Trump may announce the finalization of the “deal,” which would become
the framework for preparing the next stage of war, or he may massively
and recklessly escalate. Journalist Seymour Hersh reported Wednesday
that Trump, at a recent White House staff meeting, raised the use of
low-yield nuclear weapons to destroy “some” of Iran’s underground
missile factories, asking whether a nuclear strike “was doable.” Hersh
wrote that a source with extensive knowledge of nuclear weaponry called
it “a very scary and very serious moment” and that the president was
“desperate not to lose in Iran.”
Trump’s idea, Hersh wrote, was
to warn Iran’s leadership that “we are very seriously” considering such
an escalation. At least one aide present was shocked that an American
president would talk so casually about initiating a nuclear war in the
Middle East.
*****
Whatever the immediate course of events, the war is rooted in the
determination of American imperialism to control the Middle East, a
campaign bound up with its conflict with nuclear-armed China and the
escalation of the US global war. The ceasefire Trump announced in June
2025 lasted until February 28, when Washington and Israel resumed the
war by assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Any new “agreement”
will have the same character.
Each stage of the war has followed
the failure of the last. Trump began the year with a covert operation to
topple the Iranian government. “We sent guns to the protesters, a lot
of them,” he told Fox News in April. When that failed, the United States
and Israel assassinated Iran’s leaders and began the air war. In April,
the United States blockaded Iran’s ports, and on Thursday Trump
threatened to invade.
Washington has been preparing some form of
invasion for months. The journalist Ken Klippenstein reported Monday
that an April 7 order sent paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division to
Israel under joint US-Israeli plans “completed since February, for
seizing Kharg Island and carving out coastal territory inside Iran.”
For
the American ruling class, the stakes are enormous: its global
position, the valuation of a massively overvalued stock market, the role
of the dollar as world reserve currency, and the solvency of a
government that is $39 trillion in debt all depend on the outcome.
No section of the political establishment opposes the war, and none has called any protest against it.
*****
While American missiles were striking targets around Tehran Wednesday
night, Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York
was posting exultantly about the New York Knicks’ victory at Madison
Square Garden.
The Democrats are silent because they support the
same imperialist policy. Above all, they fear the emergence of
opposition from below.
The war is intensifying every element of
the capitalist crisis—economic, political and social. Its consequences
are being felt in surging prices, falling real wages, cuts to social
programs and the escalating assault on democratic rights. This is
fueling a growing movement of the working class, expressed in the
mounting strike wave across the United States and internationally.
One million young people in the UK aged 16 to 24, one in eight, are
not in education, employment or training (NEETs). The figure is on track
to reach 1.25 million, one in six young people, within five years. This
is the “lost generation” identified by Alan Milburn’s “Young people and work” interim report.
Roughly 400,000 are unemployed, actively
looking for work, and 600,000 are “economically inactive”, either unable
to or seeing no hope of finding any. Six in 10 NEETs have never had a
job—up from four in ten in 2005. This is despite 84 percent reporting
having sought employment at some point and wanting a job or training.
*****
Capitalism has robbed these young people of a fulfilling life and a
future. Their suffering is the direct result of a parasitic economy
designed to produce nauseating levels of wealth for a tiny few. The same
processes driving down living standards for the working class and
creating NEETs are driving up historic profits for the ruling class.
While a million young people are deprived of even a job, 157 people in
Britain enjoy a net worth of at least a billion pounds.
From an initial 800,000 expressions of interest, its membership has
sunk into the low thousands; it was equal parts unable and unwilling to
stand a significant number of candidates in the local elections; its
parliamentary leader Jeremy Corbyn refuses even to adopt the title of a
“Your Party MP”; there is a real question over whether it survives a
full year.
This result was produced by the anti-socialist politics
of the leadership around Corbyn, to which every faction of Your Party
subordinated itself.
The Socialist Equality Party stands alone in
having warned of and opposed these consequences from the very
beginning. Our first major statement on the initiative declared:
We
will not be advocates of and apologists for ‘Your Party’. It is not
ours… Our aim is to ensure that the working class does not spend its
energies in a demoralizing campaign for a party which will lead them to
betrayal and defeat, to ensure that illusions in Corbynite reformism are
dispelled as quickly as possible in preparation for the revolutionary
class battles ahead.
