Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. “Left populist” Avi Lewis wins race to lead Canada’s social-democratic NDP
Lewis’ left posturing is all hot air. He supports the US/NATO war on Russia in Ukraine and has emphasized his determination to work closely with the right-wing NDP governments in British Columbia and Manitoba, which are close allies of the Carney Liberal government and staunch supporters of Ottawa’s rearmament drive. In his acceptance speech, he praised both McPherson and Ashton and vowed to promote party “unity.”
Lewis does not repudiate the pivotal role that the NDP—with the unions’ full-throated support—has played since 2019 in propping up the minority federal Liberal governments, as they have stampeded to the right. He merely argues that the NDP should be more assertive when it holds the balance of power in parliament, i.e., do a better job of justifying its support for the big business Liberals with “left” posturing.
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Lewis hails from the first family of Canadian social democracy. His father, Stephen Lewis, led the Ontario NDP for eight years in the 1970s and later served, under Brian Mulroney’s Tory government, as Canada’s UN ambassador. His grandfather, David Lewis, served as federal NDP leader from 1971 through 1975, and as federal secretary, chairman and national president of its predecessor, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). The husband of the writer Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis also has deep connections with the pseudo-left in Canada and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is a faction of the Democratic Party, one of the twin parties of US imperialism.
During the campaign, Lewis described his family background as representing “a history of struggle.” This tells one everything one needs to know about Lewis’ politics. The history of Canadian social democracy has never been one of class struggle, based on the independent political mobilization of the working class, but rather its suppression. The CCF/NDP has defended Canadian capitalism, striving to divert social opposition into efforts to “humanize” it through parliamentary reform and collective bargaining, while ruthlessly opposing revolutionary socialism.
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Like social-democratic parties the world over, the NDP has over the past four decades emerged as a right-wing, anti-worker party virtually indistinguishable from its Liberal and Conservative rivals. Its mild reformist program was junked long ago.
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With his reference to the “99 percent,” Lewis clearly walks in the footsteps of political charlatans like Bernie Sanders and the DSA’s Zoran Mamdani. This amorphous category, promoted by the proponents of pseudo-left politics, dissolves the working class into a broad milieu encompassing the privileged middle class and excluding only the very wealthiest sections of the ruling elite. It is tailor-made to pursue the material interests of the upper-middle-class—trade union bureaucrats, academics, and better-off professionals—whose incomes and wealth fall within the richest 10 percent of Canadian society. This layer—the “next 9 percent”—resents the political and economic power of the capitalist oligarchy, and would like to see it more broadly shared within the top ten percent. But Lewis, like Sanders and Mamdani, is above all intent on preserving the existing capitalist social and political order. He is bitterly hostile to any independent political movement of the working class.
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Lewis sought in his acceptance speech last Sunday to give the impression that he would significantly alter the gaping levels of social inequality that have risen steadily over recent decades, irrespective of which party has held power at the federal level or in the provinces. “This is more than a rigged economy, it is a war on working people,” he declared. “It is immoral, it is un-Canadian and we cannot let it stand.” He pledged a “nation-building” exercise to strengthen the “care economy.”
In reality, glaring social inequality, monopoly and the domination of economic and political life by a super-wealthy capitalist elite have been at the heart of Canadian capitalism, since it rapidly expanded following Confederation and the dispossession of the native people of the West. They are as “Canadian” as maple syrup.
Today, millions of people rely regularly on food banks, and at least as many work in precarious jobs with no protection. To pay for war and the enrichment of the oligarchy, NDP-backed Liberal governments have cut health care, education, and other public services and social supports to the bone. Lewis’ clumsy attempt to present these organic features of Canadian capitalism as foreign imports is inseparable from his “left” Canadian nationalist perspective, which has been a hallmark of the petty-bourgeois “left” in Canada for well over 50 years. Portraying Canada as a “gentler” and “kinder” society than the rapacious Dollar Republic south of the 49th parallel, these forces work tirelessly to split Canadian workers from their natural allies in the working class of the US, Mexico, and internationally with fairy tales about “common Canadian values.” That Lewis sees himself firmly in this tradition was underlined by his positive reference in an interview with the DSA-aligned Jacobin to the “Waffle” faction in the NDP during the early 1970s, which advocated a “left” nationalist perspective bound up with more “independence” from American imperialism and was expelled by the party leadership.
This foul Canadian nationalist tradition has nothing to offer the working class. This fact has been powerfully demonstrated over the past 18 months, during which the trade unions and NDP have rallied round the ruling class’ “Team Canada” response to Trump’s trade war and annexation threats. While the union bureaucracies and NDP have been waving the Maple Leaf and preaching “national unity,” the ruling class, led by the Carney Liberal government, has dramatically intensified its class war assault. It has poured hundreds of billions into rearmament and war, implemented a new austerity drive, and eviscerated workers’ democratic rights, including the right to strike.
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Predictably, representatives of the middle-class pseudo-left have weighed in with enthusiastic statements about the new opportunities opened up by Lewis’ leadership. Radical journalist Yves Engler, who met all of the conditions necessary to run for leadership but was arbitrarily excluded by the party top brass, urged “leftist supporters” to “pressure” Lewis to ensure “he upends the party bureaucracy while promoting socialist, internationalist and anti-ecocide policies.”
