Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
This five-part series examines the politics of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya, its defence of the Stalinist-Maoist theory of the National Democratic Revolution and its opposition to Trotskyism.
2. Brazil: São Paulo university strike: 10,000 march on governor’s palace in largest demonstration yet
As 10,000 marched in São Paulo, pseudo-left leaderships steered the strike toward negotiations with a state government and a legislature dominated by the far right.
The evacuation orders were lifted Tuesday night, but many residents face financial hardship and worry that the danger from chemical exposures, or a future explosion, has not yet passed.
Workers warned for years as management ignored failing tanks and Teamsters Local 952 buried grievances to preserve labor peace.
5. Right-wing German expellee gathering in the Czech Republic: A political provocation
For the first time, the “Sudeten German Day” gathering took place in Brno, in the Czech Republic, rather than Germany. Following the Second World War ethnic Germans, many of whom had supported the Nazis, were expelled from the former Czechoslovakia. This year’s event served as a political provocation amidst the growing militarization and eastward expansion of German imperialism.
6. Trump weaponizes public health as Ebola epidemic expands
As Ebola deaths surpass 250, the Trump administration has responded not with resources but with border control orders and offshore quarantine camps for American citizens.
7. ICE brutalizes protesters at detention center in New Jersey as detainees go on hunger strike
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers pepper-sprayed dozens of protesters, including Senator Andy Kim, a Democrat from New Jersey, during a protest at the Delaney Hall prison in Newark, New Jersey, on Monday. ICE agents manhandled tackled, restrained, or physically pinned to the ground other protesters in the immediate vicinity as they sought to push ICE vehicles though a crowd.
The protest, which had begun during the weekend, was a show of support for 300 immigrant detainees who are waging a hunger and labor strike. Monday’s attack marked a sharp escalation in ICE’s response and reflected President Donald Trump’s refusal to tolerate opposition to his fascistic program.
Kim and Governor Mikie Sherrill, also a Democrat, visited Delaney Hall on Monday morning amid the protests. Sherrill previously had contacted the federal government to demand access to the prison but was refused entry when she arrived. She spoke to at least one detainee through a video call before leaving the site.
Kim briefly addressed a crowd of protesters outside the prison. “Right now, I’m trying to have them not point guns at us,” he said, referring to the ICE agents. A confrontation between the protesters and the ICE agents soon developed, and Kim attempted to broker a compromise. He asked ICE to withdraw some of its tactical teams and allow immigrant advocates to inspect cars that were leaving the facility to see whether detainees were being transported.
But ICE agents soon began pushing the crowd backward, firing pepper balls and arresting protesters. When Kim inserted himself between the armed thugs and the protesters, he was struck by an unknown object and caught in a cloud of pepper spray. He soon had trouble breathing and reported that his lungs were burning. He received medical attention on the spot. After the incident, he said feebly, “It’s sad, it’s a sad day.”
In contrast, federal officials unleashed an extraordinary torrent of bile. Federal officials slandered the protesters as “agitators” and claimed that detainees were receiving food, water and medical care and being allowed to communicate with family and lawyers. The agency denied that a hunger strike was taking place.
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The hunger and labor strike of 300 immigrant detainees at Delaney Hall began on May 22 in opposition to torture and inhumane treatment. The immigrants are demanding that prisoners not facing charges for violent crimes should be released and asserting that immigration judges are ignoring their cases. They deny having committed such crimes and say that dangerous conditions in their home countries drove them to enter the United States.
In phone calls to protesters outside the prison, the immigrants described finding live worms in their food, being kept in crowded rooms without air conditioning, receiving poor medical care and being denied bond. They assert that these measures are attempts to coerce them to “self-deport.”
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Delaney Hall is a 1,000-bed private immigration detention center that opened little more than a year ago. The GEO Group, which has a documented history of abuses, operates it on behalf of the US government. One immigrant died at Delaney Hall after being held for about one day.