*****
The Socialist Equality Party’s message to workers and students is that it is time to break out of this cycle of betrayals.
More
than a decade of potential political preparation has been lost by the
working class since Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015. As
Britain and the world plunged deeper into crisis—from austerity and the
COVID-19 pandemic to the climate crisis and global war—Corbyn sat on
and sabotaged mounting left-wing opposition, putting Starmer in the
saddle. Now Polanski is lining up to play the same role with the
prospective replacement Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham.
If the working class does not rapidly develop a socialist leadership,
then the ultimate beneficiary will be Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and the
far-right. Karl Marx coined the phrase that history repeats itself “the
first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Today we can add, the
third time as catastrophe.
Far-right loyalist mobs targeted migrants in Belfast, Northern
Ireland, for a second night Wednesday. While on a smaller scale than the
violence launched Tuesday, a target list of homes shared on social
media confirms that this was an organised pogrom.
The Police
Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) used water cannon against the rioters
and fired 20 rounds of rubber bullets. It is reported that 200 police
from across the UK are being drafted into Northern Ireland ahead of
possible further riots.
Using
as a pretext the horrific stabbing Monday of Stephen Ogilvie by a
Sudanese refugee, Hadi Alodid, far-right mobs targeted the homes of
migrants and foreign nationals. As on Tuesday, shops, schools and
delivery services closed early. Public transport operator Translink
suspended all bus and train services.
After the first night’s
violence, a “hit list” of “migrant homes” was circulated on social
media, and threats were issued against the Sinn Féin mayor of Belfast,
Róis-Máire Donnelly. In an exclusive published Thursday evening, the Guardian
reported that the Accountability Project Northern Ireland (APNI), which
monitors anti-immigration activity, has been notifying the PSNI of such
lists since the beginning of this year.
*****
Disturbances were repeated in Scotland, with protests in Greenock outside a Holiday Inn used to home asylum seekers.
The
PSNI said 12 officers were injured by petrol bombs and objects thrown
on Wednesday, and 16 rioters were arrested. Government officials say at
least 27 migrant families have been intimidated or burnt out of their
homes since Monday.
Ogilvie, who lost his left eye in the attack and suffered extensive serious cuts, remains in hospital.
*****
This week’s pogroms are the latest in an escalation of
far-right attacks across Britain and Ireland. They are the
long-cultivated product of the demonization of immigrants and asylum
seekers. Successive Conservative and Labour governments sought to show
themselves firmer on policing borders and to deflect working-class anger
from the social catastrophe they are inflicting.
Given the
terrible social and economic crisis in Sudan, Alodid had been granted
asylum in 2023 under a fast-track Simplified Asylum Process (SAP)
without interview, a system put in place by the previous Conservative
government. This was also the case regarding Afghanistan, Eritrea,
Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Labour’s Secretary of State for Northern
Ireland Hilary Benn this week stressed that asylum seekers were now
interviewed in “almost all cases.”
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, Labour’s candidate at the
upcoming Makerfield parliamentary by-election and seen as likely to take
over from the reviled Keir Starmer, is calling for “greater use of
detention” of migrants. This week he told BBC Radio Manchester that on
the question of the Home Office housing asylum seekers in deprived
areas, “I do agree with what [far-right Reform UK leader Nigel] Farage
is saying. What we’ve got to do is get back to a sense of order.”
*****
Farage said, “I’m very open about the fact that some very bad actors
got involved in this stuff [in Belfast], but not the vast majority… The
vast majority want action.” This provided legitimacy for fascist
demagogue Tommy Robinson, who joined the about to be a trillionaire Elon
Musk in calling for the protests ahead of Tuesday’s offensive. Musk
tweeted, “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any
change!!”
Following Tuesday’s pogrom, Musk doubled down, posting:
“Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their hometown is
what’s making people angry, not ‘social media’!”
