Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. US imperialism’s debacle in Iran
Whether the agreement actually holds remains uncertain. The actual text has not been released. Iran has claimed that some $25 billion in frozen Iranian assets have been unfrozen, which the US has disputed. Trump has reiterated that “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon” and warned that the United States “could attack Iran again if negotiations fail.” Israel, not a party to the agreement, has rejected it and continued strikes on Lebanon the same day.
Regardless, the outcome represents an unqualified debacle for American imperialism. It is a case of a schoolyard bully picking a fight and winding up with a black eye. The Iranian government remains in power. Its nuclear program is intact. The most concrete deliverable is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a reversion to the prewar status quo.
There is a staggering chasm between the braggadocio with which the war was launched and the reality of its outcome. Trump promised the war would end with Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared on March 2 that the United States was waging “the most lethal ... air power campaign in history” with “no stupid rules of engagement.” Days later he promised reporters “death and destruction from the sky, all day long.”
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The political character of the American ruling class’s response is captured in the editorial published by the New York Times, speaking for the Democratic Party, under the headline “President Trump Lost This War.” The Times’ concern is not that the war was waged through mass murder and assassination, but that it failed.
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The editorial’s prescription boils down to the statement: “The Pentagon will also need to modernize and prepare for the wars of the future.”
The wars of the future. The Times takes for granted the framework of permanent imperial confrontation, above all, with China and Russia, for which the Pentagon must “modernize and prepare.” What is in question is only the competence with which the framework is administered.
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The end of this stage of the war does not mean the end of the war. American imperialism will prepare new wars to recover its position. The 2015 JCPOA framework established under Obama was ended by Trump in 2018 and paved the way for the 2026 war. The 2026 ceasefire framework will pave the way for the war that follows.
The most significant consequences of the debacle, however, will be the consequences within the United States.
The war was launched, in part, in an attempt to stop the structural decline of American capitalism. The European Central Bank reported this month that gold has overtaken the euro to become the world’s second-largest reserve asset, at 27 percent of global reserves, up from 20 percent a year earlier. The federal debt crossed 100 percent of GDP in March for the first time since 1946. The failure of the war has accelerated the dollar’s decline and deepened the structural crisis the war was meant to resolve.
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The Trump administration will respond to deepening social opposition with the methods it has demonstrated: ICE raids, mass detention infrastructure, the deployment of the National Guard against domestic protest, the criminalization of political opposition and the consolidation of authoritarian state power. The defeat in Iran will not moderate this trajectory. It will intensify it. The American ruling class, confronted with the failure of its imperialist offensive abroad, will turn with renewed savagery against the working class at home.
The task is the construction of an independent political movement of the working class that is international in scope, socialist in program and politically conscious in its objectives.
2. FIFA World Cup 2026: “The beautiful game” in grip of Trump and financial oligarchy
The 2026 FIFA World Cup opened last week across the United States, Mexico and Canada with a spectacle designed to project an image of continental unity and economic power. What the world actually witnessed was something else entirely: a tournament seized at every level—organizational, financial and political—by the American financial oligarchy and its political leadership, the Trump administration.
From the moment FIFA President Gianni Infantino awarded Donald Trump the “FIFA Peace Prize” last December, prostrating the world governing body of football before a would-be American Führer, the character of this World Cup has been unmistakable. The most popular sporting event worldwide has been taken hostage.
The inauguration of the event made this reality impossible to ignore. In Mexico City, where the opening match was played on June 11, an estimated 50,000 people took to the streets—teachers demanding an end to the privatized pension system, collectives searching for Mexico’s tens of thousands of disappeared, transportation workers, indigenous and farming communities and youth who see in the tournament not a celebration but a squandering of massive resources. Riot police met demonstrators attempting to approach the Azteca Stadium with violence.
Inside SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles a day later, the US team defeated Paraguay 4–1 before a crowd in which billionaires, celebrities and tech moguls—including Bill Gates—occupied luxury suites that sold on the secondary market for tens of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, around 2,000 food service and concessions workers had voted 96 percent to authorize a strike over stalled contracts and fears that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs would be deployed at the matches. The Unite Here union, however, rammed through a last-minute settlement whose details were not even revealed to the membership. Hospitality workers in Seattle and Philadelphia also threatened to strike.
