Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. A tribute to Gordon S. Wood (1933-2026), historian of the American Revolution
A tragic accident has brought to an end the life and career of one of the United States’ major historians. Gordon S. Wood died Sunday at the age of 92, hours after being struck by a car while walking through a grocery store parking lot in East Providence, Rhode Island. He died later that day at Rhode Island Hospital—less than one month before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the commemoration of the revolution whose history he had spent a lifetime studying.
It speaks to the degradation of democratic consciousness, intellectual life and culture in the United States that Wood’s death, apart from scattered and superficial obituaries placed on the inside pages of newspapers, has gone largely unnoticed. The country’s foremost historian of its own founding has passed from the scene, on the very eve of the semiquincentennial, with hardly a ripple in official public life.
Within the historical profession, however, Wood’s death is deeply felt as a tragic loss....
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In a career spanning six decades and numerous books, articles and lectures, Wood established himself as the foremost historian of the American Revolution and the Early Republic. His Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, published in 1968, won the Bancroft Prize, and his The Radicalism of the American Revolution, arguably the most important book yet written on the period of the American founding, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Wood’s Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, published in 2009, was a landmark contribution to the Oxford History of the United States series initiated by C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter.
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Wood later recalled finding high school history unbearable, suffering through classes in which the teacher simply read from a textbook. A Latin instructor encouraged him to attend nearby Tufts University, which he attended on ROTC funding while commuting from home. He graduated summa cum laude in 1955. His subsequent Air Force service in Japan caused Wood to abandon earlier ambitions for a career in the Foreign Service. He instead enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard University.
There Wood studied under the brilliant scholar of the colonial era, Bernard Bailyn, who was himself early on in a remarkable career. Precisely in those years Bailyn was at work on a close study of the massive body of pamphlets that had, he surmised, created the political climate of the American Revolution, a study that resulted in his most important book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Published in 1967, it won both the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes and remains worthy of careful reading today.
Wood’s own Creation of the American Republic, produced out of the dissertation he had completed under Bailyn, came just one year later. It announced the start of an extraordinary career that clearly owed much to the work of his mentor, but that went, in key respects, beyond it. The “Bailyn school,” which nurtured the careers of a constellation of significant historians—among them Pauline Maier, Mary Beth Norton, Michael Kammen, Jack Rakove and Fred Anderson—produced three Pulitzer Prize winners in addition to Wood.
Wood’s writing, unlike much of academic history, was accessible to a general readership. He achieved this without sacrificing complexity and while still conveying his encyclopedic grasp of the archive. Like Bailyn, Wood possessed a rare literary gift, one rooted in a sensitivity to the voices that survive in the historical record and in a respect for his readership. Much like the present, the past was a living world inhabited by actors confronting circumstances whose resolution they themselves could not foresee. In Wood’s hands, the Revolutionary era ceased to be a familiar sequence of settled events, moving toward an outcome predetermined by the historian, and became instead a drama unfolding in real time, animated by uncertainty, conflict, possibility and tragedy. “The past cannot see the future,” Wood liked to remind students and colleagues.
From this conviction followed Wood’s emphatic rejection of historical anachronism—the ripping of historical figures out of their own time in order to impose upon them the assumptions and standards of the contemporary world. Such an approach, Wood insisted, was inherently moralistic and hypocritical. It flattered the present at the expense of the past, converting history into an exercise in self-congratulation and it rendered genuine historical understanding impossible. The men and women of the eighteenth century could not be indicted for failing to think and act as people of the twenty-first; the historian’s task was to comprehend them within the world they actually inhabited, with its given limits and possibilities.
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Wood never went to great lengths to identify precisely what those interests were or how they related to social classes in the emerging capitalist world—a limitation dictated, in great measure, by his fidelity to the archive and his sensitivity to the nature of the society itself. There was no modern bourgeoisie or significant wage-labor working class in the late colonial period, though both were emerging by the early republican era. Instead, Wood insisted, and demonstrated richly in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, that what was at stake was the erosion and eventual collapse of a monarchical society.
