Workers across the United States reacted furiously Tuesday to Trump’s
threat to “annihilate” the civilization of Iran, a country of more than
93 million people. While a two-week ceasefire was announced shortly
before his 8:00 p.m. deadline to destroy power plants, bridges and other
civilian infrastructure across the country, there is no reason to
believe this represents a step back from the brink. Previous rounds of
“negotiations” served only as a ruse for the United States to
assassinate top Iranian officials, including the February 28 murder of
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Regardless of what happens, Trump’s
utter lawlessness has already exposed the brutality of American
capitalism before workers across the world. It will contribute to a
growing radicalization in the working class, convincing workers of the
need for the socialist reconstruction of society.
The World Socialist Web Site reports responses from:
a Massachusetts nurse
a General Motors worker
a locked-out BP refinery worker in Whiting, Indiana
an engineer from Northern California
a United States Postal Service worker
a worker from Massachusetts
a California higher education employee
a student and member of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE)
a Nexteer auto parts worker
Thomas Adams, retired auto worker and author of the study UAW Incorporated: The Triumph of Capital
and a worker at General Motors’ Flint Truck Assembly
The 11th hour agreement... will be seen as a retreat by Trump.
His threats had failed to intimidate Iran, but they have intensified the
political crisis within his government.
*****
Trump’s threat to annihilate a civilization of 93 million
people—which by itself is a war crime—and the war as a whole have
produced a political crisis of historic proportions. The statements have
exposed the American government as an outlaw regime, headed by the
criminal underworld. It generated shock and revulsion throughout the
United States and internationally. Whatever remained of the supposed
moral authority of the United States has been permanently and
irreparably shattered, with the most far-reaching consequences for
American society.
Washington and its allies launched a war they
assumed could be decided by assassination and terror, but they seriously
miscalculated the level of resistance from the Iranian people. American
imperialism now confronts an insoluble dilemma. Escalation deepens the
stigma of criminality in a war that it cannot win and risks explosive
domestic consequences; retreat will be read internationally as a defeat
and will further destabilize the political situation inside the United
States.
The events of Tuesday underscore just how extraordinary the crisis has
become. Within the military, those tasked with executing Trump’s orders
were being placed in the position of carrying out operations universally
recognized as war crimes, amid growing unease that the armed forces
could be left “holding the bag” for whatever actions were taken.
*****
The official statement issued by the House Democratic leadership
Tuesday declared that “Donald Trump is completely unhinged” and that
“The House must come back into session immediately and vote to end this
reckless war of choice in the Middle East before Donald Trump plunges
our country into World War III.”
Just over one week ago, more
than 8 million people took to the streets in “No Kings” protests against
Trump. While opposition to the war against Iran was a dominant
sentiment among those participating, the Democratic Party organizers
systematically excluded any serious reference to the war against Iran,
let alone warnings about “World War III.”
Now, the Democrats
write that the world is on the brink of world war, which would
inevitably involve the use of nuclear weapons. Their appeal, however, is
not to the population but to the Republican Party. “It’s time for House
Republicans,” the statement concluded, “to put patriotic duty over
party loyalty and join Democrats in stopping this madness.”
*****
The Democrats appeal to Trump’s better judgment and to Republican
“patriotism,” while refusing to mobilize the immense opposition that
exists in the population, because such a mobilization would immediately
raise issues they fear far more than Trump.
*****
If the ruling class confronts an insoluble dilemma in foreign policy,
it faces a corresponding insoluble dilemma in domestic policy. It has
brought the political underworld to power, embodied in Trump, to
prosecute global war and social counterrevolution—policies that cannot
be carried out through legal or democratic methods. But the attempt to
impose them is detonating the very social forces the ruling class fears
most: the growth of explosive class conflict within the United States.
All
factions of the bourgeoisie are unalterably opposed to such a movement
from below, because it threatens not merely a particular administration
but the foundations of capitalist rule itself. The response of the
ruling class will not be to retreat but to escalate and to intensify
domestic repression.
Whatever the immediate developments, the war
is generating consequences the political establishment cannot control
and from which it cannot escape. The crisis cannot be resolved through
the normal mechanisms of the corporate-controlled political system.
The Socialist Equality Party insists that the decisive issue is the
independent intervention of the working class as a social and political
force. The two-week ceasefire, if it lasts, will be a period of
escalating political crisis. This period must be used to build mass
working class opposition to the war and the Trump administration.
[The 76th Berlin International Film Festival–Part 8]
The documentary Scenario (Szenario) by Berlin-born
Marie Wilke, screened in the Forum section at this year’s Berlin film
festival, documents, in fact, the normalization of German militarism—in a
sense that its director did not necessarily intend.
The film
follows the activities of the German army (Bundeswehr) at the Altmark
military training area in the Colbitz-Letzlinger Heide [heath] in
Saxony-Anhalt—a 232-square-kilometer site that ranks among Germany’s
largest training areas. In the north of the site lies Schnöggersburg,
Europe’s biggest training center for urban combat: a ghost town of
exposed concrete, complete with checkpoints, hotels, a slum, a subway
station and a religious building.
Wilke’s film shows students on guided tours of the area, along with
swearing-in ceremonies, street festivals for the local population and
staged press events. The director’s camera observes; it does not comment
or judge. She observes in the Berlinale press kit: “The film does not
attempt to make a statement or construct a narrative. It consists of
fragments; the scenes stand on their own. I was interested in what
becomes visible in popular vernacular language regarding Germany’s
relationship to war.”
The result is a film that shows the
Bundeswehr exactly as it wants to be seen—not because Wilke intended it
that way, but because the decision to let the Bundeswehr speak produces
precisely this effect.
*****
It is revealing what Wilke herself says about the film’s funding
history. In one interview, she reports that the project was
“unfinanceable” in 2015: “There was no hook and no interest.” Now,
however, following the official “turning point,” funding “came together
pretty quickly.” Particularly striking is the funding from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM)—a state that is rearming also promotes the culture intended to pave the way for it.
