Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: May 11-17
- 25 years ago:
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
Battle of Soyang River in Korean War
100 years ago:
2. Starmer’s antisemitism summit deepens right-wing slander campaign against the left and Muslims
The stabbing of three men on April 29, of which two were Jewish and one Muslim, by a mentally ill man has been used by the Labour government to declare a national emergency over antisemitism.
Starmer organized a summit at Downing Street Monday calling for a “whole of society response” before an audience of “leaders from the business, civil society, health, culture, higher education and policing sectors”. Among these were trade union officials. The media has put its shoulder to the wheel of the campaign to present British society as in the grip of runaway hatred against Jews.
This is a right-wing campaign, pressing the same buttons used to attack former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Similar attacks are already being ramped up against Green Party leader Zack Polanski.
Left-wing, anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist sentiment is to be intimidated and criminalized by associating it with the crime of antisemitism. Running through the whole affair is a barely disguised Islamophobia.
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Slander on the scale now being mounted by the government and the media is preparation for sweeping political repression. No area of life went unmentioned in Starmer’s opening speech Monday, promising a host of measures to combat alleged antisemitism.
They included “stronger powers to deal with protests, ensuring intimidation is not tolerated on our streets” and “working to speed up sentencing for offenses”.
The government had also “commissioned independent reviews into antisemitism in education and health services”, investing £7 million “to tackle antisemitism” in “our schools, colleges and universities”. Starmer added that “We will now expect them to publish the scale of the problem on their campuses, as well as the specific steps they have taken to clamp down on it.”
In “cultural venues and spaces”, where “public funding is being used to promote or platform antisemitism, the Arts Council must act, using its powers to suspend, withdraw and claw back funding”. The government would be “stopping those who spread hatred from entering the country and giving the Charity Commission stronger powers to act against organizations that enable it”.
Recent years, especially those of Israel’s genocide, have already shown what this means. Protests have been rerouted and cancelled, and thousands of protesters arrested—including under counter-terror laws in connection with the proscription of Palestine Action.
An “Index of Repression” set up by The European Legal Support Centre (ELSC) and Forensic Architecture records 964 instances of repression against pro-Palestinian speech and protest in the UK between January 2019 and August 2025. Regular targets already include students, teachers and academics, public sector workers and cultural figures.
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As in France, the Labour government’s campaign is carried out in alliance with the most right-wing forces. Depictions of Islam as a fifth column threatening “British values” dovetail with fascist conspiracy theories of the “Great Replacement” of Christian whites with Muslims.
This line-up was made clear when Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch openly defended seeking a ban of an upcoming demonstration commemorating the Nakba (the mass expulsion of the Palestinians by Israel) while refusing to do the same for a far-right march planned the same day.
They were, she said, “not the same”. Tommy Robinson, a self-proclaimed Zionist, and his band of Islamophobic fascists were engaging in legitimate “criticism of religion”, whereas with anti-genocide protesters: “It’s not the faith that’s being attacked, it’s the people.”
As before, Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” march will see a forest of Union Flags and St George’s Crosses interspersed with Israeli state flags—an accurate reflection of the political company the Israeli government keeps.
An International Conference on Combating Antisemitism held in Jerusalem last March was attended by leading representatives of the far-right French National Rally, Brothers of Italy, Spanish Vox, Sweden Democrats, Dutch Freedom Party and Hungarian Fidesz, plus Argentina’ Javier Milei. Robinson himself was welcomed in October.
It is revolting to be lectured to by these people on antisemitism. They are racist representatives of the nationalist sewer which spawned all the horrific ethnic violence of the 20th century, fought against by the socialist working class and the Marxist movement.
As David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, explained in his lecture series “The Logic of Zionism”:
Zionism, which emerged as an offspring of imperialist colonialism and as an enemy of socialism and a scientific conception of history and society, necessarily based itself on the most reactionary elements of nationalist politics and ideology.
The socialist left rejects with contempt the campaign to malign and criminalize it by people responsible for the historic crime of waging genocide in the name of the Jewish people, for the rise in antisemitism which has resulted and for boosting the Islamophobic far-right.
Starmer is providing his support to these reactionary ends by cracking down on democratic rights in the name of combating antisemitism. He must be opposed.
3. Bosch to eliminate 1,400 jobs in Türkiye
Bosch's plan to cut 1,400 jobs at a facility in Turkey, in addition to the 22,000 job cuts at its facilities in Germany, raises the need for workers to organize an international fightback.
4. Extradition requests for top politicians deepen US-Mexico crisis
Late last week, the Mexican government of President Claudia Sheinbaum was slapped with an extradition request from Washington D.C. for ten prominent politicos from the central Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, including the state’s governor, Rubén Rocha, and its sole federal senator, Enrique Inzunza Cázares.
This came a week on the heels of revelations that CIA agents, without the federal government’s knowledge, were operating in the northern border state of Chihuahua, in direct violation of Mexico’s constitution and sovereignty.
Rocha is a senior member of Sheinbaum’s ruling “left-wing” Morena (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional) party, as are the other nine serving and former politicians and security chiefs who are also subject of the extradition requests.
If Sheinbaum complies, she risks opening the floodgates to more US extradition requests, and fissures in her party. If she doesn’t, she risks aggression from an increasingly unhinged Trump administration.
5. Nexteer auto parts workers condemn new tentative agreement
Last month, Nexteer auto parts workers in Saginaw, Michigan voted down a tentative agreement presented by the UAW bureaucracy by more than 96 percent. The reaction from the shop floor to a new TA brought by the union last week is broadly one of anger and disgust. Workers who spoke to the World Socialist Web Site this weekend left no doubt where they stood.
The results of the five Indian state and territorial assembly elections announced Monday, May 4, point to a deepening crisis of bourgeois rule and the urgency of arming the working class with a revolutionary socialist program and strategy.
7. Türkiye, the war on Iran and the resurgence of the class struggle
This speech was delivered by Ulaş Sevinç, Chairman of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International), at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the ICFI.
8. Rank-and-file rebellion and the unity of the working class
This speech was delivered by Will Lehman, candidate for president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and member of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the ICFI.
9. Reckless disembarkation of hantavirus-stricken MV Hondius exposes collapse of public health
The recklessness of the operation to evacuate the MV Hondius, anchored off Tenerife in the Canary Islands on Sunday morning, exposed itself before the day was out. As the first French repatriation flight from the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship descended toward Le Bourget airport outside Paris in the late afternoon, one of the five French passengers on board began showing symptoms of infection.
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Just hours earlier, Spanish health authorities and the World Health Organization (WHO) had insisted that every passenger leaving the vessel was asymptomatic and had been screened before being put on a plane. The first French passenger to develop symptoms did so while airborne, in a sealed cabin with four other exposed travelers, on a flight authorized under those very protocols. The operation, in other words, immediately produced precisely the cross-border transmission risk it was supposed to prevent.
This was an entirely predictable outcome of an evacuation governed by political rather than epidemiological logic—a logic that finds its most extreme expression in the response of the Trump administration.
Acting Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director Jay Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration and a primary architect of the “herd immunity” strategy that contributed to more than 1.5 million American COVID-19 deaths, appeared Sunday morning on CNN’s “State of the Union” to assure the public that “this is not COVID, this is not going to have—lead to the kind of outbreak,” while confirming that the US will not require quarantining or contact tracing of Hondius passengers.
The CDC has confirmed it will not quarantine the 17 Americans being flown back from the Hondius and will not test asymptomatic passengers. “We are not quarantining anybody,” a CDC official stated on Saturday, adding that “it is not recommended to test people that do not have symptoms.”
