Elected Greater Manchester Mayor in May 2017, Burnham sought to
reinvent himself as the “everyman”, pledging to give 15 percent of his
£110,000 salary to homelessness-related causes. This was part of his
pledge to “end rough sleeping in Greater Manchester by 2020”.
Almost
10 years on rough sleeping and homelessness in general remain rife in
Manchester and across the wider conurbation of 3 million people. The Manchester Evening News
reported last December: “New data provided by Shelter through Freedom
of Information requests has shown which areas of Greater Manchester are
hardest hit by homelessness. Manchester is the highest—with 9,589 people
rendered homeless, 4,678 of whom are children. This means that one in
every 61 people are homeless. This is followed by Salford, with a rate
of 2,327 people as of 2025.”
Such a pledge was always incompatible with the mayor’s burgeoning
relationship with big business in Greater Manchester, based on central
Manchester being turned into a haven for property developers—who got Peter Mandelson-style “filthy rich” from the taxpayer funding Burnham has soaked them in for a decade.
Under
Burnham’s tenure, in close collaboration with a Labour-run,
pro-corporate Manchester City Council—which has worked with Tory and
Labour governments for almost four decades around a “private-sector led”
regeneration strategy—around 30–40 luxury skyscrapers have been
completed or begun since 2017.
Dominating the skyline in central Manchester, even the Financial Times
looks on in awe. Its chief UK business columnist, John Gapper, wrote
last month in a piece titled “Inside the luxury towers behind
Manchester’s revival” of the “breathtaking view across its rejuvenated
city centre from a £2.5mn penthouse at the top of the 40-storey Viadux
tower.”
No workers will ever step foot in these developments.
Gapper writes that “much of its appeal to the residents, who mostly rent
its apartments, lies at the foot of the building. The pool, yoga and
fitness studios, and cinema room under the arches of the old railway
viaduct on which it is built are part of the package. In return for an
annual service charge for each owner of about £5,400 for a 1,000 sq ft
flat, residents enjoy amenities rivaling top developments in global
capitals.”
The FT notes that the Viadux developer, Salboy—owned by
a gambling industry billionaire—“sold about 70 percent of the Viadux
apartments between 2020 and 2023 to Chinese and Asian buy-to-let
investors. Asian enthusiasm for UK property has since diminished but
about 20 percent of the W Residences have more recently gone to buyers
based in the Gulf and Middle East, some as second homes.”
The
main property developer profiting from Burnham’s largess, Renaker, has
built seven skyscrapers, with five more having planning permission and a
further four being considered. So far Renaker, owned by billionaire
Daren Whitaker, has received £615 million from the mayor’s Greater
Manchester Housing Investment Loans Fund (GMHILF).
GMHILF was set
up by the Tory government in 2015 to enable the Greater Manchester mayor
to hand out an initial £300 million in loans to property developers.
Since then, its use has exploded, with around £1 billion in loans given
to Renaker and 45 to 50 other property companies across 70–75
developments.
The FT wrote of the plethora of luxury apartment
blocks, “This is as much ‘Manchesterism’ as the public bus network
overseen by Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester’s mayor and prime
ministerial contender.” Burnham has presented the Bee Network of
integrated bus and tram services brought under the control of local
authority–run Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) as his greatest
victory over Thatcherism.
But as the WSWS has established,
this centerpiece policy: “retains outsourcing. While fares and
timetables are coordinated, the system remains a privatization framework
reliant on state subsidy and maintained on the backs of transport
workers exploited to the hilt by private operators.”
The private
bus companies, owned by global transnationals, continue to extract their
returns from the same public subsidy stream Burnham guarantees.
Franchise bidding continues to drive down wages and conditions. Bus
drivers in Manchester are no strangers to the cost cutting carried out
by the bus profiteers, such as those imposed at Go North West in 2021, as franchising was being finalized by Burnham, TfGM and the bus firms.
*****
As the WSWS has argued before:
“The decisive question for the working class is not which carbon-copy
Labour leader is at the head of the country when struggles erupt, but
developing its own socialist leadership in the fight against them.”
