporation is offloading the costs of
its political conflict with the far right onto the backs of the workers.
*****
The only viable path forward for Harvard workers is the strategy
proposed by Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate
for UAW president. Lehman has explained that the Harvard strike is part
of a global movement against exploitation and war, which pits workers
against the pro-war labor apparatus. “The bureaucracy can’t be reformed.
It must be abolished,” Lehman has stated, emphasizing that academic and
industrial workers face the same bureaucratic enemy.
Lehman’s
call for a “unified counter-offensive” is the only response to the
Harvard Corporation’s retrenchment and the Trump administration’s drive
toward fascist dictatorship.
The victory of Harvard workers
depends on their ability to break the grip of the UAW bureaucracy and
the two-party system it serves. The leadership’s decision to override a
strike vote is a warning: the apparatus will always prioritize its
relationship with the university and the state over the needs of the
workers.
To prevail, Harvard workers must:
Reject the sabotage of the HAW-UAW leadership and demand an immediate return to democratic control over the strike timeline.
Form
independent rank-and-file committees to coordinate action across
bargaining units, independent of the highly paid officials of the UAW
International.
Link the struggle to the International Workers
Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to unite with the
international working class in a common fight against capitalism and
war.
The fight at Harvard is a central battleground in the
global class struggle. Workers can only win by recognizing that their
true allies are not the “labor lieutenants of capital” in the union
offices, but the international working class mobilized in a
revolutionary struggle against the financial oligarchy.
The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) tracked 4,235 unique
titles challenged in 2025, the second highest ever documented by ALA.
The highest ever documented was 4,240 in 2023. As one of the essays
included in the State of America’s Libraries points out, “These numbers
stand far from the baseline of 273, which was the average annual number
between 2001 and 2020.”
This is not the result of some sudden
upsurge in public morality or even prudishness. This is a concerted,
organized campaign driven by ultra-right elements dedicated to forcing
their anti-democratic and unpopular views on a largely unsuspecting
public. It is part of the preemptive assault on popular consciousness,
driven by fear of the growing radicalization materialized in the “No
Kings” demonstrations of millions and other indications of public
hostility to the entire political establishment.
Along these
lines, one of the “key findings” of the ALA in regard to the “censorship
landscape” bears on the identity of the “intellectual freedom
challengers.”
The State of America’s Libraries observes:
Contrary
to common narratives suggesting that book challenges originate
primarily from concerned parents, our data shows otherwise.
Approximately 91.7% of titles challenged in 2025 were targeted by
pressure groups (20.8%) and government decision makers (70.9%). By
comparison, only 2.7% of challenges came from parents, and 1.4% came from individual library users.
This represents a dramatic shift from previous years. In the past,
pressure groups and government officials accounted for roughly 12.9% of
book challenges, averaging about 46 titles per year. [Emphasis added.]
*****
The claim by the censorship zealots that they are “protecting children”
is hypocritical, cynical drivel. The right-wing forces so worried about
the young are the same ones in favor of slashing budgets, social
programs and benefits, resulting in the impoverishment of millions of
children and families.
The most targeted books in 2025 included Sold, by Patricia McCormick, a 2006 novel about a girl from Nepal sold into sexual slavery
in India. The book was adapted as a film in 2014, with Emma Thompson as
one of the executive producers. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) by Stephen Chbosky is also highly targeted. That novel too was made into a film, in 2012.
Two fantasy novels by Sarah J. Maas (Empire of Storms [2016] and A Court of Thorns and Roses [2015]), and another by Jennifer L. Armentrout (Storm and Fury, 2019) are on the list, as is Anthony Burgess’ dystopian 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange!
Also on the 2025 list, John Green’s 2005 young adult novel, Looking for Alaska,
was the fourth-most challenged book in the US between 2010 and 2019,
with profanity and a sexually explicit scene identified as
objectionable. When the Marion County (Kentucky) High School considered
removing the book from the library and senior English curriculum, it
created a genuine controversy, with considerable public support for the
book. The teacher who wanted to use Green’s novel received more than 500
encouraging emails, half of them written by teenagers who had read it.
Tricks
(2009) by Ellen Hopkins was another title under attack in 2025, in this
case for its treatment of drugs and adolescent sexuality, as was her Identical(2013). Gender Queer: A Memoir (2019) by Maia Kobabe and Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021) by Malinda Lo were singled out for attack because of their gay sexual themes.
Beyond
the list of the most targeted, the ALA reports that of the titles
targeted in 2025, 1,671 deal with LGBTQ and black or indigenous themes.
The fascistic book banners consider these subjects “low-hanging fruit,”
appealing to the most backward elements in the population. And anti-gay
bigotry and racism are real driving forces in these quarters.
*****
This is along the lines of the Nazi-like effort to “synchronize”
institutions and culture behind American chauvinism, militarism and
social reaction. Donald Trump’s January 29, 2025 executive order,
“Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” for example, asserted
that parents expected US schools “to instill a patriotic admiration for
our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand.” This was to
be coordinated with the Department of Defense.
This year’s militarist Anzac Day celebration coincided with an
eruption of imperialist war that Australia, under the Labor government,
is centrally involved in.
Anzac Day marks the disastrous 1915
landing of Australian, New Zealand and British troops at Gallipoli,
Turkey, amid World War I. Notwithstanding the government’s glorification
of the landing at Gallipoli, it was a catastrophe from start to finish,
the result of the reckless decisions of British and Australian military
leadership. Up to 50,000 Allied troops and more than 85,000 Turkish
soldiers lost their lives in a battle that was supposed to be a surprise
attack but dragged on for more than eight months.