Americans repatriated from a ship on which three passengers have died of a 30-50 percent case-fatality pathogen will be evaluated at the National Quarantine Unit in Nebraska, then permitted to “opt to go home and watch for any potential symptoms for 42 days.” This is not quarantine. It is voluntary symptom self-monitoring of a disease whose prodrome—fever, headache, body aches—is indistinguishable from a common cold. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not held a single press conference on the outbreak, entirely consistent with the administration’s disastrous response to COVID-19 in 2020 and since.
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Spain is holding 14 of its nationals at Gomez-Ulla military hospital with PCR on arrival and again at seven days. Ireland has imposed roughly five weeks of isolation. France is requiring 72 hours of hospitalization followed by 45 days of home quarantine. The 42-day American self-monitoring window is itself scientifically indefensible. Andes virus incubation can extend to 56 days, as multiple published studies confirm. Passengers who develop symptoms in weeks seven and eight will fall outside the CDC’s window entirely.
Officials are also categorically asserting that asymptomatic individuals cannot transmit the virus, which is contrary to the scientific record. The CDC’s own journal Emerging Infectious Diseases concluded in 2005 that “the most probable period of virus spread would be during the days before medical attention is sought.” A 2014 CDC study identified the early prodromal phase—when symptoms are vague and easily missed—as the period of greatest transmission risk. The official assurance to the contrary is propaganda.
The pattern of the past 39 days makes the consequences of this dereliction concrete. On April 24, 13 days after the first fatality, 30 passengers freely disembarked at the remote British territory of Saint Helena with no testing, no disease notification, and no quarantine instructions. Among them was the wife of the index case. Already likely infected, she boarded a commercial flight the following day to Johannesburg and on to Amsterdam, deteriorated mid-flight, and died in a Johannesburg hospital on April 26. A British physician who treated her is now in critical condition in that same hospital. A Swiss passenger from the Saint Helena group tested positive after self-referring to a hospital weeks later.
Earlier, between April 13 and 15, just two days after the first death, the Hondius had anchored at Tristan da Cunha, where passengers and crew mingled freely with local islanders. A British man who boarded at the island is now hospitalized with suspected hantavirus. The island has roughly 250 inhabitants, no hospital, and is accessible only by a six-day boat ride.
The global dispersal of Hondius passengers constitutes a textbook violation of international law. Under the 2005 International Health Regulations, the Maritime Declaration of Health legally obligates the officer in charge of a vessel to notify port authorities immediately upon suspicion of an unusual health event. A man dying of acute febrile respiratory illness five days after departing a known hantavirus-endemic region easily meets that threshold. Yet the World Health Organization was not notified until May 2, 21 days after the initial death.
A highly lethal pathogen with confirmed human-to-human transmission was allowed to disperse to 12 countries before the world was even told it existed. Captain Jan Dobrogowski assured passengers the first death was from natural causes, while Oceanwide Expeditions claimed ignorance of the danger for weeks. What began on April 1 as an expedition for 130 affluent tourists departing Ushuaia has morphed into a global crisis.
10. New York transit and LIRR workers: Build rank-and-file committees—prepare a united strike!
A major class and political confrontation is looming in New York City as labor agreements covering more than 40,000 subway and bus workers expire May 16, the same day a 60-day cooling off period ends for 3,500 Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) workers across five unions. A combined strike against the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) would shut down transit for four million daily subway and bus riders and 300,000 LIRR commuters, bringing the “Capital of Capital” largely to a halt.
Transit workers, many drawn from the city’s massive immigrant population, have played a critical role in the history of the class struggle in New York City. Because of this, the Democratic-controlled political establishment has used anti-strike laws and the trade union bureaucracy to prevent transit workers from spearheading a broader working-class movement against Wall Street’s repeated efforts to impose financial crises on workers’ backs.
LIRR workers have voted overwhelmingly to strike—members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen voted 476 to 5 for strike authorization, with the other four unions voting similarly. On two occasions—September 15, 2025, and mid-January 2026—the union leadership nullified those votes by appealing to the Trump White House to appoint a Presidential Emergency Board. Trump obliged; the MTA rejected the PEB’s findings; nothing was settled; and state and city authorities gained eight months to prepare a strikebreaking operation.
Any strike would immediately pit workers against the Democratic Party, including Governor Kathy Hochul and the city’s social-democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Under the Taylor Law, New York public employees can be fined one day’s pay for every day on strike. LIRR workers fall under the federal Railway Labor Act, long used by both parties to suppress strikes.
There would be enormous public support for transit workers if they defied these anti-democratic laws. Millions are struggling in the metro area: median home prices in Brooklyn are hitting nearly $1 million, average housing costs run $5,500–$7,500 a month, and rents for a two-bedroom apartment reach $3,900–$5,900. To rally this support, rank-and-file transit workers must take the struggle out of the hands of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) and LIRR union leaderships and build independent rank-and-file committees.
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The MTA is demanding workers pay for a fiscal crisis they had no hand in creating. The authority holds approximately $49 billion in long-term bond debt—consuming 15 to 20 percent of its operating budget in debt service to bondholders—accumulated through decades of deliberate underfunding stretching back to the 1970s fiscal crisis.
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In New York State alone, 154 billionaires collectively hold nearly $1 trillion in wealth. Michael Bloomberg, who deployed police against the last transit strike in 2005, holds a personal fortune of $109 billion. Across the US, the largest transit systems have accumulated a $6 billion deficit since pandemic relief money ran out—a pittance compared to the Trump administration’s proposed $1.5 trillion military budget.
Mamdani was elected on promises to tax the rich and deliver free buses. In four months he has dropped the free bus proposal, replaced a wealth tax with a token fee on secondary residences, and is managing a $4.5 billion budget deficit through pension delays and cost-cutting that will fall directly on transit workers. He has made two friendly visits to the Trump White House and endorsed Hochul for re-election.
Hochul, who oversees the MTA, vetoed legislation requiring two-person train crews, handing management a future job-cut weapon. When 15,000 New York City nurses struck earlier this year, she signed executive orders allowing unlicensed scabs to break the strike. She is now openly preparing the same against any LIRR walkout, relying on the TWU bureaucracy to keep city bus drivers off the picket lines.
For subway and bus workers, the MTA has budgeted a provocative 2 percent annual raise—half the city’s 4 percent annual inflation rate as of March 2026. TWU Local 100 officials have filed 37 contract demands but refused to put specific numbers behind their call for “substantial” raises.
The five LIRR unions have already conceded the same 9.5 percent over three years accepted by other MTA unions and are now asking 5 percent in the fourth year. The MTA has offered 3 percent—or 4.5 percent, contingent on work-rule “productivity” concessions, which simply means more work for less. In the context of Trump’s tariff escalation and ongoing cost-of-living increases, even a 5 percent raise could become a real-wage cut before the ink dries.
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In 1966, New York City transit workers conducted a historic 12-day strike, defying anti-strike injunctions and the jailing of TWU President Mike Quill by Mayor John Lindsay, winning major pay raises for 33,000 workers. In 1968, the MTA was established and pensions put in a public retirement system, which allowed those hired before 1973 to retire at the age of 55 with full benefits.
In April 1980, more than a year before Reagan smashed the PATCO air traffic controllers with no resistance from the AFL-CIO, transit workers launched an 11-day strike demanding 15 and 10 percent annual raises to address runaway inflation costs. The walkout ended after a fact-finding board recommended a 23 percent wage increase over two years—paid for by raising subway fares, fining the TWU $1 million, and docking workers two days’ pay for every strike day. The deal was opposed by Ed Winn, a member of the Workers League—forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party—whom rank-and-file workers had elected to the TWU Local 100 executive board on a socialist program and the principle of political independence from both capitalist parties.