Thatcher knew what New Labour was. Workers and youth should know what
Burnham is. The task is to build a party of their own—the Socialist Equality Party.
The
UAW bureaucracy is seeking to impose a fourth sellout tentative
agreement after autoworkers at the Saginaw steering plant rejected the
first three and voted by 86 percent to authorize a strike.
Nurses
at SSM Health St. Mary's Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin have filed for a
union election with the SEIU amid management intimidation, but the
fight for safe staffing and patient care requires rank-and-file
organization independent of a union whose history is one of isolating
and betraying workers.
Early Friday morning, the US Senate passed the Secure America Act, a
nearly $70 billion funding package for the Department of Homeland
Security, providing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with funding through 2029, the end
of Trump’s second term.
The bill passed 52-47. Every Democrat present voted “no,” joined by
Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, while Democratic Senator Michael
Bennet of Colorado missed the vote. The measure now heads to the House,
where Republicans are expected to pass it.
The bill provides
billions for hiring, training, paying and equipping additional
immigration agents and support personnel, expanding detention capacity
and building out the technological infrastructure of the police state.
One section appropriates $3.45 billion for “new nonintrusive inspection
equipment,” “artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other
innovative technologies,” border surveillance systems and the biometric
entry-exit system.
This comes on top of the roughly $170 billion
provided last year for the immigration Gestapo under Trump’s “One Big
Beautiful Bill” Act, which included $45 billion to construct new
detention camps across the United States.
The passage of the bill
is not simply a victory handed to Trump by the Republicans. It is the
outcome of a political process in which every institution of the
existing order, above all the Democratic Party, played its assigned role
in strangling the mass movement that erupted in January following the
murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
*****
Across the country, ICE and CBP continue to kidnap workers from their
homes, job sites and communities. In South Carolina, 48 workers were
taken by ICE while on the job at Burnstein von Seelen, a metal casting
business.
The trade union apparatus and the pseudo-left
organizations around the Democratic Party have played their role in this
process. During the Minneapolis protests, the trade union bureaucracy
told workers to remain on the job and respect “no strike” clauses
negotiated by the union bureaucracies themselves. The pseudo-left,
including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as well as groups
like Left Voice, worked to contain opposition and promote the
fiction that the agreement between Trump and the Democrats represented a
fundamental retreat.
“Abolish ICE,” once promoted by DSA figures
such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has become forbidden language within
the Democratic Party, just as “abolish the police” was buried after the
mass protests following the murder of George Floyd. Ocasio-Cortez has
not issued a statement concerning the DHS funding bill or the continuing
crimes of ICE, though she has found time to post repeatedly about the
New York Knicks. Bernie Sanders has likewise refused to comment on the
funding and ongoing operations of the immigration Gestapo.
Their
silence expresses the political reality that the Democrats are
collaborators in Trump’s police state agenda. The Democratic Party, a
party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence agencies, is
terrified above all of a growth of opposition to Trump from below.
This is a critical experience for workers and youth. The conclusion that
must be drawn is that the defense of democratic rights is a class
question. It cannot be waged through either capitalist party, the union
apparatus or the pseudo-left organizations attached to them. The entire
state apparatus, including ICE, CBP, DHS, the police and the military,
exists to defend the wealth and power of the oligarchy.
The Socialist Equality Party calls for the abolition of ICE, CBP and
every police agency; the closure of all detention camps; and the
immediate freeing of all detainees. The defense of the most vulnerable
immigrant worker is the defense of the democratic rights of the entire
working class.
Little’s death is the fourth at the Palmetto RPDC in the last two
years. Whatever the cause of Little’s death may have been, this is a
staggering toll that exposes conditions not only inside the
one-million-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility, but across USPS as a
whole.
Workers took to social media to express outrage and grief
on social media. On Facebook, one worker wrote: “The stress level is
real at USPS and UPS which I retired from. The management doesn’t care
about employees’ health or safety.” Another commented: “This is
happening way too often. How many of the USPS employees have to die
before action is taken.” A third reported: “Working there really messed
with my son’s mental health. It’s toxic!” Yet another wrote simply: “All
they care about is getting the mail out, not the employees.”
