Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
This four-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.
What is unfolding across Sheffield is a concentrated expression of a broader, 15-year assault on higher education, accelerated under the Starmer Labour government.
Workers do not need better union leaders — they need independent organizations of their own, built in opposition to the bureaucracy, fighting for a socialist program against the billionaire ownership class and the capitalist state that enables it.
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UK postal workers at Royal Mail — recently taken over by Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky's EP Group — are voting on a new work agreement. The union leadership, represented by the CWU (Communication Workers Union) deputy general secretary Martin Walsh, is trying to pressure workers into voting Yes to what is effectively a management restructuring plan. The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee is calling for a No vote and explaining why Walsh's arguments are not genuine negotiations — they are blackmail.
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The agreement at the heart of this dispute — rebranded as "DM26" — requires three workers to do the work previously done by four, slashing jobs by 25% while intensifying workloads on those who remain. New workers receive a near-insulting 1.75% pay raise that leaves them close to minimum wage, without paid meal breaks. More established workers get a 3% raise — below inflation — meaning a real pay cut. The deal also ties any future cost-of-living adjustments to further "reforms," i.e., more job cuts and heavier workloads down the road.
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The restructuring of Royal Mail is not a uniquely British story. Everywhere, the privatization of public services, the push toward gig-economy employment (Kretinsky's vision is essentially to turn postal work into Amazon-style contractor exploitation), and the role of union bureaucracies in managing — rather than resisting — this decline are common features of global capitalism in crisis. The CWU leadership's accusation that No voters are being manipulated by unnamed "political parties" with an "agenda" is the same smear used by union bureaucrats the world over against workers who fight back.
4. Global warming is heating rivers, endangering human food supplies
More than two-thirds of all farmed aquatic species (such as carp, tilapia and catfish) are freshwater species. These facilities rely heavily on river systems for water, nutrients and feed, making rivers foundational for about half of all fish consumed worldwide.
Riverine species are critical lifelines for indigenous communities and developing nations. In parts of Asia and Africa, populations rely on these species for more than half of their animal protein. They also provide vital micronutrients—like iron, zinc and omega-3 fatty acids—that are difficult to get from strictly land-based diets.
This is not to mention the use of river water for irrigation agriculture. The availability of river water for this purpose is becoming increasingly problematic as global warming causes more frequent and persistent droughts.
With global warming resulting from the uncontrolled emissions of greenhouse gases, global weather patterns are becoming increasingly extreme and unpredictable.
Unless urgent and concerted efforts are made to rapidly lower greenhouse gas emissions, the loss of riverine resources will inevitably result in mass population displacements with drastic social, economic political consequences. Capitalism demonstrates clearly and on a daily basis that is incapable of mounting such an effort. Only the working class, armed with a socialist program, can avert an otherwise catastrophic future.
5. Nexteer workers: Vote NO! Prepare to walk out! The fight is ours to win!
In a statement that deserves the attention and solidarity of every worker in the auto industry and beyond, the Nexteer Workers Rank-and-File Committee urges the 1,300 workers at the Saginaw, Michigan auto-parts manufacturing plant to:
Reject the Third Sellout, Strike Without Delay because:
The Contract Is a Fraud
The UAW Bureaucracy Is the Enemy
Workers Have Already Disproved the "Best We Can Get" Lie
Workers Are Not Alone — A Parts Industry Uprising Is Possible
The Rank-and-File Must Lead
6. US warplanes fly over Caracas in provocative show of semi-colonial dominance
On Saturday morning at approximately 10:00 a.m., two enormous Boeing MV-22B Osprey military cargo planes flew provocatively low over the Venezuelan capital before landing at the U.S. Embassy. The warplanes delivered a large group of troops and Gen. Francis L. Donovan, head of the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which oversees Pentagon operations across Central and South America.
While ostensibly a visit to hold talks with leaders of the US puppet regime and to conduct an emergency response drill at the Embassy compound, the show of force was aimed squarely at intimidation and demonstrating who is in control. Top generals and warplanes can land and depart as though the country were a military outpost on US soil.