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The catalogue of humiliations by US authorities can only be partially listed:
US immigration officers carried out body-searches of Senegalese and Uzbek players on the airport tarmac as if they were terrorism suspects.
Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan—the first Somali ever appointed to a World Cup—was detained for eleven hours at Miami airport despite holding a valid visa and diplomatic passport, then expelled from the country. When asked about it, Infantino told supporters to “chill.”
Swiss striker Breel Embolo, born in Cameroon, had his travel authorization revoked hours before his team’s flight.
Iraqi player Aymen Hussein was interrogated for nearly seven hours at O’Hare; the Iraqi team’s photographer was denied entry outright.
Fans from Senegal, Ivory Coast, Morocco and Iran also faced blanket visa denials.
Countless African and Iranian journalists received single-entry US visas that prevent them from following their teams across all three host countries.
The head of the Palestinian Football Association has been denied a visa entirely.
A comparison to the 1936 Berlin Olympics—already invoked by critics of the 1978 Argentina World Cup, where political prisoners in the military junta’s torture chambers could hear the fans cheering in the stadium—is not hyperbole or rhetorical. The Trump administration today wages an active war of aggression against Iran, arms a genocide in Gaza, detains immigrant workers in concentration camps and mass deports them, kills peaceful protesters, and kidnaps foreign heads of state, all while hosting what FIFA calls a celebration of “unity.”
With Trump himself a student of Hitler, the chauvinism today against foreign players, referees, fans and journalists from predominantly black nations today mirror the Nazi vilification of “inferior” races, even as the tournament like the Berlin Olympics is staged behind militarized policing approaching a state of “total war.”
The $11 billion in expected revenue measures the extent to which the fusion of sport, state violence, oligarchic plunder and the turn to fascism has reached its logical endpoint under capitalism. Governing bodies like FIFA have become, as the WSWS has written of the International Olympic Committee, “little more than a direct tool of imperialism.”
The World Socialist Web Site does not share the ruling class’s contempt for sport. Football, at its most elemental, is a magnificent expression of collective human creativity, skill, movement and dedication. The working class invented the game in its modern form and has driven its culture for more than a century.
As we wrote of the 2012 London Olympics, the apparently superhuman character of athletic achievement is in reality proof of “the tremendous potentialities of the human race.”
The hundreds of millions who want to enjoy that mastery deserve to do so without it being turned into an instrument of nationalist poison and oligarchic enrichment. From de Coubertin’s Olympics—designed in part to better prepare French men to “fight and win wars”—to the Nazi Games of 1936 and the Cold War boycotts of 1980 and 1984, international sport has always been refracted through nationalism and political reaction.
What is new is the ever more malevolent fusion of nationalism and commercialism at an unprecedented scale, while the organizations of the labor movement that once gave workers the collective means to resist and find genuine means of international class solidarity have been systematically destroyed or subordinated to capital.
The antidote to nationalist poison is not indifference to sport, nor contempt for fans—that posture belongs to the liberal intelligentsia, not the socialist movement. The antidote is political class consciousness: the recognition that a Mexican worker, an American worker, an Iranian worker and a Haitian worker share common material interests that no flag-waving can dissolve. Sport belongs to everyone.
3. UAW convention opens in Detroit amid rebellion by auto parts workers
The United Auto Workers 39th Constitutional Convention opened in Detroit Monday with the usual vacuous and self-congratulatory speeches by top union officials and Democratic Party politicians, including UAW President Shawn Fain, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Detroit Democratic Mayor Mary Sheffield.
Shuler called for a mass mobilization by the UAW, not to fight for the interests of workers but to elect Democrats in the midterm elections. She called for the mobilization of 50,000 trained campaign workers. The convention hall, top heavy with well-paid union officials, provided a cheering section for this bankrupt perspective.
UAW officials are shamelessly seeking to use the workers at American Axle in Three Rivers, Michigan as PR props as part of the re-election campaign of UAW President Shawn Fain. On the eve of the convention, the UAW rammed through a sellout deal that raised top pay to $30 an hour by 2030, far less than workers made in real terms prior to the 50 percent pay cut imposed in the 2008 concessions contract. They absurdly presented the new deal as a “record contract.”