Scenario
does not gloss over the site’s Nazi history. Recruits are
matter-of-factly instructed by their superiors that Hitler’s Wehrmacht
established its testing grounds here, that villages were forcibly
evacuated. At the same time, the film argues the Wehrmacht is not part
of the Bundeswehr’s identity. That is the official propaganda lie. And
the film fails to ask the question that should follow: What is the
significance of the fact that a new training infrastructure has been
built on the same ground today by Rheinmetall—the same corporation that
supplied the Wehrmacht?
*****
Marie Wilke made this film with honest curiosity and technical
precision. But honest curiosity is no political shield. When Wilke says
she had “real images of war in her mind” while filming and wonders “in
what context I see them”—then “context” is precisely what is missing
from her film.
€100 billion in special funds, additional war
credits of up to one trillion euros, €140 million for Schnöggersburg
alone, conscription, the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall as a state
partner, the renewed drive of German imperialism toward the East, and
the global resurgence of German militarism. A policy rejected by the
vast majority of the population, but supported by all of the main political parties, who therefore gratefully accept any form of approval or supposedly “neutral” standpoint.
More than 850 BP oil workers remain locked out at the company’s
Whiting, Indiana refinery, the largest in the Midwest. After workers
overwhelmingly rejected an insulting fourth offer negotiated by BP and
the United Steelworkers Local 7-1, the company locked them out on March
19.
That agreement would have led to 100 fewer union workers and
broader use of contract workers, $8-$10 hourly wage cuts, the closure of
the environmental department and attacks on seniority and
implementation of AI with no job protections. Worse still, the six-year
agreement would have removed the facility from the national pattern
bargaining timeline, creating a precedent for the oil companies to
divide and conquer workers one refinery at a time.
*****
One Whiting worker told the WSWS, “They will pay more than double the
current operator wages for strikebreakers, yet say they cannot afford to
pay our nationally bargained pay increases everyone else agreed to pay.
It’s union busting, and it’s as simple as that.”
*****
After months of negotiations and a 98 percent strike authorization
vote, Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) locked out 1,700
members of the United Steelworkers Locals 12775 and 13796 on April 2.
The lockout came after the union unanimously rejected the company’s
fourth “last, best and final” offer. NIPSCO stated the lockout “will
remain in place until the Union agrees to the Company’s last, best and
final offer.”
NIPSCO is the largest natural gas distribution
company in the state, and the second largest electric distribution
company. Its parent company NiSource has reported a full-year net income
of $905.2 million. Yet NIPSCO is using the lockout to force through
concessions that will lower living standards, undermine safety, and gut
union job security. NIPSCO President Vince Parisi claimed the offer “is
one of the strongest proposals in our history.” The company has already
announced it will continue operating with “trained non-represented
employees, qualified contractors and support from the company’s family
of companies.”
*****
While USW officials promote local Democrats, workers are in a
struggle against both big business parties and the corporations they
defend. Workers are facing a relentless attack on jobs, wages, benefits
and social provisions at every level in the US, and old forms of
repression are being revived.
South Chicago and northwest
Indiana have been particularly hard hit. According to a recent report,
employment in northwest Indiana’s primary steel mills has fallen from
65,000 workers at its peak to roughly 9,000 today. Between 1990 and
2017, jobs at Gary Works, ArcelorMittal and Indiana Harbor in Northwest
Indiana declined by 58 percent. The industry, which has not seen
significant updates to production technology and methods in about 100
years, loses about 500 jobs per year in the region.
Steelworkers’
proud history of struggle stands in the sharpest contrast to this
destruction of jobs and productive infrastructure by the parasitic
financial aristocracy.
On Memorial Day in 1937, Chicago police
opened fire on unarmed workers demonstrating against Republic Steel in
the midst of the “Little Steel” strike of 1937, killing 10 people and
wounding dozens more. Most of the workers were shot in the back as they
fled. Another 28 were injured by police clubbing, nine of them
permanently disabled. The workers, members of the Steelworkers
Organizing Committee, were demonstrating for recognition of their union
which would later become the USW (United Steelworkers).
The USW
bureaucracy long ago abandoned these traditions. For decades it has
worked as a tool of corporate management overseeing the destruction of
workers’ jobs, pensions and working conditions. BP and NIPSCO long ago
took the measure of the USW apparatus and are now locking out roughly
2,500 workers in northern Indiana at the same time.
*****
BP and NIPSCO workers—with the support of workers at US Steel’s Gary
Works, Cleveland Cliffs, Arcelor and autoworkers at Ford Assembly
Stamping, Dakkota, Flex-n-Gate and other USW and UAW facilities—must
mobilize independently against this blatant strikebreaking that has been
aided and abetted by the USW bureaucracy.
The tragic death of Danhao Wang, a brilliant Chinese postdoctoral
researcher at the University of Michigan (U-M), is the direct and fatal
consequence of a vicious xenophobic campaign of harassment and
intimidation orchestrated by the federal government and enabled by the
university administration. The suicide of this young scientist,
following his interrogation by FBI agents, must be understood as a
homicide in a moral and political sense—the foreseeable result of state
terror and institutional complicity.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at U-M
and the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) demand that all those responsible
for this tragedy be held accountable, from the federal agents and Trump
administration officials who directed the persecution of Wang and other
Chinese researchers, to the U-M Board of Regents and interim president
Domenico Grasso.
*****
Danhao Wang took his own life on the night of March 19, jumping from
an upper floor within the G.G. Brown Laboratory building just one day
after being subjected to hostile interrogation by federal agents. For
more than two weeks, a conspiracy of silence reigned over Ann Arbor,
Michigan and the nation. The U-M administration did not even inform the
student body and faculty of this tragedy. An internal email not naming
Wang was sent to faculty and staff of the Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science Department on March 20, but no official communications
were sent to the broader university community. The Michigan Daily student newspaper published nothing on the event. On April 2, the World Socialist Web Site was the first to report the identity of Wang in English-language media.