Kim is not the first federal lawmaker or Democrat to be attacked by ICE while visiting the prison. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested at the jail last year, and Representative LaMonica McIver, who tried to prevent the arrest, was later charged with two felony counts and one misdemeanor count of assaulting, resisting, impeding and interfering with a federal officer.
The kidnapping, torture and summary deportation of immigrants are part of a broader attack on the fundamental rights of the entire working class. The foreign policy counterpart to this attack includes the criminal war against Iran, which could resume at any moment, and the preparations for a confrontation with China, which is the prime economic rival of US imperialism. This violence is necessitated by the severe crisis of the global capitalist economy, which threatens the dominance of the American ruling class.
Kim, Sherrill, Menendez and other Democrats have criticized the inhumane conditions at Delaney Hall while taking no effective action to stop it. Near the beginning of her term, Sherrill banned ICE agents from using state property as a staging area and signed a law prohibiting ICE agents from wearing masks in public. These measures have no bearing on the squalor in which immigrants are detained, and the Trump administration sued New Jersey in federal court to block their implementation. If the administration loses its case, it will simply defy the court’s decision, as it does routinely.
Moreover, these Democrats’ own histories demonstrate that they and their party are incapable of defending democratic rights or fighting fascism. Kim and Sherrill are among those the World Socialist Web Site has exposed as CIA Democrats: representatives of the military-intelligence apparatus who have migrated into the top ranks of the Democratic Party. Both were first elected to Congress from New Jersey in 2018, with Kim winning a Senate seat in 2024 and Sherrill elected governor in 2025.
Kim served as a US State Department adviser to General David Petraeus and General John R. Allen in Afghanistan. He later advised President Barack Obama on national security and was complicit in the latter’s illegal wars in Syria and Libya. In Congress, Kim has supported the NATO proxy war against Russia and refused to call Israel’s systematic mass murder of Palestinians a genocide.
Sherrill served as a helicopter pilot and Russian policy officer during her nine-year career in the US Navy. In the House of Representatives, she supported the war in Ukraine and met and was photographed with members of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in her home district.
Kim and Sherrill have spent their careers facilitating the bloody, decades-long rampage of US imperialism. Like their colleagues in both parties, they fully support Trump’s war on the working class and war crimes abroad. Their intervention at Delaney Hall was an attempt to contain mass public anger and to urge that the interests of American finance capital be defended through less inflammatory methods. The Trump administration’s response was a blast of pepper spray.
The Rouge Workers Rank-and-File Committee at Ford Dearborn Truck Plant and a retired GM worker have issued statements of support for the Nexteer workers.
9. The SpaceX IPO: Speculation on steroids
The launching of the initial public offering (IPO) of Elon Musk’s SpaceX company is a graphic expression of a process which is at the very center of the US economy and its financial system.
The aim of the IPO, for which Musk presented a 200,000-word prospectus last week, is the siphoning up of still more financial wealth into the hands of an oligarchy of which Musk is one of the foremost representatives.
As a result of the IPO, which according to reports is set for June 12 and will be the largest in history if it goes ahead, Musk, already the world’s richest man with $500 billion, will become the world’s first trillionaire.
The IPO is being backed by the biggest names in the US financial system. Some 23 financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, which has taken the lucrative “lead” position, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, JPMorgan and BofA Securities, are underwriting the launch.
If it goes ahead as planned, the SpaceX launch will raise around $80 billion, more than three times the previous record for an IPO, which was the $25.6 billion for Saudi oil company Aramco in 2019.
The launch of SpaceX is of an entirely speculative character, based not on what Musk-owned companies are making today—they are recording significant losses in a number of areas—but on what he is touting they will make in the future.
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Underscoring the speculative charter of the IPO, the Financial Times commented that the finances of SpaceX today “are of no use in trying to work out what the company is worth.” At a valuation estimated to $1.75 to $2 trillion, it would be the stock market’s seventh biggest company, but based on its revenue of $19 billion would be the 200th.
This has not stemmed the flow of financial support—no one wants to be missing out.