The convention was held under conditions of the drive to establish a fascistic dictatorship in the United States by the Trump administration and the expanding global war, including the war on Iran, which has triggered a surge in the cost of food, fuel and other basic necessities.
There was not even a fleeting reference from the convention podium to the shredding of the Constitution by the Trump administration, war or the mass arrests and deportations of immigrants, including UAW members.
Fain in his President’s Report made liberal use of militant-sounding rhetoric supplied by his advisers in groups like Labor Notes and the Democratic Socialists of America, but he made no mention of Trump by name or the critical issues facing the working class. This is not surprising, since Fain is in a de facto alliance with Trump over his tariffs, the spearhead of his fascistic America First policy directed at the overseas rivals of US capitalism, in the first place China.
Fain referenced vast wealth inequality, epitomized by Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire. But he used this to promote the “Stand Up Strike” and the supposedly historic 2023 Big Three contract, which he defended with outright lies about the supposed gains the UAW achieved for workers.
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In contrast to Fain’s absurd picture of a thankful membership, the UAW apparatus is facing a rebellion by auto parts workers, who have decisively voted down sellout contracts that the union apparatus tried ram down their throats. At Nexteer in Saginaw, Michigan, the 1,700 workers have rejected three contracts that would leave them making poverty wages. A majority of workers at Dana factories have voted down sellout deals in the last week, including at the Warren, Michigan facility and the Dana Driveline factory in Toledo, where workers turned in a 95 percent “no.”
A delegate from Local 9025 at the Dana plant in Paris, Tennessee told the World Socialist Web Site that workers at his factory voted by 288-1 to reject a UAW-backed offer by management that would have only raised top wages to a starvation level $24.50, while leaving starting pay at $19 an hour. Noting that Elon Musk just became a trillionaire, he said, “Something has got to give for the working class. $19 an hour is not going to make it. I have been in there 32 years working for nickels. We can’t make it on that. We are in there breaking out backs.”
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In the face of discontent, the convention expressed a further tightening of the bureaucratic control by the corporatist UAW apparatus. This was expressed in the fact that no agenda for the convention was presented to delegates, and business proceedings were completing closed to the media, unlike in 2022 when a livestream feed was available. As it has for the past two decades, the UAW denied the WSWS press credentials and barred its reporter from the official press room.
UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman set up at campaign table at the convention and distributed his campaign flyer calling for delegates to nominate him for UAW president. Among those campaigning for Will was a worker victimized by Dana for exposing deadly conditions and the collusion of local union official at a plant in Warren, Michigan. Another worker from the Ford Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, who ran as part of Lehman’s Insurgent Slate, also campaigned with Will.
The Lehman campaign posted a video on social media [above] of statements from workers and retirees from Stellantis, General Motors, Nexteer and the academic sector calling on delegates to nominate him.
In his campaign statements Lehman has called for the abolition of the UAW apparatus and the restoration of power to workers on the shop floor, through the construction of a network of rank-and-file committees. The committees would become bases of rank-and-file power in the workplace, fighting for workers’ control over line speed, safety, hiring and production and the power to halt production if necessary to save lives. Lehman has also issued statements opposing Trump’s criminal war against Iran and Fain’s support for Trump’s tariffs and calling for the international unity of the working class.
4. UAW officials rush through sellout contract at American Axle on eve of Detroit convention
Late Sunday, union officials reported that striking workers at American Axle & Manufacturing in Three Rivers, Michigan had ratified the tentative contract agreement, which they had less than 48 hours to study and discuss. The vote brought an end to the strike by the 1,000 parts workers that began on June 1, and they returned to work on Monday morning.
In the face of a campaign by the UAW apparatus to falsely promote the contract as a major victory—combined with threats that workers would lose their jobs if they rejected it—union officials claimed the deal passed by 80 to 20 percent, with 704 workers voting to ratify it and 173 workers voting no. Given the campaign of intimidation, lies, and the rushed vote, the fact that one-fifth of the workers still opposed it is significant.
UAW President Shawn Fain claimed the union was “winning back a big chunk” of what had been taken away from American Axle workers in a series of union betrayals over the past 18 years. Since the tentative contract was announced, Fain has celebrated the “$30 by 2030” as a significant breakthrough on wages. However, the center of this narrative is a fraud. In 2008, American Axle workers were making $29 an hour (the equivalent of $46.04 in today’s dollars) before the UAW agreed to cut their pay in half to supposedly save jobs.