This is a bankrupt strategy that pseudo-left forces around the world have promoted time and again. It recalls the “left” cheerleaders in Britain of Jeremy Corbyn, who was swept into the leadership of the Labour Party with the backing of hundreds of thousands in 2015 on a program that sounded far more radical than Lewis’. Britain’s pseudo-left trumpeted the prospects of a new foreign policy more “independent” of the US and even suggested Corbyn could lead the country towards socialism through the Labour Party, a bourgeois party and staunch defender of British imperialism of more than a century’s standing. Yet during his leadership, Corbyn responded not to the “pressure” from groups like the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Appeal (since rebranded as the Revolutionary Communist Party), but the Blairite right. He junked his purported opposition to British involvement in wars of aggression with his tacit approval of Labour’s support for Britain’s participation in the war in Syria, endorsed the country’s maintenance of nuclear weapons, and called on Labour local councils to enforce ruthless austerity in partnership with the Tory government. What’s more, Corbyn stood idly by as his supporters were systematically persecuted and expelled from the party on bogus “antisemitism” charges. He then handed the leadership over to the Blairite Keir Starmer, who now heads a government that is continuing austerity, prioritizes close relations with Trump, and has augmented Britain’s major role in the war on Russia.
The Socialist Equality Party insists that workers can only wage a struggle against capitalist austerity, inequality, and imperialist war through a decisive political break with the NDP and all political forces who claim it is possible to “reform” it or push it to the left. Workers need new forms of organization, rank-and-file committees, to lead a rebellion against the nationalist, pro-capitalist union bureaucracies, who work hand in glove with the NDP to suppress the class struggle. These organizations must intensify the class struggle on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program, uniting workers in Canada, the US, and Mexico in the fight for decent-paying, secure jobs for all, the defense of democratic and social rights, and an end to imperialist war and barbarism. The most urgent task to realize this perspective is the building of the SEP as the revolutionary leadership required by the working class in the struggles ahead.
2. Trump’s plan to fund world war through social counter-revolution
When Trump vows “Stone Age” destruction, this $1.5 trillion request is the financial mechanism for building the most technically advanced machinery to carry out a project of historical regression.
How is this to be paid for? Through a massive assault on the social rights of the working class.
3. UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman calls for support for Nexteer workers
Nexteer Automotive workers in Saginaw, Michigan have delivered an enormous rebuke to the United Auto Workers bureaucracy by voting down a UAW-backed concessions contract by 96 percent.
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Will Lehman, a rank-and-file worker from Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania who is running for UAW president in 2026, issued the following statement on the contract rejection by Nexteer workers:
Brothers and sisters at Nexteer,
Your 96 percent “no” vote rejecting the UAW’s sellout contract is a powerful and historic act. It shows that workers are not willing to accept poverty wages, tiers and endless concessions. It exposes the divide between the sentiment of the membership and the bureaucrats who thought it was good enough to bring back to you after “negotiating” behind closed doors. If your fight is going to succeed, it must be led by you, workers on the shop floor, those who are most committed to fighting the sellout, and are tied to your conditions on the shop floor.
A “no” vote is only the beginning. If the same officials who tried to ram through this agreement remain in control, they will do what they always do: Stall and delay, bring back the same deal under a different name and force revotes until they get the result they want.
You cannot leave power in their hands. Take control: form a rank-and-file committee. Workers must organize themselves independently. Form a Nexteer Rank-and-File Committee, made up of trusted workers from the shop floor, accountable only to you.
This committee must:
- Take control of all information about negotiations
- Ensure full transparency and democratic oversight
- Link up workers across all shifts and departments
- Establish direct communication with other plants
- Without this, your vote will be undermined.
Prepare for a real fight—prepare for a strike
If the contract has been rejected, that decision must be enforced. That means preparing now for strike action, organized by workers themselves—not controlled or shut down by the apparatus.
But this fight cannot be won in isolation. Appeal to Big Three autoworkers—break the divisions of dividing workers from each other. I appeal directly to autoworkers at GM, Ford and Stellantis:
You face the same conditions—tiers, rising costs, and endless concessions. The divisions between parts workers and assembly workers have been deliberately enforced by the UAW to weaken all workers. They must be broken. Nexteer workers are not separate from you—they are the front line of the same struggle.
I call on all autoworkers to take a stand:
- Refuse to handle scab parts produced during a strike
- Honor Nexteer workers’ picket lines
- Oppose any attempt to continue production based on their exploitation
Workers at GM Flint Truck Assembly, Ford Dearborn Truck, and Stellantis plants have enormous power. Used together, that power can shut down the entire system of exploitation.
Turn this into a broader movement. The companies are organized globally. Workers must be as well. Reach out to:
- Other parts workers
- Big Three plants
- Autoworkers in Mexico, Canada and beyond
And finally, the war abroad is connected to the war against the working class here at home. It is not the sons and daughters of the oligarchs who will be sacrificed for the illegal and criminal war in Iran, but our kids and in many cases, our co-workers.
President Donald Trump declared that the federal government should stop paying for daycare, Medicare and Medicaid, all of which, he indicated, must be sacrificed for the illegal and criminal war in Iran. Don’t send any money for daycare,” Trump says, because “we’re fighting wars.” He added that the federal government’s role was to “guard the country,” before dismissing Social Security, which serves more than 70 million people; Medicare, which covers about 68 million; and Medicaid and CHIP (the Children’s Health Insurance Program), which together cover more than 75 million people, including about 36 million children, as “little scams.”
Your struggle can become the starting point of a unified offensive of the entire auto working class. This is a fight for workers power At its core, this is not just about one contract. It is about who controls the workplace, the union and society. An apparatus tied to management and capitalist politicians or the workers? There are more of us than them.
4. Armed ICE officers remain at airports
On Wednesday, House and Senate Republicans announced an agreement on legislation to reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with the exception of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol, a component of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson said passage of the bill to partially reopen DHS, passed by the Senate on a unanimous voice vote on March 27, would be followed by a measure to resume funding of ICE and the Border Patrol by means of the budget reconciliation process. That legislative path bypasses the Senate filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes to pass a bill. As a result, Senate Republicans, who narrowly control the upper chamber, could pass a bill to resume funding of ICE and the Border Patrol by a simple majority, even if all Senate Democrats voted against it.