Now 111 years
later, Australia is participating in a new criminal war in that region
of the world, the US-led assault on Iran, which threatens to ignite a
global conflagration.
Widely reviled amid the mass hostility to
the Vietnam War, Anzac Day has been heavily promoted by governments
since the 1980s and 90s, a period coinciding with unending US-led wars
that are now metastasizing into a direct confrontation of American
imperialism with nuclear-armed states, Russia and China.
The lead-up to Anzac Day was more muted than in previous years. In
his statements on Saturday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese trotted out
the usual lines about the military having “embodied all that is greatest
in our national character.” But he said nothing about the role of the
military in conflicts that are underway today.
The reason for the
vagueness is that there is widespread anti-war sentiment. A Newspoll
last month found that 72 percent of the population opposed the US attack
on Iran. Over more than two years, there have been mass protests
opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the Labor government’s support
for it.
Even among the crowds that gathered, which were many times smaller than
the largest of those demonstrations, there were glimmers of popular
anti-war sentiment. Roy Pearson, a 99-year-old veteran of World War II
told the Sydney Morning Herald, “War never solves anything. We need to wake up to ourselves.”
*****
While government leaders avoid speaking about the implications of
what they are preparing, the reality of plans for a major war were spelt
out bluntly by former secretary of the Home Affairs department, Mike
Pezzullo.
In a comment published by the Murdoch-owned Australian
and the hawkish Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Pezzullo
bemoaned the fact that “Australians tend to frame war in moral terms and
as something that is in our past.” The former senior official warned
that the “solemnity” of Anzac Day, and an emphasis on the horrors of war
undermined “The idea of the utility and necessity of war.”
Speaking about his willingness to sacrifice the new generations of young people he continued:
“Will
we have the fortitude to calculate the odds of war and to prepare
accordingly, even as we abhor war? Will we have the moral clarity to
calculate the cost of war and the price of peace? Will we be prepared to
make the same sacrifices that we rightly honor on Saturday, for the
sake of future generations?
“Odds are, we may be tested soon enough.”
He denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin. But the main target of
the diatribe was China. Pezzullo repeated all of the US talking points,
falsely depicting Beijing as an aggressor and declared, “For
Australia’s part, we are not doing nearly enough to prepare for the
possibility of a war in the Pacific in the near term.”
An editorial in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) was more restrained, but made the same basic point.
*****
In what could become a defining element of this year’s Anzac Day, was
the decision of Victoria Cross recipient, Ben Roberts-Smith, to attend
an Anzac Day event on Queensland’s Gold Coast. He appears to have been
given a warm welcome by most in the small crowd, while media outlets,
including the publicly funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation,
published respectful articles citing Roberts-Smith’s comments about his
passion for Anzac Day.
It’s less than three weeks since
Roberts-Smith was criminally charged with five war crimes, for his
alleged involvement in the murder of multiple Afghans. That includes
accusations that Roberts-Smith machine gunned a disabled Afghan prisoner
to death and kicked a civilian off a cliff.
War crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan flowed
inexorably from the neo-colonial and criminal character of the
occupation itself. The official claims that governments and the military
command were unaware of the atrocities that were carried out are not
credible.
Even in that context though, the ability of
Roberts-Smith to make public appearances and to be treated politely by
the press, as an accused serial murderer, is disturbing and a marker of a
shift to the right by the entire political and media establishment.
On Saturday night, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance,
California, was tackled and subdued by Secret Service agents after he
broke through the outer security perimeter at the White House
Correspondents Association dinner at the Washington Hilton.
There
was a flurry of gunshots, some by the gunman, who was armed with a
shotgun and a handgun, some by Secret Service agents or other security
officers. Only two people required medical attention: Allen himself, and
an unnamed Secret Service agent, who was wearing a bulletproof vest and
only lightly injured, according to accounts given by federal officials.
*****
While the statement issued by Allen indicates that he was deeply opposed
to the actions of the Trump regime, the course he took serves no
progressive purpose. Long historical experience has demonstrated that
individual attacks on one or another leader play into the hands of
political reaction. In this case, it provides an opportunity for Trump
to escalate attacks on democratic rights.
*****
Trump sought to use the incident both to glorify his own significance,
and to press ahead with the construction of the gigantic ballroom that
would replace the now-demolished East Wing of the White House. This
included an obscene comparison of himself to Abraham Lincoln. Trump
declared, “the people that do the most, the people that make the biggest
impact, they’re the ones that they go after.”
The response from the political establishment and the corporate media
is, as always, reactionary, cowardly and hypocritical. In the various
statements from these layers, centered on the theme of “there is no
place for political violence in America,” none made the basic point that
Trump is himself responsible for escalating brutal violence abroad and
within the United States.
It is not even two months since US and
Israeli forces carried out the extermination of much of Iran’s political
leadership, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many of his family
members, advisers and other government officials in a targeted air
strike on the first day of the US war with Iran.
The leaders of the European imperialist powers, who have balked at
some of Trump’s actions in the Persian Gulf, were at pains to condemn
the attack on the WHCA dinner and any suggestion that violence in
America was a case of the chickens coming home to roost.
Commission
President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted that she was “relieved” Trump
and attendees were safe, adding: “Violence has no place in politics,
ever.” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas struck a similar
tone, warning that “political violence has no place in a democracy.”
British
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “shocked by the scenes”
Saturday night in Washington, while German Chancellor Friedrich
Merz tweeted, “Violence has no place in a democracy.” French President
Emmanuel Macron was more direct, declaring, “I extend my full support to
Donald Trump.”