Monarchy and its social and property forms were weak in America, Wood acknowledged, but nonetheless they existed. The American Revolution was waged against this Ancien régime no less than the French Revolution was a decade later, a comparison from which Wood never shrank. It was an Old World challenged and undone by what Jefferson called a new “natural aristocracy” of republican leaders. But, in tragic irony, these Founders’ vision of a republic governed by disinterested statesmen gave way, in Wood’s telling, to a bustling, vulgar democracy commanded by career politicians representing a new “middling type.”
Wood was at his literary height when he conveyed the sense of tragedy over the outcome of their revolution felt by founding fathers who lived into the 1820s, figures such as Jefferson, Adams and Madison. One senses that, to a certain extent, the author shared their view, which he captured memorably at the conclusion of his Empire of Liberty:
No American had spoken more eloquently or more fully for the radical impulse of the Enlightenment than Jefferson. No one had expressed the radical meaning of the Revolution—the deposing of tyrannical kings and the raising up of common people to an unprecedented degree of equality—than Jefferson. Yet he always sensed that his “empire of liberty” had a cancer at its core that was eating away at the message of liberty and equality and threatening the very existence of the nation and its democratic self-government…
Although Jefferson in his final years tried to retain his sunny hopes for the future, he had twinges of an impending disaster whose sources he never fully understood. He and his colleagues had created a Union devoted to liberty that contained an inner flaw that would nearly prove to be its undoing. The Virginians who had done so much to bring about the United States knew in their souls, as Madison intimated in his advice to his country from beyond the grave, that there was a “Serpent creeping with his deadly wiles” in their Arcadian “Paradise.” Like Madison, many of the older generation came to realize that “slavery and farming are incompatible.” The Civil War was the climax of a tragedy that was preordained from the time of the Revolution. Only with the elimination of slavery could this nation that Jefferson had called “the world’s best hope” for democracy even begin to fulfill its great promise.
These and other passages give the lie to some critics’ claims that Wood was indifferent to the issue of slavery, or to other forms of oppression. But while the historian did not shrink from the tragedy of unintended consequences, which, as Trotsky observed, always “lay inherent in the contradiction between the awakened world of the mind, and the stagnant limitation of means,” Wood emphatically insisted on the revolutionary, transformative character of the American Revolution, on its world-historic significance. He never budged from this stance.
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At the close of his life, as the United States approached the 250th anniversary of independence amid deep political and social crisis, Wood stood as one of the last major representatives of a historical tradition that is now embattled and endangered. He belonged to a generation of historians who believed that the past could be understood objectively, that ideas mattered and that great revolutions altered the course of human history. He rejected cynicism, superficial and ahistorical present-mindedness and the reduction of history to race, identity or power for its own sake. For him, the American Revolution remained one of the decisive events in the democratic development of humanity, however incomplete and contradictory its results.
That conviction animated his scholarship across more than half a century and gave his work its enduring vitality. It will be read long after the racialist falsifications and postmodernist evasions that he combatted in his last years have been discredited, not only in scholarly works but also, and most important, by the practice of a radicalized working class that draws encouragement and inspiration from the ideals of the first American revolution.
2. Wall Street anxiously awaits speculative SpaceX launch
The SpaceX launch is aimed at raising around $80 billion with the market valuation of the company set to reach $1.75 trillion. If it goes ahead as planned it will make Musk, already the world’s wealthiest individual, the first trillionaire. The SpaceX IPO is the largest in history, three times more than Saudi oil firm Aramco’s $25.6 billion in 2019.
Wall Street has always functioned as a means for siphoning the wealth of society, created by the labor of billions of workers in the US and around the world, into the hands of finance capital. But with the development of the AI boom this process has assumed historic dimensions.
There is no question that AI has the potential to bring an enormous increase in the productivity of human labor, opening up vast possibilities for the advancement of society.
But under capitalist ownership it is the vehicle for massive speculation, with the potential to cause a financial crash of major proportions, while at the same time its success, as measured by profitability, depends on its capacity to wipe out the jobs and livelihood of millions of workers as a cost-cutting measure.