Now
this cover-up has collapsed. The tragedy has become an international
incident, forcing the local corporate media to finally break their
silence. With the Detroit News featuring the story on its April 6 front page, the university and the political establishment can no longer hide this crime.
The
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chinese Consulate in
Chicago have issued statements and lodged diplomatic protests. They
correctly state that Wang’s death is the result of unprovoked harassment
and political intimidation by US law enforcement under the guise of
“national security.” They are demanding a full explanation and an
investigation, which the US government and the U-M administration are
seeking to avoid.
*****
Danhao Wang is a casualty of a nationwide dragnet targeting Chinese
scholars on unscientific and fabricated charges of terrorism, espionage,
and smuggling. This is a politically motivated witch-hunt designed to
terrorize a targeted demographic. The charges against previous U-M
researchers Yunqing Jian, Chengxuan Han, Xu Bai, Fengfan Zhang, and Zhiyong Zhang, and Indiana University researcher Youhuang Xiang, were utterly without merit, as those responsible well knew.
*****
The campaign has been driven from the top by fascist political
operatives of the Trump administration. Former Attorney General Pam
Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have publicly advanced the narrative
of widespread Chinese “sabotage” and “espionage” in US universities.
Patel, in particular, sought to stoke anti-Chinese hysteria with
inflammatory social media posts and statements framing routine
scientific exchange as a national security threat. He falsely claimed
that the nonliving plasmid DNA in Xiang’s case was the pathogenic
bacteria E. coli.
This is a political operation against
immigrants and Chinese scholars, an assault on democratic rights, an
effort to whip up national chauvinism and racism. It is part of the
erection of a presidential dictatorship and the preparation for war
against China, a nuclear power.
The hands of the U-M administration are stained with blood. The role
of interim president Domenico Grasso is particularly despicable. A week
after the death of Danhao Wang, Grasso, who had suppressed the news of
his death, boasted before a hearing of the House Committee on Education
and the Workforce of U-M’s support for the witch-hunt against Chinese
researchers.
In a display of subservience to the national security
state, he detailed the university’s “team player” collaboration with
federal intelligence agencies to “safeguard our research” from alleged
foreign adversaries. The chair of this committee, far-right Michigan
congressman Tim Walberg,
praised Grasso’s cooperation. To protect its institutional funding, the
U-M administration and the Board of Regents willingly handed over their
own students and researchers to Kash Patel’s FBI.
*****
The defense of democratic rights and the opposition to imperialist
war cannot be entrusted to the university administration, the courts, or
any faction of the capitalist political establishment. The only social
force capable of stopping this descent into barbarism is the
international working class, mobilized independently and in opposition
to all the institutions of the ruling financial oligarchy.
The
IYSSE and the SEP are taking the lead in this fight. We call for the
immediate formation of a committee of U-M students, faculty, campus
workers and researchers to conduct a full, independent investigation and
mobilize workers and students at U-M and beyond.
We raise the following demands:
A
full independent investigation: The U-M administration and federal
authorities must immediately release all documents, communications and
footage regarding the harassment and interrogation of Danhao Wang.
Hold
the perpetrators accountable: The Republican and Democratic officials
spearheading the anti-Chinese witch-hunt must be driven from office and
prosecuted; the federal agents involved in the hostile interrogation,
along with the U-M officials who facilitated the environment of terror,
including President Grasso, must be identified, fired and held
accountable.
End the witch-hunt: All investigations,
surveillance and harassment of Chinese scholars based on fabricated
“national security threats” must cease immediately.
Restore the
victims’ rights: Drop all charges against those researchers who have
been victimized and deported and offer the restoration of their resident
rights and their university positions.
ICE off campus and out
of our communities: An immediate end to the terrorizing of immigrants
and citizens alike at airports, hospitals and universities. Abolish ICE
and the Border Patrol.
Stop the drive to World War III: End the provocations against China and the war against Iran.
Workers at the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado returned to
work Tuesday after the United Food and Commercial Workers suddenly
canceled their powerful three-week strike without any progress at the
bargaining table.
The Greeley JBS plant occupies a pivotal role in
the food processing industry, processing more than 6 percent of all
beef production in the United States. The industry is highly
concentrated: Four conglomerates, including JBS, Tyson, Cargill and
National Beef account for 85 percent of all beef sold in the United
States. JBS and Tyson also dominate the chicken and pork industries,
with the two alone accounting for more than 50 percent of all US chicken
meat production. JBS and Tyson along with Smithfield and Hormel account
for nearly 70 percent of the US pork market.
Workers at the
Greeley beef plant receive abysmally low wages while safety procedures
are routinely flouted at the plant. In the last six years alone, JBS has
been fined for 184 health and safety-related offenses, 40
employment-related offenses and has been found to have violated 85
environmental regulations as well. Six workers died in the first year of
the coronavirus pandemic and a seventh died in an industrial accident
in 2021.
Despite such consistently high numbers, the majority of
such incidents go unreported with workers often dealing with severe
injuries and management maltreatment in silence.
During multiple visits to the picket line by World Socialist Web Site reporters,
strikers relayed horror stories of their fellow workers losing limbs or
suffering other devastating injuries. One young worker related how the
skin on his hand was peeled away after getting caught in machinery,
while another showed a terrible chemical burn on his skin.
Such
incidents happen on a near daily basis, but management refuses to halt
production to care for the injured workers. Line speeds are kept
absurdly high to increase output. In order to maintain these speeds,
workers are often denied bathroom breaks, with stories of workers
soiling themselves on the line a common occurrence.