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The structure of the company is aimed at giving Musk not only enormous wealth but unprecedented control over its operations. He will hold a special class of shares that will give him 85 percent of the voting power. This is well in excess of the founder control rights which already exist in many Silicon Valley companies.
A comment in the FT by Sujeet Indap, headlined, “SpaceX to drive a cyber truck through corporate governance norms,” cited a statement by three major public pension funds, which play an increasingly important role in financial markets.
They characterized the Space governance structure as “the most management-favorable governance structure ever brought to the US public markets at this scale.”
Under its rules, Musk will be able to appoint a majority of the SpaceX board and will not be able to be removed as chief executive without his consent. It will also be very difficult for ordinary shareholders to pursue litigation. In other words, while listed as a public company on NASDAQ, enabling its shares to be bought by major investors and Exchange Traded Funds, it will be public in name only and will operate as the private fiefdom of Musk.
If the SpaceX IPO goes ahead as planned, it will likely be followed by OpenAI and Anthropic and could well see other firms “going public.” This has brought warnings that the flow of capital into these ventures could drain the market, leading to a downturn in other areas. FT columnist Tej Parikh has noted that “history suggests that the issuance buzz may in fact mark the beginning of the end of the rally.”
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Besides illustrating the way in which the US economy and financial system have become a machine for funneling wealth into the hands of a tiny financial oligarchy, the SpaceX phenomenon expresses the vast changes in the political superstructure.
Finance capital, as the Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding noted in 1910 as its rise was beginning, demands vast changes in this arena. It is intensely hostile to liberal democracy. “Finance capital does not want freedom but domination,” he wrote. The ideal now, he continued, “is to secure for one’s own nation the domination of the world, an aspiration which is as unbounded as the capitalist lust for profit from which it springs.”
In the case of Musk, that lust now extends to outer space.
Politically Musk is a fascist hell-bent on suppressing all opposition to his speculative profit accumulation, above all from the working class which must be suppressed by all means necessary, as his history shows. But he is the personification of a social process.
The confirmed death toll from the Longview paper mill disaster rose to two Wednesday, with nine workers still inside the wrecked facility presumed dead.
11. May 29 general strike in Italy: What way forward for the working class?
To defeat Meloni, workers striving for political independence from the union bureaucracy and the parliamentary parties must be deepened through the establishment of rank-and-file committees.
12. Trump-backed fascist wins Texas Republican primary
Paxton was viewed as a problematic candidate by Senate Republicans and their corporate backers. He was the subject of a long-running corruption investigation and was actually impeached by the Republican-controlled state assembly. He survived only because the state Senate failed to reach the two-thirds vote required to convict him.
What endeared him to Trump was his leading role in the Republican campaign to steal the 2020 election. Paxton was one of a handful of Republican elected officials who joined Trump in addressing the January 6, 2021, rally outside the White House, which preceded the attack by a fascist mob on the US Capitol.
Paxton spearheaded the effort by Republican state attorneys general to have the electoral votes of “battleground” states like Pennsylvania handed over to Trump. He was the lead plaintiff in a suit that was tossed out by the Supreme Court on a 9-0 vote, without a single justice, including the three appointed by Trump, agreeing that Texas could interfere in the elections conducted by another state.
The Texas attorney general is also notorious for his leading role in the bullying of abortion providers and women seeking abortions and his open demonization of Muslims and other minorities. He also sought to take over election administration in Houston, peddling Trump’s baseless and racist claims of widespread voter fraud in heavily minority areas.
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Paxton will now face the Democratic nominee, state legislator James Talarico, in November in what is certain to be the most expensive Senate campaign in US history. Talarico raised $27 million in the first quarter alone, allowing him to swamp his primary rival, Representative Jasmine Crockett. Polling on the general election, still five months away, suggests a close contest.
Talarico has emphasized his religious background as a former seminarian who is comfortable appealing to Christian fundamentalists and other right-wing supporters of Trump and the Republican Party.