The hypocrisy is sickening. Trump is himself the
greatest threat to American democracy, as these ladies and gentlemen
well know. His thugs attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an
effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, and his war against
immigrants has left American citizens dead on the streets and immigrants
dead in detention camps. To say nothing of the thousands slaughtered in
Iran, Lebanon and Gaza by US bombs and missiles.
Unite union officials have held secret talks with representatives of
Reform UK over ending the 15-month Birmingham bin strike. The meeting is
the filthy product of Unite’s isolation of a struggle that has pitted a
small but determined group of 400 refuse workers against the Labour
Party, locally and nationally, and its brutal austerity agenda.
Strike
action became all out from March last year against the Labour-run
council’s abolition of the safety-critical Waste Recycling and
Collection Officer (WRCO) role, affecting 150 bin loaders, crippling pay
cuts of up to £8,000, and a reduction in crew sizes by a quarter, with a
similar downgrading exercise impacting bin lorry drivers.
Unite’s
attempt to portray Reform UK—a far-right, anti-immigrant, pro-business
party—as a potential ally is politically criminal, with implications far
beyond the Birmingham dispute.
The Times
reported Unite officials met senior advisors to Reform UK leader Nigel
Farage on April 14 at a Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Birmingham to
discuss a potential settlement of the protracted dispute with the Labour
authority led by John Cotton. Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham was
not present, with talks conducted by trusted emissaries.
The meeting was held in secret to avoid backlash against getting into bed with the far-right party.
It
took place amid a deep crisis for Keir Starmer’s Labour government,
which faces a meltdown in local elections on May 7 covering thousands of
council seats across England, Scotland and Wales. This reflects
widespread anger over its austerity program, such as the devastating
£300 million cuts imposed in Birmingham, the UK’s second-largest city,
across the council workforce
Unite’s engagement with Reform UK
lends credence to its efforts to pose as a worker-friendly alternative
to Labour that will in fact be used to push a further shift to the right
in the interests of the corporate and financial elite.
*****
Farage provided an exclusive with the Daily Mail on Friday which laid out what Reform UK would do in power if it replaced the Starmer government.
The
ex-banker demanded brutal cuts to welfare provision, targeting those on
disability benefits, threatening that “there’ll be riots, and there’ll
be strikes and there’ll be protests, and we know all of that, but that’s
what we’re going to have to do – it has to be done. We just can’t
afford it now.”
This is the party Unite officials are promoting as
intermediaries in Birmingham, while normalizing its toxic nationalism
and xenophobia. Conservative shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick made
infamous hate filled remarks against immigrants and the working class
of Birmingham in March 2025 after visiting the Handsworth area of the
city, complaining he had not seen “another white face” and “it was as
close I’ve come to a slum in this country.”
*****
The embrace of Reform UK is in line with Unite’s own promotion of
nationalism and militarism. Graham’s most heated rows with the
government have centered on her complaints that Labour is not moving fast
enough on military spending, including threatening that Chancellor
Rachel Reeves should be sacked if this was not speeded up. If Reeves
could not “grasp the concept” of backing British industry “and doesn’t
care where things are made then she should go.” She described a massive
rearmament program as “vision for Britain.”
Unite’s agenda of
militarism and economic protectionism, so far pursued in collaboration
with the Starmer government, is fundamentally incompatible with the defense of workers’ jobs, pay and conditions, or public services, all of
which are being sacrificed on the altar of increased military
expenditure, trade war and further tax concessions to big business. But
it is entirely compatible with support for a Reform UK government by
bureaucracy that functions not as a vehicle for workers’ resistance, but
as an instrument for its suppression.
The Holiday Inn meeting
between Unite and Reform UK is a damning exposure of the role of the
pseudo-left, including the Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party and
the Revolutionary Communist Party, which have backed Graham, promoted
the union’s bogus “mega-pickets” while the strike was systematically
isolated, and glorified Graham’s spats with Starmer as representing a
shift to the left by the union bureaucracy.
*****
The Socialist Equality Party has insisted throughout the Birmingham
dispute that the fight against the Starmer government, against
anti-migrant attacks, the rise of the far-right, austerity and war mean
ending the strangulation of the class struggle by the union bureaucracy.
It requires the building of independent rank-and-file committees to
transfer decision-making to workers themselves and unify struggles
across workplaces and sectors and forging a new leadership for the
working class, the SEP.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan and her Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM)
government has released a report into the October 2025 post-Tanzanian
election mass killing of protesters—one of the bloodiest episodes in
post-independence African history.
The October 29 election, in
which Hassan claimed a one-candidate “victory” with the absurd official
result of 97 percent, was a transparent fraud. The main opposition
leader Tundu Lissu was detained and accused of treason ahead of the
elections. His pro-business Chadema party was barred from contesting.
The response was explosive. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions,
of workers and youth flooded the streets in the largest protests since
independence, shattering the myth of Tanzania as a stable “land of
peace” promoted by the corporate media and foreign investors. The regime
responded with naked terror. Under cover of a five-day internet
blackout, security forces unleashed a killing spree, gunning down
protesters nationwide.
The report is a whitewash. The commission
was chaired by former chief justice Mohamed Chande Othman, like all
senior judicial posts appointed from the CCM regime responsible for the
massacre.
The report admits that at least 518 people died from
“unnatural causes”, 197 by gunfire, and that victims were shot in their
homes as well as in the streets, with over 2,000 injured and 833 struck
by live rounds. Of the 518, 21 were children. But it dismisses well
documented reports of mass graves and large-scale disappearances as
unsubstantiated, even as it acknowledges that 245 people are still
missing and that 39 families reported seeing the bodies of relatives in
morgues before they later disappeared.