The TWU would not call another strike for 25 years. In December 2005, transit workers walked out again, but the leadership shut the powerful strike down in three days. Beyond a $2.5 million Taylor Law fine, the union lost automatic dues check-off. In a court affidavit, TWU President Roger Toussaint pledged that the union “does not assert the right to strike against any government” and would not participate in any strike against a “governmental employer”—now or in the future. In return, a state Supreme Court judge restored dues check-off, authorizing the transit agency to deposit approximately $1.5 million a month in union dues directly into the union treasury.
The current leadership has followed the same path of political subordination. In April 2022, TWU Local 100 held a rally where members chanted “Kathy, Kathy!” and officials waved “Labor for Kathy” signs. Union president John Samuelsen—who now calls Hochul “the bosses’ governor”—actively participated. He previously backed Governor Andrew Cuomo for years, even as Cuomo embedded Tier 6 into state law, requiring public employees hired after April 1, 2012, to work longer, contribute more, and receive less. His claim that the union never formally endorsed Hochul is ludicrous: it is inconceivable that TWU Local 100 staged that rally without his full support.
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Workers need immediate, substantial wage increases—not a carefully negotiated crawl toward poverty. The restoration of the Cost-of-Living Allowance surrendered by the TWU in 1982 must be a central demand. Workers have been discussing this openly on social media; the union leadership will not raise it—not because it is unrealistic, but because fighting for it means confronting the Democratic Party to which the bureaucracy is organically tied.
The decisive question is not whether the union leadership will call a strike on May 16. It is whether workers are organized independently of the union apparatus and capable of fighting regardless of what the bureaucracy does. New York transit and LIRR workers must build rank-and-file committees—democratically run, answerable to the membership, and completely independent of union officials, the Democratic Party and management’s political allies—uniting subway workers, bus operators and LIRR and Metro-North workers, and reaching out to riders, nurses, postal workers, teachers and every section of the working class fighting the same ruling class across the metro region.
The specific demands that must anchor this fight: immediate double-digit wage increases to offset years of inflation and concession contracts; 100 percent COLA pegged to the real cost of living; rejection of all work-rule concessions; fully paid pensions and retiree medical benefits with elimination of all inferior pension tiers (2 through 6); two-person crews on all passenger trains; and no fare hikes—transit must be funded by taxing the oligarchs, not the four million workers who ride the system daily.
The struggle of New York transit and rail workers is not a local labor dispute. It is one front of a global class war. The same ruling class gutting transit in New York funds the destruction of cities in the Middle East and provokes confrontation with nuclear-armed states. The answer is the international unity of the working class against a capitalist system that produces war and austerity as its twin products. Transit workers should contact the World Socialist Web Site to get information on building rank-and-file committees. The question before every worker is: who controls this struggle—the bureaucracies that have surrendered over and over, or the rank and file?
11. Germany: Defend every job at VW!
Volkswagen is preparing the next round of mass job cuts. Plants in Emden and Zwickau, the commercial vehicle plant in Hanover and the Audi plant in Neckarsulm face closure. All together, 40,000 people work at these plants.
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The plans go far beyond the previous agreement to cut 35,000 jobs at the core VW brand and a further 15,000 in the overall corporation, which the IG Metall union and the works council had signed at the end of 2024. At that time, they justified their agreement to the job cuts and severe wage cuts with the claim that plant closures were thereby moved off the table. But now the executive board is planning exactly that.
Audi boss Gernot Döllner is even threatening the closure of the entire German car industry. He is quoted in an employee information bulletin as saying: “It has long since ceased to be about a single model or about market shares here or there. It is about the continued existence of the German automobile industry.” Some 720,000 people currently work in the car and supplier industries. In addition, there are up to 1.8 million jobs that depend on this directly or indirectly.
The corporate plans make clear that if VW workers do not take up the struggle against this madness, the cuts will know no bounds. Forgoing wages and accepting dismissals do not secure plants, but prepare for their closure. Management wants to cut jobs en masse and enormously increase the exploitation of the remaining workers in order to boost profits, position the corporation for the escalating trade war and convert the German economy to war.
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VW has a special significance here. In no other German corporation is the collaboration between the owners, the state and the trade unions as close; no other corporation shapes the entire world of work so strongly. The state of Lower Saxony holds 20 percent of the voting rights, and the IG Metall union is involved at all levels of management. On this basis, an example is being made of VW that the whole car industry is to follow.
Yet the problem is not that VW is no longer selling cars. The corporation’s turnover has risen from €254 billion in 2020 to €322 billion in 2025. “VW continues to sell many cars, but earns significantly less money from them,” said Lazar Backovic, mobility lead at Handelsblatt.
The aim of the restructuring is therefore not to build better and more cars, but to exploit auto workers more intensively in order to increase the profit margin per vehicle. Wage cuts, job cuts and plant closures serve this purpose.
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Workers and their families are supposed to bleed, forgo wages and lose their employment in order to increase the return for shareholders. This principle is to be enforced as the new normal throughout the industry.
At the same time, production is to be converted to a war economy. For the plant in Osnabrück there is already said to be a letter of intent from an Israeli arms company to produce weapons beginning 2027. There have also been talks with major German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall.
VW workers are thus supposed to produce the weapons with which their children or they themselves are sent to war to kill workers of other countries and die for the interests of German imperialism. Volkswagen is returning to its original traditions. Founded in 1937, the company did not produce the previously announced “Peoples Car” (Volkswagen) during the war, but military vehicles for Hitler’s war of annihilation. It exploited forced laborers for this.
Today’s conversion to a war economy is part of comprehensive war preparations. With the government’s new military strategy, Defense Minister Pistorius is planning an open war against the nuclear power Russia. To this end, trillions are being spent on the Bundeswehr to make it the largest armed force in Europe. This madness is financed by ruthless cuts to health, education and pensions.
The proxy war that Germany and the other NATO powers are waging against Russia in Ukraine has already had grave consequences for industry and workers’ living standards. The attack on Iran, supported by Chancellor Merz, has further exacerbated this. High energy prices are driving up production costs and leading to further sackings. At the same time, real wages are melting away with rising inflation.
Now this is to be pushed even further to strengthen Germany’s position in the global trade war and align society as a whole toward war. VW serves as the benchmark for this.
In the struggle to defend jobs, VW workers therefore face not only the owners and management, but also the government and the entire ruling class. They can win only if they oppose the logic of capitalist profit and warmongering and launch a common struggle with workers all over the world.
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The biggest obstacle in this struggle is the IG Metall union. It works most closely with management and acts as a police force in the workplace to suppress any resistance to the mass cuts.
The latest cutbacks are supported by IG Metall. Its first reaction to the corporation’s declaration of war on the workforce consisted of playing things down and denying the obvious, so that no resistance developed among the workers.
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In the 1970s, workers could still fight for important rights as part of the system of “co-determination”—which provides so-called “employee representation” on company committees and boards—and compel high wages and good working conditions. But to the extent that globalization has intensified international competition and fueled the pro-war policy, the role of “social partnership” as a straitjacket for the workers has fully emerged. It binds workers to the company’s profit maximization logic and the government’s nationalist policy of making Germany an attractive production location, and serves to enforce the cuts against the employees. The universally known corruption of the IG Metall functionaries is only an expression of this deeper development.
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In order to develop resistance against the cutback plans, employees must organize themselves completely independently of the IG Metall union and its works council reps, that is, in the VW Action Committee. This rank-and-file committee pursues the goal of uniting all those who wish to fight—production workers, salaried employees, core and temporary staff. Trade union functionaries have no place in it.
The action committee is organized democratically, i.e., the members have the say. It does not strive for well-paid posts in the co-determination bodies, which are committed to maintaining secrecy and industrial peace. It will, however, use all possibilities—including works council elections—to stand up for its aims.
The action committee defends all jobs at all locations as a matter of principle. It fundamentally rejects concessions on wages, pensions and working conditions. It is not the corporation’s cash position, but the struggle that decides the preservation of jobs.