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Particular note should be taken of the outcome of the statewide vote for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, which contrary to its name is actually responsible for regulating oil pipelines and the drilling of oil wells. Incumbent Republican Jim Wright was defeated by Bo French, chairman of the Tarrant County (Fort Worth) Republican Party.
French had the backing of Paxton and hosted vigilante gunman Kyle Rittenhouse at a campaign rally, while Wright had the support of both Governor Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, an even more right-wing figure.
French campaigned as the representative of smaller, independent oil drillers whose interests diverge from the large global oil giants. But his main focus was a vitriolic anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant campaign that amounted to incitement of genocide. He called for deporting 100 million people from the United States—nearly a third of the entire population.
He vilified the incumbent as “Jihadi Jim,” claiming that Wright had supported a Saudi company, which was responsible for the water pollution crisis in Corpus Christi that forced residents to use bottled water for weeks. Last year, French posted a poll asking Fort Worth Republicans to weigh in on whether Jews or Muslims posed a “bigger threat” to the United States. He also described Texas mosques as “training centers” for people “to rape your wife and daughter.”
This gutter Nazi will now be the favorite to win a six-year seat on the panel that regulates the oil industry in the largest oil-producing state.
13. Mine disaster exposes grim reality facing Chinese workers
The tragic deaths of at least 82 workers in last Friday’s gas explosion at the Liushenyu Coal Mine in Shanxi Province has exposed the brutal face of capitalist exploitation in China. Details slowly emerging from official investigations point to systematic flouting of safety regulations in mines in the drive for production and profit.
The state-owned Xinhua news agency has revealed that the privately-owned mine operated by the Shanxi Tongzhou Coal Group had “hidden” shafts mined by outsourced and unregistered contractors. Of the 247 workers in the mine at the time of the explosion, 123, or nearly half, were not carrying mandated location trackers and were not logged as being underground, which can only indicate large-scale and unsafe illegal operations.
Mining corporations such as the Shanxi Tongzhou Coal Group resort to such methods to evade regulations that place upper limits set for each mine on production and the number of miners on any shift. By doing so, the mine owners not only increase output, which is sold illegally, but also avoid taxes on coal extraction. The hidden shafts are, of course, not subject to the same safety requirements as other areas of the mine.
In the case of the Liushenyu Coal Mine, management maintained two separate sets of mine plans—known colloquially in Chinese as “yin-yang drawings”—a false one for inspectors to examine and the actual mine blueprint needed for daily operations that was kept hidden.
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The only reason that what are undoubtedly widespread unsafe practices have come to light is because of the scale of the tragedy at the Liushenyu mine. It simply could not be hushed up at the local level, and given the potential for widespread public outrage and anger, President Xi Jinping decided to step in with what will inevitably be a more sophisticated cover-up.
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Like governments and their various agencies globally in the face of terrible disasters, the Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy is putting on a show of concern and ordering investigations and inspections whose primary purpose is to identify convenient scapegoats while leaving the underlying processes of capitalist exploitation and profiteering intact.
A final point needs to be made about the grim reality facing workers in China, as revealed by the Liushenyu mine disaster. The official annual death toll in the country’s coal mines has dramatically fallen over the past decade from thousands to a few hundred. It is certainly true that the introduction of sophisticated 5G technology and automated systems as well as the closure of small, illegal mines have been factors.
However, if half of the workforce at the Liushenyu mine can be compelled to work unregistered in unregulated hidden shafts, and the practice is widespread in the coal industry, then how many other deaths have not been included in the official toll? How many workers not on the company books, bodies buried in disused shafts or elsewhere, and co-workers bullied into silence?
14. Tony Abbott to become Australian Liberal Party president in further lurch to right
Abbott’s ascendancy signals that the Liberals are moving towards an openly far-right pitch, in a bid to stem their existential crisis and to compete with the fascistic One Nation.
15. WSWS speaks to Australian disability advocate Megan Spindler-Smith on Labor’s NDIS cuts
“If you don’t get access to support at the right age, during pivotal periods of mental and physical development, it can have long-term effects, including increased psychosocial disability and mental health challenges.”