The UAW bureaucracy kept the strike isolated and cut off from critical support building up among low-paid parts workers nationally. At Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan workers have rejected three sellout UAW contracts—which top out at $27 an hour after four years, and forced a strike authorization vote, which Solidarity House has ignored. At Dana Incorporated, workers in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee and other states have rejected UAW-backed deals by margins of 90 percent and higher. Here too, the UAW International has prevented a strike at the critical parts supplier.
A fool-proof way for workers to determine in whose interests the ratified contract serves is the official response of the management of American Axle, now known as Dauch Corp. Chris Son, Dauch’s vice president of marketing and communications, said in a statement to the Commercial-News Sunday night, “We are pleased that UAW Local 2093 at our Three Rivers Manufacturing Facility has ratified a new, four-year collective bargaining agreement.”
The UAW bureaucracy’s primary concern in advance of the strike was making sure that American Axle had enough parts in inventory to last for two weeks so that the major automotive assembly plants, including the GM Flint Assembly Plant, would not be disrupted by a shortage of parts. Additionally, the timing of the strike made it clear that the Fain leadership wanted it shut down just as the UAW convention was beginning in Detroit on Monday morning, so they could declare it a major “victory” in front of the assembled delegates.
In other words, for the UAW apparatus, the strike was a stage-managed public relations operation that avoided any disruption in the auto industry supply chain and then repackaged it as union theater for the Fain bureaucracy’s own political purposes.
The strike was also coordinated with the Michigan Democratic Party with Governor Gretchen Whitmer and leading Democratic candidates posturing as friends of the strikers on the picket line. This included US Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who voted in November 2022 for legislation requested by the Biden administration to block a nationwide railroad strike and impose a contract that railway workers had previously rejected.
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For workers who had expected the strike to lead to substantial changes in wages and benefits, the strike resulted in a bitter outcome. The anger American Axle workers feel connects them to the broader opposition throughout the parts sector, including at Nexteer, Dana, Bridgewater Interiors—where workers in Warren, Michigan also rejected a UAW-backed contract.
This underscores the necessity for American Axle workers to build rank-and-file committees, independent of the UAW apparatus, to prepare a fight against the coming job cuts and oppose the terms of the pro-company contract.
The campaign to form such committees is central to the campaign of rank-and-file Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman who is running for UAW president based on a program of transferring power from the UAW apparatus to workers on the shop floor. In a statement on the opening of the UAW convention, Lehman pointed to the UAW bureaucracy’s efforts to strangle the struggles of workers at American Axle, Nexteer and Dana and urged delegates to take the side of the rank and file and nominate him to run against Fain and the rest of the apparatus.
The lesson from American Axle, Nexteer and Dana is that the fight for decent wages, benefits and working conditions cannot be won through the existing union apparatus, but only through a rank-and-file rebellion against it.
5. The NY Knicks championship and the social reality behind New York’s “impossible joy”
The New York Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs Saturday night to win their first National Basketball Association championship since 1973, ending a 53-year drought. The victory, secured in Game 5 of the finals, triggered mass celebrations across New York City, with crowds pouring into the streets.
What is extraordinary, and troubling, is the manner in which this sporting event has been presented by the corporate media, politicians of both parties and a host of celebrities as a major political event of national and international significance. Add to that the intensity of the popular response.
Donald Trump attended game three along with the Democratic mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. “Progressive” Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spent the week posting online about the NBA finals, hailing a Knicks victory as a victory for all New Yorkers.
This, after all, was in the midst of a criminal war against Iran, an ongoing assault on immigrants, an inflationary spiral that is impoverishing tens of millions in the US, savage cuts in vital social programs and Trump’s ongoing erection of a presidential dictatorship. It follows strikes this year by New York nurses and Long Island Rail Road workers. The speculative bubble centered in New York’s financial district has minted the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk.
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The Knicks’ victory loomed large on the Sunday talk shows of the broadcast and cable networks.