At the same facility, RussellScruggsJr.,
44, died last November when he suffered a cardiac event, fell and
struck his head. A supervisor had denied Scruggs’ request to go, who
reported he was not feeling well.
Coworkers told the WSWS that supervisors stood around him without
administering CPR, that no defibrillator was available and that it took
over an hour for an ambulance to arrive after initially going to the
wrong entrance. While the autopsy classified the manner of death as
“natural,” the circumstances were entirely preventable.
EricSmith,
59, collapsed and died of a heart attack in the lunchroom on June 3,
2025. Another worker died at the facility just one week later; their
name and cause of death was never made public.
ShannonBarnes, 48,
collapsed during her night shift on August 18, 2024, after telling a
coworker she wasn’t feeling well. Because there is no cell phone service
inside the building, someone had to run outside to call 911. It took 30
minutes for paramedics to reach her. She was already dead when she
arrived at the hospital.
As the WSWS wrote
after Smith’s death, a medical emergency in this facility “becomes a
test of a system already at its limits.” The USPS Office of Inspector
General’s July 2025 report documented disregarded safety issues, broken
equipment left unrepaired and chronic absenteeism.
The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committees, a nationwide group
of workers formed in opposition to both management and pro-corporate
union bureaucrats, is carrying out an independent investigation.
Citing a source, it reported that the Palmetto facility “has never had
written safety protocols.” Billions were spent on automated equipment,
the committee found, “yet there is no money for medical equipment,
on-site health professionals, or even basic safety procedures,” the
investigation concluded.
These conditions are the product of
USPS’s 10-year “Delivering for America” (DFA) restructuring program.
Since its launch in 2021, DFA has produced chronic understaffing,
inadequate training, operational failures and service disruptions at new
Regional Processing and Distribution Centers (RPDCs) across the
country. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) audits repeatedly identified serious problems at all of the new RPDCs. Palmetto is among the worst.
*****
The union bureaucracy has responded with silence. The APWU has issued
no statement on the Palmetto deaths or on Acker’s death in Detroit. The
National Postal Mail Handlers Union has been equally silent. At
Manhattan’s Morgan PDC, workers reported that management and union
officials focused on taking employees off the clock after a worker died
rather than informing them about what had happened.
Having
endorsed Delivering for America and collaborated in its implementation,
the postal unions function not as organizations of struggle but as
partners of management while conditions continue to deteriorate and the
death toll mounts.
Workers are fighting back. In April, postal
workers at the Springfield, Massachusetts, NDC formed a local committee
affiliated with the national USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee,
citing the APWU’s failure to enforce contractual rights or respond to
safety hazards.
The Springfield committee’s founding statementdeclared:
“USPS is a public service, not a profit-making enterprise. Hundreds of
thousands of living-wage jobs, employment for veterans, and a national
lifeline for seniors and those living in rural communities are at
stake.” It asserted “the right of postal workers to take decisions
affecting our jobs, safety and the public interest into our own hands.”
A statement
by the National USPS Rank and File Committee issued earlier this year
advanced immediate safety demands: defibrillators and nurses in every
facility, an end to the blocking of cell phone signals, written
emergency plans subject to workers’ oversight and strict enforcement of
lockout/tagout procedures. It stressed that these are “inseparable from
broader demands needed to protect both jobs and lives by ending
overwork.”
As the committee warned:
“The only way we will see justice is if we reveal the truth, hold
accountable those responsible for the conditions that put us in harm’s
way, and set up our own shop floor organizations to take control.”
The Lebanon strikes are an escalation of the Israeli war, waged in
coordination with the US-Israeli war against Iran, that has killed at
least 3,516 people and wounded 10,674 since March 2, the Lebanese health
ministry reported. The United Nations counted at least 88 killed over
the May 30-31 weekend, and Israeli attacks killed at least eight on
Tuesday, nine on Wednesday and four on Thursday. Among the dead was a
paramedic, one of more than 130 medics killed since March.
On
Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the
occupation of Southern Lebanon permanent. Israel needs “security zones:
separation and security areas on the other side of the border,” he told
mayors in Northern Israel. “This is a fundamental change.”