On March 27, following the bipartisan Senate vote, Johnson denounced the Senate measure and refused to bring it to a vote in the House. Both chambers then went on a two-week recess, with Congress scheduled to return on Monday, April 13.
But on April 1, President Trump posted a tweet on his Truth Social platform demanding that by June 1 Republicans deliver for his signature a bill to fund ICE and the Border Patrol, using the budget reconciliation process. A senior White House official said Trump would sign a separate bipartisan bill to fund the rest of DHS.
The political import of these maneuvers is that Congress will resume funding of Trump’s immigration storm troopers without any limitations on their police state methods. Despite their rhetorical calls for “reform” of ICE and CBP and their proposals for token restraints, the Democrats are fully and knowingly complicit in this conspiracy against the democratic rights of the American people.
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Hailing the March 27 Senate bill as a “victory” and concealing its real significance, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “This agreement funds TSA, the Coast Guard, FEMA, CISA, strengthens security at the border and ports of entry, and keeps America safe.”
Not one Democratic office-holder denounced this exercise in cynicism and duplicity, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They are all complicit.
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The immediate pretext for passing the March 27 Senate bill was the chaos at US airports caused by the shutdown of DHS, which led to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers going without pay for nearly a month. Thousands of TSA officers called in sick and hundreds resigned, resulting in long lines and flight delays.
Trump exploited this situation to deploy dozens of armed ICE officers at airports across the country, supposedly to ease the crisis. This was a ruse. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote:
It is, rather, a further step in normalizing the use of armed federal agents and the military in civilian settings to intimidate and terrorize the population. It is a core element in the drive by Trump, and the corporate oligarchy that he represents, to dictatorship.
ICE at the airports is particularly sinister. It will be used to block not only immigrants from leaving the country but also political opponents of the government. It is the physical prefiguration of a police state.
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The ACLU warned that TSA has begun sharing traveler lists with ICE, “breaking from TSA’s past practice.” It advised citizens without legal status to “consider the risks of flying, including on domestic flights within the US.”
The National Immigration Law Center on March 26 issued an updated alert titled “Community Alert: Immigration Arrests at Airports.” It stated that the TSA was “giving passenger information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).” The alert continued: “This means people who don’t have legal immigration status or whose status is uncertain could be arrested or deported when they go through airport security in the United States.” Since being deployed, ICE has carried out immigration arrests inside airport terminals.
On March 27, President Trump ordered DHS to begin paying TSA officers, who began receiving back pay on Monday, March 30. By mid-week, the airports were back to normal, as TSA sickouts sharply declined. But Trump’s border czar Tom Homan and DHS officials have refused to say when, or if, the ICE officers will be withdrawn.
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In the face of this indefinite deployment of ICE goons at US airports, not a single Democratic speaker at the March 28 “No Kings” demonstrations, which brought out over 8 million people, called for their removal. That includes, once again, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, not to mention Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America/Democratic mayor of New York, with two of the country’s busiest airports, Kennedy and LaGuardia.
Since then, only one Democratic lawmaker, Representative Shontel Brown of Ohio, has explicitly demanded the removal of ICE officers. In an April 3 press release, Brown called for ICE to leave Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.
This virtual silence is not accidental. The Democratic think tank Third Way issued an internal memo warning that “the slogan (abolish ICE) is simple, but politically it is lethal.” Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona said, “The last thing we need to do, again, is to make the same mistake when it comes to ‘Defund the Police’ rhetoric… People want a slimmed-down ICE that is truly focused on security.” Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas said, “Abolishing ICE is not a good message for Democrats.”
The Workers’ Revolutionary Current (Corriente Revolucionaria de Trabajadores—CRT), the Spanish affiliate of the Morenoite Permanent Revolution Current–Fourth International (PRC-FI), is calling for a “united front” with the trade union bureaucracy to put pressure on the Socialist Party (PSOE)–Sumar government to oppose imperialist war. This is a political mechanism for subordinating the working class to the very forces responsible for militarism, war and austerity.It is being advanced under conditions of determined mass popular opposition to imperialist war. Across the globe, millions have taken to the streets in protest against the genocide in Gaza, expressing deep hostility to the crimes of the imperialist powers and their allies. In the US, this opposition has found expression in the “No Kings” demonstrations. The third round of protests last weekend drew an estimated 8 million, making it the largest single day of protest in American history. Demonstrations have been held internationally, involving workers, youth and students outraged by the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and the complicity of their own governments in the US-Israeli war against Iran.
Mass opposition is developing alongside a deepening global economic crisis. Workers in every country are confronting soaring inflation, rising costs of living, energy shortages and attacks on wages and social conditions. This is laying the objective basis for escalating class struggle.
It is under these conditions that middle-class organizations such as the CRT advance the “unity of left” with the trade union bureaucracy, seeking to contain and divert this emerging movement and prevent it from breaking with the parties of the capitalist state through the adoption of an independent socialist political perspective and leadership.
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A genuine anti-war movement requires the independent mobilization of the working class on an international scale, through the development of rank-and-file organisations in workplaces and communities, and the unification of workers across national borders against imperialism. This struggle is inseparable from the fight against capitalism. The alternative to war is not pressure on capitalist governments, but the conquest of political power by the working class and the reorganization of society on socialist foundations.