One of the most important tasks of the action committee is linking up with other production locations at home and abroad. It does not allow the corporation’s various locations and brands to be played off against each other with the help of the trade unions, to drive a wedge between the workforces in Germany, China, Mexico, the US, the Czech Republic or Spain.
The VW Action Committee is part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), which coordinates the growing resistance in workplaces across industries and worldwide.
We recommend VW workers follow the campaign of IWA-RFC member Will Lehman, who is running for the presidency of the American autoworkers union, the United Auto Workers (UAW). Lehman works at the Volvo subsidiary Mack Trucks in Pennsylvania. His goal is not to replace the current UAW apparatus with another, but to abolish the apparatus and hand control over to the members. His campaign is meeting with a strong response among US autoworkers.
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When workers take up the struggle, they are inevitably confronted with political questions. The corruption of the trade unions, the jobs cull in industry and the development of war are not simply due to the actions of a few degenerate individuals. They are an expression of the deep crisis of the capitalist system, which has nothing to offer humanity other than poverty, dictatorship and war.
Karl Marx once compared capital to a vampire whose thirst for blood constantly grows. “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” he wrote. This vampire has grown into a global colossus. Securities, financial instruments and foreign exchange worth trillions circulate daily on the international stock exchanges. The concentration of wealth at the top of society has reached gigantic proportions. Elon Musk is on the verge of becoming the first dollar trillionaire in world history.
These massive concentrations of capital search all over the world for “living labor” they can suck in. They use every wage difference and every competitive advantage to increase profit margins. Technological advances that could raise the living standards of all humanity and make work easier—the international division of labor, e-mobility, robots and artificial intelligence—are used instead to destroy jobs, intensify levels of exploitation and increase profits.
Financial and economic crises are piling up. The bitter struggle for markets and raw materials has, as in the First and Second World Wars, once again taken the form of violent military conflicts. This is the reason for the wars that the US and the European powers are waging against Russia and against Iran, and for their war preparations against China. They want to control the energy resources of the Middle East and the raw materials of Russia in order to dominate the world economy and blackmail their rivals. The imperialist powers are fighting for a redivision of the world and are prepared to plunge all of humanity into a nuclear inferno for this purpose.
But globalization has not only exacerbated the crisis of capitalism. It has also welded the international working class together into a powerful revolutionary force. Today, it encompasses billions worldwide who are closely connected to each other through the production process and social networks, and who come into open conflict with the globally operating corporations, the capitalist governments and their allies in the trade union apparatus.
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The struggle to defend jobs can be waged successfully only if it is guided by a perspective that places the social needs of the working class above the profit interests of the corporations, and becomes the starting point for an international struggle against capitalism and war:
- For the expropriation of VW under the democratic control of the workers.
- For a workers’ government that does not submit to the dictates of the banks and business associations.
- For the reorganization of society on a socialist basis.
The working class needs a party that represents its interests. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) has not done this for decades, and the Left Party, which goes back to the Stalinist state party in the former East Germany, has never done it.
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP, Socialist Equality Party), the German section of the Fourth International, stands in the tradition of Marx and Engels, August Bebel, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Lenin and Trotsky. It has defended and further developed the perspective of international socialism.
12. Trump calls Iranian response to negotiations “unacceptable,” as Israel continues Lebanon bloodbath
US President Donald Trump declared Iran’s reply to his negotiation terms “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE” on Sunday, threatening renewed military escalation four days before his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
In two posts on his Truth Social platform, Trump accused Tehran of “playing games” for “47 years (DELAY, DELAY, DELAY!).” At a Cabinet meeting Sunday morning, he told reporters he was no longer certain Washington wanted a deal at all.
Iran’s reply to the Trump administration, delivered Sunday through Pakistani mediators, offered to transfer Tehran’s stockpile of 60 percent-enriched uranium to a third country and demanded that the US blockade of Iranian ports be lifted before further talks. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described the demand to dismantle enrichment facilities as non-negotiable. Trump’s terms had required immediate suspension of enrichment for 12 years.
In a televised interview Sunday with the journalist Sharyl Attkisson, Trump repeated his threat to bomb the Iranian uranium stockpile if any country assists Tehran in moving or hiding it: “If anybody got near the place, we will know about it. And we’ll blow them up.” On May 7, Trump warned that the United States would soon have to “look at one big glow coming out of Iran”—a remark widely read as a threat of nuclear strikes.
The administration is signaling a return to direct combat operations. Trump told reporters Friday that he was preparing to resume the U.S. Navy operation in the Strait of Hormuz, suspended on May 6, “with other things.” The US military has three carrier strike groups in the region; the blockade has now redirected 61 commercial ships and is holding more than 70 tankers in custody.
As Trump escalated his threats, the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon entered its bloodiest weekend since the cease-fire that began on April 16. Israeli forces killed at least 24 people in Lebanon on Saturday and at least 39 more on Sunday, according to Lebanese health officials, in what officials described as the deadliest single day of strikes since the cease-fire began. The Lebanese health ministry has now recorded 2,846 dead and 8,693 wounded since the resumed Israeli bombardment began March 2.
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Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has filed a complaint with the U.N. Security Council. Hezbollah responded with a drone attack on northern Israel that wounded three Israeli reservists. The Trump administration issued no condemnation of the Israeli strikes; a third round of US-mediated Israel-Lebanon talks is to be held in Washington on May 14 and 15.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an interview broadcast Sunday on CBS’s 60 Minutes, declared that the war on Iran was “not over” and demanded that Tehran dismantle its enrichment facilities and surrender its uranium stockpile. Asked whether Israel would remove the stockpile by force, Netanyahu declined to rule it out.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff met Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, in Miami on Saturday in emergency consultations that produced no announced result.
Trump’s confrontation with Iran will be carried directly into his Beijing summit, scheduled for Thursday and Friday. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the war would dominate the agenda. Roughly four out of every five barrels of Iran’s seaborne oil exports go to China, which has refused to participate in the US blockade and whose commerce ministry has issued a blocking statute ordering Chinese firms to ignore the US sanctions regime.
The Iran war is now in its 72nd day. Brent crude is at roughly $101 a barrel, gasoline above $4.50. US intelligence has found that the renewed combat operations did little additional damage to Iran’s nuclear program; the roughly 440 kilograms of 60 percent-enriched uranium Iran is believed to hold, material sufficient for some 10 warheads if further enriched, sits in underground facilities US munitions cannot reach.
Democratic Party officials who appeared across the Sunday morning talk shows did not oppose the war. They demanded that Trump prosecute it more aggressively.
*****
All factions of the US political establishment support the global war drive and the aim of subjugating Iran to US domination.
13. US Steel contests OSHA fines for deadly Clairton Coke Works explosion
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined US Steel and its contractor MPW Industrial Services $180,000 for the deaths of Timothy Quinn and Steven Menefee.
As in the rest of the United States, New Jersey is experiencing a wave of layoffs of educators and school workers because of budget shortfalls.
The Harvard Graduate Student Union–United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW) walkout, which began April 21, is not a local dispute over a few percentage points of salary. It is a concentrated expression of the deepening crisis of capitalism as it penetrates the university and the conditions of intellectual and scientific labor.
Graduate student workers occupy a peculiar and deliberately obscured position in the contemporary capitalist university. They are simultaneously enrolled students and full-time workers, a dual status that universities exploit to suppress wages, deny benefits and undermine labor rights.
As Teaching Fellows (TFs), they stand at the front of undergraduate classrooms, lead discussion sections, design curricula, administer exams and provide the individualized instruction that constitutes the actual educational experience of tens of thousands of undergraduates.
As Research Assistants (RAs), they run the laboratories, collect and analyze data, write code and generate the scientific and scholarly output that earns universities billions in federal grants and private donations. In the humanities and social sciences, they are the primary intellectual interlocutors for entire cohorts of students. In the sciences, a tenured professor’s lab would simply cease to function without them.