16. Unifor names Ford as its pattern-setting “partner” for auto contracts in Canada
Autoworkers will not be surprised at the amicable business relationship the auto bosses and the union enjoy at their expense. They know from bitter experience over the past four decades that the Unifor bureaucracy (and its predecessor in the Canadian Autoworkers/CAW) has no interest in defending their jobs or working conditions. Rather their overriding concern is working with management and the state to ensure that the automakers turn a handsome profit in Canada and that they can maintain a steady stream of dues income to finance their bloated salaries and expense accounts.
Since 1985 when union officials split from the UAW in order to launch a nationalist CAW that has allowed the auto bosses to pit American workers against their class brothers and sisters in Canada by whipsawing concession contracts back and forth across the border, nine Detroit Three assembly and engine plants in Canada have been closed with tens of thousands of jobs eliminated. For decades, concession contracts have been the order of the day in union-company contract negotiations in the US and in Canada. An inferior and divisive two-tier wages and benefits system has been institutionalized, the defined pension plan eliminated, eight-hour-day and overtime work rules obliterated, and line speed-ups increased. Low-wage temporary part-time positions have proliferated even as the pockets of the auto executives and shareholders continue to bulge.
Workers will not soon forget how Unifor, in line with its nationalist-corporatist perspective, worked overtime in 2023 to keep Canadian workers separate from their colleagues at the Detroit Three in the United States who faced nearly simultaneous contract expirations for the first time in decades. This found expression in Payne’s repeated declarations that the union was “charting our own course.” To further impede joint action by US and Canadian workers, Unifor negotiated three-year contracts while the UAW agreed to a four-year deal, thereby decoupling the contract expiration in Canada and the US for years to come.
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Workers are bearing the brunt of the global restructuring drive, which corporate bosses are carrying out with the connivance of union bureaucracies in Europe and North America. Governments around the world are systematically orchestrating the transformation of civilian industry to military production, while the conflicts between the imperialist powers to secure markets, raw materials and strategic influence are compelling sweeping cuts to auto production.
Unifor’s strategy, both long-term—i.e. the nationalist-corporatist course it pursued through and since the split—and in response to the need to “decarbonize” has produced a disaster. Union officials claimed they had secured a place for Canadian capitalism in the emerging global electric vehicle industry, by closely collaborating with the auto bosses, and the federal Liberal and Ontario Progressive Conservative governments. They offered up concessions and shilled for subsidies, only to have the rug pulled out from underneath them by Trump’s trade war and removal of EV incentives and subsidies.
Unifor’s response has been to double down on its nationalist-protectionist program and integrate itself even more with the Canadian state. In the name of defending “Canadian jobs,” it advocates Canada aggressively pursue trade war against China and the US, while seeking to convince the automakers to retain production and make investments by pointing to the profitability of their Canadian operations, due to years of concessions and “downsizing.”
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The critical lesson to be drawn from this entire experience, which follows the same pattern of the past four decades, is that only in a rebellion against the union bureaucracy to place power in the hands of workers on the shop floor can autoworkers wage a genuine struggle for their demands. This struggle necessitates the building of rank-and-file committees at every plant, and the unification of Canadian autoworkers with their class brothers and sisters in the US and Mexico in a joint struggle against the profit-hungry, internationally mobile auto giants.
Already, the struggle to build rank and file committees among autoworkers has taken root in auto assembly and parts plants in the United States. This fight is best exemplified in the campaign of Will Lehman for the presidency of the United Autoworkers in the membership vote to be held later this year. A rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker from Pennsylvania, Lehman is running in the UAW on a socialist program to abolish the union bureaucracy and place power back in the hands of workers on the shop floor.
Lehman opposes the nationalist-protectionist policies of both the UAW and Unifor, which divide workers, for the benefit of the auto bosses, and corral then behind their “own” governments in trade war and the developing global war.
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The sign says: "Peace for the world! Down with war!"