JBS was the largest single donor to Trump’s second inaugural committee,
giving half a million dollars to the would-be dictator. Their efforts
were rewarded when US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced
waivers to individual plants in March 2025 allowing them to exceed
regulated speeds. Rollins justified this with the lying claim that
“extensive research has confirmed no direct link between processing
speeds and workplace injuries.”
The press release was accompanied by the announcement that the federal
government’s Food Safety and Inspection Service would no longer require
plants to submit worker safety data, all but insuring that the resultant
increase in worker injuries would be kept secret.
*****
The Greeley strike was called after the union and JBS had reached a
national agreement preventing union-sponsored sympathy strikes among the
14 plants covered in the agreement, which together employed 26,000
meatpacking workers. This included the JBS meatpacking plant in Cactus,
Texas, which went on to process diverted beef from Greeley during the
strike, forcing Texas meatpacking workers to scab on their brothers and
sisters in Colorado.
UFCW Local 7, which covers grocery and
agricultural workers across the greater Colorado and Wyoming regions
including the Swift Beef plant, had also shut down a powerful strike of
Colorado grocery workers at the King Soopers and Safeway chains last year.
At
the Greeley plant, Local 7 even allowed scabs to cross picket lines in
the midst of the strike so that some production could be kept going and
to make the plant ready for workers once the union called off the
strike. Asked by WSWS reporters about why scabs were being allowed into
the plant without resistance, one UFCW official replied that they were
“not scabs but ‘replacement workers.’”
Despite these efforts, the
Greeley strike put workers in a powerful position. US cattle numbers had
already hit a 75-year low prior to the strike and efforts to divert
product and keep production running at the plant only resulted in
recouping a small fraction of its normal output.
*****
As a result of the UFCW’s sudden surrender, however, JBS has not
improved its meager offer by a single cent, staying at the initial 60
cent per hour increase the first year followed by 30 percent in the next
two years of the contract. Many workers on the picket lines believe
that even these small amounts will largely be absorbed by increased
healthcare costs. This is from a company that made $415 million in
profits in the fourth quarter of 2025 and has an overall market
capitalization of $18.7 billion.
*****
Greeley workers should be under no illusions that a major sellout
agreement is underway which will address none of their concerns for
decent compensation or safe conditions. The UFCW bureaucracy’s primary
concern is to maintain their highly paid conditions and perks as payment
received for successfully policing their own members. Local 7 president
Kim Cordova herself made nearly $250,000 in 2024, nearly six times the
salary of a typical Swift worker and her compensation has doubtless
increased since.
Instead, Greeley workers will only be able to
take the struggle forward if they form their own rank-and-file
committees independent of the bankrupt union apparatus. The strike
itself has found broad support including that of healthcare workers in
Greeley who issued their own statement supporting the Swift workers’ struggle. Similarly, JBS workers in Brazil issued statements of support last month.
Canada Post confirmed last week that, on the orders of the Mark
Carney-led Liberal government, it is moving ahead with “consultations”
on implementing a far-reaching restructuring plan. Dictated by the
federal Liberal government, the transformation of the postal service
into an Amazon-style employer of precarious “gig workers” will result in
the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs.
The announcement
marks a decisive escalation in the ruling class’ effort to remake the
Crown corporation into a hyper-exploitative, profit-driven logistics
operation. Their goal is to use the restructuring of Canada Post as the
spearhead of a broader assault on public sector workers and the working
class as a whole.
Reports indicate the government has already
authorized the implementation of the initial restructuring proposals
unveiled in September 2025 and ordered Canada Post to return within
another 45 days with a further round of “transformation” measures. This
sets in place a rolling process of continuous cuts and restructuring,
dictated directly by the big business Liberal government, in which one
wave of attacks prepares another.
Behind demands for
“modernization” and “financial stabilization,” the measures outlined
last September and now being enforced entail a program of social
devastation: the elimination of home mail delivery, the closure or
sell-off of rural and suburban post offices, the scrapping of the
five-day delivery standard, shifting non-urgent mail from air to slower
ground transport, and the expansion of precarious weekend parcel work.
These measures will destroy Canada Post as a universal public service
and turn those workers who remain into a precarious, low-wage workforce.
The
mandated consultations, to begin with the Canadian Union of Postal
Workers (CUPW) and then extend to municipal leaders and other
“stakeholders,” are a fraud. The essential decisions have already been
taken behind closed doors by Canada Post management and the federal
government. Management’s restructuring blueprint, submitted late last
year to Ottawa, remains hidden from workers and the public alike. Even
the corporatist “partners” in the leadership of the union bureaucracy
have not been granted access to the secret plan worked out between
management and the government. Its implementation will require shredding
the current Canadian Postal Service Charter, which mandates universal
door-to-door delivery.
*****
Former Canada Post executive and Carleton University business
professor Ian Lee has repeatedly insisted that up to 40,000 jobs, out of
roughly 55,000 current workers, must be cut. This would reduce the
workforce to a skeletal operation focused on rural and remote delivery.
Canada Post’s reported losses, totaling more than $5 billion since 2018,
are being cynically invoked to justify this social counterrevolution,
even as the government of former central banker Prime Minister Mark
Carney lavishes tens of billions on the military and corporate subsidies
and tax cuts.
The latest government announcement comes as postal
workers prepare to vote between April 20 and May 30 on concessionary
contracts that will pave the way for the imposition of the restructuring
plan. They will at the same time be voting on strike action.
As the World Socialist Web Sitehas explained,
the two agreements covering the urban and rural and suburban
units—endorsed by a majority of the CUPW bargaining committee—accept
management’s core demands for “flexibility,” expanded part-time and
weekend work, wages that lag inflation, and the erosion of longstanding
protections. They are, in substance, a framework for dismantling secure,
full-time postal employment and aligning working conditions with the
requirements of the restructuring.
