Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. California DSA tells workers to vote for a billionaire Democrat in gubernatorial primaries
The California Democratic Socialists of America (CA-DSA) has issued a voter guide recommending that workers support billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. The call for a vote for Steyer confirms, if such confirmation were needed, that the DSA has nothing to do with socialism.
CA-DSA does not even attempt to hide the contradiction of a self-declared socialist organization backing the election of a billionaire. Its voter guide admits that Steyer is a billionaire whose wealth “was earned through the exploitation of the working class” and that his fortune was invested in private prisons and coal mining. It notes that he refuses to characterize Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a genocide. Nevertheless, it insists that workers should “not cast a protest vote,” or build an independent movement in the working class against the twin parties of Wall Street and war, because Steyer is supposedly “the most progressive of the current viable candidates.” The guide concludes, absurdly, “Time will tell whether he’s truly a class traitor.”
There is no mystery to solve. Steyer is not a “class traitor.” He is a conscious representative of the capitalist class. He does not propose the abolition of capitalism, the expropriation of the billionaires, workers’ control of production or the building of a socialist movement.
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The CA-DSA endorsement comes in the final weeks before California’s June 2 “jungle primary,” in which the top two vote-getters advance regardless of party. The race remains extremely tight. A May Emerson College poll found former Biden Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra leading with just 19 percent, followed by Steyer and Republican Steve Hilton statistically tied at 17 percent.
Under conditions in which millions of workers and young people are moving to the left and identify capitalism with inequality, war, ecological destruction, fascism and dictatorship, the DSA is seeking to channel opposition behind a billionaire Democrat attempting to buy political office at a decisive point in the campaign.
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Taken together, Steyer has spent or poured roughly $546 million into his presidential and gubernatorial ambitions, roughly the same amount the US government refused to provide Spirit airlines to stop the destruction of 17,000 jobs. The half billion wasted on his own political ambitions could have paid the annual salaries of tens of thousands of teachers, nurses and public workers. Instead, it has been consumed by consultants, television advertisements, polling firms and campaign operatives, converting Steyer’s stolen wealth into political power.
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The DSA’s support for Steyer demonstrates that it is nothing but an arm of the Democratic Party. For the DSA, socialism is reduced to a set of reforms that the Democrats have no intention of actually implementing. It does not seek to make the working class conscious of its independent social interests and historic tasks, but to prevent socialist consciousness from developing by insisting, at every decisive moment, that workers remain within the framework of the Democratic Party.
The promotion of Steyer as a potential “class traitor” expresses the political function of the pseudo-left: to take the growing hatred of capitalism among workers and youth and redirect it behind liberal millionaires and billionaires. The task facing workers is not to search for saviors among hedge fund managers, but to build an independent socialist movement of the working class, in conscious opposition to the Democratic Party, the trade union bureaucracy and the capitalist system they defend.
2. US-China summit brings no respite in global war
US President Donald Trump returned to Washington Friday from a two-day state visit to China—the first by an American president in nearly a decade—that offered no let-up in the global eruption of American imperialism. The trip produced no easing of the US blockade of Iran, no halt to the US arming of Taiwan, no reduction of Trump’s anti-China tariffs and no communique.
The meeting took place in the shadow of the US attack on Iran that had been launched less than three months earlier. Despite the brutality of the US onslaught, the Trump administration had failed to achieve its aims of overthrowing the Iranian government, destroying its military and gaining control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump hoped to have arrived in Beijing as the conqueror of Iran, ready to dictate terms to China with a stranglehold on its energy supplies. Instead, he was facing a geopolitical disaster, and he sought Xi’s aid in resolving the crisis created by the war.
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The Trump regime confronts a deepening political, social and economic crisis. Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 34 percent, the lowest of his presidency. The US national debt has reached 100 percent of gross domestic product, one year after the latest of three separate debt downgrades by the major rating agencies. Mounting doubts about the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency hung over the trip.
Against this backdrop, the summit made clear that the US effort to economically strangle China — begun in earnest under the first Trump administration — has failed. In October 2018, Vice President Mike Pence declared the intent of the United States to seize “the commanding heights of the twenty-first century economy.” The campaign of economic warfare that followed, waged through tariffs and export controls, was continued through the Biden administration and into the second Trump administration. This effort has not destroyed China’s technology sector, which has made major advances in robotics, autonomy and artificial intelligence.
