Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Democrats choose 5 more military-intelligence veterans as congressional candidates
While the bulk of the public and media attention to the results of Tuesday’s primary elections has focused on the shift to the left among voters in New York City, the Democratic Party as an organization has further cemented its ties to the military-intelligence apparatus, selecting a former Navy admiral and four veterans of wars in the Middle East as congressional candidates.
2. Mamdani-backed candidates win NYC congressional primaries: The political issues
The primary results reflect a political radicalization within the working class and among youth and professional layers who are being hammered by the accelerating economic, social and political crisis of American capitalism. The leftward shift of large sections of the population that resulted in the election of Mamdani last year is continuing and deepening. It is fueled by hatred for Trump and disgust with the Democratic Party’s failure to seriously oppose—indeed, its complicity in—Trump’s fascistic attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, wars of aggression, cuts in social programs, and the plundering of the economy for the benefit of his fellow billionaire oligarchs.
This radicalization in the center of capitalist finance—the city with the largest number of billionaires in the world—has national and international significance. It is accompanied by an upsurge in the struggles of the working class and a growing rebellion against the corporatist trade union bureaucracy. It poses the task of breaking with the Democratic Party, a party of American imperialism and the corporate oligarchy within which the DSA operates as a faction.
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These victories follow last week’s win by DSA member Janeese Lewis George in the Washington D.C. Democratic mayoral primary, virtually assuring her victory in the November general election. DSA members will then hold the mayor’s office in the nation’s capital as well as its most populous city.
It is highly significant that a central theme of the DSA campaigns was opposition to the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, which garnered broad support in a city with 1.2 million Jews. This shatters the claim that opposition to Zionism and genocide equals antisemitism.
Republican politicians and media outlets responded with near hysteria to the primary results in New York. Trump repeatedly called the DSA candidates “communists.” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson posted on X: “We are in a fight RIGHT NOW to save the Republic, and EVERY AMERICAN needs to take this seriously.”
At a press conference on Wednesday, Johnson warned that communism is now “on our own shores” and added, “The Marxists have nominated some of the most radical candidates to ever run for office, and they’re running for Congress. The insurgent left is on the rise.”
Trump’s fascist aide Stephen Miller declared that the Democratic Party is embracing a “violent ideology that wants to tear America down and destroy everything that we know and love, from top to bottom.”
The Murdoch-owned New York Post headlined its front-page report “The Hateful Slate.”
In fact, the DSA is being brought forward and further integrated into both the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy to promote the fatal illusion that the Democrats can be pressured into serving the interests of working people, and the union apparatus can be forced to oppose the corporations and the government.
The DSA’s role is to block an independent movement of the working class against capitalism. It works to channel the growing social and political opposition into the blind alley of electoral politics and the Democratic Party. It has nothing to do with Marxism or genuine socialism. It represents the interests not of the working class, but of privileged and better-off layers of the middle class, which seek to improve their lot within the framework of the existing system—and at the expense of the workers.
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The international working class has had critical experiences with movements similar to the DSA that promise radical reforms within the framework of capitalism, only to betray the workers and impose the dictates of the ruling class—from Syriza in Greece, to Podemos in Spain, to Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and the Left Party in Germany. These lessons must be assimilated and applied to the current struggles. The danger is that without an independent movement of the working class against all sections and parties of the ruling class, the initiative will pass to the far right and the fascists.
The task before workers and youth is not the reform of the system, but its overthrow. The capitalist oligarchy must be expropriated in the US as part of an international struggle for socialism. The necessary revolutionary leadership—the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International—must be built to lead that struggle.
In addition to forcing workers to vote inside the plant, UAW officials are handpicking supporters of the rotten deal to oversee the vote.
4. New Zealand Rich List highlights soaring social inequality
Internationally, the escalating fortunes of the super-rich represent a historic redistribution of wealth upwards, based on the increasing exploitation of the working class. In New Zealand, a country of 5 million people which once postured as a model of egalitarianism, the richest 150 individuals and families now own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population.
5. Türkiye launches police dragnet ahead of NATO summit: War, dictatorship and permanent revolution
As it prepares to roll out the red carpet for US President Donald Trump and other imperialist war criminals, the Erdoğan regime is seeking to suppress all opposition to war, genocide and militarism.
6. Three IYSSE representatives elected to Berlin’s Humboldt University student parliament
The IYSSE was the only university group at Berlin's Humboldt University to stand on a socialist program against the genocide in Gaza, the development of war and the militarization of the universities.