6. United Kingdom: End the politically motivated prosecution of Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan!
NHS FightBack calls for the dropping of all charges against 31-year-old Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan under the Terrorism Act (2000) and the Public Order Act (1986). The charges against the National Health Service (NHS) trainee surgeon, for opposing the genocide in Gaza, are a fundamental attack on all healthcare workers and their rights to freedom of political expression, protest and free speech.
Dr. Aladwan, of Palestinian heritage, has worked in the NHS for seven years with a spotless employment record. She has been targeted relentlessly by Zionist lobby groups and the British state, based on groundless claims that her opposition to Zionism and pro-Palestinian activism pose a risk to patient safety.
She was formally charged last week, after police arrived at her home in Gloucestershire and arrested her for breaching bail conditions. It was the fifth arrest of Dr. Aladwan, following an extraordinary campaign of intimidation and harassment led by Zionist lobby groups, police agencies and the Starmer Labour government.
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A growing number of NHS workers have been targeted for their opposition to the Gaza genocide:
Dr. Ellen Kriesels, a consultant pediatrician at Whittington Health NHS Trust, was suspended following her arrest in December 2025, over two social media posts criticizing Zionism.
Dr. Nadeem Crowe, an emergency medicine doctor, was suspended by the Royal Free London in August 2024, for posts expressing solidarity with Gaza and opposing the destruction of its healthcare system.
Dr. Rehiana Ali, a consultant neurologist with two decades of NHS service, was arrested again in February this year. After an interim suspension in December 2024 was lifted by the MPTS last July, a further complaint by the Campaign Against Antisemitism led to a new 18-month suspension.
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NHS FightBack does not endorse all of Dr. Aladwan’s views. Her claim that repression of pro-Palestinian activism in Britain and its support for the war on Iran reflect “Jewish supremacy” is disoriented and false. It inverts the relationship between Zionism and imperialism and obscures the class character of the British state. Israel would not exist, and its genocide in Gaza could not have proceeded for weeks, months and years without imperialism’s backing.
As David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, explained in a recent lecture on the Iran War: “the Israel-centric narrative detaches the conflict from any coherent historical, geopolitical, socioeconomic and class analysis of its origins, causes, and aims. It essentially abandons imperialism as an analytical framework.” If the central problem is Israeli influence, “then the solution is to remove that influence and replace it with a ‘good’ foreign policy that defends genuine ‘All-American’ [or British] interests. Foreign policy becomes a matter of hygiene—of purging a foreign contaminant from an otherwise healthy body politic.”
These are critical questions confronting all those seeking to oppose imperialism and Zionism. But the cynical claims that Dr. Aladwan’s views threaten patient safety are groundless. As she stated in response to such accusations, “No jew has been harmed by anti-genocide, pro-Palestine healthcare workers. We are not ‘Israeli’ or Jewish supremacists. We see everyone as EQUAL.”
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NHS FightBack calls on healthcare workers everywhere to take a stand. Publicise Dr. Aladwan’s case, challenge the wave of disinformation, protest outside the court and organise workplace meetings. Pass resolutions calling for the dropping of all charges and disciplinary proceedings and demanding her immediate reinstatement. The attack on Dr. Aladwan is an attack on the entire NHS workforce and must be fought on that basis.
At this year’s Leipzig Book Fair March 19-22, concerns and horror over the global political situation were palpable. The escalation of war in the Middle East and the danger of fascism in America have shaken the cultural world. While tens of thousands of readers, authors and publishers gathered in Leipzig, bombs fell on Iran and ICE agents patrolled American cities.
Against this background, it was of great significance that the new book by Mehring Verlag was published just in time for the fair, raising the key question that is moving millions of people: Where is America Going? Fascism or Socialism.
8. Berlinale Retrospective: A look back at the fall of the Berlin Wall—“Lost in the 90s”
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union were accompanied by a deafening triumphal cry about the supposed historic and final victory of capitalism. Socialism and class struggle were declared dead, while capitalism, it was predicted, would lead to peaceful, democratic, social development. Few could have imagined back then that a fascist politician like Donald Trump could rise to the top of world politics—and, of all places, in the country that presented itself as the embodiment of freedom and democracy.
Looking back at the films from that era casts the 1990s in a different light. The Berlinale, along with the Berlin Zeughaus cinema, had already screened, in 2009, a series of films about the fall of the Berlin Wall under the titles “Winter Ade” [“Farewell Winter”] and “Scheiden tut weh” [“Parting hurts”].
While the films from that era demonstrated illusions in “democratic” capitalism, this year’s selection was characterized by pictures of life highlighting the negative effects of the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall—social insecurity, existential anxiety, skepticism and pessimism about the future. The title “Lost in the 90s” can also be interpreted in terms of a loss of orientation and perspective.
To emphasize that this not only affected the countries directly involved in the transition, this year’s program included several international films from that era. For example, the American films Slacker (1990, Richard Linklater) and Party Girl (1995, Daisy von Scherler Mayer) help capture the mood of Generation X, while the New Black Cinema’s Boyz N the Hood (1991, John Singleton) and Bamboozled (2000, Spike Lee) attempt to address the prejudices and social problems faced by black people in big US cities.
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The German documentary In the Splendour of Happiness (1990, Im Glanze dieses Glückes, Helga Reidemeister, Johann Feindt, Jeanine Meerapfel, Dieter Schumann, Tamara Trampe) reflects the confusion and uncertainty in the face of the impending reunification of Germany. The film consists of interviews with East German citizens prior to the last People’s Chamber election in 1990, in which there is much talk of morality and the end of the “socialist utopia.” One interview delves extensively into the inner state of mind of a former Stasi [secret police] psychologist.