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All told, the four major hyperscalers—Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (the owner of Facebook) and Microsoft—are expected to spend $725 billion on AI this year. Initially this money was drawn from their cash reserves but now they are seeking finance through debt or via the share market.
And the market is showing signs of increased volatility. Last Friday its nine-week rise, which saw the S&P 500 index reach 11 record highs in May, came to a jarring halt set off by the tech sector with the NASDAQ index falling 4.2 percent, its largest one-day fall since the start of the pandemic in 2020.
The fall was largely ascribed to official figures which showed an increase in employment of 172,000, higher than the market expectation of 85,000. This led to the conclusion that interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve—two had been expected at the start of the year—were off the table for the foreseeable future.
That was no doubt a factor. But the instability of the tech boom, and its speculative character had been revealed the previous day. In a major selloff the chipmaker and technology firm, Broadcom, lost $285 billion in what was the fourth largest single-day loss by a company on record.
It was not that Broadcom had made a loss or suffered a significant downturn in revenue. In fact, its projected revenue for the second quarter was $29.4 billion, above consensus estimates of $28.2 billion. But because this was short of the insatiable demands in the market, its shares opened the day 15.9 percent lower and finished the day 12.6 percent down.
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The reason SpaceX and others are so anxious to secure a listing, and NASDAQ is doing everything to make that possible, is to ensure that money from Exchange Traded Funds, which base themselves on indexes rather than individual stocks, can flow into their shares.
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But even as there is knowledge of the speculative character of the boom, the rush to cash in continues, with a WSJ article noting that Wall Street was “rushing to fund the AI bonanza in every conceivable way.”
In a comment published on X, Jurrien Timmer, head of global macro at Fidelity, a global fund manager, said bull markets ended either because they were not supported by fundamentals or because of inflation.
Timmer’s post then recalled the words of Chuck Price, the one-time CEO of Citigroup who famously said in July 2007, little more than year before the 2008 crisis broke, that “ as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”
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It remains to be seen what the outcome of the SpaceX IPO on Friday will be. But one thing is clear.
The gyrations on Wall Street, the escalation of the valuations of loss-making firms into the stratosphere on the basis of expectations, the support for this process by the major banks—they expect to collect at least $500 million in fees from the SpaceX launch—the “buy the dip” mentality, the bending of the rules by major indexes, and the feverish drive by the Wall Street oligarchs to acquire ever more wealth are all indications of the decay and rot of the entire financial system.
3. Record One Nation polling underscores crisis of Australia’s two-party system
The far-right party is a temporary beneficiary of explosive social discontent that will increasingly find expression in the struggles of the working class.
4. May 8: How the Soviet Union’s victory over the Nazis is being erased from memory
While visitors to the Soviet memorials in Berlin laid wreaths for the soldiers of the Red Army and commemorated the victims of Nazi terror, the German government is rearming at a pace not seen since 1945. A new world war is already unfolding on several fronts. The war in Ukraine has entered its fourth year, and the war of aggression by the US and Israel against Iran threatens to set the entire region ablaze.
Germany is, in effect, once again at war with Russia and is risking a nuclear escalation. In the weeks leading up to the anniversary, the German government introduced the new Conscription Act, published a German military strategy for the first time since the end of the war and agreed on a “strategic partnership” with Ukraine that provides for joint arms production and the economic exploitation of Ukraine. The German armoured brigade in Lithuania, which is permanently stationed in the immediate vicinity of Russian territory, is being reinforced.
The more aggressively the German imperialists stoke the war against Russia, the less they can tolerate people recalling the Nazi crimes of the last world war—and who was instrumental in defeating the fascists. The Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany, the struggle of millions of Soviet workers of all nationalities who gave their lives to defend the achievements of the October Revolution, is being erased from the collective memory. For it is this memory that stands in the way of the new war policy.
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The attacks on the Soviet Union are most clearly evident in the reignited campaign against Soviet memorials, which commemorate the approximately 13 million Soviet soldiers who fell in battle. Today, they are a thorn in the side of the ruling class because they remind the whole world of what war produces.