The true scale is far greater. A November report by 40 African human
rights organizations in Nairobi estimated the death toll at up to 3,000
protestors.
*****
Without presenting a shred of evidence, the report attributed the
violence to “trained individuals” and “coordinated actors.” It claims
that “there were people roaming around in various places… inciting and
recruiting others to participate in violence during and after the
election”.
This is a well-worn pattern employed by regimes across
the region, including that of William Ruto in Kenya following the
massacres of anti-austerity protests in 2024 and 2025, and Yoweri
Museveni during recent elections in Uganda.
These stooges of
imperialism, presiding over capitalist regimes carved out on the
colonial boundaries, routinely invoke shadowy external forces to justify
their repression, rather than acknowledge the real driving forces:
soaring living costs, austerity measures, and police state violence,
pushing workers and youth into struggle.
Speaking after receiving
the report, Hassan declared that the events were a “tragedy” that “shook
our nation”. This gave way to an open defense of repression. She
insisted that the security forces had acted to prevent the country from
descending into “anarchy,” and claimed that “all the violence was
planned, coordinated, financed and executed by people who were trained
and given equipment for committing crimes.” The aim of the protests was
“to create a leadership vacuum” and render the country “ungovernable.”
*****
The report’s release has been met with deafening silence from
Washington and Brussels, whose sole concern is Tanzania’s growing
importance within the global scramble for resources. The country
possesses vast deposits of nickel, graphite, rare earths, and other
critical minerals essential for electric vehicle batteries, advanced
electronics, and military technologies. US-backed ventures, including
major nickel and liquefied natural gas projects, are moving forward,
while the European Union has intensified cooperation under its Critical
Raw Materials strategy to secure alternative supply chains.
These
investments are central to the economic and military interests of the
imperialist powers. Maintaining access to these resources and countering
the expanding influence of China, which has become Tanzania’s largest
trading partner and a major investor in infrastructure and mining, is
their overriding aim.
*****
For the Tanzanian masses, the central issues remain unemployment,
poverty, and repression. The October protests expressed a deep social
crisis. The essential lesson is that the struggle for democratic rights
is inseparable from the fight against capitalism and imperialism, and
cannot be entrusted to the state, the bourgeois opposition, or the
imperialist power now waging war on Iran.
What is required is the
united independent political mobilization workers, youth, and the rural
masses in a struggle that must extend beyond the colonial boundaries
imposed by imperialism. This must be based on a program linking
immediate democratic demands, including accountability for the killings,
the release of political prisoners, and the restoration of democratic
rights, to the broader objective of socialist transformation: the
expropriation of the ruling elite, democratic control over the region’s
vast resources, and their utilization for human need rather than profit,
as part of the fight for the United Socialist States of Africa.
The ongoing industrial uprising of tens of thousands of workers
in the manufacturing belt that surrounds Delhi, India’s capital and
largest urban area, is being met with mounting state repression. Acting
at the behest of the BJP–the Hindu supremacist party that holds power
nationally, in Delhi, and in the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh
and Haryana–police have arrested hundreds of workers protesting poverty
wages and brutal working conditions, as well as scores of activists who
have supported them.
Over 400 workers have been arrested in the
National Capital Region (NCR), since the worker rebellion began on April
10. Police are now casting a wider net to capture and arrest young labor and political activists who have shown solidarity with the worker
protests by publicizing their plight and resistance via social media
and by giving speeches at various strike locations. The police have
falsely claimed that these activists are the principal cause of the
worker unrest, labeling them instigators. In a transparent smear, the
authorities have also suggested some of them may be in cahoots with
India’s arch-rival Pakistan.
The police started systematically
targeting the activists after the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (UP),
the Hindu fascist Yogi Adityanath, called the workers’ protests an
“organized conspiracy” to “disrupt peace and progress at a time when the
state is moving steadily towards development and stability.”
On
April 18, Aditya Anand, a young labor activist was arrested at a
railway station in the city of Tiruchirappalli in the southern state of
Tamil Nadu by teams of UP police who had traveled about 2,500 km (1,500
miles) to capture him. They had placed a reward of Rs. 100,000 for his
arrest. Despite holding a bachelor’s degree in engineering, Aditya is
unemployed.
The UP police are fanning out across the country to
arrest political activists simply for being present at the workers’
demonstrations. So far, they have reportedly arrested at least 63 people
across the country, not including the hundreds of workers who have been
thrown in jail.
The police have described Aditya Anand as the “mastermind” behind the
violence that occurred on Monday, April 13, in the Noida township,
about 25 km from New Delhi, the site of India’s parliament buildings.
What the police and the Indian corporate media have termed “violence”
took place after the police mounted a frontal assault on the workers,
mercilessly beating them with batons and dragging detained workers
through the streets. After this assault, the workers defended themselves
by throwing stones and firecrackers at the police and by overturning
police vehicles. Some other vehicles were set on fire by unknown
persons.
Anand has been charged with various criminal offences,
including inciting violence and damaging public property. The police
have also served him with a non‑bailable arrest warrant endorsed by a
local court. Prior to Anand’s arrest two persons police have labelled
his accomplices—Manisha Chauhan and Rupresh Rai—were also arrested. The
day after Anand’s arrest, police arrested two more individuals: Himanshu
Thakur in New Delhi and Satyam Verma in the UP city of Lucknow. What is
common to all of them is that they are activists in a labour advocacy
group named Mazdoor Bigul (Workers’ Bugle). Their only “sin”
has been to document and publicize the misery of these oppressed workers
through social media and to appear at their demonstrations.