The official, and even the popular, response is clearly disproportionate to the intrinsic significance of a basketball championship. There is nothing wrong with fans cheering on their home teams, and sports have a place in the social life of the people. There is, moreover, much to be admired in the extraordinary skill and determination of professional athletes and how they work as a team. Basketball is a beautiful game, and millions of people legitimately admire the abilities of players such as Jalen Brunson, who was named finals most valuable player after leading the Knicks’ championship run.
But the Knicks hysteria is so over the top as to mark it as a significant social phenomenon and raise the question: Why? What is behind it?
The media presents the victory as proof that the city is united, that the immense social gulf between billionaires and workers can be overcome through shared sports enthusiasm. The wealthy celebrities in courtside seats, costing thousands of dollars, the Wall Street financiers in luxury suites, the politicians posting selfies in Knicks gear and the youth crowded into the streets are all presented as part of the same New York.
But the unity is fraudulent. New York is one of the most unequal cities on earth. It is home to the headquarters of finance capital alongside millions of workers living under conditions of rent-gouging, depressed wages, insecure employment, homelessness, police violence and collapsing social services. The same city that produces billionaires and luxury towers forces immigrant workers, delivery drivers, transit workers, teachers, nurses, food service workers and students into poverty.
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Today, after decades of McCarthyism, red-baiting, deindustrialization and the corporatist transformation of the trade unions into arms of the employers and the state, there are no mass outlets for workers to realize their desire for solidarity and unity in the fight for democratic and social rights.
The trade unions, including the UAW, the Teamsters, UNITE HERE and the AFL-CIO as a whole, function not as instruments of struggle, but as mechanisms for containing it. They systematically subordinate the working class to the parties of big business, mainly the Democrats. They shut down strikes, isolate workers, enforce sellout contracts.
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In this vacuum, sports can become a substitute form of social cohesion. Fans experience, in distorted and temporary form, a sense of belonging, shared purpose and collective identity that capitalist society otherwise denies them. The celebration of the Knicks becomes a surrogate for solidarity. The championship becomes a symbolic victory in a social order in which workers experience defeat after defeat at the hands of employers, landlords, police, courts and politicians.
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This manipulation is reinforced by the proliferation of sports gambling. Over the past several years, gambling has been integrated into nearly every level of American sports. The major leagues, broadcasters and betting platforms have fused into a single commercial apparatus. Disney-owned ESPN has entered the gambling business through sportsbook partnerships. CBS Sports’ betting page functions as a portal for betting previews, “expert picks,” promo codes and promotions for FanDuel, DraftKings, Bet365, Kalshi and other platforms.
The smartphone has made this apparatus ever-present. A user can download a betting app, upload a credit card or link a bank account, and begin wagering within minutes. Push notifications, odds boosts, parlays, “no sweat” bets and individualized promotions are used to draw users back into the app throughout the day. The same behavioral technologies used by social media companies to maximize engagement are deployed by gambling firms to maximize losses.
6. Australia: Broad opposition to Labor’s NDIS bill that cuts support for disabled
The Labor government’s far-reaching assault on the National Disability Insurance Scheme has provoked an outpouring of anger from disabled people, their families and advocacy organizations.
7. Corporate thugs open fire on miners in Türkiye
On Sunday, June 14, in the Uzunköprü district of the northwestern city of Edirne, miners who had been fighting for 26 days at the Özşen Mining pit over unpaid wages and benefits and against layoffs came under armed attack—carried out in full view of the security forces by assailants reported to be acting at the behest of the mine’s owner, Bekir Kiremitçi.
In a video statement issued together with the miners’ families after the attack, Başaran Aksu, organizing specialist of Bağımsız Maden-İş (Independent Miners Union), declared that they would not back down.
“Shots were fired three times from two separate weapons in a place where there were children, women and workers. This attack is directed not at the Özşen mine workers, their families and their children alone, but at the entire working class,” he said, before adding: “Let those who rob workers of their hard-earned wages and send guns and gangs against families demanding their rights know this: this resistance will grow, these workers will win, and all of Turkey will see it.”
Aksu had previously been summoned to give a statement to the authorities over his remark, “As the miners who do the producing, we will run this mine ourselves.” One day before the armed attack, the miners occupied the pit and began a hunger strike 1,200 meters underground.