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The Saturday flyover directly revived the trauma Caracas suffered during Operation Absolute Resolve on January 3, a brutal predawn military assault openly aimed at seizing Venezuelan oil. That morning, high-rises and the city center trembled as helicopters dropped troops, the Presidential Guard was annihilated, and President Nicolás Maduro was seized with his wife Cilia Flores from his compound and flown out of the country. At least seven explosions ripped across northern Venezuela, with strikes on military infrastructure, including the Generalissimo Francisco de Miranda Air Base, Fort Tiuna, Higuerote Airport and La Guaira port, while a blackout across southern Caracas cloaked the operation.
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Protesters connected to Chavismo and the pseudo-left demonstrated in several sectors of Caracas against the US military drill. A university professor among them declared: “We have been in a state of war from the moment they bombed us.” Another protester warned: “We are practically already under tutelage— perhaps tomorrow we will be a colony.”
In fact, the Trump administration now exercises comprehensive political, economic, judicial and military control over Venezuela. The Pentagon is now using Venezuela as a forward base overseeing the Caribbean as the Trump administration escalates preparations for a military assault against Cuba and continues Operation Southern Spear—the bombing of 59 fishing boats, killing nearly 200 people in Latin American waters since September, on baseless charges of drug trafficking.
Venezuelan oil proceeds flow directly into U.S. Treasury accounts to be administered by Washington. Military control over Venezuelan territory is openly demonstrated. Social austerity is being enforced by Wall Street firms.
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Leon Trotsky’s analysis of the 1930s semi-colonial world contains a grave warning to workers as the Trump administration moves to recolonize the region.
In 1938, Trotsky explained that fascism in Latin America is not the expression of an aggressive domestic imperialism, as in Germany or Italy, but rather “the expression of the most servile dependence on foreign imperialism.” The ruling clique is the instrument to smash any independence of the working class that could block the extraction of profits by Wall Street. This is the logic that is being followed by the Rodriguez regime.
“The ascending national bourgeoisie cannot launch a serious struggle against imperialist domination out of fear of unleashing a mass movement that would in turn threaten their own social existence,” Trotsky wrote. Instead, the bourgeoisie, structurally incapable of independence, must suppress the proletariat in order to guarantee the “stability” demanded by its imperialist overlords.
The Chavistas and their bourgeois nationalist allies Lula da Silva in Brazil, Sheinbaum in Mexico and Petro in Colombia have now completed that arc as they accommodate to Trump. Having spent two decades dressing the management of a capitalist petro-state in the language of “anti-imperialism” and “socialism,” the Chavistas have surrendered the country to Wall Street, while already turning their riot police on workers demanding higher wages in Caracas.
The workers of Venezuela and across Latin America face not a series of local crises but a single, internationally coordinated offensive of imperialism directed from Washington and enforced by regional proxies to impose neo-colonial shackles and social misery. No bourgeois nationalist leadership or trade union bureaucracy will defend workers against this offensive—Those forces are its transmission belts for imperialist domination.
The answer to Trump’s dreams of a “Greater North America” and hemispheric hegemony is the revolutionary unity of workers across the entire Americas, including those in the United States itself, fighting to end capitalist exploitation and to establish the United Socialist States of the Americas.
7. Israel escalates rampage in Lebanon
Israeli forces struck Lebanon with more than 120 air raids on Tuesday, the sharpest single-day escalation since Israel resumed its bombing of the country in early March. The Lebanese health ministry said at least 31 people were killed and 40 wounded in attacks across the south and the Bekaa Valley.
The ongoing destruction of Lebanon takes place within the framework of the US-Israeli war on Iran launched February 28. While the US media is focused on the terms of negotiations with Iran, Israel is expanding its campaign of mass murder and annexation in Lebanon. The bombing extends the US-Israeli onslaught across the region that began in October 2023 with the genocide in Gaza.
Israeli forces killed fourteen people in the overnight bombing of Burj al-Shamali, including two children and three women. At Mashghara in the Bekaa Valley, Israeli strikes killed 11, including a woman and two children. They killed five at Kawthariyat al-Ruz and four at Habboush, with two children among the dead at each.
The Lebanese health ministry put the cumulative toll since Israel resumed its bombardment of the country on March 2 at 3,213 dead and 9,737 wounded. The World Health Organization has recorded 608 killed in Lebanon since the cease-fire that took effect April 16.
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US President Donald Trump is moving, meanwhile, to make normalization with Israel a central war aim. In a Truth Social post over the weekend he wrote that he was “mandatorily requesting that all Countries immediately sign the Abraham Accords,” naming Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan.