This is not peripheral work. It is the core of what a university does, and it is performed by workers who, at Harvard, earn between $18 and $21 per hour—so little that many qualify for government food assistance programs.
This is a national condition. At the University of Maryland, a graduate assistant in the College of Information takes home roughly $2,100 a month after taxes while paying around $2,000 for a one-bedroom apartment near campus. At the University of Michigan, the research assistant “stipend” sits roughly $6,000 below what a living wage calculator estimates is needed for a single adult to cover basic costs.
A 2025 survey at the University of Colorado Boulder found that only 37 percent of graduate students receiving financial support said their stipend adequately covered the cost of living. This figure should be understood not as a local management failure but calculated exploitation for financial gain.
More than a quarter of graduate students nationally report suffering from housing or food insecurity. They are working in some of the most intellectually demanding environments in the world while rationing food, taking on debt to cover rent and deferring medical care because the university’s benefit funds—which at Harvard have been inaccessible since the previous contract expired in June 2025—do not adequately cover the costs of basic health needs.
*****
Among the demands that Harvard’s administration has most conspicuously refused to engage in is the protection of non-citizen workers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). International graduate students make up a substantial proportion of the workforce in STEM fields at every major research university.
At Harvard, as across the country, they are among the most exploited and most vulnerable members of the academic labor force carrying the same workloads and enduring the same poverty wages as their domestic colleagues, while simultaneously navigating a federal immigration apparatus that has become increasingly hostile, arbitrary and weaponized.
The Trump administration’s assault on international students has been systematic. Visa revocations have swept campuses across the country. The Department of Homeland Security proposed last August to end the longstanding “Duration of Status” policy for F-1 visa holders, a change that would replace open-ended educational status with a rigid four-year limit, introduce new restrictions on changes to a major or degree level and require students to file for extensions through an immigration bureaucracy that is openly hostile to their presence.
Social media screening has been mandated for all F and J visa applicants. Roughly 17 percent fewer new international students arrived in the United States in fall 2025 compared to the previous year.
The human consequences are not abstract. Kennedy Orwa, a University of Washington graduate student and UAW Local 4121 member, was deported along with his 13-year-old son in April. The Trump administration is expediating its plans to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student, for opposition to the US-back Israeli genocide in Gaza. These are stark demonstrations of what federal policy means in concrete human terms for the workers whose research Harvard and every other major institution depend upon.
When Harvard’s administration refused to include protections for non-citizen workers in contract negotiations, citing a desire not to interfere with its “relationship with the federal government,” it made a political declaration. It chose its institutional relations with the fascist administration over the safety and rights of its own workers.
The striking Harvard workers’ insistence on these protections is not simply a labor demand. It is, as Will Lehman, a rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker from Macungie, Pennsylvania, running as a socialist candidate for UAW president, rightly noted, a political demand bound up with the defense of democratic rights and academic freedom against the integrating logic of university administrations and the imperialist state.
*****
No analysis of the Harvard strike is complete without an examination of the role being played by the United Auto Workers (UAW) bureaucracy, a role that is one of containment, delay and betrayal.
Members of HGSU-UAW voted by 96 percent to authorize strike action in near-unanimous expression of class anger building for more than a year of fruitless bargaining under UAW supervision.
The apparatus delayed the walkout for months after their strike mandate was delivered, keeping workers at the table with an administration that had no intention of offering a fair settlement, while the previous contract’s benefit provisions—covering childcare and medical expenses—remained inaccessible.
The record of the UAW apparatus with academic workers is consistent. The 2021 HGSU-UAW strike was settled after three days on terms that, adjusted for inflation, amounted to a real wage cut of 1.2 percent, which the apparatus nonetheless declared a victory.
At the University of California, when academic workers moved to strike in defense of pro-Palestinian protesters facing arrest and administrative repression, the apparatus surrendered immediately upon receipt of a strikebreaking injunction.
At Columbia University, UAW Region 9A Director Brandon Mancilla—a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the political organization that performs the essential function of channeling left-wing sentiment back into the Democratic Party—intervened directly to suppress strike action and pressure the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) to abandon political demands, including protections for non-citizen workers, limits on campus surveillance and divestment from military contractors.
Before the local union complied, the apparatus threatened trusteeship. Even after the SWC leadership capitulated and watered down the political demands the UAW International still refused to authorize a strike. Mancilla was the former president of HGSU-UAW at Harvard itself—the very union whose strike he is now helping to strangle.
Meanwhile, at Harvard itself, the leadership of the Harvard Academic Workers-UAW (HAW-UAW)—the union representing non-tenure-track faculty—unilaterally cancelled planned coordinated strike action that 53 percent of attendees at a general meeting had voted to launch immediately.
*****
UAW President Shawn Fain, who publicly backs Trump’s tariff policies and framed the union as a partner in wartime industrial production, has done nothing to mobilize the broader UAW membership in support of the Harvard strikers. The entire apparatus functions, as Lehman stated plainly, as the “labor lieutenant” of the Harvard Corporation and the corporate-political establishment it serves.
*****
The Harvard graduate workers’ strike is a focal point of the class struggle in American academic life. But it cannot be won if its direction remains in the hands of the UAW apparatus, whose institutional interests lie in reaching a settlement—any settlement—that takes the workers off the picket lines and produces a contract the bureaucracy can present as a victory while Harvard’s administration locks in another cycle of wage suppression.
The demands of the HGSU-UAW strikers—living wages, protection for non-citizen workers from ICE, independent arbitration for harassment and discrimination complaints, academic freedom protections, divestment from military contractors and weapons manufacturers and opposition to campus surveillance—are fully justified and deserve the support of the entire working class.
But these demands can only be secured through the independent organization of the workers themselves, in rank-and-file committees that are democratically controlled by the strikers and accountable to no institutional interest other than the workers’ own.
Such committees must reach beyond the Harvard campus to their class brothers and sisters in other bargaining units—the HAW-UAW non-tenure-track faculty whose own planned strike was sabotaged by the apparatus, the Columbia graduate workers whose political demands were suppressed and the clerical workers whose leadership just accepted a one-year holding contract that amounts to a real-wage cut in everything but name, a flat $2,300 raise on a one-year contract. For a worker earning around $55,000, this is barely a 4 percent raise, well below inflation.
The fight must be extended to autoworkers, healthcare workers, educators at every level and the broader working class mobilizing against exploitation, war and the assault on democratic rights. This is an international struggle led by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) and committees should affiliate to it to develop a joint fight with workers internationally.
16. Sri Lanka: 12 men sentenced to death over killing of MP prepare to appeal
Twelve people sentenced to death over the killing of former government parliamentarian Amarakeerthi Athukorala and his police guard in May 2022, during the country’s mass uprising, are preparing to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Their convictions and sentences, based on threadbare evidence, are a travesty of justice. The 12 men are being punished to intimidate all who took part in the uprising, which ended with the ousting of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse.
The men are currently being held at Welikada Prison in Colombo, following a verdict delivered by the Gampaha High Court Trial-at-Bar on February 1.
The court found the 12 guilty on charges including “murder” and “unlawful assembly.” The case involved 43 defendants. Several received suspended prison sentences for related offenses, while a number were acquitted due to insufficient evidence.
*****
The four-month mass uprising in Sri Lanka, during which MP Amarakeerthi was killed, erupted in April 2022, involving millions of workers, rural poor and young people across the country. The mass protests were in response to crushing attacks on living conditions by the Rajapakse government to make working people pay for the economic crisis fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic and the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. People faced severe shortages and skyrocketing prices for fuel, medicine and other essential commodities, and hours-long power cuts.