When a filmmaker interviews two workers at an auto plant and asks, almost accusingly, why they continue to work rather than resisting the Stalinist SED dictatorship, one of them remarks gloomily that he had always championed socialism. But the GDR (East Germany) had not achieved higher labor productivity compared to its capitalist neighbors—a necessity Marx had already addressed.
The worker raises a question that actually lay at the root of the GDR’s demise: the fact that the globalization of production had rendered futile the attempt at a nationally limited planned economy based on nationalization. The role of Stalinism and its reactionary nationalist policies—pursued by the SED regime as well as in Moscow and the Eastern European states, and directed against Marx’s international socialism—is not, however, addressed in the film.
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Shortly after German reunification, unemployment was rampant in the former GDR. The Border Guard (1995, Der Kontrolleur, Stefan Trampe) is a bleak film about Hermann, an unemployed GDR customs officer. While his colleague Rolf sells vacuum cleaners, Hermann continues to go to the abandoned facility, performing his old job every day, making his rounds, noting down unusual occurrences and necessary repairs (which are increasing). After “work,” he sometimes stops by a bar where the red-haired waitress, Inge, reminds him of his late wife.
One day she curiously tags along; he proudly shows her the old movie theater, where they watch old training films and get drunk. The next morning, Hermann suddenly arrests and interrogates her. He also arrests a young man who has stopped his car due to engine trouble, drawing his gun. He is clearly mentally disturbed. In the end, he burns his uniform and walls himself in at his old workplace.
The film’s most compelling protagonist is the abandoned, ruined environment that had once been his work location. It is a former border facility. The images evoke associations with the ruins of the large GDR industrial complexes that were suddenly shut down and left to rot. Workers had spent decades here, performing useful work. Within a very short time, everything that had made up their lives crumbled into worthless scrap. The film is also a document of the bewilderment that prevailed at that time.
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Wolf Vogel’s satire Sunny Point was made in 1995 on a shoestring budget by East and West German film enthusiasts. It criticizes the self-serving profit motives behind the “aid” for East German “brothers and sisters” and challenges the official narrative of a “Peaceful Revolution.” After its premiere, the film disappeared into the archives for decades.
The story takes place in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. Victor’s advertising firm “Sunny Point” in West Berlin is on the brink of ruin. So the former East German refugee decides to flee to the West once more, using a different name (his real one), to shake off his creditors and try to start over. Unfortunately, he chose the day the Wall fell, and is met with laughter when, after crossing the river Spree, he shows up soaking wet in a West Berlin pub as a “refugee.” He also has bad luck with the financial frauds he uses to oust his employees and make a clean getaway. In the end, Victor should be grateful he doesn’t end up in prison.
The sarcastic depictions of the small advertising firm’s struggle for survival are the most compelling. The employees, who would rather be filmmakers, must endure daily humiliating treatment from stingy, brazen clients and the bank.
In the freedom of the market economy, Victor is no freer than he was in the GDR. When he once refers to the German Basic Law in frustration, an acquaintance, amused by Victor’s naïveté, remarks that the Basic Law is an illusion; only contracts are real.
Following this lesson in capitalist reality, Victor sneers at the illusion of GDR citizens who had perhaps believed they had torn down the Wall themselves. “Special offers” lurk everywhere, their exorbitant prices amounting to exactly the 100-mark welcome bonus. East Berliners, who left everything behind at home, ride in taxis full of anticipation toward “freedom.” There, however, only primitive emergency shelters in gymnasiums await the new citizens.
9. Science is not neutral: The rubella vaccine and the attack on public healt (conclusion)
As Dr. Stanley Plotkin recently explained to the WSWS, the mid-century vaccinologist worked with severely limited tools: “At that time we had only two ways to make vaccines: attenuation of the agent or inactivation of the agent.” Plotkin chose attenuation—the Pasteurian principle of weakening a pathogen until it can stimulate immunity without causing disease.
Plotkin executed this Pasteurian logic with mid-century precision but made one crucial departure from conventional practice: He chose to cultivate the rubella virus in human cells rather than animal substrates. Animal tissues—monkey kidneys, duck embryo cells—were notoriously prone to contamination with latent pathogens, including the cancer-associated SV40 virus that had contaminated early polio vaccines.
There was a deeper scientific logic at work as well. Unlike most pathogens, rubella has no known animal reservoir—It exists exclusively in human populations and replicates most faithfully in human tissue. A virus with no animal host, Plotkin must have reasoned, should be attenuated in the cells it targets. Growing it through animal substrates risked producing a strain mismatched to the human immune system it needed to train. Human cells were not merely cleaner; for this pathogen, they were demonstrated to be scientifically correct.
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The vaccine, however, ran immediately into regulatory resistance. Despite its demonstrated safety and immunogenicity, American regulators refused to approve RA 27/3 for a decade—a delay driven not by scientific evidence but by institutional prejudice against human cell substrates. The government’s Division of Biologics Standards, led by Roderick Murray, stubbornly favored vaccines grown in animal tissues, warning that human cell strains might harbor hypothetical cancer-causing agents—this from an agency that had authorized monkey kidney cells repeatedly shown to carry actual dangerous contaminants, including SV40.
While American regulators stalled, Plotkin’s vaccine was licensed and deployed across Europe, accumulating a decade of safety data. The impasse in the United States was finally broken by Dorothy Horstmann, a Yale virologist whose comparative field studies demonstrated conclusively that the animal-based rubella vaccines approved in the US failed to prevent reinfection at the rates Plotkin’s strain did. RA 27/3 produced higher and more durable antibody levels, better resistance to reinfection, and—critically—a stronger mucosal immune response in the nasopharynx, precisely where the virus first established itself.