After Anand’s arrest, Noida Police Commissioner Laxmi Singh
sensationally told the press that “the violence that occurred in Noida
was a mala fide, internationally organized activity.” The Police
Commissioner provided no evidence to support this claim. She simply
repeated an allegation first propagated by Chief Minister Adityanath
that there may be a “Pak connection,” referring to Pakistan, behind the
workers’ uprising.
*****
In contrast to these sensationalist and highly prejudicial claims, Aditya’s aghast brother, Akash Anand, told the Indian Express:
“He was simply demanding a fair wage for laborers, is that so wrong?”
He continued: “He always had a humanistic approach to everyone. We even
have video evidence of Aditya pleading with workers to protest in a
peaceful manner, but no one is ready to listen to us.”
Aditya
Anand has now reportedly “confessed to his role in the crime.” This
suggests that the police have used beatings and/or torture to extract a
confession from him. India’s police are notorious for abusing detainees
and using forced confessions to railroad poor people and government
opponents to lengthy prison terms.
Lawyers for some of those arrested have called the detentions completely
illegal, arguing that the police have violated the most basic
procedures of law. Defense lawyer Kabir Gupta, who represents Aditya
Anand, told the Times of India: “The arrests are illegal
because they were carried out without following due procedure under law.
Unless the grounds of arrest are disclosed and our client is served
with an arrest memo, the arrests cannot be called legal.”
*****
The Indian ruling class has a long history of criminalizing workers’
struggles. One of the most notorious cases was the frame-up and
victimisation of the entire leadership of the Maruti Suzuki Workers Union
(MSW), a newly formed independent union that led a series of militant
job actions in 2011-12. Following a company-provoked altercation and
mysterious July 2012 fire at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar, Haryana, plant,
thirteen MSWU leaders were framed up on murder charges. After five years
in prison and a bogus trial in which the judge deliberately mangled the
law, the thirteen were sentenced to life in prison. Although the 11
surviving MSWU leaders are currently out on bail pending the court’s
ruling on their appeal, they remain under threat of re-imprisonment and
continue to suffer from their terrible ordeal.
The draconian
measures being utilized by the authorities to suppress worker opposition
flow from their determination to reassure domestic and foreign capital
that India will guarantee them ever expanding profits under conditions
of growing global economic turbulence, further compounded by Trump’s
tariffs and now the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran. While the attack on
the Noida workers has been led by the BJP, opposition-led state
governments have similarly unleashed the police on protesting workers
and routinely invoke essential services laws to break strikes. Many are
also now implementing the “Labour Codes”
introduced by Prime Minster Narendra Modi and his BJP government to gut
even minimal statutory protections for the already highly exploited
Indian working class.
The World Socialist Web Site
condemns the arrests, imprisonment and ongoing prosecution of the Noida
workers and labor activists. These actions are aimed at suppressing
worker resistance and silencing left-wing opposition, above all that
which seeks to support working class struggles. Workers, youth and
socialist-minded professionals in India and around the world must
strongly denounce and publicize this outrage and demand the immediate
release of these class war prisoners.
A strike by approximately 1,300 workers at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Missouri is entering its fourth week
without resolution. The workers, members of the International
Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Local 778, walked
out on April 5 after courageously rejecting a pro-company contract that
enforced severe cuts to real wages amid historic inflation and
maintained a punishing regime of forced, excessive overtime.
While
the immediate demands of the workers are economic—centered on defending
their living standards and winning back a semblance of work-life
balance—the objective logic of their struggle brings them into a direct
political collision with the US government and the machinery of military
production.
The Lake City plant is a central artery of the US
military-industrial complex, producing the vast majority of
small-caliber ammunition for the United States Armed Forces. The context
of this strike is of the highest strategic consequence. It is unfolding
in the midst of a massive, blood-soaked war launched by the Trump
administration against Iran. While a recently declared “indefinite
ceasefire” has nominally paused direct military strikes, workers must be
warned: this is a fraud. Accompanied by a continuing and illegal US
naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the ceasefire is not an end to
the war or a step toward peace, but a tactical, armed truce.
As the World Socialist Web Site has continuously warned, the
assault on Iran is not an isolated conflict, but a major theater in the
initial stages of a rapidly developing Third World War. The drive by
American imperialism to subjugate Iran is inextricably linked to the
US-NATO proxy war against Russia and advanced preparations for a massive
military confrontation with China.
*****
Because the military is demanding this massive stockpiling effort,
the demands placed on defense manufacturing workers have reached
intolerable levels. The mass production of ammunition is dangerous, exhausting work.
Workers operate amid massive industrial presses and high-decibel metal
stamping, facing constant exposure to toxic heavy metals such as lead,
alongside volatile explosive compounds. To meet the Pentagon’s quotas,
workers have been subjected to an exhausting regime of endless, forced
overtime. This brutal setup deprives workers of time to rest, recover or
see their families, destroying their health to guarantee an
uninterrupted supply of bullets.
In stark contrast to the
sacrifices demanded of the workers, Olin Winchester, the
multi-billion-dollar defense contractor that operates the
government-owned facility, is gorging itself on the profits of war. As
the international death toll has climbed, Olin has raked in massive
revenues, funneling this blood money directly into the pockets of its
corporate executives and Wall Street investors. As its own corporate
financial filings confirm, Olin routinely diverts hundreds of millions
of dollars toward aggressive stock buyback programs and uninterrupted
quarterly dividend payouts. The company expects the rank-and-file to
accept effectively lowered wages—eaten away by years of inflation—while
management liquidates the profits of global slaughter to enrich the
major shareholders.