Beginning on April 9, Galle Face Green in Colombo became the center of the protest movement, with thousands occupying it. On April 28 and May 6, millions of workers engaged in one-day general strikes. The second strike was supported by millions of others in a hartal, or general shutdown of businesses.
Shocked by these developments, then Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, the elder brother of the president, called thousands of supporters to his residence, including ministers and MPs belonging to the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) on May 9. Amarakeerthi appears to have been a participant at this meeting.
After speeches by the prime minister and other SLPP leaders, their supporters attacked protesters near the residence and then marched to Galle Face Green, violently assaulting the unarmed occupiers. The police and military allowed the marauding thugs to proceed. Some SLPP ministers, MPs and area leaders were seen directing attacks on protesters and the destruction of their encampment.
As many as 150 protesters were injured, several seriously, and treated at the Colombo National Hospital. This violent attack marked a turning point in the mass uprising, drawing in more layers of workers, youth and the rural poor. Outrage spread across the country and demonstrations took place in many towns and cities. Thousands of postal, health and port workers struck work and marched.
Later that evening, in Nittambuwa, about 40 kilometers from Colombo, hundreds of people had gathered in protest. Amarakeerthi’s vehicle got stuck in the crowd. According to local accounts, his police bodyguard opened fire on the demonstration, killing one youth and injuring another. The MP and the bodyguard then sought refuge inside a nearby building, where their dead bodies were later found.
The prosecution case relied heavily on circumstantial evidence. CCTV footage was apparently used to identify some of the accused, but no direct video evidence or eyewitness testimony was presented to establish who carried out the killings. Cameras had only been installed on the ground and first floors, not the second floor where the MP and his guard were killed. This glaring lack of evidence did not stop the court from convicting and imposing the death penalty on 12 people.
Most of the 12 come from poor and lower-middle-class families devastated by Sri Lanka’s economic collapse. World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to family members of some who were preparing to file appeals. Their lives have been shattered by the arrests, years of remand detention and mounting legal costs.
*****
While severe punishments have been imposed on ordinary people caught up in the turmoil of 2022, many ministers, MPs and other political organizers connected to the attacks on anti-government demonstrators have been exonerated. According to some reports, they have also obtained insurance payouts involving huge sums disproportionate to any damage caused.
This double standard exposes the class character of the capitalist state and its legal system.
The mother of one of the accused said her son had left home on May 9 merely to observe the tense situation developing in the town. “He was not a criminal,” she said. “We are poor people. We have no power, no money and no influence. We are only asking for justice.”
*****
The court verdict and sentence have serious implications for the entire working class and the country’s oppressed people. The 12 people found guilty are victims of a ruling class that lives in fear of the mounting opposition from the masses and wants to set an example to intimidate working people.
For decades, Sri Lanka has maintained a moratorium on the death penalty, although courts continue to hand down death sentences. Human rights organizations have repeatedly criticized the practice, pointing to the dangers of wrongful convictions, political interference and unequal access to legal defense.
All the capitalist parties—the government and the opposition—have remained silent on the fate of the 12 men and their families. None has raised any concerns over the fairness of the trial, the divided verdict or the reliance on circumstantial evidence in imposing death sentences.
The bourgeois media, meanwhile, has largely portrayed the Nittambuwa incident as an isolated criminal act detached from the broader upheavals of 2022. Television channels and newspapers repeatedly highlighted the deaths of the MP and his bodyguard while paying little attention to the social desperation and political anger that fueled the nationwide protests.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) categorically opposes the 12 convictions and the death sentences. Capital punishment is a barbaric instrument historically used to intimidate and suppress the oppressed.
The SEP calls on workers, students, youth and everyone who defends democratic rights, in Sri Lanka and internationally, to demand the dropping of all charges over the killing of the SLPP MP and the release of the 12 wrongfully convicted men. The real criminals on May 9, 2022—those who organized violent attacks on unarmed protesters—are the ones who must be prosecuted.
17. New Zealand government ramps up anti-immigrant measures
A proposed “citizenship test” seeks to portray migrants as a threat to New Zealand “values,” while other legislation will significantly expand the ability of the state to deport people.
18. A Sad and Beautiful World: “When things get better, we’ll come back to Beirut”
The first film from the recent San Francisco film festival that we commented on, Inside Amir, was shot in and focused on Tehran. The second, discussed here, A Sad and Beautiful World (Nujum al’amal w al’alam), directed by Cyril Aris, takes place in Beirut.
Both cities have been subject recently to savage imperialist bombardments by the US and its vicious attack dog Israel.
If anything, Beirut has fared worse, according to media reports, having suffered more frequent and devastating attacks. The city and its southern suburbs, where many of the poor live, have been subjected to repeated, brutal Israeli bombing raids throughout the conflict. Three thousand people have been killed in Lebanon so far. The strikes have forced more than one million Lebanese to flee. At least 35 percent of those displaced are estimated to be children. The UN reports that 620,000 women and girls have been driven from their homes.
A Sad and a Beautiful World follows Nino (Hasan Akil) and Yasmina (Mounia Akl), childhood friends, who reunite as adults, marry and have a child. The present-day social and political crisis in Lebanon threatens to tear them apart.
*****
There are amusing and telling sequences here, but, overall, the film is far “softer” than the horrific Lebanese and Middle Eastern situation demands. A little complacent, fatalistic and wistful. Inside Amir from Iran, although it also treats a layer of the middle class, is more penetrating, troubling, urgent. With A Sad and a Beautiful World, one feels that the director has adopted the not-very-useful program of “Making the Best of Things.”
*****
The recent history of Lebanon is very difficult. In the 1975-1990 civil war an estimated 150,000 people were killed, with another 300,000 injured and an estimated one million people displaced. At present, Israel is attempting to transform southern Lebanon into another Gaza.
Unfortunately, like a number of Lebanese films, A Sad and Beautiful World leans toward treating this history as a natural catastrophe, as something incomprehensible (this “absurd war”) that befell the country. A series of more or less heartfelt films, 1982, West Beirut, Around the Pink House, Skies of Lebanon, Costa Brava, Lebanon and numerous others (Capernaum, which depicts the social misery of the population is somewhat different) legitimately bewail the ghastly civil war and the carnage it produced, but never hazard an analysis as to the roots and sources of the decades-long conflicts.
The Lebanese situation is complex, with different powers and parties taking part, with shifting alliances and so forth, but, as the World Socialist Web Site noted some years ago, under the Bush administration, imperialist policy had been aimed at reversing
the outcome of the Lebanese civil war, which raged from 1975 until 1990. The US, Israel and other imperialist powers, notably France, played a central role in inciting that long and bloody conflict and keeping it going, including the introduction of American and French military forces and an Israeli invasion in 1982 that was followed by an 18-year Israeli occupation of the south. Washington’s chief ally was the fascistic Phalange, which headed a coalition of right-wing forces arrayed against an alliance of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Lebanese Left.
Imperialist intrigue and intervention succeeded in driving the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon, but the eventual settlement curtailed the power of the Phalange, on the one hand, and saw the rise of the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah on the other. This is what Washington is determined to change.
And then as now
The Israeli offensive is above all a war against the Lebanese poor. The more affluent residential neighborhoods of Beirut and other parts of the country have been largely spared. This is in keeping with US and Israeli policy during the civil war, when they were allied with the Phalange against the Shiite masses and the Palestinian refugee population.
On April 8, 2026, a particularly black day, reports the BBC, “a deadly wave of [Israeli] strikes [began] at 14.15 local time and saw about 100 targets across Lebanon hit in the space of just 10 minutes.” The death toll “for the day reached 361, according to the Lebanese authorities, with more than 1,000 injured.”
As a result of the day’s bombing,
In the southern suburbs of Beirut, the neighbourhood of Hay el Sellom is barely recognisable. What was once a densely populated, lively community is now a landscape of collapsed concrete, twisted metal and exposed wires. Homes have been reduced to layers of rubble. Staircases lead nowhere. The sounds of everyday life have been replaced by silence.