The attack, in which by sheer luck no one was injured or killed, lays bare the extent to which the class struggle has intensified. Just one day earlier, construction workers and members of Dev Yapı-İş union employed at the building site of the new Palace of Justice, under construction in Ankara, were attacked with knives and clubs by thugs from the subcontractor Gül Pa İnşaat because they had demanded their unpaid wages.
These attacks, which are not isolated incidents and are steadily mounting, can be countered only by building a politically conscious and organized movement of the working class from below. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) was founded to free workers and their struggles around the world from the stranglehold of the trade union apparatus and to unite them on an international scale. Building the IWA-RFC is also indispensable if workers are to take measures to protect themselves collectively.
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As imperialist war escalates around the country’s borders, the Turkish ruling class and the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are steadily intensifying police-state repression at home. For decades, with the assistance of the Türk-İş, Hak-İş and DİSK confederations, the capitalist establishment has driven workers’ conditions backward, the class struggle has been suppressed, and social anger has been kept within the bounds of the existing system. Not only in Türkiye but across the world, class tensions can no longer be contained by these methods, nor even within the limits of constitutional norms.
According to a 2023 report by Credit Suisse, Türkiye leads Europe in the inequality of wealth distribution. The top 1 percent of the population controls 40 percent of wealth, and the wealthiest 10 percent controls 70 percent. While this trend has accelerated since 2023, Türkiye also ranks first in Europe in income inequality, according to Eurostat.
According to the World Inequality Database, as of 2023 the share held by the poorest 50 percent—half the population—was only 2.6 percent. That figure is 2.5 percent in the United States, where Elon Musk recently became the world’s first trillionaire and President Donald Trump is seeking to secure the wealth of the financial oligarchy by building a fascistic police dictatorship.
This level of social inequality is incompatible with democracy; suppressing a working class movement that comes from below and is turning to ever more militant struggles now requires state force and the deployment of corporate thugs. The history of the class struggle in Türkiye—particularly from the second half of the 1960s, amid the intensification of class struggles on both the national and international scale—is filled with such attacks by the hired thugs of the corporations and by fascists seeking to break workers’ struggles. The corporations that set these assailants in motion have always acted with the consciousness and confidence that the state belongs to them.
8. Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi member speaks against the armed attack on miners in Türkiye
On Sunday, June 14, in Edirne, in northwest Türkiye near the border with Bulgaria, company thugs opened fire on workers and their families at Özşen Mining who were fighting for unpaid wages and against layoffs. This vicious attack was protested on Monday, June 15, in various provinces across Türkiye. At the protest held in Izmir, the country’s third-largest city, Can Denizli, a member of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International) and a writer for the World Socialist Web Site, delivered the following speech.
Our demands are clear:
- Pay the miners all their unpaid wages immediately!
- Reinstate those who were dismissed!
- Prosecute and jail the perpetrators of the attack and those who instigated it!
From miners to teachers, from construction workers to textile workers, we must unite all sectors of the international working class that are joining the struggle under a common programme of class struggle.
Build a revolutionary workers’ movement that will fight against capitalist exploitation, imperialist war and growing repression, and for socialism!
Thank you.
9. Africa’s billionaires and the causes of the continent’s poverty
Africa’s four richest billionaires own $57.4 billion—more than the combined wealth of half the continent’s 1.5 billion population.
Furthermore, according to Oxfam’s report Africa’s Inequality Crisis and the Rise of the Super-Rich, the richest are getting richer. The top five billionaires have increased their wealth by 88 percent over the last five years, compared to a 22 percent rise for all Africa’s billionaires. Billionaire wealth in Africa grew by 36.5 percentage over the previous year, more than double the global average of 16 percent.
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Extreme inequality within Africa is replicated between Africa and the rest of the world. Most of Africa’s wealth ends up outside the continent, which possesses extraordinary resources—diamonds, gold, platinum, cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, graphite, bauxite, and major oil and gas reserves in Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, and South Sudan.
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Africa produces about 7 percent of the world’s crude oil and 6 percent of its gas, mainly in Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Egypt and Libya, but its oil and gas value chain is even more brutally skewed than its minerals. It follows the same structural pattern: Africa exports crude (low‑value) and imports refined products (high‑value), with the overwhelming share of value captured outside the continent.
