Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
This four-part series examines the politics of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya, its defense of the Stalinist-Maoist theory of the National Democratic Revolution and its opposition to Trotskyism.
2. Law-and-order frenzy dominates final weeks of D.C. mayoral primary campaign
Washington D.C.‘s Democratic establishment is responding to youth gatherings by adopting Trump’s law-and-order agenda, criminalizing the impoverished children of communities its own policies have hurt.
3. Ebola outbreak in DRC and Uganda passes 1,000 cases, as Italy reports 2 suspected cases
With the Ebola toll past 1,000 cases, the gap between the WHO's recommendations and conditions in the eastern DRC has erupted in the torching of two treatment facilities.
4. Trump administration targets Hasan Piker, Medea Benjamin over Cuba trip
In a video posted on her social media accounts, Benjamin responded to the investigation, saying it “looks like the Trump administration” was targeting her, Piker and others for bringing “medicines and medical supplies to Cuba’s pediatric hospitals. Basically we want to help save babies. And that, according to Trump, is something that must be investigated. Because how dare we wanna help the Cuban people. How dare we love the Cuban people? And if indeed the charge is that we love Cuban people: guilty!”
She added, “I want my government to leave the Cuban people alone! Not to be strangling them by keeping oil from the island, by sanctions that are so brutal. I want them to stop threatening to invade Cuba… So please, if any government officials are watching, don’t investigate us for trying to save Cuban babies. Investigate yourselves for what you are doing to kill Cuban babies and make lives of the Cuban people miserable.”
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The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party have well-established political differences with Piker’s reformist politics and his attempts to shepherd workers and youth into the Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street and war no less than their “Republican colleagues.”
But we unequivocally oppose the Trump administration’s McCarthyite investigation into him, Benjamin and anyone else targeted by the administration for traveling to, and providing aid to, the Cuban people.
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The bipartisan silence over the investigation underscores the central fact: The attack on Piker, Benjamin and others is part of a broader campaign to criminalize opposition to US imperialist policy, from the blockade of Cuba to the genocide in Gaza and the expanding wars in the Middle East.
The defense of those targeted cannot be left to the Democratic Party, which has helped construct the machinery of repression now being deployed by Trump. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class in defense of democratic rights and against war, dictatorship and the capitalist system that produces them.
5. US launches missile strikes on Iran in advance of talks in Qatar
The US military launched new strikes on southern Iran late Monday as Iranian officials arrived in Doha for negotiations involving Qatari intermediaries acting under the direction of the Trump administration.
The attacks were described by US Central Command (CENTCOM) as “defensive” to “protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces.” The US strikes reportedly targeted missile launch sites and mine-laying boats in the Strait of Hormuz.
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The new strikes were announced by CENTCOM spokesman Hawkins, who said they were defensive, although he did not provide details or evidence of any alleged Iranian threats. Hawkins said, “US Central Command continues to defend our forces while using restraint during the ongoing ceasefire.”
The strikes were no doubt timed with the arrival of Iranian negotiators in Doha. Multiple reports said Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf and Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser were part of the Iranian delegation.
The reports said they were there for talks with Qatari officials tied to a potential US-Iran deal and the unfreezing of Iranian assets and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
On Monday morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that negotiations were “proceeding nicely,” but then added a threat: “It will only be a Great Deal for all or, no Deal at all — Back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before — And nobody wants that!”
This sequence follows a repeated pattern used by the Trump White House to carry out illegal military aggression while publicly talking about negotiations.
The justifications for the strikes also expose the claims by Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and other officials that the 38-day US-Israeli air campaign had degraded or destroyed Iran’s military power. How can Iran threaten US forces in the region if, as Hegseth has repeatedly asserted, Iran’s missile capability has been rapidly crushed, “functionally defeated” and “destroyed”?
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Qatar has been mediating the current round of talks with Tehran over reopening the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for sanctions relief and a halt to hostilities. The talks have been presented by the White House as moving toward an agreement.