*****
To win this battle, Lake City workers need a new strategy based on a
clear understanding of the political forces arrayed against them. They
are fighting not just Olin Winchester, but the bipartisan war machine,
the capitalist state, and an IAM apparatus that is functioning as an
agency of the government.
Workers
at Lake City must urgently take the conduct of the strike into their
own hands by forming a rank-and-file strike committee. This committee
must outline non-negotiable demands—including a substantial wage
increase that fully offsets inflation, the institution of automatic
cost-of-living adjustments (COLA), and the total abolition of forced
overtime.
But such a committee must recognize the political nature
of this fight. It must break the isolation imposed by the IAM by
sending delegations to other defense plants, manufacturing facilities,
and logistics centers, appealing for broader working-class action. By
organizing through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File
Committees (IWA-RFC), workers can unite their struggle with the growing
movement of the working class globally against austerity and capitalist
exploitation.
The fight for decent living standards, for the right
to a life free from exhausting exploitation, is inherently bound up
with the fight against imperialist war. The working class must not be
forced to sacrifice its health, its wages, and its democratic rights to
build the arsenals for World War III. Instead, workers expropriate the
war profiteers and convert the military machine into a socially useful
industry.
The US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran is having a devastating
impact on the global economy, threatening to plunge billions of people
into deep poverty and hunger. Among the worst-affected regions is the
Pacific, where impoverished and isolated island states are highly
vulnerable to the fuel shortage caused by the blocking of the Strait of
Hormuz.
On April 17, the leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), which
includes 18 countries and territories, declared a region-wide emergency
and invoked the Biketawa Declaration—which provides a framework for the
regional coordination of relief efforts.
*****
The imperialist powers, which are responsible for the extreme poverty
and underdevelopment in the Pacific, are utterly indifferent to the fact
that millions of people’s livelihoods are being crushed. The US and its
allies, Australia and NZ, will exploit the crisis to further militarize
the strategically vital region in preparation for war against China—the
main target of US imperialism.
The
US maintains thousands of troops in Guam and is developing bases in
Palau and the Northern Mariana Islands. The US and Australia are
upgrading and making use of the Lombrum Naval Base in Papua New Guinea.
Australia
has signed neo-colonial military agreements with PNG and Tuvalu, and is
spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a Pacific Policing
Initiative, aimed at deploying militarized police anywhere in the region
to suppress popular unrest.
New Zealand last year cut all aid to
the Cook Islands in order to coerce its government into signing an
agreement that will compel it to consult NZ before making any commercial
or diplomatic agreements with China. Under the deal, reached earlier
this month, the NZ military has unimpeded access to the Cook Islands’
vast territorial waters.
Despite the tremendous hardship imposed
on their populations by the war, none of the Pacific governments has
opposed the genocidal bombing of Iran and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
Papua New Guinea’s foreign minister Justin Tkatchenko spoke for the
capitalist elites throughout the region when he told Radio NZ (RNZ) on
March 3: “We have supported the United States and Israel from day one.”
*****
On April 10, Kimberlyn King-Hinds, a US Republican representative for
the Northern Marianas, told the ABC that the territory was on the brink
of economic collapse, fuel prices had doubled and people were “having to
choose between having medication or not having medication… this is a
life and death situation.” But she refused to criticise the war and the
billions of dollars being squandered on the military, saying “that’s for
the president [Trump] to decide.”
Major struggles will inevitably erupt in the Pacific as the imperialist
powers and the local ruling classes seek to impose the full burden of
the economic crisis on working people. Workers, farmers and young people
must prepare by taking up a conscious political struggle for socialism.
We call on readers across the Pacific to participate in the upcoming International Online May Day Rally,
which will present a socialist strategy to stop the developing third
world war, and to join the fight to build the Trotskyist movement in
every country.
Last week, media outlets reported that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA) mayor of New York City, is considering a
plan to defer required contributions to several pension funds for city
workers—an austerity measure that amounts to a pension cut in slow
motion—aimed at reducing the city’s $5.4 billion budget gap.
Such a
move is a major attack on workers who will retire over the next two
decades, weakening the funds’ position and paving the way for future
benefit cuts and “reforms” imposed in the name of fiscal necessity.
Mamdani has taken up this plan from the City Council’s counterproposal
for the Fiscal Year 2027 budget, which begins in July.
Mamdani’s
stated aim is to save $1.2 billion a year in payments to the city’s five
pension funds by extending the legal deadline for full funding. In
2013, the City Council passed a law requiring the funds to reach 100
percent funding by 2032. Mamdani’s proposal would push that deadline
back to 2042 or later.
This is aimed at satisfying Wall Street
while exposing workers to far greater danger in the long term. If a
major stock market crash were to occur in 2033, for example—and the
financial system is already in an extremely fragile state—the city would
be in a far weaker position to absorb the shock because it would not
yet have the supposed “100 percent funded” cushion.
There is also
the more immediate danger of provoking credit rating agencies to reduce
the city’s rating, making borrowing more expensive. In March, Moody’s
and Fitch issued negative outlooks for the city—the same warnings that
preceded credit downgrades in 2020.
There is desperation in this
proposal—but also political calculation. The DSA administration is
working to prove to finance capital that it can govern “responsibly,”
which in practice means administering austerity and preparing major cuts
to schools and social programs.
*****
Last week, amid much fanfare, [conservative New York Governor Kathy] Hochul and Mamdani announced that she
would implement a “pied-à-terre tax” on second homes in New York City
valued at $5 million or more and owned by people who do not live in the
city.
The aim is political theater: a headline-grabbing “tax the
rich” gesture used to provide cover for austerity measures aimed at
workers—beginning with pensions. On April 15, the day income taxes were
due, Mamdani released a widely circulated video in which he stood
outside hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthouse on
Billionaires’ Row in Midtown Manhattan and declared that he was honoring
his campaign pledge: “Well, today we’re taxing the rich!”