We refer to these events only to underscore the fact that the middle class soul-searching and to-ing fro-ing in A Sad and Beautiful World is very distant from this and inadequate to the devastation. Yasmina and other professionals may be able to leave, for Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Germany and points beyond, but the poor in southern Beirut have no means of escape. As the same BBC report notes, explaining why the April 8 attack was so deadly,
Beirut’s southern suburbs had faced repeated Israeli evacuation orders and air strikes since the start of the war, but residents told us few people left Hay El Sellom, as they had nowhere to go. (emphasis added)
The filmmakers need to keep various things in mind, including this. A sensitive, humane approach is a starting-point, but actual social and historical knowledge as well as an angry, partisan stance are indispensable too.
19. How workers can fight the wave of AI layoffs
Mass layoffs are spreading across the global economy, as corporations move to destroy jobs, drive down wages and declare millions of workers redundant as a result of the introduction of AI technologies.
On May 7, tech security company Cloudflare announced layoffs for 20 percent of its workforce. The 1,100 affected workers were told by email that their roles had no future in what CEO Matthew Prince called “the agentic AI era.”
The company’s internet security services and Content Delivery Network plays a central role in the architecture of the internet, servicing more than one-fifth of all websites. Cloudflare claims it is used by 35 percent of all Fortune 500 companies and has numerous contracts with the US Department of Defense and intelligence agencies. In February, it was announced as one of the contractors for the Missile Defense Agency’s $151 billion SHIELD program, part of Trump’s “Golden Dome” program.
The layoff announcements landed on the same day the company reported its highest-ever quarterly revenue—$639.8 million, up 34 percent year over year. When an analyst asked why such deep cuts were necessary after a record quarter, Prince replied: “Just because you’re fit doesn’t mean you can’t get fitter.”
*****
This is a global war on the working class, which must be answered with a globally coordinated campaign in defense of jobs. The central issue is to take control of powerful new technologies out of the hands of the corporate oligarchy. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees encourages, and is organizing, mass resistance to the accelerating jobs massacre.
According to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, American employers have announced more than 300,000 job cuts in the first four months of 2026. The technology sector (85,411 jobs) ranked first, more than double the second place transportation sector (33,479). For the second consecutive month, AI was cited as the primary reason for layoffs.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest figures, the “information” sector has seen 16 consecutive months of job losses, shedding 342,000 jobs or 11 percent from its peak in November 2022.
By and large, the tech firms slashing jobs are not only profitable, but play central roles in the AI boom. Facebook’s parent Meta is eliminating 8,000 positions while canceling 6,000 open roles. It also plans to spend $145 billion in capital investment this year, overwhelmingly directed at AI infrastructure. Microsoft launched the first voluntary buyout program in its 51-year history, targeting up to 8,750 workers. Oracle is eliminating up to 30,000 employees—including, workers told Time magazine, people who had spent their final months training the AI systems that then rendered them redundant.
The stock market is rewarding major layoff announcements, particularly when it is tied to AI restructuring, ushering in what the Wall Street Journal is calling the “era of the mega-layoff.”
While the tech industry combines booming profits with mass layoffs, the ruling class is also using bankruptcies as a time-tested means of destroying jobs overnight. This was the case with Spirit Airlines, which collapsed overnight last week, leaving 17,000 workers unemployed. The immediate trigger was the doubling of fuel prices due to the war against Iran. The White House refused to bail Spirit out in order to accelerate the next round of mergers and consolidations in the airline industry.
Mass layoffs are also underway in other sectors where AI is a less immediate factor. In logistics, UPS has eliminated or targeted 68,000 positions through automated mega-hubs; it has recently announced 26 more facility closures for later this year. In auto, Volkswagen is aiming for 50,000 cuts by 2030, Renault is cutting 15 to 20 percent of its engineering workforce and US automakers are laying off thousands.
*****
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts AI will write essentially all software code within a year. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, says three-quarters of Google’s new code is already AI-written. Investor Vinod Khosla forecasts that by 2030, “80 percent of all jobs will be capable of being done by an AI.”
AI itself is not the problem. It is an extraordinary technology with the capacity to eliminate drudgery and vastly improve productivity, to reduce the working day to a theoretical minimum while vastly accelerating the potential for human learning.
The critical question is who controls this technology. It must be freed from the shackles of private ownership. The development and training of AI systems is social labor in the fullest sense of the word, and its benefits must be available to all.
They were built from the accumulated labor, knowledge and creative output of millions of workers—the code written by software engineers, the conversations handled by customer service agents, the analyses produced by researchers and data scientists.
AI also fatally undermines the foundations of the capitalist system itself. When Khosla predicts that the amount of necessary labor could be reduced by 80 percent within a few years, or when tech executives speak of AI-generated “abundance,” they are describing, without understanding it, a state of affairs in which capitalism is hopelessly obsolete.
In reality, the potential of this technology can never be realized under capitalism, because capitalism must restrict, distort and weaponize it to survive. In place of abundance, it produces mass unemployment. In place of liberation from drudgery, it produces intensification of drudgery for those who remain. In place of human development, it produces a generation declared redundant by systems built from their own knowledge.
Meanwhile, control over the new technology, and the resources and supply chains needed to develop it, has become an increasingly central factor in the growth of imperialist war—today against Iran and Russia, tomorrow against China.
A progressive response to this offensive is possible only through a frontal assault by the working class on the unchallenged “right” of capitalist property itself. Those on the pseudo-left who respond by demanding that AI be regulated, halted altogether, or subjected to union-management boards are diverting from the central issue of class, and in many cases directing opposition into a reactionary attack on technological progress itself.
*****
A mass, worldwide working class movement requires new forms of organization: rank-and-file committees, built independently of the existing apparatus, capable of preparing and coordinating action without seeking permission from bureaucracies whose interests lie elsewhere. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees is advocating for and building these organizations on a world scale, with active committees in industries all over the world.
The central demands of such a movement must be:
Not a single layoff due to artificial intelligence! If AI genuinely increases productivity, then the gains belong to the workers who produced them. The workweek must be shortened proportionally, with no loss in pay.
Workers’ control over the introduction of new technology. Workers must have full information, genuine veto power and real control over how productivity gains are allocated.
Good-paying, fulfilling jobs for all workers already laid off for any reason, including Spirit workers and the hundreds of thousands laid off in the tech sector.
Expropriation of the major technology corporations, banks and financial institutions, and their transformation into publicly owned utilities under the democratic control of the working class, including democratic control and ownership of AI technologies.
The fight against layoffs and “AI restructuring” cannot be waged plant by plant or country by country. The corporations operate globally, shift work across borders, and use nationalism to pit worker against worker. The only answer is the international unity of the working class—linking workers in tech, logistics, manufacturing, education and every sector into a common struggle.
20. War, genocide and the weaponization of healthcare: An interview with Bilal Irfan
Irfan has participated directly in medical missions to Palestine and Pakistan and continues to engage with health systems across the Eastern Mediterranean region and South Asia. He is among a small number of researchers who have continued to document the medical realities of the Gaza genocide in real time, maintaining contact with healthcare workers on the ground through the destruction of the health infrastructure they are embedded in.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke with Bilal Irfan, amid an accelerating regional catastrophe that has transformed the Middle East since our previous interviews in November 2024 and June 2025. This interview, conducted on April 26, 2026, was edited for brevity and clarity.*****
Bilal Irfan (BI): People are still being killed almost every week. There are people being massacred. And what we’ve seen now—from on-the-ground reports as well as international media—is that the so-called yellow line, which was supposed to encompass approximately 53 percent of Gaza, has been steadily and incrementally expanding in some sectors.