Unionist leaders
in Northern Ireland have used the attack to demand a hard border with
Ireland. Former Democratic Unionist Party deputy leader Gavin Robinson
told Starmer in parliament, “People are tired of warm words and promise.
They want to see action. The government must now demonstrate that it is
prepared to defend our borders.”
Sinn Féin’s leader in Ireland,
Mary Lou McDonald, condemned the “racist intimidation and violence”
which had been “orchestrated by loyalist and far-right thugs.” She then
praised the “swift” actions of the PSNI, when they were anything but.
Between June 3 and June 5, 2026, elite units of the United States
Army Special Operations Command descended upon working-class communities
across the Los Angeles metropolitan area in a series of exercises known
as Military Operations in Urban Terrain.
The operations included
low-flying Black Hawk helicopters, simulated weapons fire, flashbang
grenades and pyrotechnic explosives detonated without meaningful public
notice, throwing thousands of terrified residents into panic.
*****
A long history of escalation precedes these developments. In April 2012, Black Hawks and Little Birds flew
low-altitude tactical formations through Chicago’s downtown skyscraper
canyons. That same year, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department
secretly partnered with defense contractor Persistent Surveillance
Systems to conduct nine days of wide-area aerial surveillance over Compton, concealed from the city council.
In
2015, the “Jade Helm 15” exercise deployed special forces in civilian
clothing across nine states. In February 2019, blacked-out Black Hawks
flew formation runs through Los Angeles residential neighborhoods,
landing troops on Wilshire Boulevard. These operations were real, not
virtual. They demonstrated that the capitalist state was already
developing the architecture of domestic military control, field-testing
on American soil the counterinsurgency methods drawn directly from Iraq
and Afghanistan.
But they were preparatory. They were conducted under administrations
(Democratic and Republican alike) that still operated within certain
procedural constraints. What has changed is not the existence of this
infrastructure but the social and political conditions under which it is
being deployed.
The intensification of the class struggle,
reflected in strikes, mounting social opposition and growing resistance
to inequality, found its political expression within the ruling class in
the rise of Trump and the consolidation of oligarchic forms of rule.
The
infrastructure built in Compton and Chicago has now been placed in the
hands of a government that in June of last year deployed 4,000 National
Guard troops and 700 Marines against Los Angeles, occupied Washington
DC, and mobilized troops to support federal agents in Minneapolis,
Portland and Chicago, not to enforce the law against suspected
criminals, but to flex the muscle of militarization.
Internal Army documents,
leaked and published by journalist Ken Klippenstein, exposed that last
July’s Operation Excalibur in MacArthur Park—in which 90 National Guard
soldiers and dozens of federal agents descended on a working-class
immigrant neighborhood—had a stated mission not of enforcing any
specific law but precisely that: to demonstrate “the capacity and
freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement.”
The
counterinsurgency methods developed in Baghdad and Kabul, rehearsed over
the years in Compton and on Wilshire Boulevard, are now being test-run
as a matter of deliberate policy by an oligarchic government whose
target is the working class.
*****
The domestic military buildup is directly connected to the
international war drive. As WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North stated at
the May Day 2026 rally, the same crisis of capitalism that drives the
oligarchy toward fascism and authoritarian rule at home drives it toward
military violence and the redivision of the world abroad.
Under
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the Trump administration has launched
the “Drone Dominance Program,” a $1 billion initiative to purchase over
340,000 attack and surveillance drones, the same assets being rehearsed
over Long Beach and Pasadena. The $1.5 trillion military budget
requested for 2027 is, as North stated plainly, “a budget for world
war.” The working class in Los Angeles confronts the same state
apparatus that is bombing Iran, funding genocide in Gaza, and occupying
Washington D.C.
The danger is not only political but immediate and
physical. In January 2025, a US Army MH-60 Black Hawk conducting a
domestic training exercise over Washington D.C., collided with
American Airlines Flight 5342, killing all 67 people aboard both
aircraft. The NTSB determined the disaster was “entirely preventable.”
The Pentagon’s response was to make minor adjustments to flight paths,
allowing operations of exactly this character to proceed in Los Angeles a
year later.