While
the US media remains focused on “peace” negotiations between Trump and
Iran, events in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank make clear that any
“ceasefire” is merely a cover for ongoing mass killing.
The
Committee for Public Education urges educators and workers to join the
meeting to discuss how to develop the fight against the sellout deal
between the Australian Education Union and the Victorian state Labor
government, and the underlying austerity and war agenda of the federal
Labor government.
Germany
lost the vote for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council to
Portugal and Austria, reflecting growing global opposition to its
imperialist foreign policy and militarism.
As Wall Street powers ahead and major banks go all out promoting the
initial public offering (IPO) of the Elon Musk-owned SpaceX and those to
come of the AI companies Anthropic and Open AI, collecting fat fees
running into hundreds of millions of dollars, warning bells on the state
of the US economy and the global financial system are growing louder.
There is increasing focus on the narrowness of the stock market boom,
which is concentrated in the handful of AI companies amid a slowing of
the rest of the economy. Profits as a proportion of GDP are rising, but
rather than leading to a “trickle down” effect in which workers receive
higher wages, real wages are falling, and the most profitable companies
are those which shed the most labor as they seek to cut costs,
increasingly through the use of AI.
The overall data show that
consumption spending in the US is holding up in the aggregate, but an
increasing proportion of this is coming from higher income groups while
millions of families are struggling to make ends meet as inflation,
above all in necessities, surges.
And there is growing concern about the way in which the economy and the financial system are resting on the growth of debt.
*****
The US has been able to finance its debt because of the dollar’s
pre-eminent role as the global currency, enabling it to raise money from
international capital markets. But there is a shift underway as
investors are coming to regard the US as “overstretched.”
*****
The holding of US Treasuries, as well as the debt of other governments,
by central banks has played a crucial role in the global financial
system following the global financial crash. In the period 2008 to 2021,
central banks bought up 63 percent of the debt issued by the major
powers in the G7. In other words, one arm of the capitalist state issued
large amounts of debt, the majority of which was then bought by another
arm.
Thirty-six days into Bolivia’s indefinite general strike, the
government of Rodrigo Paz has not broken the uprising. Road
blockades—which peaked at more than 100 active points earlier this week
before a partial reduction during the Corpus Christi holiday—continue to
strangle access to La Paz and extend well beyond the capital.
Demonstrations
are reported across the country, with Cochabamba having become the new
epicenter of protests. In Santa Cruz, mobilized peasants occupied the
Humberto Suárez Roca oil field on Tuesday and were brutally repressed. A
21-day blockade in San Julián has paralyzed one of the country's main
agro-industrial corridors. The cocalero federations of the Chapare have
announced a mass march converging on El Alto.
On June 2, the
Departmental Federation of Neighborhood Associations of La Paz (Fejuve)
organized a massive popular assembly in El Alto, the working-class city
on the plateau above La Paz where major class battles of this century
have been waged. The assembly declared a “permanent mobilized state of
emergency” and ratified the single demand of Paz’s resignation. After
military clearing operations, protesters retook El Alto’s industrial
zone of Senkata and occupied the surrounding streets that drivers had
been using as alternative routes.
One week ago, Paz signed the
revocation of Law 1341, clearing the legal path for a military crackdown
against the mass uprising. However, the immensely demoralized Bolivian
bourgeois regime has not yet felt in a position to frontally clash with
the working masses.
With the backing of US imperialism and every dirty and illegal method
at its disposal, the Paz administration has spent the last days focused
on bridging that gap.
*****
A clear expression of the mood prevailing among the working class
masses came after a court suspension of the terrorism arrest warrant
against COB executive secretary Mario Argollo—the condition the
confederation had itself set for entering dialogue with the government.
The rank-and-file rejected negotiations regardless, ratified the
blockades, and declared the permanent mobilized emergency. As former COB
leader Jaime Solares summarized after the confederation's own internal
deliberations: “They don't want dialogue, they don't want anything. The
only demand the people have now is that the president has to go.”
The
Bolivian working class has sustained this uprising for 36 days against
everything the government and its imperialist backers have thrown at it.