Despite these advances, or rather because of them, China confronts a US-led imperialist world order determined to strangle and subjugate it through economic and military warfare. The US rampage in Latin America and the Persian Gulf, alongside its efforts to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal, are part of a drive to seize the world’s strategic choke points in preparation for direct military conflict with China.
In the face of this offensive, aimed at reducing China, alongside the entire former colonial world, to subjugation, Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping spent the summit making entreaties toward peaceful cooperation between the United States and China.
Xi opened the summit by asking whether the two countries could “transcend the so-called Thucydides Trap and forge a new model for relations between major powers.” He added that “the common interests between China and the United States outweigh our differences.”
The Trump administration, by contrast, sees any potential thaw in relations with Beijing as an occasion to accelerate US rearmament and better position the country for war.
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There can be no peaceful coexistence between American imperialism and China. American capitalism, crisis-ridden and indebted, cannot tolerate China’s continued economic growth. To accept China’s economic ascent would mean the collapse of the dollar-denominated world order on which the entire system of US power rests.
Ultimately, the US drive to subjugate China arises from the structure of the capitalist world order itself — the irresolvable contradiction between a globally integrated economy and a system of competing nation-states, each defending the interests of its own ruling class.
The Chinese state is not a workers’ state, a socialist state, or even a “socialist market economy.” It is headed by a regime that subordinates everything to a capitalist oligarchy, the product of the decades-long process of capitalist restoration that began with Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” in the late 1970s — a process the ICFI analyzed at each step as a betrayal rooted in the Maoist variety of Stalinist nationalism. That restoration created an enormous working class of hundreds of millions, integrated China into the circuits of world capital, and produced a stratum of billionaires tied to global markets, international supply chains, and the dollar-denominated financial system that Washington wields as a weapon.
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The working class must formulate its own response to the global eruption of US imperialism. Trump has already made clear that the global war being launched by US imperialism will be a war on the working class at home. At a White House Easter luncheon on April 1, he declared: “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. We have to take care of one thing: military protection.” “We’re fighting wars,” he said.
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World war can be stopped only by the international working class, organized independently of all factions of the capitalist class and fighting on the program of socialist internationalism. That program is fought for by the International Committee of the Fourth International, the Socialist Equality Parties and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
3. CIA director’s trip to Havana paves way for regime change operation
CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana on Thursday and met with Raúl Castro’s grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, Interior Minister Lazaro Alvarez Casas and the head of Cuba’s intelligence services, according to statements made by a CIA official to The Miami Herald.z
The purpose of the trip, he said, was “to personally deliver President Trump’s message that the United States is prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes.”
The political significance of welcoming the CIA director to Havana cannot be overstated. The agency owes much of its nickname—Murder Inc.—to its record of organizing relentless terrorist attacks on Cuba.
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While the visit is not entirely without precedent—CIA Director John Brennan secretly traveled to Cuba in 2015, meeting with Raúl Castro’s son Col. Alejandro Castro Espín—what is entirely unprecedented is that the CIA and the US Embassy in Cuba publicly posted photographs of Thursday’s visit and had their officials describe the details in real time to the media. The entire affair was for public consumption.
The broadcasting of such a trip by the CIA can only be seen as smoke-and-mirrors to manufacture a narrative: Cuba bears responsibility for whatever comes next. The sporadic offers of minimal aid and dialogue from Washington are aimed at providing the pretext that the Cuban government rejected these well-meaning US gestures.
The fraudulent character of these gestures, however, was made unmistakably clear within hours of Ratcliffe’s departure. US officials told USA Today that the US Justice Department is moving to indict former Cuban President Raúl Castro, now 94, in connection with the 1996 shooting down of two planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue. This was a CIA-connected organization whose pilots conducted repeated hostile overflights of Cuban territory, on occasion buzzing Havana and dropping leaflets calling on Cubans to revolt.
The planned indictment is a transparent threat that Washington may move against Castro in a manner similar to the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro following his fraudulent drug indictment—an operation in Caracas in which US Special Forces killed 32 Cuban security personnel and scores of Venezuelans.
Ratcliffe warned Cuban officials to take Trump seriously and told them they should be “under no illusions that Trump will not take action to enforce red lines.” The direct demand was raised that “Cuba can no longer be a safe haven for adversaries in the Western Hemisphere.”
While the demand that Cuba sever ties with China and Russia was not spelled out, the context leaves no ambiguity that what is being referred to.