Following the demolition of hundreds of Soviet monuments in Ukraine and the Baltic states in recent years, alongside the erection of new monuments to fascist collaborators such as Stepan Bandera, efforts are now underway in Germany to put an end to the commemoration of the Red Army’s victory. The campaign is advancing step by step.
In the treaties of 1990 with the USSR and subsequently with Russia, the Federal Republic of Germany undertook to preserve and maintain Soviet monuments and war graves in Germany. Therefore, demolition, as has occurred in Ukraine, is not legally possible without further ado. Instead, a “redesign” and “contextualization” of the memorials is being demanded.
The focus is on the three Berlin memorials in the Tiergarten, where some 2,500 soldiers are buried; in Treptower Park, the largest memorial of its kind in Germany, where 7,200 soldiers are buried; and in the Schönholzer Heide in the district of Pankow, the largest Soviet military cemetery with some 13,200 fallen Red Army soldiers. The monument in Dresden is also being called into question—the oldest memorial to the Red Army in Germany, which was inaugurated immediately after the war in 1945.
Calls for the removal or alteration of the memorials are not new. As early as 2014, at the start of the Ukraine crisis, the right-wing Springer press had called for the dismantling of the monument in the Tiergarten. Following Russia’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Soviet tank there was draped in a Ukrainian flag and the monument in Treptower Park was sprayed with swastikas and anti-Russian slogans.
Now the offensive is entering a new phase. The Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens tabled motions in the Berlin State House of Representatives calling for a “contextualization” of the Stalin quotations at the Treptow monument and for the inclusion of the other successor states of the Soviet Union in the handling of the monuments—several of which are pursuing a policy of rigorously removing Soviet monuments. The Berlin Left Party agreed to such a motion in the committees.
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These nationalist attacks on the Soviet Union are based on a distortion of history. As Jochen Hellbeck demonstrates in detail in his latest book, “World Enemy Number 1,” Hitler’s war in the East was directed primarily against the Soviet Union. In that war, the drive of German imperialism towards the East converged with the anti-communism of the Nazis, who propagated the fight against “Jewish Bolshevism” and sought to reverse the October Revolution. This is the only way to explain the Nazis’ massive extermination campaigns, to which 27 million Soviet citizens fell victim.
The Nazis treated all Soviet prisoners of war as representatives of despised Bolshevism and subjected them to barbaric “special treatment,” in violation of the 1929 Geneva Convention. In consultation with the Nazi leadership, the Wehrmacht command deliberately had over 3 million of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war murdered through mass shootings, starvation, epidemics and forced labor.
Conversely, millions of workers and peasants from all the Soviet republics joined the Red Army to defend the achievements of the October Revolution—and not for their respective nations. They fought side by side for the Soviet Union and were victorious despite Stalin’s devastating policies and the terror and the brutal persecution of national minorities and groups by the NKVD.
If Stalin’s crimes are now being used to belittle the heroic struggle of the Red Army soldiers and to bolster the nationalism of the former Soviet republics, this is a falsification of history in two respects.
Firstly, Stalin was not Lenin’s legitimate heir, but the gravedigger of the Russian Revolution. After Lenin’s death in 1924, the Soviet bureaucracy under Stalin seized power and transformed the USSR into a dictatorship that oppressed the working class and murdered the flower of the revolution in the Great Terror of the 1930s.
Secondly, it was Stalin himself who brought back nationalism, which ultimately culminated in the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy. When the heads of state of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus—Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich—decided to dissolve the USSR on December 8, 1991, without any democratic legitimacy, they opened up the territory of the Soviet Union to imperialist ambitions and created the multitude of post-Soviet mini-states that are now being pitted against one another, which forms the basis for the war in Ukraine.
The erasure of the Soviet Union and the rehabilitation of the national movements in the Soviet republics that collaborated with the Nazis serve the transparent aim of rehabilitating the Nazis’ old anti-communist narratives, which were used to justify the war against the Soviet Union. By rehabilitating the collaborators, the Nazis are ultimately rehabilitated, and today’s war policy is legitimized
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Furthermore, the distortion of history against the Soviet Union is aimed at removing the world’s first workers’ state—and thus the October Revolution—from history books and collective memory. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the greatest transformation in history and proves that an alternative to capitalism is possible. It dealt a severe blow to the ruling class and inspired workers and oppressed peoples across the world to mass uprisings and revolutions. The national independence of the former colonies would have been just as unthinkable without the October Revolution as the social gains in the industrialized nations.