The response of California’s Democratic establishment was
perfunctory. Mayor Karen Bass made theatrical gestures of opposition.
Governor Gavin Newsom positions himself as a defender of California’s
communities. But Pasadena’s own officials acknowledged they had no
authority over the exercises. The City of Industry and Diamond Bar
received no notice at all.
This is not political miscalculation
on the Democrats’ part. It flows directly from what the Democratic Party
is: a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus.
California’s supposed sanctuary laws are riddled with loopholes
permitting continued ICE cooperation. Democratic congressional leaders
voted to fund Trump’s $839 billion military budget, which pays for these
forces deployed domestically. The Democratic Party functions not as an
opposition but as an enabler of the Trump administration.
The working class cannot afford illusions about who will defend it or
what is required. Appeals to Democratic politicians who fund and enable
the military-intelligence apparatus lead nowhere. Reliance on union
bureaucracies which have already demonstrated their role—canceling a
planned strike of 77,000 LAUSD workers at the precise moment workers
were poised to act—leads nowhere.
What is required is the
construction of rank-and-file committees, independent of and in
opposition to the union bureaucracies, capable of mobilizing the class
power of working people.
Even as the cuts took effect, the Trump administration moved to suppress
the data that would document their consequences. In September 2025, the
USDA announced it was terminating its annual Household Food Security
Report—the government’s primary tool for measuring hunger in the United
States, produced under both Republican and Democratic administrations
for more than three decades. The department called the report
“redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous,” and said it did
“nothing more than fear monger.”
*****
As SNAP is gutted, food banks across the country are being overwhelmed.
Demand at food pantries has risen dramatically, with food bank directors
describing operations as being in “disaster response mode,”drawing
down reserve funds that are explicitly described as unsustainable. The
same period that has seen SNAP gutted has also seen the federal
government slash hundreds of millions of dollars in annual food bank
assistance—simultaneously attacking both the primary program and the
last-resort fallback.
*****
The reactionary press has been fulsome in its support for the assault on food assistance. A Wall Street Journal editorial
published June 7 was headlined, “The Food Stamp Rolls Decline—Hurray:
GOP reforms are paying off as more recipients work or volunteer.” It
endorsed the OBBBA’s SNAP provisions, argued that the program had become
“an income transfer for able-bodied adults who choose not to work,” and
that work requirements were nothing more than a restoration of “the
basic bargain that Americans have always accepted: that government aid
should come with responsibilities.” This framing—forced work as civic
virtue, hunger as personal choice—revives the moral logic of the
Victorian workhouse.
*****
Access to food is a basic social right, not a privilege to be earned
through documented labor submitted monthly to a government agency.
Securing it requires the independent mobilization of the working class
against both capitalist parties—for workers’ power and the socialist
reorganization of economic life to serve human need, not private profit.
Teachers
in the United States and Britain have sent messages of solidarity to
teachers and Education Support staff in Victoria fighting a sellout
union-Labor deal.
Newly released 911 calls shed new light on the death of U.S.P.S.
worker Demarcus Little at the Palmetto Regional Processing and
Distribution Center (RPDC) in Georgia. Little, a 45-year-old father of
two, collapsed and died at the facility on June 3. He is the fourth
worker known to have died at Palmetto since it opened just over two
years ago.
According to 11Alive, coworkers who called 911 said
Little appeared to be suffering a medical emergency. In another call, a
coworker expressed alarm over the delay in emergency response: “We’ve
called several times, and nobody has made it here. This man has been
down for like 10 minutes.” Dispatch records state that the first 911
call was received at 11:06 p.m. and that CPR was in progress by 11:25
p.m., roughly 19 minutes later.
But the reports do not explain who
was administering CPR, what happened inside the facility before the
call was made or what emergency procedures were followed. Little’s
fiancée Laura Wheaton and coworkers report that he had asked to leave
after telling a supervisor he felt sick and was refused permission to go
home.