The counterrevolutionary conspiracy being assembled is a measure of
this uprising’s strength, not its weakness. But the government is not
standing still, and the gap between the determination of the masses and
the political leadership they have at their disposal is the most
dangerous terrain of the conflict.
The power of the working class
in Bolivian society lies in the international nature of this class. It
must understand its own insurrection as part of an unfolding
international revolutionary crisis that poses directly the question of
the world socialist revolution. Only by strategically orienting its
struggle in that direction and by appealing to its international class
brothers and sisters can it defeat Paz and the reactionary national
bourgeoisie and their imperialist patrons.
Rollins was indisputably one of the major figures of 20th century
American music. His passing has been widely covered by the US media and
has triggered an outpouring of respectful, well-deserved accolades,
including glowing references in his New York Times obituary to “the greatest living jazz improviser” and “the greatest virtuoso ever produced by jazz.”
Notably,
Rollins was the last survivor of the 57 musicians in the iconic 1958 photograph by Art Kane known as “A Great Day in Harlem.” The image has
been frequently invoked as capturing the “Golden Era” of jazz, a period
that coincided with the emergence of the US as the leading capitalist
economic and political power but riven by social contradictions.
Rollins’ breakthrough 1956 album for Prestige Records was aptly named Saxophone Colossus,
also the title of Aidan Levy’s extensive but somewhat uneven and
tedious 2022 biography. While not the last surviving bebopper—the
superlative vibraphonist Terry Gibbs is very much alive at 101—Rollins
deserves consideration among such pioneers as alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro and Miles Davis, pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, and drummers Max Roach, Art Blakey and Roy Haynes.
*****
Rollins was raised in Harlem by his mother Valborg and her sister
Mirium, an eclectic left-wing activist, in a family profoundly affected
by the Harlem Renaissance afterglow cast by W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston
Hughes and Paul Robeson but also the shadow of black nationalist,
charlatan and swindler Marcus Garvey , an immigrant from Jamaica who formed a “Back to Africa” movement in Harlem before being convicted of mail fraud and deported.
As
a youth, Rollins attended Camp Unity in Wingdale, New York, described
by his biographer Levy as “an interracial, antichauvinist,
anticapitalist summer camp,” established by the New York branches of the
Communist Party. Many black artists turned toward the CP as the
supposed continuator of the 1917 October Revolution and a beacon in the
struggle against oppression. Tragically, the Stalinized Communist Party
had shifted sharply to the right, doing everything in its power to
subordinate the working class to the Democratic Party and the liberal
sections of the ruling elite.
Rollins later recalled, “It was
considered a communist camp, … a bad word to some people but a good word
to the people in my community because it offered a lot of the black
Americans intercourse with some of the other activities that you
otherwise would be prohibited from engaging in.”
One activity
available to everyone in Harlem, of course, was music, with the major
big bands of Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford and Chick Webb based in
the neighborhood, along with innumerable individual performers such as
Fats Waller. Rollins took up the saxophone at age eight and by his
mid-teens was proficient enough to start working around New York City,
just as the clubs on 52nd Street were becoming the ground zero for
bebop.
*****
Rollins made outstanding records during the 1950s in groups led by Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis, including one notable session with Charlie Parker switching
to tenor saxophone. Unfortunately, like too many of his peers, Rollins
became addicted to heroin. He spent time in custody before breaking the
habit mid-decade, leading to the most creative and productive years of
his career.
In 1955, Rollins joined the Clifford Brown-Max Roach
Quintet and began recording prolifically under his own name, including
the classic Saxophone Colossus, Tenor Madness, featuring a “battle” with
the up-and-coming John Coltrane, and a daring trio album—only bass and
drums, no piano or guitar—in Los Angeles for Contemporary Records, Way Out West.
Rollins followed up with A Night At the Village Vanguard, also with only bass and drums, and several other albums for Blue Note, before 1958’s remarkable Freedom Suite for Riverside Records, using the same spare instrumentation for an unusual four-movement composition
based on a recurrent motif. Intended as a political statement, the
liner notes by Rollins express his inexhaustible spirit of struggle and
optimism but also the undoubted influence of black nationalism.