A minority faction within the
union leadership, headed by CUPW President Jan Simpson, has postured as
opposing the deal by calling for a “No” vote. This maneuver is a
transparent attempt to distance the bureaucracy from the consequences of
a sellout it has itself facilitated. Simpson has for well over two
years led CUPW as it has confined the opposition among rank-and-file
workers to the straitjacket of the “collective bargaining” system. She
oversaw the sabotage of two national strikes, above all by
systematically isolating postal workers on the picket line by refusing
to call for a broader mobilization of the working class in defence of
public services and worker rights.
*****
By insisting that workers remain confined within the pro-employer
“collective bargaining” framework, the CUPW bureaucracy is blocking any
struggle against what is fundamentally a political offensive by the
Liberal government. Opposing the destruction of Canada Post requires a
political fight against the government’s austerity and war agenda, a
fight which the union apparatus rejects.
The government and
management have made clear they will proceed with restructuring
regardless of what is said in the review or the outcome of the contract
vote. The agreements are designed to secure labor peace and impose the
initial concessions required for the transformation plan. A “No” vote
combined with a strike mandate, while vitally necessary, will not stop
the government-management assault.
*****
The Carney government’s assault on public sector workers is
accelerating. It has issued thousands of layoff notices across federal
departments, including in healthcare and scientific research, while
preparing massive increases in military spending and corporate handouts.
The attack on postal workers is a test case for the dismantling of
public services across the board.
This agenda is being pursued
with the full support of the trade union bureaucracy, which has for
decades pursued “partnership” with government and business interests.
Across sectors, unions are enforcing concessions and suppressing
resistance in the name of “competitiveness” and “fiscal responsibility.”
Under the banner of “Team Canada,” they are also pitting Canadian
workers against their class brothers and sisters in the US, where
workers confront the same attacks on their democratic and social rights
at the hands of the fascist Trump administration.
Workers must
take matters into their own hands. They can do this by building sections
of the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) in every postal
office, depot and sorting plant across Canada. Established in 2024, the
PWRFC provides the means to unite workers across workplaces, break
through the information blackout imposed by CUPW and Canada Post, and
develop a common independent strategy.
In response to Carney’s wrecking operation, the central demand must
be the transformation of Canada Post under workers’ democratic control
into a genuinely public service, run to meet social needs, not profit.
This means defending universal door-to-door delivery, expanding
services, and guaranteeing secure, well-paid jobs. Technological
advances must be used to improve working conditions and service, not
eliminate jobs.
Postal workers cannot fight alone. Their struggle
must be linked with that of workers across Canada and internationally,
including postal and logistics workers confronting similar attacks. This
requires a conscious break with nationalist and pro-capitalist politics
and the adoption of an international socialist perspective.
On February 27, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth released a memorandum,
“Aligning Senior Service College Opportunities with American Values,”
announcing the revamping of the US military’s Professional Military
Education (PME) program “to ensure alignment with the warrior ethos,
National Defense Strategy, and American values.”
The memo marks a major step in the Trump administration’s drive to
mold the US military into a US version of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, based on
an ultra-nationalist and fascistic ideology.
According to the
summary statement released by the Department of War (DoW), “the
Department is discontinuing all graduate-level PME fellowships and
certificate programs with Harvard University” starting in the 2026-2027
academic year. The statement goes on to say that the DoW will end its
“legacy Senior Service College Fellowships (SSCFs) at Ivy League and
other universities that similarly diminish critical thinking, have
significant adversary involvement, or fail to deliver rigorous education
grounded in realism.”
*****
The decision to sever PME links with Harvard flows directly from the
Trump administration’s broader political and financial campaign to
subordinate higher education to the state and punish institutions that
resist its ideological line. Harvard, Columbia and other former-PME
institutions, despite their suppression of opposition among students,
faculty and staff to the genocide in Gaza during the Biden
administration, found themselves at odds with Trump’s demands to
escalate the on-campus crackdown on democratic rights.
Harvard’s
legal challenge to the administration’s move to freeze $2.2 billion in
federal grants and the public dispute over campus protests provided a
pretext for escalation. Trump threatened an additional $1 billion in
funding cuts and the elimination of the university’s tax‑exempt status.
The
discontinuation of Harvard’s PME status and other DoW-linked programs
is part of the Trump administration’s punishment of Harvard and other
universities that failed to comply with sufficient speed with its
fascistic demands.
*****
The remolding of the PME system is part of the Trump administration’s
reorientation of the US military and intelligence apparatus on an overly
fascist basis so as to carry out US imperialism’s wars of
extermination, as in Iran, and the violent suppression of workers and
youth at home. In this, the Democratic Party, which dominates the U-M
Board of Regents and most elite private universities, is complicit.
On April 2, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters announced the
signing of a new Defence and Security Declaration with the government of
the Cook Islands, which he said would establish “a shared certainty”
about the “special constitutional relationship” between the two
countries.
The declaration cements New Zealand’s colonial domination over the
Pacific archipelago. It gives the NZ military unimpeded access to the
land, territory and airspace of the Cook Islands, including its vast
exclusive economic zone covering an area of 1.96 million square kilometers, roughly the size of Mexico.
The Cook Islands, with a
population of just 15,000, is ostensibly self-governing, but it remains
part of the colonial Realm of New Zealand, which also includes the
islands of Niue and Tokelau. The new declaration reaffirms that the Cook
Islands is obligated to share any information with NZ relating to defense or security. It gives Wellington the right to veto any agreement
between the Cook Islands and another country on the grounds of “defense and security” of the Realm.
The agreement brings to an end a
year-long rift between the two governments, after the Cook Islands
signed commercial deals with China without consulting New Zealand
beforehand. The NZ National Party-led government retaliated by blocking
$30 million worth of aid in June and November 2025, which is vital for
the functioning of basic public services, including health and
education, in the islands. This was nothing less than an attempt to destabilize the Cook Islands government led by Prime Minister Mark
Brown.