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These maneuvers are unfolding against the backdrop of a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Cuba, inflicted deliberately by Washington.
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The United States has cut off the island from virtually all fuel imports since January, allowing only a single Russian tanker through. That ship, which docked in late March carrying 730,000 barrels of oil, provided only temporary relief. A second Russian-flagged vessel, the Universal, carrying diesel for Cuba, shifted course several weeks ago.
The fuel blockade constitutes a crime of collective punishment, pure and simple. Blackouts have caused reduced working hours and widespread food spoilage. Hospitals have canceled surgeries. Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla has stated that infant mortality has doubled, and 12,000 children are waiting for operations. On Wednesday and Thursday, protests broke out across Havana, following blackouts lasting up to 48 hours in some neighborhoods. The demonstrations spread to at least 12 municipalities, including Guanabacoa, Marianao, Playa, San Miguel del Padrón, Vedado and Havana del Este. Protesters chanted “Electricity and food!”
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Pentagon contingency plans for a military operation have already been drawn up at Trump’s request. According to CNN’s analysis of flight data, US surveillance and reconnaissance missions off the coast of Cuba have increased markedly since February.
Amid military exercises on the Florida Keys—directly facing Cuba—the US Southern Command declared that a “hybrid fleet is ready.”
Meanwhile, White House officials have made it increasingly clear that they seek regime change. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared that Cuba’s economic system “cannot be fixed” and that those in power in Cuba are incapable of solving it. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, in a recent congressional hearing, designated Cuba a threat to US national security. Trump himself has personally stated that “Cuba is next” after Iran.
Ratcliffe’s visit was preceded by an earlier State Department delegation that issued Cuba an ultimatum, giving it “weeks” to implement changes and release prisoners. The demands included the replacement of President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the release of political prisoners, the settlement of claims on US property confiscated by the Cuban government and the operation of Starlink satellite systems on the island.
In this context, the offer of $100 million in US aid—directed not to the Cuban government but to Catholic charities—must be understood for what it is: a Trojan horse. The figure amounts to roughly $10 per Cuban. Rubio and other US officials immediately and falsely announced that Cuba had rejected the offer, using the manufactured controversy as a pretext to portray the Cuban government as indifferent to its own population’s suffering.
President Díaz-Canel responded on social media accepting the aid as long as it is delivered “in full conformity with universally recognized practices for humanitarian assistance.”
The $100 million figure is a wholly manufactured number for propaganda purposes. It functions as a distraction to shift blame for US policies starving the Cuban people and decades-long plans for regime change.
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US maneuvers have thoroughly exposed the political bankruptcy of the Cuban leadership, even beyond the capitulation of welcoming the CIA director. At no point has the Castro regime appealed for the independent mobilization of workers in Cuba, the United States, or across the Americas to stop an aggression that carries the historical significance of a counterrevolutionary retribution for the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
After insisting that Cuba harbors no foreign military or intelligence bases and supports no hostile activity against the United States, the Cuban government issued a statement expressing its interest in developing cooperation between law enforcement agencies to enhance “the security of both nations, as well as regional and international security.” The Cuban leadership has also signaled its willingness to hand economic control to US imperialism so long as the privileges and power of the Castroite ruling elite are preserved.
All nominally left-wing governments in Latin America have been entirely complicit in Cuba’s suffocation. Brazil’s Lula da Silva traveled to the White House last week to kiss Trump’s ring, emerging to lend full credibility to Trump’s claims that he has no plans for war against Cuba. Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum responded to Ratcliffe’s Havana visit by saying, absurdly: “Hopefully an understanding and agreement will be reached recognizing the sovereignty of the Cuban people”—an effective endorsement of the process underway.
Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Venezuela’s remaining Chavistas have equally refused to take any concrete action to break the fuel blockade.
Regarding Cuba’s other main international partners, China’s President Xi Jinping refrained from raising the question of Cuba at all in his summit with Trump in Beijing. Russia, for its part, has made empty promises of aid while diverting its oil tankers from Cuba whenever they face US pressure.
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Workers cannot afford to place any confidence in any section of the capitalist establishments, including in the United States, Cuba and across the Americas. The threat of a military operation against Cuba—a counterrevolutionary settling of accounts aimed at the international working class—demands the independent and international mobilization of workers to end the economic blockade and military preparations against Cuba and the source of imperialist war: the capitalist profit system.