Horstmann’s data persuaded Maurice Hilleman, Merck’s chief virologist, to abandon his company’s duck-embryo formulation and adopt Plotkin’s strain. In 1979, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finally approved RA 27/3, making it the standard rubella vaccine in the United States—10 years after it had been in use in Europe.
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The great public health achievements of the mid-20th century—among them the elimination of rubella and measles in the United States—were not the natural, inevitable triumph of scientific progress. George Rosen’s foundational 1958 work A History of Public Health established what the dominant narrative of scientific advancement consistently obscures: that public health infrastructure is not an inevitable product of civilization but the accumulated, institutionalized expression of working people’s demand for a better life.
Hospitals, medical science, vaccination programs—These did not descend from enlightened governance. They are the consequence of class struggle, the social product of the value generated by the working class and the long fight to direct that value toward human need. The threads connecting that struggle to its institutional results are invisible in the way that historical causation is always invisible to those who inherit its benefits without understanding its origins. Rosen restored those threads to visibility. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal and possess inalienable rights to pursue happiness,” he was giving political expression to a social demand already being fought for from below. Public health was never a gift. It was a conquest.
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The COVID-19 pandemic and the ruling elite’s response to it across six years of normalized mass death demonstrated conclusively that Kennedy and Trump are not aberrant individuals who happen to hold power. The groundwork was laid across multiple administrations, parties and countries. The attacks on public health are the political expression of capitalism in terminal crisis—a system that can no longer afford even the limited concessions it once found expedient and that now deploys irrationalism as a weapon against the working class it can no longer pacify.
This has a founding American precedent, and as the nation marks the 250th anniversary of its independence, the contrast could not be starker. As Andrew Wehrman documents in The Contagion of Liberty, the fight against smallpox was inseparable from the fight for independence itself. Ordinary colonists—sailors, farmers, mothers and militia members—did not wait for authorities to protect them. They demanded inoculation from below, pressuring towns and assemblies to build public hospitals at collective expense, understanding that their individual vulnerability was a shared social condition.
On February 5, 1777, General George Washington ordered the mandatory smallpox inoculation of the entire Continental Army, establishing what historians consider the first mass immunization mandate in American history. For the revolutionary generation, liberty meant interdependence, not isolation—shared vulnerability required collective action.
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It is this history that Plotkin now forgets—or rather, was never equipped politically to truly understand. The institutions he built his career within, and now watches being dismantled, were not the starting point of the story. They were a way station in a struggle that long preceded them and that their dismantling now demands be taken up again. The rubella vaccine did not emerge from the benevolence of capital or the wisdom of regulators. It emerged from publicly funded science, in a publicly supported institution, under historical conditions extracted from ruling elites by the organized struggle of working people. To despair at its dismantling without understanding that history is to mistake the institution for the struggle that produced it.
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The explosive resurgence of measles in the United States is the leading indicator of a catastrophic collapse of MMR vaccination coverage. National kindergarten coverage has fallen to 92.5 percent, with 39 states now below the 95 percent threshold required to sustain herd immunity against measles—and with it, the coverage that also prevents rubella’s return.
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This unraveling is greatly compounded on the global stage. The capitalist political establishment’s normalization of mass death across six years of the COVID-19 pandemic has paved the way for the abandonment of international public health cooperation. Today, 19 countries still lack a routine rubella vaccination program. Universal introduction of the vaccine in these vulnerable nations could prevent an estimated 986,000 cases of CRS between 2025 and 2055, sparing nearly a million children from preventable blindness, deafness and brain damage.
Yet this undertaking is now acutely imperiled. The Trump administration’s reactionary withdrawal from the WHO (World Health Organization) and the gutting of foreign aid infrastructure threaten to collapse the institutional framework required to deliver the vaccine to those who need it most, guaranteeing that the devastating toll of congenital rubella syndrome will continue for decades. The broader context makes this still more alarming: the military escalation now driving the world toward a third world war has historically been the condition under which epidemic disease spreads most rapidly, as the wartime rubella epidemic that swept through Australian army camps in 1939 and ultimately reached Gregg’s clinic in 1941 so grimly demonstrated.
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When Dr. Plotkin surveys the dismantling of the public health infrastructure he spent his life building, his outrage is unmistakable—and entirely legitimate. In his STAT News profile and in responses to questions posed by the World Socialist Web Site—he declined a formal interview but responded to written questions—he conveyed the same verdict: that the field’s achievements are slipping away, that vaccine nihilism is rising, and that he does not know how to counter it. Branswell’s reporting rendered that despair with skill and sympathy. But sympathy without historical/political analysis has its own political function. Together, the STAT profile and Plotkin’s own responses present a unified picture of defeat—moving, humane, and, from the standpoint of science and history, profoundly insufficient.
There is no dispute here about Plotkin’s integrity as a scientist or the magnitude of what his work achieved. On the immediate moral question his judgment is direct and unsparing. Confronting the ACIP’s elevation of “individual autonomy” over communal survival, he told the WSWS that to tell people they do not need to be vaccinated is to promote disease—foolish and immoral. But he does not address the political questions his own moral condemnation suggests.
Plotkin’s youthful idealism emerged during a period of rabid anticommunism and carefully managed concessions to the working class. The teenager, who read Arrowsmith and Microbe Hunters in the Bronx and grasped that science could be a social mission, came of age precisely as McCarthyism was conducting its systematic destruction of left-wing thought in American intellectual and scientific life. The postwar institutions he entered—the CDC, the EIS, the Wistar lab—had already been purged of the class-conscious traditions that had shaped an earlier generation of scientists and public health workers.