The cancellation of aid was accompanied by a belligerent
and hysterical media campaign that accused China of attempting to “take
over” the Cook Islands and establish a military presence there. One New Zealand Herald columnist even suggested that NZ troops should invade the territory.
In
fact, the Cook Islands-China deal centred on maritime exploration,
transport and civilian infrastructure development. While the New
Zealand, Australian and US militaries have a heavy presence throughout
the Pacific, China does not.
This anti-China campaign—which was backed by the opposition Labour Party
and its allies—fed into demands for New Zealand to build up its
military forces and integrate further into the aggressive US-led
preparations for war against China.
*****
The Pacific experienced extremely bloody battles during World War II.
Now the region is once again being placed on the front lines of
preparations for a catastrophic US-led war against China, the main
economic and strategic rival of US imperialism.
Meanwhile, people
across the Pacific continue to suffer from poverty, soaring prices and a
lack of public services, and vulnerability to climate change-related
disasters. Countries such as Fiji and PNG are recording high levels of
drug addiction, as well as HIV, diabetes and other diseases. All of this
is the legacy of more than a century of colonial domination, which is
continuing and becoming ever more entrenched.
An International Monetary Fund (IMF) delegation is visiting Sri Lanka
from late March to early April to ensure the government’s continued
adherence to the IMF’s austerity agenda amid a deepening global crisis
triggered by the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.
The
IMF mission is expected to conclude the combined fifth and sixth reviews
on April 9 with a “positive assessment,” allowing for the disbursement
of about $US700 million in two tranches of the Extended Fund Facility
(EFF). This endorsement is a clear indication of the government’s strict
adherence to IMF dictates, which impose the full burden of the crisis
on the working class and rural masses.
The IMF delegation met with President Anura Kumara Dissanayake on
April 2 to discuss “Sri Lanka’s ongoing economic reform program and
progress.” The president has proven every bit as ruthless as his
predecessor President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who negotiated the $3
billion IMF emergency loan in 2023. The country defaulted on foreign
debts in 2022 amid an acute foreign exchange crisis sparking soaring
inflation and shortages of food and fuel that triggered mass protests
and strikes.
The IMF commended President Dissanayake, noting that
“the country has transitioned toward a more resilient footing through
the achievement of growth targets, improved revenue management, and the
strengthening of foreign reserves.”
Referring to the Iran war, the
delegation lauded the government for “managing the situation
prudently,” including measures taken to address mounting pressures on
fuel prices and the energy sector. In response, Dissanayake, proving
himself an obedient servant of finance capital, boasted that “Sri Lanka
has met all targets set under the program and has reached a position
of relative stability.”
The IMF’s praise confirms that the ruling Janatha Vimukthi
Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) is carrying out the demands
of international finance capital to the letter. The measures include
restructuring and privatizing some 400 state-owned enterprises,
including the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB), prioritizing debt
repayments, adopting market-driven exchange rate policies, and
implementing price-cost recovery—namely, reducing or eliminating price
subsidies for energy and utilities.
*****
The entire political establishment—including opposition parties and
trade union leaderships—supports the IMF program which is having a
devastating impact on the social conditions of working people. On April
1, the opposition parties made a token appeal for the government to
remove taxes on fuel to reduce prices. The opposition Samagi Jana
Balavegaya (SJB) leader Sajith Premadasa, unlike on previous occasions,
did not meet the IMF delegation in a cynical attempt to distance himself
from its austerity demands.
The only viable alternative is the mobilization of the working class independent of the capitalist parties
and treacherous trade unions that support the IMF’s austerity agenda.
The Socialist Equality Party calls on workers to break from the trade
unions and build independent action committees in workplaces and neighborhoods to fight for their social and democratic rights. We
advocate the repudiation of all foreign debts, oppose all privatization and call for the banks and big business to be placed under the
democratic control of the working class as part of the socialist reorganization of society.
The war in Iran has also plunged Italy and other European nations into a diplomatic crisis with the Trump Administration. In recent days, US President Trump has repeatedly attacked both European allies and NATO for their limited support for his unbridled war.
Meloni responded, “Even after Sigonella [ajoint Italian-U.S. military base in Sicily], what are our relations with the
United States? I continue to believe that on the geopolitical level,
Europe does not have much to gain from a divergence with the United
States. However, our job is above all to defend our national interests.
And when we disagree, we have to say it. And this time we disagree.”
*****
While all Italian political parties hypocritically invoke Article 11
of the Italian Constitution, which rejects war as an instrument of
national policy, Italy remains deeply integrated into the US-led war
machine. It hosts a dense network of bases, logistical hubs and
intelligence facilities central to US military operations across the
Mediterranean and Middle East.
The Italian coalition government’s official line, “We are not at war,
and we do not wish to enter one,” is one of “national autonomy”. It
proclaims that this “is not our war.” However, Italy is supplying the
Arab oil sheikdoms in the Persian Gulf with weapons to counter Iranian
retaliatory attacks and is assessing further requests as they are made.
Italy’s
investment in the Gulf is a two-way $50 billion strategic corridor:
Italy invests through its energy, defense and industrial corporations,
while Gulf sovereign wealth funds invest in Italy’s AI, infrastructure
and clean-energy sectors. This has become central to Meloni’s economic
policy. The largest Gulf partners are the United Arab Emirates,
estimated at $40 billion, Saudi Arabia, estimated at $10 billion, and
Qatar, estimated at $8 to $10 billion.
Meloni’s trip to the Gulf
is both a diplomatic mission and an exercise in domestic political
damage control. Her government faces mounting unpopularity after last
month’s failed national referendum, while anger continues to grow over
its unequivocal support for the Gaza genocide. The widening war against
Iran is fueling hostility among workers and youth not only in Italy but
across all the NATO countries.