Mamdani and Hochul have, in fact, formed a close political alliance and,
as with his alliance with the would-be Führer Donald Trump, he has
carefully avoided criticizing her in public. Hochul is using Mamdani to
provide a pseudo-left cover for a right-wing budget framework, while
Mamdani uses Hochul to market austerity as pragmatism.
*****
Mamdani’s public “affordability” branding has now been explicitly
folded into the Democratic Party’s attempt to refurbish itself through a
photo-op with Barack Obama—an architect of Wall Street rule and
imperialist war. In their first public appearance together, Mamdani and
Obama staged a preschool event earlier this month. Mamdani’s cultivation
of Obama—like his cultivation of Hochul and even Trump—signals a deeper
integration into the capitalist establishment.
There is little
doubt that Mamdani will be unable to balance the budget without massive
cuts to education and social programs. The Trump administration is
cutting aid to New York City at the very moment that the New York City
Housing Authority, which houses 500,000 low-income residents and is kept
afloat by federal funds, is collapsing. An estimated $80 billion is
needed simply to address the enormous backlog of repairs.
While
the full impact of federal cuts has not yet become clear, the expiration
of certain programs is already making working class life measurably
worse. The Emergency Housing Voucher program—part of the American Rescue
Plan Act of 2021, the third and final pandemic measure passed by
Congress—has run out of funds. The program subsidizes rent for 5,200 New
Yorkers, who will now have to find new subsidies or face homelessness.
The city is teeming with poverty and homelessness, and layoffs are
affecting broad layers of the working class. Inflation driven by the
Iran war is pummeling incomes, and a simmering mood of dissent and anger
is brewing in millions of households.
*****
... perhaps nothing will better symbolize the tenor of Mamdani and
the pseudo-left’s accommodation to American imperialism than the visit
of the British monarch, Charles III, to New York City next week, in the
year of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. Charles is the
figurehead of British imperialism and the patriarch of the decayed and
disgraced British royal family.
Mayor Mamdani, King Charles and
Queen Camilla will lay a wreath on Wednesday at the monument to the
victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.
After everything carried out in the name of that event—and amid the
ongoing American assault on Iran—nothing could more clearly symbolize
the surrender of Mamdani and the DSA to imperialism.
On April 14, a collision was narrowly avoided between a cargo jet and
a smaller aircraft on approach to Louisville Muhammad Ali International
Airport in Louisville, Kentucky. The 767 cargo jet had to abort its
landing when another aircraft moved onto the runway, forcing a go-around
at one of the busiest freight hubs in the country.
The airport
hosts UPS’s Worldport hub, the center of its air operations and one of
the biggest logistics hubs in the country. The same facility was the
site of the fatal crash of UPS Airlines Flight 2976 last November which
killed 15 people, including three pilots. The plane crashed shortly
after takeoff into a dense industrial corridor, which includes a Ford
assembly plant, creating a debris field a mile long.
The National
Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) preliminary findings showed that
the left engine and pylon separated during takeoff, with fatigue cracks
and overstress failures in the attachment structure. Evidence so far
indicates that maintenance of the 34-year-old MD-11F freighter was
inconsistent at best. The plane had been in San Antonio from September 3
to October 18 for a heavy maintenance check, and investigators said
they would examine every maintenance action performed before the crash.
UPS has since retired its entire MD-11 fleet.
*****
The latest near-disaster at Worldport is the latest sign of a serious
crisis in US aviation safety. On March 22 at LaGuardia Airport in New
York City, an Air Canada Express CRJ-900 struck a fire truck on landing,
killing the two pilots. Only two controllers were in the tower
overnight, and the fire rescue truck on the runway lacked a transponder
and could not be reliably tracked by the airport’s surface detection
system.
On April 18, four days after the near miss in Louisville,
two Southwest aircraft came perilously close at Nashville International
Airport in Tennessee. One Southwest aircraft was executing a go-around
while another was departing from a parallel runway, creating a near miss
that investigators are still reviewing.
The ruling class’s
relentless drive for profit has led to the dangerous neglect of
maintenance and technology in the National Airspace System (NAS). More
than 90 percent of US air traffic control facilities operate below
recommended levels, forcing controllers into 10-hour shifts and six-day
weeks.
While billions of dollars are being spent on domestic
repression and imperialist wars, air traffic control systems are forced
to rely on antiquated equipment and a technological patchwork.
Conditions for controllers have worsened for decades since the Reagan
administration smashed the PATCO strike in 1981 by firing over 11,000
air traffic controllers.
Significantly, the November UPS crash took place during a federal
shutdown, in which controllers spent more than a month working without
pay.
On March 6, Trump fired NTSB board member J. Todd Inman,
undermining the independent investigatory powers of the agency. Inman
had played a key role in the investigations of the November and the
midair collision of a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American
Airlines flight over Washington D.C. in January 2025, which killed all
67 people aboard both aircraft. Inman has said he was removed without
explanation. White House cited misconduct allegations, which Inman has
denied.
Inman is the second NTSB board member fired by Trump in less than a year. NTSB Vice Chair Alvin Brown was fired last May.
In his drive to establish a presidentialdictatorship,
Trump fired 17 independent inspectors general across departments like
DHS, State and Defense during his first week in office. He has since
dismissed dozens of independent agencyleaders and either appointed loyalists or left seats vacant.
The latest data from Gallup and Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF)
provide a devastating statistical portrait of social conditions in the
United States. The figures expose a society in which tens of millions
are forced to sacrifice basic necessities, forego treatment and incur
crushing debt in order to survive.