4. Trump seeks $1.7 billion taxpayer payout for allies and January 6 fascists
According to ABC News, Trump is poised to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded “weaponization” compensation fund. The fund could be used to compensate Trump allies, entities associated with the president and, potentially, the January 6 fascists who stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
The proposed fund would not be distributed through an open, accountable process. ABC News reports that the commission overseeing the money would be appointed under conditions in which Trump could remove its members without cause, and the commission would not be required to disclose its procedures or decision-making process.
A supposed prohibition on Trump receiving money directly is a transparent fraud. ABC reports that while Trump himself would be barred from receiving payments tied to several of his own legal claims, entities associated with him would not be explicitly barred from filing claims. This would allow the president to posture as personally disinterested while building a mechanism through which his allies, his political operatives and, potentially, businesses in his orbit could receive taxpayer money.
The hypocrisy is staggering. Trump, who should have been prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned for his role in the January 6 conspiracy, is instead using the machinery of the state to extract money from the public treasury. Those who joined his attempt to overturn the election are being transformed from criminals into claimants for government compensation.
The class character of the settlement is unmistakable. There was supposedly no money to protect the jobs of 17,000 Spirit Airlines workers after the government refused to provide a $500 million loan. But more than three times that amount is now being prepared for Trump’s allies, January 6 defendants and, potentially, entities associated with the president himself. The ruling class claims there is no money for jobs, health care, schools or social programs, but billions can be mobilized overnight for war, prisons, police and political payoff operations.
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Trump is now seeking to move from pardoning the fascist foot soldiers of the failed coup to compensating them. ABC reports that hundreds of January 6 defendants have already begun seeking payouts from the federal government, and that Trump previously told Newsmax that people in government “really like that group of people,” adding, “They were patriots as far as I was concerned.”
The proposed settlement is part of a systematic effort to transform the state into an instrument of personal rule, political retribution and preparation for presidential dictatorship. Earlier this week, it was reported that the Justice Department is pursing what it called a sweeping “criminal conspiracy” case against Trump’s perceived enemies. The FBI under Kash Patel has assembled a team described by sources as a “payback squad.” A senior FBI official denied that such a unit exists under that name, but confirmed the existence of a Director’s Advisory Team examining materials tied to officials who investigated Trump and his allies.
Trump’s Justice Department has brought bogus charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both long vilified by Trump as personal enemies. Trump is also pressing for cases against other political opponents, while the state drops or buries investigations into the higher-level figures involved in his own attempted coup.
At the same time, Trump’s allies are openly discussing the use of federal police forces in the 2026 elections. Steve Bannon declared in February, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” Following Bannon’s threats, the Trump administration deployed immigration agents to airports to threaten and harass travelers.
The Supreme Court has also cleared the way for a new wave of racial gerrymandering. On April 29, the court gutted enforcement of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, striking down Louisiana’s second black-majority congressional district and opening the door to new maps across the South. Within weeks, Republican-controlled legislatures in Louisiana and South Carolina were advancing maps that would eliminate Democratic-held seats and reduce black political representation.
That Trump is in a position to carry out such an operation is above all the responsibility of the Democratic Party. The Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland refused to seriously prosecute the political conspiracy behind January 6, delayed for nearly two years before appointing Special Counsel Jack Smith, and left intact the state apparatus that Trump is now wielding against his opponents. The Democrats’ central concern was never defending democratic rights, but instead rehabilitating the Republican Party to pass war budgets and preventing mass opposition to Trump from developing outside the framework of the two-party system.
The proposed $1.7 billion fund is a warning. The same administration that pardoned the January 6 fascists, deploys immigration Gestapo at airports, threatens to surround polling stations with ICE, and categorizes left-wing opposition as “terrorism” is preparing to compensate its shock troops ahead of the midterm elections. The fight against this developing dictatorship cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party, the courts or any faction of the capitalist state. It requires the independent political mobilization of the working class against both parties of Wall Street and US imperialism.
5. Australian study reveals tunneling workers’ concerns over silica dust exposure
Tunneling workers’ health and lives are at risk from the continued refusal of corporations and government authorities to address the known dangers of respirable crystalline silica dust inhalation.
6. The fraud of Labor’s “historic” housing policies in Australian budget
Virtually all of the coverage and commentary surrounding the Australian Labor government’s budget since it was brought down on Tuesday has focused on changes contained in it to the property tax investment regime, centered on the winding back of some negative gearing and capital gains tax breaks.