The Trump administration faces both a military and political crisis over its inability to achieve its goal of regime change when it launched the war on February 28 and, with the assistance of Israel, killed the entire political leadership of Iran. After first claiming the war would be over within days, Trump later shifted to saying it would end “pretty quickly” in four-to-six weeks. None of this has come to pass.
In a massive miscalculation, the failure of the US-Israeli war to break Iranian resistance led to the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz. The consequences for the world economy from the shutdown are severe since roughly one-fifth of global oil flows through the strait.
The renewed bombing in southern Iran shows that the Trump administration’s propaganda about negotiations is inseparable from the use of military violence. Washington continues to demand surrender while it prepares the next stage of a region-wide imperialist war.
6. The international significance of Erdoğan’s preemptive coup against the CHP in Türkiye
The regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Türkiye is staging a preemptive political coup before the eyes of the entire world. Erdoğan first removed the elected leadership of the Republican People’s Party (CHP)—the main parliamentary opposition party and leading party in the polls—through a politically motivated court ruling, then ordered riot police to forcibly seize the party’s headquarters.
What is unfolding in Türkiye is not a purely national event but a manifestation of an international collapse of democratic forms of rule rooted in the deepening crisis of the capitalist system. US President Donald Trump, having lost the November 2020 elections, mounted a failed coup on January 6, 2021, seeking to remain in power illegally. Erdoğan, for his part, is attempting to forestall a likely defeat in the next elections by neutralizing his principal rival.
Workers and youth must oppose this preemptive coup—which threatens fundamental democratic rights and whose target is ultimately the working class.
The Turkish working class is entering this struggle in a mood of explosive opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the US war against Iran. In the first days of the war against Iran, workers at the Polyak mine in İzmir tore down a gendarmerie barricade and seized control of the mine. Last month, Turkish politics was dominated by the struggle of Doruk Mining workers in Ankara.
Though polls show that more than 90 percent of the Turkish population opposes the war against Iran and the presence of US military bases in Türkiye, Erdoğan has effectively aligned himself with the Trump administration’s aggression in the Middle East and continues to facilitate the flow of oil from Azerbaijan to Israel. Across the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of the population is seething with anger at their ruling elites’ collaboration with US imperialism and Israeli Zionism.
Erdoğan and his allies are working to suppress the emergence within the Turkish, Middle Eastern and international working class—already battered by a severe cost-of-living crisis—of a movement against genocide and imperialist war.
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Erdoğan and his allies are working to suppress the emergence within the Turkish, Middle Eastern and international working class—already battered by a severe cost-of-living crisis—of a movement against genocide and imperialist war.
The repression directed at the CHP has a historically unprecedented character. The CHP is not a Kurdish political movement that has been violently suppressed throughout the history of the Republic, nor is it a left-wing party. It is the party of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the Turkish Republic in 1923. The judicial coup that has ousted its leadership under Özgür Özel and restored Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu—who has assumed the role of “His Majesty’s loyal opposition”—amounts to a declaration that, amid explosive class and international tensions, even the mildest political opposition will not be tolerated.
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It is no coincidence that Erdoğan held phone calls with Trump both before İmamoğlu’s arrest and before the latest judicial operation against the CHP. He does not expect anything more than token statements from his European allies, who have declared war on the working class’s living conditions to finance military spending in their own countries and attacked democratic rights.
Özel’s response to Erdoğan’s unlawful operation to remove him as CHP leader underscores that democratic rights cannot be defended under the leadership of a bourgeois party like the CHP. As the leader of a party bound by a thousand threads to imperialism and finance capital, Özel swiftly capitulated to the preemptive coup despite his initial rhetoric of “resistance.” He talked to Kılıçdaroğlu—after first refusing to do so—then accepted the court ruling he had vowed to reject and vacated the party headquarters he had pledged never to leave. He has now called for a new CHP party congress and new elections.
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The ruling elites in Türkiye and across the Middle East sit atop a social powder keg. As Türkiye ranks among the most unequal societies in Europe, the polarization between the working class and the bourgeoisie has reached unprecedented dimensions. The Erdoğan government’s policies, enriching a financial oligarchy while driving workers into destitution, only intensify class tensions and the threat of social revolution. The domination of the capitalist oligarchy over economic and social life, under conditions of expanding global war, is incompatible with democracy even in its most limited form.