Africa’s main role in the oil supply chain is the upstream extraction of crude oil, but this is the lowest‑value segment of the chain, yielding just 10 to 15 percent of its final value. Highly capital intensive, it employs relatively few workers and is dominated by the transnational oil corporations, with some revenues going to the national oil companies and states via royalties and taxes.
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Despite exporting crude oil, Africa imports more than 40 percent of its refined products, as the continent has relatively little refining capacity and utilization is often below 60 percent. Much of the refining, which takes between 20 and 30 percent of the final value, the biggest link in the chain, takes place outside Africa, with Europe, Middle East, India, and increasingly China capturing this value. Even with Dangote’s new refinery in Nigeria, Africa will remain a net importer of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel for decades.
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In total, Africa captures just 11 to 18 percent of the final value, while the advanced economies take 82 to 89 percent. This is because Africa is dependent on imported refined products, losing the majority of value to foreign refiners and traders.
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Nigeria is the clearest—and the most tragic—example of an African petro‑state sitting atop vast hydrocarbon wealth while capturing almost none of the value it generates. It is the archetype of political economy built around the systematic externalization of every profitable segment of the oil chain. Everything above extraction is offshored.
This is the outcome of a long historical process: a colonial export structure that the national bourgeoisie never dismantled after “independence” from Britain in 1960; a post‑independence ruling class that ruled on behalf of the industry’s foreign operators; and a global oil regime in which the most profitable activities—refining, petrochemicals, logistics, finance—are monopolized by advanced industrial economies. Nigeria’s role is to supply crude oil and absorb the costs of its production, while importing the products made from it.
The numbers are stark. Nigeria captures 10–15 percent of the value of its own oil at the wellhead. The remaining 80–90 percent—the value added that turns crude into fuels, plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, and industrial feedstocks—is captured offshore. Europe, India, the Gulf, and increasingly China refine Nigerian crude. Swiss and Singaporean traders price it. London insurers underwrite it. Global petrochemical complexes transform it. Nigeria exports the raw material and then buys back the finished products at a premium. Despite being one of the world’s largest crude exporters, Nigeria is one of the world’s largest importers of gasoline.
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Africa’s billionaires function as a comprador layer, whose wealth depends on smoothing the passage of foreign capital rather than building domestic productive capacity. Their fortunes are rooted in their position as intermediaries: securing concessions for oil majors and mining corporations, guaranteeing regulatory stability for global financiers, arbitraging import licenses, and policing the political order required for uninterrupted extraction.
Africa’s billionaires are enriched because they help maintain the structures that drain wealth from the continent, in exchange for a minority stake, a board seat, or a lucrative service contract. Unlike the classical bourgeoisie of independent capitalist development described by Marx in nineteenth-century Europe, African billionaires are a rentier layer living off their intermediary position between the state and global capital.
Leon Trotsky’s analysis of the colonial bourgeoisie in The Third International After Lenin captures this dynamic with remarkable precision. Against Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin—who claimed the colonial bourgeoisie could play a “revolutionary” role because it was oppressed by imperialism—Trotsky argued that its character is determined by structural subordination to imperialism and by its fear of the working class. The bourgeoisie of an oppressed nation, he wrote, is not more revolutionary than that of an oppressor nation, but rather “if anything, viler and more reactionary.” It may maneuver between imperialist powers, but it cannot lead a genuine struggle against imperialism because doing so would require mobilizing the working class, which threatens its own class position.
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The comprador character of the African bourgeoisie has decisive political implications. It means that this class cannot lead a struggle for genuine national independence or economic development. It is structurally tied to imperialism. Its wealth depends on the continued exploitation of Africa’s resources by foreign capital. It will suppress strikes, enforce austerity, and collaborate with whichever imperialist power offers the best terms.
This is why the Stalinist “two-stage theory”, the conception that the national bourgeoisie will lead a democratic revolution against imperialism and decades later the working class will fight for socialism, was always a fraud. The historical experience of Africa since the independence wave of the 1960s has been a brutal confirmation of Trotsky’s analysis. Every Pan-Africanist regime, every “African socialist” leader, every national liberation movement that took power—from Nkrumah to Nyerere to Mugabe to the ANC—ultimately imposed IMF structural adjustment programs, privatized state assets, and acted as the local enforcer for imperialist capital.