The escalation in Lebanon coincides with a deepening crisis within the US political establishment over the Trump administration’s negotiations with Iran. Democrats joined Republicans across the Sunday morning talk shows in attacking Trump from the right, denouncing his prospective Iran deal as insufficiently advantageous to US imperialism.
Senator Cory Booker told CNN Sunday that Trump was “being played as a fool.” “He’s got us in a situation that’s worse than it was before.” The United States, Booker told CNN, had “let go of billions of dollars” in negotiations to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program. Giving Iran more money, he warned, would enable Tehran to “fuel their terrorist proxies.”
The commentary being published in the US media reflects the air of desperate crisis facing US imperialism. Thomas Friedman in the New York Times asked on Tuesday “How Much Crow Will Trump Have to Eat on Iran?” “Only two questions remain regarding the U.S. war with Iran,” Friedman wrote. “One, how big a plate of crow will President Trump have to eat to end this conflict with at least some achievements? And two, will he tell us the crow he’s eating is lobster or filet mignon?”
Bret Stephens, in a Times column Tuesday, made the case for escalating the war regardless of cost. “Heed the words of Robert Frost,” he wrote: “The best way out is always through.” Stephens called for the US to “destroy a facility of military significance to the regime pending a material Iranian concession, and make good on the threat. The next day, two targets, and so on.”
The Wall Street Journal published an editorial Tuesday titled “Iran’s ‘Skirmish’ Strategy in the Strait,” charging that Hezbollah had fired “more than 900 rockets and 1,300 drones since the April 17 Lebanon ‘cease-fire’ began” and demanding “decisive U.S. or Israeli action” to “reverse the dynamic.”
American imperialism, confronted with crises it has no answer to, can only escalate its effort to secure global hegemony through military means. Whatever agreement is made with Iran, if any, will follow the pattern of the 2025 Gaza cease-fire and the Lebanon cease-fires of November 2024 and April 2026, each of which opened the way for a deeper offensive.
8. Industrial slaughter in Washington: 1 dead, 9 missing after chemical tank implosion at paper mill
At least one worker is dead and nine remain missing after a massive chemical tank ruptured at Nippon Dynawave, a Washington paper mill with a record of safety and environmental violations.
9. Worker killed, dozens of firefighters injured in Staten Island shipyard fire and explosion
Xiaoyuan Li, an immigrant worker, was killed and dozens of firefighters injured when fire and explosions tore through the May Ship Repair shipyard in Mariners Harbor, Staten Island.
10. Report reveals impact of Australian school crisis on principals
An Australian Catholic University report on the well-being of school principals points to intolerable conditions.
11. Enough is Enough: Catastrophe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
“Enough is Enough!”–it’s true. But this has to be directed toward the central problem: world imperialism, which needs to be overthrown as rapidly as possible, by the international working class. The present system spells catastrophe, and not only in the DRC.
12. Cargill locks out Colorado beef plant, as struggles of meatpacking workers intensify
The lockout followed an overwhelming rejection of the last contract offer by 85 percent.
The near-disaster comes as the Trump administration is calling for an unprecedented 50 percent increase in the annual military budget to $1.5 trillion.
Over 40,000 New York City subway and bus workers face serious MTA austerity demands — below-inflation raises, higher insurance costs, and restrictions on overtime and sick leave — but the biggest obstacle to their struggle is not the MTA itself. It is the Transit Workers Union (TWU) bureaucracy.
15. Measles outbreak in Bangladesh kills over 500 children
The death and suffering of children from a preventable disease is a political indictment of policies that have prioritized profits over universal public health.
16. Australia: NT laws to permit police interrogation of children without legal guardian
These laws are the latest escalation in a bipartisan offensive to essentially criminalize the poverty, chronic housing shortages and lack of secure employment that Australian capitalism has inflicted upon many working people, particularly Indigenous people.
17. Mine disaster in China: Another tragedy in the global industrial slaughterhouse
The mine explosion is another graphic example of the dangers facing miners and other workers around the world as their lives and health are subordinated to the rapacious corporate drive for profit.
18. Students and workers in Germany demand the release of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk
For Bonn student Jonas, the case has immediate significance for Germany: “Bogdan’s struggle for the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian working class poses a threat not only from the perspective of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie but also for German imperialism, as it shows workers in this country a real way to stop the current development of war. Therefore, all workers who oppose the war against Russia should campaign for his liberation.”
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.