*****
Rollins’ style remained instantly recognizable, sometimes
fusing elements of his previous periods with rock instrumentation and
increasing doses of calypso. Rollins provided three saxophone tracks for
the Rolling Stones’ 1981 Tattoo You but declined their invitation to tour.
As
an elder statesman, Rollins won multiple awards and honors from the
music industry, academia and the political establishment. He was always
gracious and modest in interviews and with aspiring musicians.
On
September 11, 2001, Rollins was in his apartment a few blocks from the
World Trade Center when the buildings were struck by airliners and
collapsed. Toxic particles infested the area, and he could not be
evacuated until the next day, when he had to descend 39 flights. While
no causal link was proven, Rollins subsequently developed pulmonary
fibrosis, which ended his career. Rollins’ last public performance was
in 2012.
A notable episode in 2014 highlights Rollins as a victim of the general decline of American culture. The New Yorker
magazine published a piece purportedly quoting Rollins that jazz is
“the stupidest thing anyone ever came up with.” Not clearly marked as
satire—and not remotely amusing—the piece shocked and confused fans.
Rollins responded graciously, stating that the article “hurt his
feelings” and that it felt like someone being kicked “when he is down.”
The
legacy of Sonny Rollins embodies the best traditions of jazz and art in
general—democratic, rooted in tradition, disciplined and yet expressive
of individual freedom and expression. It is a legacy worth fighting
for—against the cheapening of popular taste, the racialist reduction of
art and the postmodernist and irrationalist currents that sometimes
drove Rollins inward or away from performing music altogether.
Özgür Özel, the elected leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), published an article on June 1 in the American Newsweek magazine,
addressing the political crisis in Türkiye. The piece is directed at
Türkiye’s imperialist NATO and European Union (EU) allies, framing the
government’s pressure on the CHP as a security threat to the
imperialists.
Özel warns that the obstruction of what he terms a
“peaceful democratic means to change” under CHP leadership by President
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government will plunge the country into
instability—to the detriment of NATO and the EU.
By implying that
the CHP is capable of containing the mounting social opposition to the
Erdoğan government, Özel seeks to win over NATO and EU powers—and in
doing so, lays bare the CHP’s class character and its organic ties to
imperialism.
*****
In his article, Özel argues that the Erdoğan government has seized
control of most of the state apparatus and is working to eliminate “the
last meaningful democratic alternative.” Yet he is unable to explain why
this is happening; his sole stated reason is that the CHP came first in
the 2024 elections.
Attacks on democratic rights, however, are an
international phenomenon that cannot be reduced to the ambitions of
one-man. The WSWS wrote:
What
is unfolding in Türkiye is not a purely national event but a
manifestation of an international collapse of democratic forms of rule
rooted in the deepening crisis of the capitalist system. US President
Donald Trump, having lost the November 2020 elections, mounted a failed
coup on January 6, 2021, seeking to remain in power illegally. Erdoğan,
for his part, is attempting to forestall a likely defeat in the next
elections by neutralizing his principal rival.
The
authoritarianism of governments is not a subjective choice by individual
rulers; it is the product of the objective contradictions of
capitalism. The escalating imperialist wars and aggression across the
Middle East and around the world, alongside unprecedented levels of
social inequality and class tension, are manifestations of this.
In Türkiye, the ruling class is sitting atop a social powder keg.
Türkiye ranks among the most unequal societies in Europe, and the
polarization between the working class and the bourgeoisie has reached
extraordinary dimensions.
*****
Whatever the factional conflicts between Özel, Kılıçdaroğlu and
Erdoğan, all three are representatives of the same ruling class, bound
organically to imperialism. That is why Özel’s article did not address
the social and democratic rights of the working class, but rather the
security concerns of the imperialists.
Özel’s central argument
runs as follows: the political crisis in Türkiye could trigger a social
explosion; that explosion would destabilize NATO and the EU; the CHP is
therefore the democratic alternative best equipped to contain such an
explosion—more effectively than Erdoğan. The fact that the CHP prevented
the spontaneous mass protests by young people and workers that erupted
following İmamoğlu’s arrest in March 2025 from becoming radicalized and
managed to bring them under control and bring them to an end, serves as a
concrete and significant example.