Today, all these achievements are under attack across the board. “All that had occurred in the aftermath of the revolution—the upsurge of the international working class, the monumental global movement of the oppressed masses against imperialism, and the social advances that were won in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949—was to be reversed,” explained David North in his May Day speech this year, referring to the US wars and the social counter-revolution.
What the imperialist powers actually seek to impose with their bombs and missiles, as well as by smashing workers’ social rights, is ideologically underpinned by the erasure of the October Revolution. Politicians and the media seriously believe they can simply wipe out the most important event of the past century.
Yet in reality, both the horrors of world war and fascism and the struggles of the working class are deeply rooted in mass consciousness. That is why the vast majority reject the politics of war. But to transform this rejection into a conscious movement, it is essential to counter the falsification of history and to keep alive the memory of fascism and war on the one hand, and the October Revolution on the other.
5. Germany: IG Metall union accepts closure of Mahle auto components plant in Neustadt an der Donau
The union is celebrating the plant closure and loss of 400 jobs as a great success, as it has achieved "a significantly improved financial safeguard." Previously, the workforce had proved that it wants to fight to preserve jobs.
UAW officials at GM's Flint Assembly plant are allowing the company to truck in axles from the strikebound American Axle plant (Dauch Corp.) in Three Rivers, Michigan.
7. Will Lehman issues open letter to UAW members and delegates on eve of Constitutional Convention
Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker waging a rank-and-file campaign for the presidency of the United Auto Workers, distributed an open letter Tuesday to a list of 300,000 UAW members maintained by the federal monitor, calling on delegates to nominate him from the floor of the union’s Constitutional Convention, which opens in Detroit on June 15.
“The aim of my campaign is not to swap one official for another,” Lehman writes in the letter, which was also posted on his website. “It is to organize a rebellion against the dictatorship of the UAW apparatus and restore power where it belongs: the rank and file on the shop floor.”
To every delegate, the letter states: “Nominate me on the convention floor on a program of rank-and-file power.” To every UAW member: “Press the delegates from your local to do exactly that, and join this movement.”
Lehman says UAW members are facing an “absolutely desperate situation,” pointing to inflation accelerating under the impact of “the criminal war against Iran”; multi-year contracts that “erode living standards”; the auto companies “using AI and other advanced technologies to carry out a jobs bloodbath.”
He then declares:
There are two forces in the UAW: the rank-and-file workers who work every day and pay dues, and a bloated bureaucracy of highly paid officials who work against our interests at every turn. This has not changed under the Fain administration. It has only gotten worse.
The letter was issued under conditions of growing militancy and an incipient revolt against the UAW bureaucracy. In Three Rivers, Michigan, 1,000 workers at the American Axle (Dauch Corp.) plant walked off the job on June 1 for the first time since 2008, when the UAW accepted a 50 percent cut in their wages. At the GM Flint Assembly plant, rank-and-file workers have objected to the use of axles from the strikebound plant.
At Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan, 1,700 workers have rejected three UAW-backed tentative agreements and voted by 86 percent to authorize a strike. A rank-and-file committee has emerged, which is campaigning to defeat a fourth contract and join the American Axle workers in a common strike. Workers at Bridgewater Interiors in Warren, Michigan, and at Dana in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, overwhelmingly rejected UAW deals.
Among academic workers—who make up a quarter of all UAW members—there is growing anger against the bureaucracy, including at Harvard where the UAW International shut down a 41-day strike without a contract or any meaningful concession.
In every struggle, Lehman explained, workers are confronting an apparatus that works not to mobilize the membership against the employers but to contain and disorganize the workers it claims to represent.