The Committee for Public Education urges all public school teachers
and workers in Tasmania to reject the offer published last Thursday by
the Australian Education Union (AEU) and the state Liberal government.
Make
no mistake: By calling off its work bans the AEU is signalling its
willingness to force this offer through. The union officials are
preparing a massive sellout that does nothing to address the enormous
crisis wracking public education.
Over the past year, Tasmanian teachers have staged repeated
stoppages, including rolling regional strikes, half day actions and,
just late last month, a series of full day walkouts, expressing anger at
decades of cuts, crushing workloads and real wage erosion.
The latest walkouts in Tasmania coincided with a statewide strike by
Victorian teachers which directly poses the need for unified action
across the two states and nationally. But the AEU has repeatedly acted
to limit, isolate and channel the unrest into narrow, staged actions and
closed door negotiations that prepare sellouts rather than a genuine
fight.
*****
Having let teachers blow off steam, the AEU is now working to shut down
any escalation of industrial action amid rising unrest and opposition.
Overseen by both Labor and Liberal governments, at federal and state
level, and enforced by the union bureaucracy, the decades-long assault
on the public education system is being deepened.
*****
Tasmanian public schools have the second worst staff shortages in
Australia, with the AEU reporting that 82 percent of schools in the
state face critical staff shortages. Staff shortages lead to high levels
of stress and burnout for other staff and increased workloads, with 83
percent of teacher respondents saying they have taught split or merged
classes.
The government’s offer merely outlines that full-time
teachers will receive an additional half an hour a week planning time,
rising to 40 minutes a week next year. The union has boasted of the
proposed meeting caps, to be phased in over three years. But these
measures are to be implemented by local agreements, opening the way for
staff being pressured to “agree” to more onerous arrangements.
Likewise,
the promise to employ seven more school psychologists to service 185
public schools with approximately 57,000 students is far from the mass
hiring and permanent resourcing levels educators need to reduce
workloads and ensure safety, and the same goes for a proposal to have
just over 8 full-time equivalent staff to implement a Violence in
Schools action plan.
*****
The AEU’s role must be recognized for what it is. Far from being
defenders of teachers, union leaders have been integrated into the
ruling establishment. The AEU leadership has been complicit in the
driving down of conditions and wages of educators for years. Across
Australia, union bureaucracies have subordinated members’ struggles to
negotiations with state governments, limiting action to token stoppages
and then bargaining away workers’ demands in secret.
While
governments claim there is no money for pay rises or to address staffing
shortages, billions of dollars are being channeled into preparations
for war, including through the AUKUS agreement. The US-led war against
Iran has exposed the entire political establishment in Australia as
supporters and participants in an illegal war that threatens to plunge
the world into World War III. Regardless of whether Liberal or Labor are
in office, capitalist governments of every ilk are committed to
corporate profit and war over social need.
Three workers were killed and one injured in a horrific accident at
the Çolakoğlu Metallurgy plant in Dilovası, Kocaeli on Sunday, April 5.
The injured worker was reportedly discharged from hospital on Tuesday.
The plant’s section manager, an engineer, and an occupational health and
safety specialist have been arrested.
Three maintenance workers
and one subcontracted cleaning worker, who were performing routine
maintenance on top of an arc furnace, plunged approximately 10 meters when the rotating platform they were standing on collapsed. It appears
the workers had been sent up onto the platform without any safety
measures in place—most notably, without lifelines.
*****
The events that claim the lives of countless workers every year in
Türkiye and around the world are not accidents. They are murders
produced by the capitalist profit system. The millions of workers who go
to work each morning to support their families may not know that the
conditions awaiting them could end their lives. But corporations, the
union apparatus, the establishment parties and the state apparatus as a
whole are fully aware of which legally mandated safety measures are not
being taken at their workplaces, and of what the consequences may be.
Behind every link in this chain of killings—stretching back decades—lies
a safety violation ignored for the sake of profit, a maintenance job
never carried out, and a sentence never handed down by any court.
The
necessary lessons from decades of experience must be drawn. Bringing
these killings to an end and ensuring safe working conditions cannot be
left to the good will of corporations. Appeals to the authorities or
faith in the courts will likewise prove futile. In the Soma massacre
of 2014, which claimed 301 miners’ lives, the mine owner served only
eight days in prison for each worker killed, while not a single official
faced any punishment.
Workers must intervene against corporate
indifference, official negligence and willful blindness, and union
complicity. To do so, independent rank-and-file committees must be built
in every factory as part of the International Workers Alliance of
Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). These committees must independently
investigate workplace incidents and intervene to enforce safety measures
in the strictest and most uncompromising manner. This struggle must be
guided by the understanding that putting a definitive end to workplace
killings requires the working class to take power and abolish the
capitalist profit system.
The French government’s response to Trump’s threats to annihilate
Iranian civilization is an infamous mixture of cynicism and cowardice.
While seeking to distance itself from Trump’s most undeniably genocidal
statements, it has made itself complicit in crimes against humanity.
President Emmanuel Macron did not bother to comment after Trump
pledged to destroy Iran’s bridges and electrical infrastructure,
threatening: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought
back again.” Macron left it to Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot to
issue a statement. On France2 television, Barrot trivialized Trump’s
threats, calling them “excessive” and declaring, “Everything that is
excessive is insignificant.”
Barrot completely sidestepped the
politically criminal and genocidal character of US policy. He naturally
claimed that “France is firmly opposed to strikes on civilian
infrastructure,” while ignoring French attacks on civilians like the
January 3, 2021 bombing of a wedding in Bounti during the war in Mali.
But when asked point-blank whether US actions are war crimes, Barrot
refused to answer, stating: “We must first analyze their strikes and
their consequences in order to say.”