Workers at Palmetto and across the country are demanding an
investigation into Little’s death. In November 2025, the USPS Workers
Rank-and-File Committee launched an independentinquiry
into deaths at the post office, following the deaths of Russell Scruggs
Jr., also at Palmetto, and Nick Acker at the Detroit Network
Distribution Center that same month. The inquiry was launched because
management, federal regulators and the union bureaucracy had failed to
protect workers. This was underscored by a recent OSHA decision to fine
USPS $26,481 over the death of Acker, who fell into a postal sort
machine and was not discovered until hours later.
*****
From its findings, the Rank-and-File Committee urged postal workers to advance the following demands over safety:
Defibrillators and fully stocked first aid equipment in every facility;
Nurses and trained medical personnel on site;
An end to the blocking of cell phone signals;
Written emergency plans in every building, subject to workers’ oversight;
Strict enforcement of lockout/tagout and other safety procedures;
Full transparency over workplace injuries, medical emergencies and deaths;
The right of workers to stop work when conditions are unsafe.
The
postal unions have not issued a single statement on the deaths at
Palmetto or the conditions that produced them. Having endorsed
Delivering for America and collaborated in its implementation, they bear
direct responsibility for the conditions that have killed workers. The
same conditions persist and the deaths continue.
Workers in every
facility must organize to enforce safety measures, not waste time and
effort pleading with management or Congress.
The USPS Workers
Rank-and-File Committee’s investigation into safety continues. But this
issue is inseparable from broader demands to end overwork: an end to
Delivering for America and no more facility closures; full protection
for career jobs; an end to workplace surveillance and punitive
“productivity” regimes; and a reaffirmation of USPS as a public service.
*****
On Sunday, June 14, the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee is
holding an online public meeting: “4 workers dead at Palmetto—The
consequence of decades of cuts and the drive to privatize USPS.” Register for the event here.
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) announced June 1 that
both bargaining units—representing 55,000 letter carriers, mail truck
drivers, post office clerks and sorting plant workers—had voted in
favour of new contracts. Rural and Suburban Mail Carriers (RSMC) voted
by 85.9 percent and Urban Postal Operations (UPO) by 90 percent to
ratify the tentative five-year agreements, which expire January 31,
2029.
The union’s success in selling out the contract struggle
paves the way for the corporation, in close coordination with the
Liberal government and the union, to implement Phase 1 of the
restructuring of the Canada Post Corporation (CPC). This includes the
reduction of postal workers by up to two-thirds over 10 years, the
elimination of door-to-door delivery over five years, the implementation
of new technologies to increase workloads and surveillance and the
general Amazonification of the post office.
The restructuring of
the postal service has been aggressively promoted by the Liberal
government. It hopes to use the attacks enforced on us as a benchmark to
slash wages and eliminate job protections and other worker rights for
all workers, private and public sector alike. The onslaught on worker
rights and conditions is deemed necessary by the ruling class to ensure
the “global competitiveness” of Canadian capitalism and fund a massive
military build-up so Canada can wage war around the world.
The
voting results are not an expression of workers’ support, let alone
enthusiasm, for the concessions-filled contracts. Rather they express
the lack of confidence among the rank and file that the CUPW bureaucracy
could achieve anything or would wage any serious struggle. After more
than two years of the CUPW leadership isolating postal workers,
conniving behind the scenes with management and the Liberal government,
and blocking any attempt to broaden the fight to other sections of
workers confronting the same attacks, the prevailing mood among workers
was that they had no other option but to accept.
World
power politics, attacks on social rights and military rearmament are
Merz’s priorities ahead of the European Council meeting in Brussels in
mid-June.
Several
generations of Chilean students have passed through an educational
system systematically stripped of resources, handed to profiteers and
disrupted by closures and regulatory failures.
The
firing of Antwiane Sanders exposes the bureaucracy’s real function:
policing workers on behalf of the corporations by suppressing opposition
and enforcing labor discipline.
On Wednesday evening, the UAW bureaucracy announced a tentative
agreement in the 10-day strike by 1,000 American Axle workers in Three
Rivers, Michigan. In a video streamed press conference, standing in
front of members of the Local 2093 bargaining committee, UAW President
Shawn Fain presented the agreement as a historic breakthrough with
workers, “winning back a big chunk of what was taken from them” in 2008
when their wages were cut from $29 to $14.50.