This pattern is grounded in the very structure of the institution. The UAW International holds $1.1 billion in assets. Of its roughly 1,000 employees, nearly 470 take home more than $100,000 a year. Fain himself earns $270,000; Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock, $247,000; the three vice presidents average $235,000; the nine regional directors, $220,000. Beneath them sit 500 to 600 International Representatives—who are paid $140,000 to $160,000, what Lehman characterizes as “industrial police”—whose function is to enforce leadership decisions and ensure that strikes do not take place.
Lehman states that the apparatus intends to hold the convention as a coronation of Fain’s “Stand Up” slate—described in Lehman’s letter as “a rogues’ gallery of Fain and former Curry supporters”—with no accounting for the past four years and no opening for an independent rank-and-file candidate.
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Lehman calls on delegates to “take the side of the rank and file” and nominate him from the convention floor, and on every UAW member to press their delegates to do the same, talk to their coworkers and build rank-and-file committees independent of the bureaucracy.
8. Trump booed at Madison Square Garden during NBA playoffs
Millions of people across the United States and internationally watched on various media platforms Monday night as basketball fans loudly booed President Donald Trump when his image appeared on the Jumbotron inside New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The eruption of hatred for Trump occurred during a National Basketball Association (NBA) playoff game between the New York Knicks, the favored home team, and the San Antonio Spurs.
Trump was attending the event in a bullet-proof glass VIP room with members of his family and cabinet, including Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, along with the widely despised Knicks owner (and owner of Madison Square Garden) James Dolan, a billionaire and longtime Trump supporter.
The audience booed Trump for many reasons—his assault on immigrants, his attack on Medicaid and other social programs, the war with Iran, his erection of a personalist dictatorship—but certainly on their minds was the fact that Trump’s presence had turned the area around the venue, near a central transit hub and the center of many business and corporate headquarters, into an armed camp.
The New York Police Department (NYPD) fenced in 10 blocks around Madison Square Garden and deployed thousands of cops alongside hundreds of federal agents. Every single ticket holder had to pass through heavy-duty, airport-grade metal detectors set up at street checkpoints blocks away from the Garden’s actual doors. Secret service agents and members of NYPD tactical units had a long list of items to confiscate, such as metal water bottles, aerosols, glass, selfie sticks, and laser pointers.Bags and backpacks had been banned in advance. Because of how long it took security personnel to clear thousands of people through long lines, the stadium was half-empty just before tip-off, causing massive entry delays for the fans.
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Millions of working class Knicks fans in New York could not afford the cheapest seats at the game, priced at between $3,100 and $4,600, since the Knicks had the possibility of winning an NBA championship for the first time since 1973. Prices for better seats started at $8,150.
It is worth noting that standard ticket prices for the 1973 playoffs ranged from $5.00 to $15.00. A $15.00 ticket would put a fan in some of the best lower-level seats in the arena. In 2026 dollars, accounting for inflation, those tickets would now cost between $37 and $259.
These differences in prices are not simply the product of inflation, but of the vast social chasm that has opened up in the last half-century between the top 5 or 10 percent of income earners and the rest of the population. Basketball, football and baseball games were affordable and regularly attended by working class families. But now the working class is far poorer than it was in 1973, and attendance at one of these games is at best an annual treat.
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One only has to look at the grotesque publicity for the game to get a sense of the unreal world the rich inhabit. Coverage in the media featured the anticipated attendance of super-rich Hollywood and sports celebrities such as former Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter (net worth $200 million); filmmaker Spike Lee (net worth $60 million); actor Timothée Chalamet (net worth $30 million); comedian Chris Rock (net worth $60 million) and singer Jay-Z, whose net worth is estimated to be $2.6 billion. The aristocrats of today’s degraded culture sat at the courtside seats. Sources in the media wasted no time in pointing out that Spike Lee could have sold his three tickets for over $500,000.
The most deceptive and mendacious coverage of the event, however, was reserved for the New York Times, which glorified it for supposedly uniting New Yorkers. Its lead article after the game told readers, “Mr. Trump’s attendance was a footnote on a night when New Yorkers banded together to support a team that had united them like few things can.” It quoted the Democratic Party political operative and charlatan Al Sharpton as saying in an interview before the game, “I don’t care about Trump… This is one of the few things I’ve seen New Yorkers across gender and race united around. You walk around, everyone has Knicks’ gear. It’s healthy.”