In making this case, Özel emphasizes Türkiye’s geopolitical
significance: a gatekeeper of the Black Sea, NATO’s second-largest
military power, a crossroads of Europe and Eurasia. He warns that
Türkiye risks becoming “a strategically indispensable [NATO] member that
no longer functions as a democracy.” This posture is a continuation of
Kılıçdaroğlu’s approach—who declared NATO “the guarantor of democracy in
the 21st century.”
The claim that NATO leaders have any interest
in democratic rights—in Türkiye, in their own countries or anywhere
else—is a fraud of the first order. Since its founding as a bulwark
against the Soviet Union, NATO’s history has been defined not only by
imperialist aggression but by military coups and regime-change
operations. The September 12, 1980 and July 15, 2016 coups in Türkiye,
as well as the 2014 coup in Ukraine—a pivotal moment in provoking the
present war against Russia—were all carried out with the backing of
leading NATO powers.
*****
It is impossible to defend democratic rights and NATO and the EU
simultaneously. These institutions are the instruments not only of their
ruling classes’ imperialist wars of plunder abroad, but of the class
war waged against the working class at home. They are incompatible with
any democratic form of governance.
The struggle for democratic
rights therefore cannot be separated from the struggle against
imperialism and NATO. That struggle requires a radical political
break—from bourgeois parties, and from the Stalinist, Pabloite and
pseudo-left parties that channel the working class and youth behind a
pro-imperialist party like the CHP. Not one of these parties has made an
accounting for its support for Kılıçdaroğlu in the 2023 presidential
election—despite his openly pro-NATO and anti-immigrant platform. They
are now forming up behind Özel’s leadership to play the same role.
This
is the Turkish expression of an international phenomenon: bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois political forces, together with the trade union
apparatus, are joining hands to neutralize a working class that is
beginning to mobilize against war, genocide, austerity and political
repression. The only revolutionary response to this offensive is to
build an independent political movement of the working class—one that
stands against all these forces. The developing independent workers’
movement provides the social foundation for building an alternative
outside the political establishment.
This movement must be armed
with an international perspective rooted in Trotsky’s Theory of
Permanent Revolution. A democratic regime based on social equality and
anti-imperialism can only be established as part of an international
socialist revolution, under the leadership of the working class.
The brutal murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak by 23-year-old Vickrum
Digwa, a British Sikh, is being used to advance the far-right agenda of
Reform UK and smaller far-right groups. Workers must reject attempts to
use this killing to drag them behind their class enemies.
Nowak’s
death is being used to promote the bogus right-wing “two-tier policing”
narrative, claiming whites are penalized because of “woke” attitudes and
“political correctness”.
*****
This week, Digwa received a life sentence with a minimum of 21 years
for the murder of Nowak. Police bodycam footage, made available to the
media, has gone viral and the story has led newspapers and sites for
days.
Millions are appalled at the callous negligence of the
police, of which every working-class community has some experience.
There is also great sympathy with Nowak’s family, who have said they “do
not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or
tensions.”
In contrast, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and the gang
of far-right thugs and provocateurs orbiting around the party saw a
young man’s death at the hands of a criminal family and a stupid,
sneering police force as an opportunity to claim anti-white prejudice
and paint all “non-whites” as a potential threat.
In what he described as “Emergency Address”, “to the nation”, Farage
seized on the event to “suggest” in a video message that people respond
with “pure, cold rage”, warning that “Britain’s historic way of life is
being thrown away.”
Every fascist leader in Britain heeded the call and traveled to
Southampton where Nowak’s murder took place to speak at what rapidly
became a violent protest of a few hundred people. Farage’s clear
intention was to recreate the far-right riots of July 2024, when mobs attacked buildings accommodating asylum seekers after the murder of three children in Southport.
*****
That the far-right was able this week to hang its nationalist,
xenophobic campaign on a case where a white man died horribly thanks to
the actions of the police is incidental. They rove from one scandal to
the next—whether real, embellished or totally unsubstantiated—as fuel
for their violently divisive agenda.
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.