The framework that could have given historical grounding to his enthusiastic embrace of medical science had been made systematically unavailable. What remained was a liberalism of expertise: science as a social good, delivered by enlightened institutions, contingent on nothing so uncomfortable as class conflict. When asked by the WSWS about the contradictions between public health and pharmaceutical profit, Plotkin defended the profit motive as the engine of American vaccine leadership—while its current demise is a contradiction that does not appear to register.
Pessimism of the kind expressed by Plotkin and amplified by STAT News is antithetical to science itself, and in particular to any serious understanding of how social progress has ever been made. It treats the working class as passive, as the object of policies handed down from above or withheld, rather than as the historical force that extracted those policies through struggle. The revolutionary generation that demanded inoculation from below understood what Plotkin’s own education taught him to forget: Science serving human life and the organized power of working people are not separate causes. They are the same cause. Do we accept defeat? The answer to the history that this article undertakes—and that Plotkin’s science deserves—is a resounding “no.” Not naive optimism, but the recognition that what was won through struggle can only be defended the same way.
10. US special forces launch rescue operation inside Iran after downing of US fighter jet
Iranian air defenses shot down an F-15E Strike Eagle jet over western Iran Friday, the first US aircraft shot down by Iranian fire since the war began. Following the downing, US special forces launched a rescue operation inside Iran to recover the pilot. Axios reported that “US special forces located one of the crew members and rescued him, alive, on Iranian territory.” The other crew member remains missing inside Iran.
The rescue operation came as roughly 7,500 Marines from three Marine Expeditionary Units and a combat brigade from the 82nd Airborne Division’s Immediate Response Force arrived or were en route to the Persian Gulf, joining more than 50,000 US service members already in the region. The buildup points toward a ground invasion.
Following the downing of the aircraft, President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social: “With a little more time, we can easily OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE.” Seizing Iran’s oil would require a ground invasion and occupation.
A second aircraft, an A-10 Thunderbolt, was shot down in a separate incident the same day. The pilot ejected over Kuwaiti airspace and was rescued. Two HH-60G rescue helicopters sent to recover the F-15E’s crew were also hit by Iranian fire, injuring US personnel aboard before returning to base. In all, four American aircraft were struck in a single day—the worst losses of the five-week war.
The shoot-downs came two days after Trump addressed the nation in a prime time speech in which he threatened to destroy Iranian society. “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks,” Trump said Wednesday. “We are going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.” He threatened to hit “each and every one of their electric generating plants,” and said he had not yet struck Iran’s oil only because doing so “would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding.”
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Five weeks of bombing have killed more than 5,000 people, the vast majority of them Iranian civilians. More than 85,000 civilian structures have been damaged, including 64,000 homes and 600 schools. Between 3 and 4 million Iranians have been internally displaced. Iran’s 90 million people have been cut off from the outside world by a near-total internet blackout since February 28.
Thirteen American service members have been killed and nearly 370 wounded. Brent crude has surged more than 60 percent and gasoline has passed $4 a gallon. The war has cost at least $25 billion—and the administration is asking for more.
On Friday, Trump released the largest defense budget in American history: a $1.5 trillion Pentagon request for fiscal year 2027, a 44 percent increase. The budget cuts the Environmental Protection Agency by 52 percent, the State Department by 30 percent and NASA by 23 percent. It eliminates the National Endowment for Democracy. It cuts $73 billion from environmental, health and education research to pay for warships, missiles and a “Golden Dome” missile defense system. Jessica Riedl, a budget analyst at the Brookings Institution, said the purpose of the budget is “to push Congress to approve the largest defense spending increase since the Korean War.”
The war is expanding. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that the Israel Defense Forces will demolish all homes in Lebanese border villages “like in Rafah and Beit Hanoun.” More than 600,000 Lebanese have fled their homes. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for making the Litani River Israel’s new northern border.
11. Sri Lankan Tamil bourgeois parties support US-Israeli war on Iran
The main Tamil bourgeois parties in Sri Lanka have for the most part said nothing about the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran. But it is a silence to cover up their ongoing support for US imperialism and the major powers as is demonstrated by the handful of comments that have been made.
The island’s Tamils were subjected to a brutal communal war for nearly three decades in which tens of thousands were slaughtered by the Sri Lankan military in final months that led to the defeat of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009.
For many Tamil workers and youth, like their counterparts throughout the island and internationally, their sympathies undoubtedly lie with the civilian victims in Iran of the relentless US-Israeli bombardment. However, for the main Tamil party, Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK), the slaughter of Tamils is cynically used as the pretext to justify its failure to condemn, in reality tacit support for, the slaughter taking place in Iran.
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The entire political establishment is mired in reactionary communal politics, which is above all aimed at dividing the working class. Successive Colombo governments whipped up Sinhala supremacism that resulted in anti-Tamil violence, pogroms and ultimately civil war. The Tamil bourgeois parties promote Tamil nationalism and separatism in a bid to secure their own venal interests. In doing so they all align themselves with imperialism and its crimes.
The Socialist Equality Party has consistently opposed all forms of nationalism and chauvinism, defended the democratic rights of Tamils and called for the withdrawal of troops from the predominantly Tamil areas of the North and East. We do so on the basis of uniting the working class on the basis of a common fight for Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam.
We call on all workers—Tamil as well as Sinhala and Muslim—to oppose the US-Israeli war on Iran and the pro-imperialist policies of all of the country’s capitalist parties. Far from being “an initiative for world peace,” the war on Iran is one front on an unfolding world war already underway in Ukraine and being prepared against China threatening a catastrophe for humanity.
Only a unified anti-war movement of the international working class fighting for the abolition of capitalism and a socialist future for mankind can prevent that disaster.
We urge workers and students to participate in the public meeting titled “Stop the US-Israeli War Against Iran!” organized by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (Sri Lanka) on April 7 at 3:30 p.m., at the Orient Educational Institute in Hindagala, near the University of Peradeniya.