The entire social context of the game, including the Times’ reporting, are, in fact, deeply diseased. Trump was sandwiching his appearance at the game, during which he visibly fell asleep, between war crimes and social devastation. His administration had just made cuts to SNAP benefits (food stamps) for the working poor, and ICE and Border Patrol agents had attacked protesters at Delaney Hall, an ICE-run immigrant concentration camp in Newark, New Jersey, some 13 miles from Madison Square Garden, where 300 inmates are on a hunger strike against inhumane conditions.
In a pre-game Sunday interview with NBC, he said of the Iranians, “Now, if we don’t make a deal, then we’re going to take them out militarily, very harshly.”
Zohran Mamdani, the pseudo-socialist DSA mayor of New York City, was also present at the game, although he was standing in a cheaper area farther away from the court. At a press briefing last Thursday, he said that he would be “In a very different section of the stadium… I won’t be courtside or in a suite.”
He told the media, nevertheless, that his ticket cost $1,000, a price out of reach for at least 80 percent of New Yorkers, including the 50 percent of working-age city households that do not earn enough to cover basic necessities (housing, food, healthcare, childcare) without assistance or extreme budgeting.
Mamdani was taking a break from promoting his new “Block by Block” housing plan, a project that provides major sops for the same criminal layer of building developers from which Trump emerged. He is also in the midst of imposing government “efficiencies” through his new COGE city government restructuring plan, having reneged on his campaign promises, including free bus service. Last month he encouraged commuters to scab on striking Long Island Rail Road workers.
Always ready to offer up a political diversion in the service of their ruling class masters, the supposed “progressives” in the Democratic Party such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spent the days preceding the game tweeting in support of the home-town Knicks and ignoring the multiple crimes of Trump and American imperialism.
Mamdani played a central role in encouraging the bogus “unity” of New Yorkers proclaimed by the Times in social media posts that took jibes at the Spurs. While Mamdani did not, at least publicly, meet with the fascist in the White House for a third time, he did welcome Trump. He told the Atlantic: “I think we look forward to welcoming any New Yorker who is excited for the Knicks to have that chance to win that championship.”
The grotesque episode of Game 3 of the NBA playoffs underscored the mammoth social divide between the financial oligarchy and the broad mass of working people that will, perhaps sooner rather than later, produce political convulsions that will shake the entire rotten economic and political system to its foundations.
9. US railroad CSX plans to reduce human track inspections following government waiver
Automated Track Inspection, used in conjunction with human visual inspections, can be used to greatly increase railway safety. Instead, they are being used to cut jobs on behalf of profit.
10. DSA candidate Raman advances to Los Angeles mayoral runoff as Democrats seek new “progressive” face
The Los Angeles race lays bare the Democratic Party’s increasing reliance on the DSA to contain working class opposition to inequality, war and austerity.
More than half of the country’s 50 largest school districts are either making budget cuts, have already implemented them, or are confronting reported deficits, according to a Chalkbeat analysis published at the end of May.
Describing the mass layoffs as a long-anticipated “Big Shrink,” Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab details cuts in Boston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, San Diego, Toledo, Broward, San Francisco, Anchorage, Cedar Rapids, Tulsa, Brevard, Richmond, Fresno, Clark County, Cleveland, Bellingham “and countless small and mid-sized districts.”
They conclude, “What’s becoming clear: This isn’t temporary—it’s a reset.”
The capitalist-controlled media universally describe the cuts as the inevitable result of declining student enrollment. In reality, they are part of a decades-long bipartisan strategy by the ruling class to cripple public education services, drive students out and privatize it.
12. An opera and an art exhibition in New York focus on Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
Kahlo and Rivera were not merely remarkable artists whose marriage was unusually turbulent. They were, at critical moments of their lives, participants in the great political struggles of their era. Rivera was expelled by the Mexican Communist Party in 1929, initially opposing the dictates from Moscow on art, and soon exhibiting growing sympathy for the struggle of Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition. For most of the 1930s he and Frida Kahlo, whom he married in 1929, supported Trotsky’s fight against the Stalinist bureaucracy. Rivera played a key role in convincing the government of Lazaro Cardenas to offer Trotsky refuge in Mexico in 1937. In 1938 he co-authored, with Trotsky and Andre Breton, the “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art.” This document, written almost 90 years ago, rejecting the Stalinist lie of “socialist realism” and upholding both revolutionary commitment as well as freedom for artistic creation, retains its full significance today.