*****
Barrot’s response exemplifies the bankruptcy of the French
bourgeoisie’s response to Trump’s war on Iran. Relations between the US
and European ruling classes are disintegrating, particularly after Trump
threatened to invade the Danish territory of Greenland earlier this
year. Yet despite admitting that Trump launched the war outside of
international law, the French government has not taken any significant
action to halt the war.
It has refused to denounce Trump as a
criminal, and his war as one of aggression and extermination. It has
remained in the NATO alliance and continues to allow US supply planes
carrying matériel to the Middle East to use its airbase at Istres.
Despite its refusal to allow US fighter jets to fly out of French
airbases to go bomb Iran, Paris thus remains complicit in US war crimes
against the population of the Middle East.
Moreover,
Macron has not publicly spelled out the disastrous impact on the French
and world economy of the cutoff of Persian Gulf oil and gas exports due
to Trump’s war. Even as gas prices explode to over €2 per liter across
France, there is no concrete discussion of what the collapse of energy
and fertilizer supplies means for workers. Officials are silent on the
impoverishment of the working class due to a surge in global fuel and
food prices that is set to escalate, as well as on the threat,
especially in more vulnerable countries, of famine claiming millions of
lives.
*****
The war on Iran is also exposing the reactionary character of the
European bourgeoisie’s calls for rearmament to wage an independent
foreign policy from Washington. This policy, financed by hundreds of
billions of euros in social cuts targeting workers across Europe, does
not aim to prevent or stop US war crimes. Rather, it is preparing the
European imperialist powers to pursue their own wars of plunder across
Eurasia and the world.
This was apparent this weekend, during
Macron’s trip to Japan and South Korea. He met Japan’s far-right prime
minister, Sanae Takaichi, who has applauded Japan’s genocidal war of
occupation in China during World War II as a “war for security.” In
private, Takaichi and Macron no doubt discussed their anger with Trump
amid the looming collapse of their economies due to the war on Iran.
*****
As bombs rain down on Iran, genocide continues in Gaza, and Trump
threatens to blot out a civilization and plunder its oil, it is not time
to “savor a period of calm.” The working class cannot wait. It is time
to urgently mobilize workers in France and across Europe against war, to
defend Iran against imperialist war and genocide, and to struggle
alongside their class brothers and sisters in America, where there is
explosive opposition to Trump.
Tens of thousands of National Health Service (NHS) resident doctors
in England began their 15th round of strike action since March 2023 on
Tuesday morning. The action in pursuit of “full pay restoration” will be
their longest yet, lasting for six days. The strike follows the
collapse of talks between the British Medical Association (BMA) and
Labour government Health Secretary Wes Streeting.
After
denouncing the demands of the doctors for a 26 percent pay rise as
“absurd”, Streeting warned that a strike would “torpedo the pay rises
and training posts available to resident doctors, but it also puts at
risk the recovery of the NHS.”
*****
World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to striking resident doctors as they began a six-day strike.
The Guardian has published a scurrilous attack by unnamed
union officials against resident doctors backing the Starmer
government’s enforcing a below RPI inflation 3.5 percent pay award
against half of all of medics in the National Health Service (NHS).
Around
50,000 members of the British Medical Association (BMA) in England are
taking their fifteenth round of strike action since March 2023 for pay
restoration, to reverse a real-terms erosion by around one-fifth since
2008.
The April 4 article, “Unions privately voice misgivings over
BMA pay demands and doctors strikes,” is a public denunciation of
resident doctors made on the eve of the strike that began April 7. The
only thing “private” about it is the anonymity of the union officials
cited, so they are not held accountable by their members while the Guardian presents them as the “voice” of NHS workers.
The unattributed comments from “senior union figures” complain that
resident doctors are demanding too much and acting in a “chaotic
fashion.” This echoes the slanders of Labour Prime Minister Keir
Starmer, who has branded the upcoming strike as “reckless,” and his
Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who has accused doctors of “holding the
country to ransom.”
The smears against resident doctors must be rejected. NHS workers should demand to know who spoke to the Guardian claiming to speak in their name and demand their removal from leadership positions.
The
briefings by anonymous union officials against the strike is a wake-up
call for NHS workers and the entire working class. What is required is
not the suppression of the struggle of resident doctors but its
extension.
*****
Only through the independent mobilization of the working class, armed
with a socialist program, can the resources required to rebuild the
NHS be secured. This struggle is not confined to Britain, but forms part
of an international fight by healthcare workers and the working class
against austerity, privatization and war, which NHS FightBack advances as an affiliate of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
Court proceedings over the deadliest rail crash in Greek history began on April 1, continuing on April 6.
The
crash occurred on February 28, 2023, in the Tempi valley of central
Greece, after a passenger train collided with a freight train, resulting
in the horrific deaths of 57 mainly young people. Among the dead were
11 rail workers. The passenger train—going from Athens to
Thessaloniki—had been traveling on the wrong track for 12 minutes and
18 kilometers before it impacted with a southbound freight train.
Harrowing
footage released in January last year indicated that 30 of the 57
victims were still alive for a period after the crash and died following
a massive explosion.
The deaths were not an accident but a crime
of capitalism. This act of social murder was made possible by the
complete absence of safety on the rail network after years of cuts by
successive austerity-imposing governments, culminating in the network’s privatization in 2017.
The disaster is still raw in the
consciousness of Greek workers and youth. Millions took to the streets
in the initial and anniversary protests over the past three years in
Greece and among the diaspora in Europe, the US and Australia. See here, here and this year’s protests here.
*****
The crime at Tempi has discredited all the main bourgeois parties.
One of the main chants at demonstrations is: “Syriza, PASOK, New
Democracy, this crime has a history”.
The political vacuum is
reflected in the high polling of the new party, “We Begin – The
Independent Citizens’ Movement”, launched on April 1 by Maria
Karystianou, former president of the Tempi Victims’ Families
Association. A poll conducted just before the April 1 announcement found
that 17.8 percent would consider voting for it.
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.