Labor and its defenders in the media have presented the measures as “bold,” “ambitious,” even “historic” and as a significant attempt to improve the plight of first homebuyers, especially among the youth. Others, including the Liberal-National Coalition, One Nation and the Murdoch press, have condemned the changes as a vast “wealth redistribution” and even as something approaching “communism.”
The official discussion, on all sides, is a kabuki dance. Despite their positions seemingly being diametrically opposed, the government’s supporters and its detractors are coming together to present one of the most inconsequential aspects of the budget, in terms of its impact on the lives of masses of people, as its centerpiece.
Together, they are burying the essence of the budget, its frontal assault on social spending accounting for some $63.8 billion in cuts over the next four years, targeting workers and the poor.
More than half of those “savings” are based on a program of completely gutting the National Disability Insurance Scheme and kicking up to 300,000 people off it. Obscenely, those vulnerable and disabled people are not only having their support taken away and their lives destroyed. The cuts are being presented by the media as old news, if they are mentioned at all, given they were announced four weeks before the budget itself.
The callous indifference of the press hacks to the plight of poor disabled people goes hand in hand with their wilful credulity over the government’s housing tax changes. In both instances, the coverage is substantially premised on ignoring, or pretending to ignore, what is actually in the budget.
According to the government, its housing changes will result in 75,000 more new homebuyers than would have otherwise been the case over the next decade. That is, even on the rosiest estimate, this “historic” change will nominally assist 7,500 people to purchase a house per year.
To describe that as the equivalent of a rounding error is not an exaggeration. In a country of 28 million people, those 7,500 amount to 0.026 percent of the population, or to be more generous to the government line, to 0.034 percent of all adults. Needless to say, the minuscule impact of the change, as expressed in those crude percentage terms, has not been featured in the headlines hailing the “historic” change.
It is not as though the 7,500 people are being gifted homes either. Only that they will have the “opportunity” to enter a housing market that will remain super-inflated, to acquire a crippling mortgage from one of the banks and to be saddled with it, likely for the rest of their lives.
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An article in Forbes magazine last month, on the eve of the budget, pointed to the reality that Australian homes are among the most unaffordable in the world. It notes that “The median house price reached 8.9 times annual income, up from 6.6 five years earlier.” The ratio was 3.3 times annual income in 1984. It noted that “A new loan devours 45 percent of the median household salary. Saving for a standard 20% deposit now stretches to nearly 12 years.”
A Demographia International Housing Affordability study last year found that Sydney was the second most unaffordable housing market in the world, after Hong Kong, with a median home cost of $1.3 million.
In March, Canstar figures cited by the Daily Telegraph showed that you “currently need to earn a combined income around $300,000 a year to buy a median priced house in Sydney with a five percent deposit.
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To the extent that the Labor governments are seeking to boost supply, it is through handouts to the property developers. That is the real content of the maintenance of negative gearing for new builds, and a raft of measures by Labor at the federal and state levels, aimed at maintaining construction rates at the higher end of the market.
The reality is that the housing crisis is a particularly acute expression of an intractable class division in society. The basic social right to affordable housing for all requires nothing less than a frontal assault on the wealth of the property developers, the billionaires and the banks, and all the political forces that represent their interests, above all the Labor government. That is a fight for nothing less than the socialist reorganization of society from top to bottom.
7. What science knows about Andes hantavirus and why governments ignore it
Hantaviruses belong to a family of RNA viruses that are naturally maintained and carried by wild rodents. While most hantaviruses are transmitted exclusively from animals to humans, the Andes strain is uniquely dangerous because it is the only hantavirus in the world with documented person-to-person transmission capabilities. This distinct biological property transforms the virus from a localized ecological hazard into a pathogen with profound global reach.
The public health significance of this transmission potential is staggering, yet it is met with a glaring paradox. The Andes virus carries a catastrophic case fatality rate of 38 to 40 percent, and medical science currently offers no approved vaccine and no specific antiviral treatment. Despite these alarming realities, the scientific literature investigating its exact transmission biology remains dangerously thin.
The existing evidence, however limited, identifies a credible and severely undercharacterized pandemic threat. What research does exist raises urgent questions about global preparedness, particularly as capitalist governments actively dismantle the exact public health and scientific infrastructures required to monitor and contain such diseases. The deliberate defunding of pandemic research programs by the ruling class makes this biological threat exponentially more dangerous.