7. The success and worldwide recognition of math-rock duo Angine de Poitrine
Since their concert was posted on the YouTube channel of the American radio station KEXP, the math rock duo Angine de Poitrine has generated considerable excitement and quickly gained worldwide recognition.
The concert, originally performed at a music festival in France in December 2025, garnered over 16 million views in just four months. In April, one of the standout tracks from their latest album, “Fabienk,” topped Spotify’s Viral 50: Global chart, which takes into account factors such as how often a song is shared and the number of new listeners who have discovered it.
The band, based in Quebec and whose name translates roughly as “Chest Pain” in English, has embarked on a tour of cities across Europe and North America and most of these concerts are already sold out.
The musicians, anonymous individuals that have adopted pseudonyms as brothers, guitarist Khn de Poitrine and drummer Klek de Poitrine. The math rock genre is a progressive, experimental subgenre of alternative rock that uses complex rhythms, unconventional time signatures, angular guitar riffs and an “electro-infused rock” sound.
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To these math rock features, Angine de Poitrine also includes microtonality. Departing from the whole-tone and half-tone octave intervals commonly associated with Western music and found in most rock and pop music, the band makes effective use of quarter- and eighth-tone intervals.
As is evident in the YouTube video, the Angine de Poitrine duo plays freely with the audience’s musical expectations as the structure of their songs remains rooted in dance. They make remarkable use of microtonality and odd time signatures and keep their music very accessible. They do not shy away from repetition or simplicity. They skillfully use loop pedals to create a “build-up,” while also deviating from standard song structures.
The comical costumes worn by the two conceal the identities of two very accomplished musicians who are masters of their instruments and equipment. The performance demonstrates remarkable skill and groove. We see Khn, barefoot, managing a range of loopers with his toes while playing a microtonal double-neck guitar/bass hybrid, while Klek, unwavering, produces a rhythmic body and coherence with the subtlety of a jazz musician and the energy of a metalhead.
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Guitarist Khn has also revealed that he is a fan of Indian music, Japanese music, and other Asian musical traditions where microtonality is common. The band’s success is likely due less to its originality—though real—and more to the social and historical context in which it emerged. One internet user poses the provocative question: “Is it Angine de Poitrine that’s good, or is everything else just mundane and boring?”
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To their credit, they don’t reduce their music to an exercise in self-expression. Being half-serious, they explain that their music serves to “stimulate the neurons, sweat in the pure present moment, and hear the geometry.”
And what about their costumes? Some have claimed that it was a “publicity stunt to attract attention,” but the origin of their costumes is more modest. Unable to play two consecutive weeks at the same venue in a small town in their home region, Saguenay Lac-St-Jean—a remote industrial region of Quebec known for its aluminum smelters—they decided to dress up “just for fun.”
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The reasons behind the cultural stagnation in recent decades have been analyzed in detail on the World Socialist Web Site. The working class has faced a widespread assault by the ruling class on social conditions, including attacks on funding for and access to the arts. Capitalism subordinates all of society to the pursuit of profit in every sphere.
Add to this the influence of postmodernism and the turn by artists toward subjectivity and their “inner self” rather than toward social reality and the damage done to art by identity politics, which accuses artists of “cultural appropriation.” It is refreshing and encouraging that Angine de Poitrine has “appropriated” elements of Eastern and Asian music to create something new.
The immense artistic void that has emerged is just waiting to be filled. It is into this void that the duo of Khn and Klek de Poitrine has stepped and they are pointing in a direction as the audience responds with enthusiasm. Time will tell how the band will evolve musically. But the explosive social and political context suggest that more captivating musical surprises are on the horizon.
8. Australian educators discuss way forward after rejection of Labor-union sellout deal in Victoria
Educators who participated in the Committee for Public Education’s recent online public meeting speak about the issues raised at the meeting and the No vote that followed.
Steven Linell Smith, a black maintenance mechanic at the USPS St. Paul Processing and Distribution Center in Eagan, Minnesota, endured five years of racial harassment, including death threats and slurs, before being fired.
10. Australian state governments deliver austerity budgets, led by Labor
Budgets in New South Wales and Queensland show the leading role of Labor governments in slashing social spending amid the ongoing fallout from the Iran war.
11. How the German Left Party is trying to curb the radicalization of the youth
The national party conference of the Left Party (Die Linke), which took place in Potsdam from 19 to 21 June, centered primarily on one question: Will the party succeed in curbing the radicalization of the youth?
12. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
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.