9. South Korean factory fire investigation exposes indifference to safety
Two weeks since the deadly blaze in Daejeon, South Korea that killed 14 workers and injured 60 more at an auto parts plant, the investigation has revealed the complete disregard for safety that led up to the tragedy. These disasters are not unpredictable accidents, but are the result of capitalism’s relentless drive for profit at the expense of the working class.
The fire took place on March 20 at a plant operated by Anjun Industrial, where workers produced 70 million engine valves annually for cars and ships, and was a key supplier for Hyundai and Kia Motors. The South Korean state went into damage-control mode as is typical in order to contain and suppress workers’ anger.
President Lee Jae-myung, who came to office last year pledging to reduce South Korea’s high workplace death rate, offered a pro forma apology, stating, “As workplace accidents continue to occur, I feel deeply sorry as the person responsible for state affairs.” He declared the government would “conduct thorough inspections of high-risk workplaces and ensure that safety-related systems are functioning properly.” In reality, as previously with such disasters, nothing will be done.
Investigators barred six executives from Anjun from leaving the country, including company CEO Son Ju-hwan and began to expose some of the dangerous conditions that existed at the factory. However, they focus blame solely on Anjun, giving the impression that the disaster was the result of individual negligence or corruption.
However, the unsafe conditions are the result of pressure of major corporations like Hyundai Motors in order to ensure the uninterrupted flow of components and thus profits. Hyundai’s chief concern following the fire was not the fate of the workers and their families, but obtaining a new parts supplier, one that will no doubt reproduce the same dangerous conditions elsewhere.
Hyundai encouraged and rewarded Anjun handsomely for doing whatever was necessary to be a reliable supplier. Sales flourished at Anjun in recent years, nearly quadrupling from 35.8 billion won ($US23.7 million) in 2005 to 135.1 billion won ($US89.4 million) in 2024.
Whatever punishment, if any, is meted out to Anjun and its executives will be purely for show, while the underlying production system that encourages dangerous practices will remain untouched.
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The reckless and dangerous operations at Anjun are not the exception but the rule around the world where workers are sacrificed in industrial slaughterhouses for profit. Regardless of its rhetoric, the Lee Jae-myung administration will take no genuine measures to improve workplace safety.
12. Wave of job cuts in New Zealand
New Zealand is in a deepening social and economic crisis, marked by rising unemployment, mass job cuts and escalating poverty.
Official unemployment stood at 5.4 percent in December 2025, the highest level in over a decade, representing 165,000 people, which has undoubtedly increased in the past three months. In February there were 220,839 people (6.8 percent of the working-age population) on a Jobseeker Support benefit—more than the population of Wellington city—including those unable to work due to illness. In total, 424,155 people are on welfare, including sole parents and people with disabilities.
Unemployment has been rising since then Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr admitted in November 2022—during the previous Labour Party government—that the central bank was “deliberately engineering a recession” by lifting interest rates. The aim was to intensify the exploitation of the working class.
The US-Israeli war against Iran—which the National Party-led government supports—is further deepening the crisis. Annual inflation is 3.1 percent and is expected to go much higher. Food prices increased by around 5 percent annually, with rates, rent and electricity all rising significantly in recent years.
The social consequences are already severe. Food insecurity is widespread, with one in three households affected in 2025. One in seven children (169,300) are living in material hardship. Homelessness is increasing even as the government moves to criminalize rough sleepers.
The scale of job losses across the economy is extensive and accelerating, with food manufacturing, timber processing, construction and retail bearing the brunt.
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Workers everywhere face a political struggle, not just against individual employers, but against the capitalist system itself. Workers are being thrown out of jobs in their tens of thousands, while those still employed face intensifying exploitation, insecure or long hours and declining real wages. This reflects the irrationality of production organized for profit rather than social need.
To stop mass layoffs and the closure of factories deemed unprofitable, workers should fight for public ownership of all major industries, under workers’ democratic control. What is required is nothing less than a struggle for the socialist reorganization of society.
13. Australian Labor government secretly sends SAS to join the war against Iran
Behind the backs of the Australian population, the Albanese government last month dispatched approximately 90 Special Air Service (SAS) commandos to participate in the escalating US-Israeli assault on Iran.
This secret deployment shows that nothing that the Labor government says about the war can be believed, including its repeated claims that it is not involved in the Trump administration’s barbaric offensive.
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The truth is that the Albanese government has been an active participant in the war from the start, including through the joint Pine Gap satellite surveillance and war targeting base in central Australia, the North West Cape submarine communications base and the embedding of Australian forces in the US military-intelligence apparatus.
That integration was underscored by the presence of three Australian naval personnel on a US nuclear attack submarine that torpedoed a defenseless Iranian frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka on March 4, claiming at least 87 lives. The Australian personnel were undergoing training under the auspices of AUKUS, the military pact with the US and the UK directed against China.
The SAS mobilization is occurring under conditions where the Trump administration—while also denying it will have “troops on the ground”—is ramping up US forces around Iran and President Trump has blatantly vowed to send the Iranian people “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
In that nationally-televised address last Wednesday, Trump declared his government’s intention to annihilate an entire country—to level its cities, its power grid, its water supply, its hospitals and its industry, everything that sustains 90 million people.
Not a single member of the Labor government, from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese down, has uttered a word of condemnation of Trump’s vow, signalling again their readiness to fully support the US war, as they did within hours on day one, on February 28.
14. Workers Struggles: Asia & Australia
Australia:
New Zealand:
Sri Lanka:
15. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The sign says: "Peace for the world! Down with war!"