It’s not marked clearly. A lot of people who thought their houses were quite far away from the supposed line find themselves incrementally closer to it. So, some people are not sending their children out in the streets—often not even to school—because of the risk of being shot. We now see so many testimonies from Israeli soldiers about shooting unarmed people crossing arbitrary, often undelineated lines.
*****
BI: There are several humanitarian groups conducting medical missions. One thing that is different about Lebanon compared to Gaza is that Beirut’s airport is functional to some degree. Some people have been able to come in and out, and Lebanon’s land border with Syria makes refugee flow and humanitarian medical access somewhat easier.
We also must understand Lebanon’s history and the sociopolitical landscape it operates in. Part of the reason Lebanon is treated differently by international media and European governments compared to Gaza is the deeper ties Lebanese institutions, civil society, cultural groups and academic centers have with European and American counterparts. It is also a full member state of the United Nations, Palestine is also recognized as a state under international law but has been under occupation for much of its existence and has never been able to meaningfully exercise full sovereignty over its territories and borders. Lebanon’s colonial history also plays a role, as France has deep ties to the region.
And we must be frank about the religious dynamic. Israeli leaders and early Zionists, even when they came in as part of a settler colonial project within Mandatory Palestine, were often quite explicit about trying to divide and rule, by elevating certain groups above others and attempting to pit groups against one another. You see the messaging: open calls for ethnic cleansing against Shias in southern Lebanon, while more conciliatory messages are sometimes sent toward Christians or Druze. Israel even sent messaging condemning the attacks on a statue of importance to Christians by its soldiers. One would be hard pressed to find something like that with respect to reprimands for the burning of the Qur’an. This is not to say that Israel does not kill Christians; they have indiscriminately bombed and killed populations in Palestine and Lebanon regardless of faith and have often struck churches. But messaging calling for people of other faiths to expel Shias is part of trying to separate the people of the region from one another to expand the colonial foothold.
It’s also worth noting that while Lebanon and Iran have rightly drawn international attention, Israel has used that shift in focus to continue its human rights violations in Gaza. Many humanitarian medical organizations have been forced to reduce the number of teams they send, which cut down in capacity, due to arbitrary restrictions imposed precisely while much of the world’s media attention is elsewhere.
It is important to also discuss who is bearing the cost of this war in the region. Take the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as an example. South Asian, Southeast Asian and West African migrant workers, living in many cases in systems of severe exploitation through the kafala system, constitute most of the UAE’s population, while Emirati Arabs represent only a small percentage. Much of the country runs on the labor of migrant workers. These workers are now also caught in the crossfire of the UAE’s decision to host imperialist military bases and enable these wars. It is often not the Emirati elites in their palaces, mansions or villas who bear that cost, but rather it is the average worker. That dynamic, where the people who help build a country’s wealth and infrastructure are paying the price of the wars it engages in, runs through many of the themes we’ve discussed.
*****
BI: I think much of what we’ve spoken about today points to the same fundamental conclusion: The destruction of healthcare infrastructure, the suppression of data, the targeting of journalists and physicians—these are not incidental to these wars. They are increasingly weapons of war and direct aims on it. And until the people who are often most impacted by these policies—working people in the Middle East, in the United States, across the world—recognize that their struggles are connected and build the kind of independent political movement capable of confronting the class that profits from all of this, the devastation may likely continue.
21. Farrer by-election deepens existential crisis of Australia’s Liberal Party
The plunge of the Liberal vote to just 12 percent, in a seat held by its previous leader, indicates that the traditional conservative party of the ruling elite is on the brink of collapse.
22. Australia: Health Workers Rank-and-File Committee opposes Labor’s attack on disability services
The meeting of health and disability workers unanimously passed a resolution opposing the cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and discussed a campaign to mobilize health workers against Labor’s brutal austerity agenda.
Less than three weeks after United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 called off the powerful strike of meatpacking workers at the JBS meat processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, meatpacking workers at the JBS beef and pork plant in nearby Denver voted April 27 to authorize strike action.
24. Ukraine: New linguistic expertise deepens debacle for prosecution of Bogdan Syrotiuk
In the case against 26-year old Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk, a third linguistic expert opinion requested by the court further undermines the case of the prosecution based on charges of “state treason under martial law.” If convicted under those charges, Bogdan faces between 15 years to life in prison. Even though clearly aimed at finding as many potentially damaging statements as possible, this latest linguistic analysis found not a single formulation to support the charges of “state treason under martial law” under Article 111 of the Ukrainian penal code.
The expert opinion was requested after a report commissioned by Bogdan’s lawyers and authored by one of Ukraine’s leading criminologists completely refuted the accusations of the state prosecution. It put the prosecution in such a difficult position that the court took the unusual step of requesting a third expert opinion.
In cases of alleged state treason under martial law—an article that has been invoked to prosecute thousands of workers and youth in recent years—such linguistic reports are of great legal significance. The prosecution often relies primarily on such reports which analyze statements made by the accused. More often than not, the accused’s statements are interpreted in a way that justifies their conviction as “traitors to the state”.
Like the previous two reports this new 84-page long report examines 14 articles and statements published on the World Socialist Web Site and authored or translated by Bogdan Syrotiuk. Among them are multiple statements by the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, a Trotskyist youth organization in the former Soviet Union that Bogdan founded in 2018, articles by Bogdan on the history of fascism in Ukraine, WSWS articles on the war, and statements by the chairperson of the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party (US), David North.
Authored by Natalia Kondratienko and Daria Krivenchenko, the linguistic analysis of these statements repudiates the principal basis for Bogdan’s persecution. They found that
There are no direct calls for the undermining of the national security of Ukraine, its interests, the liquidation of its statehood or the destruction of Ukrainian identity and the conduct of disintegrating activities in the informational sphere; [there are no calls] for the overthrow of the constitutional order or the seizure of state power, the change of territorial borders of Ukraine, aggressive war, the development of a military conflict or propaganda for war.
Later on, their report states, that none of the articles examined contained statements suggesting
the approval of the military aggression of the RF [Russian Federation] against Ukraine, …[there is no] justification or legal recognition or denial of the temporary occupation of a part of Ukrainian territory, [there is no] glorification of individuals who have realized the armed aggression of the RF, of representatives of the Russian armed forces, illegal military formations, mercenaries and the occupation administrations of the RF. [There is no] propaganda, directed toward supporting the armed forces of the RF against Ukraine.
This conclusion completely undermines the prosecution of Bogdan for “state treason under martial law.” The relevant article in the Ukrainian penal code defines high treason as an “act intentionally committed by a citizen of Ukraine to the detriment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability, defense capability, state, economic or information security of Ukraine: joining the enemy during martial law or in the period of armed conflict, espionage, providing assistance to a foreign state, foreign organization or their representatives in conducting subversive activities against Ukraine.”
The conclusion also repudiates the indictment of the prosecution, which specifically alleged that Bogdan had been working on behalf of the Russian government, describing the World Socialist Web Site as an “information agency” of the Kremlin.
That the report found no evidence to support any of these claims is all the more remarkable since it was clearly written in an attempt to find as many potentially damaging formulations as possible and interpret statements in a way that can make them the subject of criminal prosecution.
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This latest expert opinion further undermines and discredits the Ukrainian state’s prosecution of Bogdan in a dual sense. It proves, once more, that the charges of “high treason under martial law” and collaboration with the Russian government are groundless. What the linguistic experts “found” are “thought crimes”: Bogdan’s courage to tell the truth about the war and the role of the imperialist powers, the history of Ukrainian fascism and the state of Ukrainian society, and his Marxist perspective for socialist unification of the working class in Ukraine and Russia. His prosecution is an indictment of the war propaganda that Ukraine is a democracy. He has been subjected to a deliberate, politically motivated persecution by the Kiev regime because he is a Trotskyist.
25. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