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Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS) progresses through three distinct and brutal clinical phases. The initial prodromal phase typically lasts one to five days and presents with nonspecific symptoms, including fever, severe myalgia, headache, nausea and abdominal pain. Because this presentation is clinically indistinguishable from routine influenza or gastrointestinal illnesses, patients are frequently misdiagnosed. Tragically, this deceptive period represents the most highly infectious window for person-to-person transmission of the Andes virus.
The disease then abruptly shifts into the cardiopulmonary phase, characterized by a rapid onset of coughing, severe shortness of breath and profound hypoxia. The pathophysiology behind this collapse is rooted in the viral infection of the endothelial cells lining the blood vessels. This cellular invasion triggers a massive immune system overreaction heavily mediated by infiltrating T lymphocytes. The resulting immunologic assault causes a catastrophic increase in pulmonary capillary permeability. As plasma rapidly leaks from the microvasculature, the alveoli flood with high-protein fluid, leading to massive noncardiogenic pulmonary edema and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Hemodynamically, the patient experiences a severe drop in blood pressure driven initially by distributive fluid loss into the lungs, which is quickly complicated by profound myocardial depression, ultimately culminating in fatal cardiogenic shock.
For those who survive the acute hemodynamic collapse, the convalescent phase begins with spontaneous diuresis as fluid finally clears from the lungs. However, recovery is exceptionally prolonged and can take up to six months, with some patients suffering lasting physical or neurological sequelae.
This medical crisis is compounded by the complete absence of targeted pharmaceutical interventions. Currently, there are no approved vaccines and no specific antiviral medications available to treat the infection. Treatment remains entirely supportive, relying heavily on lung-protective mechanical ventilation, vasopressors to maintain blood pressure, and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation in cases of refractory shock. Consequently, the case fatality rate for the Andes virus is extraordinarily high, hovering around 38 to 40 percent in published series, with some severe outbreaks recording mortality rates exceeding 50 percent.
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The catastrophic unanswered questions surrounding the Andes virus are not the result of innocent scientific limitations, but of a deliberate political assault on global public health. In particular since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, capitalist governments have systematically dismantled the exact research and surveillance programs required to understand and contain this pathogen.
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This domination of reactionary politics over science has transformed manageable ecological challenges into existential threats to humanity. The outbreak aboard this luxury cruise ship is but a chilling preview of the ease with which future pandemics will unfold. The capitalist system has proven it is structurally incapable of protecting human life from the increasing threat of zoonotic spillovers.
8. University and school strikes shake São Paulo on the eve of explosive elections in Brazil
A week of near-daily mobilizations in São Paulo exposes the explosive crisis of the Brazilian bourgeois regime five months before the presidential elections.
9. Germany: Accelerated job cuts in the auto and supplier industry
The attack on jobs in the German auto and supplier industry is accelerating. It goes hand in hand with the social cutbacks the government has introduced in relation to the citizen’s income, healthcare and pensions, and with the squandering of vast sums of money on rearmament and war. Unless this trend is halted, disaster looms.
10. Sri Lankan government extends draconian state of emergency
President Dissanayake can rule through emergency decrees, deploy the military and police with extraordinary powers, restrict gatherings, detain individuals without normal judicial procedures, invoke censorship and ban strikes.
11. South Asia, the Iran war and the bankruptcy of bourgeois nationalism
This speech was delivered by Deepal Jayasekera, General Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka), and Dilaxshan Mahalingam, a leader of the IYSSE (Sri Lanka), at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the ICFI.
12. The role of Australian imperialism in the war on Iran and China
This speech was delivered by Cheryl Crisp, Socialist Equality Party (Australia) national secretary, at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the ICFI.
13. Attend Sunday's meeting to vote for an immediate Nexteer strike!
After workers voted down a second UAW-backed contract by 73% local union officials have called a membership meeting on Sunday. The following is a statement by the Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee.
On May 8, the 81st anniversary of Germany’s liberation from the Nazis, around 45,000 school students protested nationwide against conscription and war. The movement shows the enormous opposition of an entire generation, but requires a socialist perspective to succeed.
The World Socialist Web Site republishes an interview with Brian Goldstone about homelessness in America: “In America right now, a low-wage job … is homelessness waiting to happen.”
16. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
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.