While Fain claimed
that “workers will make their own decision about this deal,” the UAW
apparatus is giving the strikers—who remain on the picket line—Friday to
review “highlights” about the contract, Saturday to attend Q&A
sessions with the union leadership and Sunday to vote on the four-year
contract.
A review of the available details shows the tentative
agreement is another sellout. The UAW said it will raise the wages of
American Axle workers, who currently make $22 an hour, to “$30 by 2030.”
American Axle workers made $29 an hour in 2008—the equivalent of $45
per hour today and, with inflation continuing at its present rate, would
be making $50 per hour by 2030. However, in 2008 the UAW betrayed an
87-day strike by 3,600 workers at the company in Michigan and New York,
and agreed to 50 percent wage cuts to supposedly save jobs. The company
promptly laid off half the workforce and shuttered plants in Detroit and
the Buffalo, New York area, leaving Three Rivers as its major remaining
plant.
The current agreement completely fails to make up for the
lost income that was essentially stolen from workers over the past 18
years, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
*****
The UAW bureaucracy has done everything possible to prevent the
strike from developing into a broader struggle of workers in the auto
parts and auto assembly facilities. From the start, UAW officials
intended to run the strike as stage-managed public relations operation
that could be hailed as a “victory” when the UAW Constitutional
Convention opens on June 15 in Detroit.
The bureaucracy is
desperately seeking to contain a growing rebellion of auto parts
workers, including at Nexteer Automotive, Dana Incorporated and
Bridgewater Interiors. Nexteer workers in Saginaw, Michigan have
rejected three UAW-backed sellout contracts that will keep top wages at
just $27 an hour by 2030. Defying the workers’ 86 percent strike
mandate, Fain has sent his lieutenants, including Region 1D Director
Steve Dawes and International Servicing Rep Jason Tuck, to browbeat the
militant workers and hopes the shutdown of the American Axle strike will
convince them to surrender.
*****
The union apparatus also paraded a series of Democratic Party
politicians before the workers on the American Axle picket line and
allowed the capitalist politicians to use the strike as a backdrop for
their electoral campaigns. “We had plenty of politicians come by,
[Democratic Party Michigan Governor] Whitmer, [Michigan Democratic Party
candidate for US Senate] El Sayed and others for photo ops,” one worker
said.
Even before the strike was launched, the union had
coordinated overtime production carefully with the company to make sure
enough product was in inventory so that a potential walkout would not
impact the assembly plants, especially General Motors Flint Assembly
where American Axle provides axles for heavy-duty and light-duty pickup
trucks.
*****
The effort to end the strike underscores once again that the
UAW apparatus functions as a direct tool of corporate management and
both big business parties. While parading Democrats on the picket line,
Fain is in a de facto alliance with Trump, promoting the lie that the
fascist president’s tariffs and the destruction of workers’ jobs in
Canada and Mexico will benefit American workers. But economic
nationalism and the subordination of workers’ needs to the profit
interests of the US-based corporations were the chief culprits for the
massive wage cuts imposed on parts workers in the 1990s and 2000s.
The
only answer to the global assault on the jobs and living standards of
workers is the international unity of the working class and the
coordination of struggles across national borders. This means the
building of rank-and-file committees, under the direction of the
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to
break the grip of the union bureaucracy and unleash the enormous power
of the working class.
American Axle workers should reject the
tentative agreement and build a rank-and-file strike committee to
continue their walkout. They should link up with their brothers and
sisters at Nexteer, Dana, Bridgewater and other parts plants, and with
workers at the Big Three automakers.
The
NATO gathering in Ankara will be a historic war summit. It will be
driven by escalating imperialist war abroad and the suppression of the
social and democratic rights of the working class at home.
The
group’s call to support the bourgeois opposition parties is aimed at
trapping workers and youth who are moving to the left and blocking the
development of a socialist anti-war movement.
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.