The Erdoğan regime’s operation against the CHP further exposes as a brazen fraud the claim—promoted by the DEM Party, the CHP and pseudo-left tendencies—that the very same government can resolve the Kurdish question through “peace and democratization.”
As Leon Trotsky explained in his theory of Permanent Revolution, in countries of belated capitalist development, no faction of the bourgeoisie in the imperialist epoch is capable of establishing a democratic regime or establishing independence from imperialism. The task of building a regime that stops imperialist wars and secures the basic democratic rights of the Kurdish people and all other oppressed masses in Türkiye and across the region falls to the working class. This means the struggle for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
The incident lays bare, in the starkest terms, the subordination of working class communities to the profit demands of global military-industrial corporations. GKN Aerospace, headquartered in Birmingham, UK and owned by the investment firm Melrose Industries PLC, is one of the world’s largest aerospace and defense suppliers, generating annual revenues of £3.4 billion ($4.6 billion). It operates in 12 countries with more than 16,000 employees across 30 sites worldwide. In Garden Grove, it sits directly adjacent to residential neighborhoods, a sports complex and schools. It has now emerged that the facility has been cited repeatedly for safety and environmental violations for years.
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Jose, a self-employed renter who has lived for 12 years near the GKN facility, said: “Since we’ve been living here, we never imagined that this company had such dangerous chemicals. It’s surrounded by residents living here for so many years who probably never thought we were breathing contaminants on a daily basis, day and night.”
He described the anxiety of not knowing when residents will be allowed to return and the real fear about what return will mean. “Many people won’t be feeling secure going back home knowing that company still operates in that same location,” he said.
Jose also pointed to the economic devastation facing homeowners in the area. “Who knows about your own property value? There are many years of work going down, their savings and home value, because of that situation.” The surrounding community, he noted, is predominantly working class, drawn from Asian, Latino and black families, many of them immigrants.
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On Sunday, GKN Aerospace issued a formal apology, expressing “deep regret” for the disruption to residents’ lives. The statement pledged cooperation with authorities and committed to “the safe resolution of this incident.” It offered no explanation for how the situation was allowed to develop, no acknowledgment of its prior regulatory record and no concrete commitments to affected residents beyond the immediate crisis response.
Absent from the official response has been any serious reckoning with the fundamental question: Why is a multinational defense manufacturer storing thousands of gallons of volatile, explosive chemicals in a 34,000-gallon tank directly adjacent to a densely populated working class neighborhood in one of the most expensive and overcrowded regions of the United States? Why have years of regulatory citations and settlements not produced safe storage conditions? And who, if not the workers, renters, disabled, elderly and children now sleeping in cars and evacuation shelters, bears the cost of corporate cost-cutting?
8. Japan and the Philippines to deepen military collaboration against China
Under the cover of collaboration and so-called “collective self-defense,” Tokyo is building military networks in the Indo-Pacific through agreements with nations like the Philippines.
The proposed AEU agreement in the state of Victoria amounts to a further real pay cut, does nothing to address crushing workloads or class sizes and strips educators of the right to strike until 2030.
10. New York subway and bus workers enter second week without contract, as MTA demands austerity
The claim that there is “no money” to meet transit workers’ demands is absurd in New York City, the center of the global economy and the richest city in the world. In reality, trillions are hoarded by Wall Street firms. The MTA’s position amounts to a refusal to accept even the most microscopic concessions to workers, indicating that the contract struggle is a fight of the working class against inequality and the power of the financial oligarchy.
The Nexteer rebellion is the concentrated expression of decades of betrayal by the UAW bureaucracy, breaking to the surface across the entire auto parts sector.
12. Beef Season 2: “The people in charge have made it impossible for us”
Series creator, co-director and co-writer Lee Sung Jin makes the pressures of capitalism and class society a persistent theme and source of crises in the series.
13. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Brazil:
Canada:
Ecuador:
Mexico:
Puerto Rico:
United States:
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.