The Gallup survey finds that 33
percent of Americans, or roughly 82 million people, have cut back on
essentials such as food, utilities and transportation to pay for
healthcare in 2025. Among the uninsured, the figure rises to 62 percent,
but even among those with coverage nearly 3 in 10 report similar
sacrifices.
Among the uninsured, 32 percent borrowed money to pay
for care and 24 percent delayed or prolonged medication use. Nearly 1
in 10 Americans (about 9 percent) reported postponing retirement due to
healthcare expenses, while twice as many delayed changing jobs.
The
financial strain extends well beyond low-income groups. Around 25
percent of households earning $90,000–$120,000 and even 11 percent of
those earning $240,000 or more reported cutting back to afford care.
Healthcare has become a top economic concern, with over 60 percent of
Americans expressing serious worry about costs and access.
*****
One-third of adults report cost-related rationing of medications,
including skipping doses or failing to fill prescriptions. A similar
percentage say they skipped or postponed needed medical care due to cost
in the past year. Meanwhile, 41 percent of the population carries
medical or dental debt, with nearly a quarter unable to pay their bills
at all.
Financial vulnerability is pervasive, with about half of
adults unable to cover an unexpected $500 medical expense without going
into debt. Healthcare costs now rank as a leading source of anxiety,
with roughly two-thirds of Americans expressing serious concern about
their ability to afford care, which only compounds mental healthcare
conditions.
These statistics have profound political significance. Access to
healthcare in the US, one of the most basic needs in human society, is
determined not by medical need but by one’s income, employment status
and insured status. And having health insurance is not a guarantee of
access to medical care. The insured majority of patients increasingly face
rising premiums, deductibles and out-of-pocket costs that render formal
coverage largely meaningless. The result is a system of de facto
rationing, enforced by the financial limits imposed on working class
households.
This situation is the product of decades of bipartisan policy, carried
out by both Democrats and Republicans, aimed at dismantling the social
gains won through generations of class struggle. Programs established in
the aftermath of the Great Depression and expanded in the postwar
period have been systematically eroded. The guiding principle has been
the same: to subordinate healthcare and other social needs to the profit
requirements of the financial and corporate elite.
The expansion of privatization and deregulation has been central to
this process. Public programs have been hollowed out or transformed into
vehicles for private profit, while regulatory constraints on insurers,
pharmaceutical companies and hospital systems have been weakened.
The
Affordable Care Act, designed and signed into law under the Obama
administration, was not a progressive reform; rather, it entrenched the
role of private insurance and, above all, was based on the private
ownership of the health insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and giant
healthcare chains. The result is the present crisis, in which nominal
coverage coexists with widespread inability to access care.
Under
Donald Trump, these long-standing tendencies have taken on an especially
aggressive and reactionary form. The administration’s 2025–2026
policies represent a direct assault on the most vulnerable sections of
the population, while increasing funds for war abroad and repression at
home.
Central to this is the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act,
which imposes mandatory Medicaid work requirements of 80 hours per
month and introduces monthly eligibility checks, while cutting $900
billion from the fund. These measures are designed not to promote
employment but to create bureaucratic barriers that strip millions of
coverage through paperwork hurdles and administrative churn.
The
impact is already evident. The expiration of enhanced Affordable Care
Act subsidies (introduced in 2021 through pandemic relief laws) has
driven up insurance costs, placing coverage further out of reach for
low-income families.
At the same time, new restrictions on Medicaid and CHIP eligibility
for immigrants have excluded broad layers of legally present residents
from care. Frequent income verification requirements have produced a
system of “coverage churn,” in which eligible individuals lose insurance
due to minor reporting discrepancies or delays.
The essential aim
of these policies is to reduce federal expenditures by cutting people
off from care. The human cost, measured in untreated illness,
preventable deaths and deepening poverty, is treated as irrelevant. What
matters is the reallocation of resources to serve the interests of
finance capital, including tax cuts and increased military spending.
*****
Under the Clinton administration, the “Pivot to Managed Care”
integrated market-driven efficiency into public safety nets. This era
was defined by the expansion of private HMOs within Medicare and the
1996 welfare reforms, which disassociated Medicaid from cash assistance
and introduced administrative hurdles that reduced enrollment.
The Obama administration furthered this trajectory with the “Private Market Mandate” of the Affordable Care Act.
By rejecting a “public option” in favor of an individual mandate, the
ACA required citizens to purchase private products, effectively using
federal authority to guarantee a customer base for the insurance
industry. Additionally, the growth of Medicare Advantage plans, which
use federal funds to pay for privately run Medicare plans under both
administrations represents a form of “stealth privatization.”
In states such as California, under Gavin Newsom,
austerity budgets have targeted essential programs with approximately
$5 billion in cuts, affecting particularly those serving immigrants and
low-income communities.
The combined effect of these policies is a
healthcare system that functions as a mechanism of social control and
economic extraction. Workers are compelled to remain in jobs they might
otherwise leave due to fear of losing insurance. Families are driven
into debt or forced to choose between medical care and other
necessities. The system operates not to promote health but to sustain
profitability for insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms and
corporate hospital networks.
*****
No solution lies within the existing political framework, as both
parties defend profit and corporate dominance. Growing social struggles
point to the need for an independent working class movement to transform
the system, establish universal public healthcare and abolish corporate
control. As millions already sacrifice basic needs, conditions will
worsen, posing a stark choice between continued inequality or a mass
socialist movement to reorganize society.
A video reminder describes Syrotiuk's ongoing plight
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.