Rivera broke with Trotsky in 1939. Both he and Kahlo made their way back to Stalinism, a reflection of the defeats of the revolutionary struggles of the 1930s, but also the failure of either artist to ever fully assimilate the difference between revolutionary Marxism and the radical nationalism of the Mexican Revolution. As the WSWS noted back in 2002 in its analysis of the film Frida, “it seems safe to suggest that neither Rivera nor Kahlo—remarkable artists and not first and foremost political thinkers—ever understand the essence of Trotsky’s struggle with the Stalinist bureaucracy … and remained to one extent or another under the influence of Mexican nationalism.”
Not all of this perhaps can be treated exhaustively, but the fact that all references to political struggle are missing in the new opera, including the collaboration of both Rivera and Kahlo with Trotsky, is indeed revealing. The problems of this new opera are bound up with the baleful influence of identity politics. Frida Kahlo in particular has been turned into a feminist and gay icon, above all the victim of mistreatment by Rivera. She has become a “brand,” with her image adorning tote bags and coffee mugs. Rivera himself has been to some extent dismissed, as if an appreciation of Kahlo required the shrinking of Rivera’s reputation. Àlvarez himself, in a brief intermission interview during a performance, referred to his character as “the bad boy” of the opera. The great Mexican muralist is depicted as a depressed and despairing figure. This is the image of one of the greatest artistic figures of the 20th century that audiences are asked to take away from El Ùltimo Sueño de Frida y Diego.
While the MoMA exhibition suffers from some of the same problems as the opera, and at times feels more like a co-branded marketing opportunity than a serious approach to these artists’ work, it nevertheless offers the opportunity to see six of Kahlo’s most significant paintings along with several of Rivera’s murals and other sketches, and allows one to appreciate what resonated in their work, as well as their differences.
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Often valorized for its intensely intimate depiction of pain, be it physical or emotional, Kahlo’s work is also strikingly objective, as much as it appears fanciful and dream-like. Although grouped with surrealists, particularly through Rivera’s association with Andre Breton, Kahlo did not see herself as part of any “School,” and was often quite critical of many avant-garde circles.
For all their differences, and their often-tumultuous personal relationship, Kahlo and Rivera remained committed politically as well as fiercely loyal to one another as artists. Even though they returned to the camp of Stalinism, both conceived of their art as part of humanity’s struggle for liberation. Their political trajectory amounted to a tragic repudiation of the revolutionary courage they displayed in the 1930s, but it did not of course negate their earlier contributions.
The political commitment of both Rivera and Kahlo is lost on the creators of El Ùltimo Sueño de Frida y Diego, as well as on the curators of the art exhibition at MoMA. But Rivera and Kahlo as simply a tormented husband and wife is hardly the lesson to be drawn by a more inquisitive viewer who examines the complex legacy of their lives and work more deeply. A serious and all-sided examination of the intertwined artistic and political careers of these two great artists has yet to be presented.
That the decision was ultimately taken to integrate the Socialist People’s Party and Red-Green Alliance into government, or at least some form of support for it, speaks to the recognition within the ruling class that they require a political cover to proceed with their agenda.
A homeless Congolese man, Yves Sakila, resident in Ireland since childhood, was killed last month in Henry Street, Dublin. He had been chased and forced to the pavement by private security guards of Arnotts department store.
The BMA and other health unions—Unite, Unison, the GMB and the Royal College of Nursing—are suffocating a unified fightback by National Health Service workers.
16. Educators strike in Australian capital as public education crisis deepens
Teachers and school assistants in Canberra will join a 24-hour strike this Thursday over essentially the same issues of poor pay and deteriorating conditions that confront educators everywhere.
17. 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.