The African working class cannot look to its own billionaires for liberation. Its struggle is irreconcilably opposed to the comprador bourgeoisie and can only be victorious through forging political and organizational unity with workers in the imperialist states and China, with whom its fate is already objectively unified, in a struggle against the entire capitalist system—imperialism and its local intermediaries alike.
10. Australia’s educators online meeting exposes AEU suppression of opposition to sellout deal
Teachers, support workers and student teachers spoke out against the intolerable conditions in public schools and the Australian Education Union’s anti-democratic methods.
In April, the pro-Zionist Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) last April against the National Education Association (NEA), claiming the teachers’ union created a “hostile environment” for Jewish and Israeli members, particularly at a July 2025 Representative Assembly in Portland, Oregon.
The charges are a politically motivated attempt to equate opposition to the Israeli state and its ongoing genocide in Gaza with antisemitism and to use federal anti-discrimination law as a weapon against democratic rights.
The Brandeis Center’s complaint rests on two interlocking lines of attack. The first concerns the NEA’s existing DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) infrastructure: its racially coded bylaws, constitutional provisions and standing rules mandating proportional representation of U.S. Census-defined “ethnic minorities” at every level of the union, from delegate assemblies to staff hiring. The complaint argues that because Jewish members are classified as “White (not Hispanic origin)” under the Census rubric, they are structurally excluded from these benefits and opportunities.
The second focuses on the conduct at the assembly’s vote last July on New Business Item (NBI) 9, a resolution calling for a boycott of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and NBI 6 and 7, which dealt with Palestinian history and the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
The NEA’s Representative Assembly voted democratically to sever ties with the ADL because of its equation of the Gaza genocide as “antisemitism” and calls for bans and investigations against pro-Palestinian groups. Standing reality on its head, the Brandeis Center charges treat the vote and the surrounding debate as evidence of a “hostile environment.”
The filing arrives in a context where the both the Democrats and the Trump administration have waged a systematic campaign to criminalize opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Executive orders have directed universities to function as extensions of immigration enforcement, enabling the cancellation of student visas and deportations of protesters on fabricated charges of “antisemitism.”
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The fact that the Democrats are full partners in this—and, under the Biden administration, the leaders and initiators of it—exposes the union bureaucracy’s alliance with this capitalist party. Under the Biden administration, peaceful protesters, including Jewish anti-war activists, were smeared as “antisemitic” to justify repression. In spring 2024 alone, more than 2,500 anti-war protesters were arrested during campus crackdowns across at least 25 states.
When Representative Ocasio-Cortez provided Zionist lobby groups a platform in 2024 to smear opponents of the Gaza genocide, the pseudo-left played a central role in legitimizing this narrative. The Democratic Party itself has repeatedly codified this logic, including through H.Res.183 in 2019 and the promotion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of opposition to the State of Israel or the Gaza genocide as “antisemitic.”
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The Brandeis Center is also using the reactionary logic of identity politics as an opening to demand greater access to top positions for Zionists, equating this with representation for Jewish people as “ethnic minorities.” The NEA’s governing documents are saturated with identity-based rules and proportional representation schemes that divides teachers into separate racial categories rather than uniting them on the basis of their common class interests.
The Brandeis Center’s complaint exploits the door the NEA has left open. This is the logical extension of identity politics, a framework that substitutes racial and ethnic representation for class struggle.
12. Germany: Auto supplier IAV to shutter Berlin site: Form an action committee to defend every job!
As early as December 2025, IAV management announced its intention to eliminate roughly 1,500 jobs this year. Over the course of seven rounds of negotiations with management to date, union officials have, in their own words, proven themselves “willing to compromise.”
13. Sri Lanka: JVP-led government’s broken promise on provincial council elections
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna-led (JVP) government is continuing to stall on its election promise to hold Provincial Council elections, which have been delayed by successive governments for years. Without elected councils, the provincial administrations have been run anti-democratically by governors appointed by the Colombo government.
The protracted delay has been driven by the Sinhala chauvinist opposition to granting any concessions to the Tamil elites in the North and East of the island, now compounded by the current government’s fears of mounting opposition to its austerity program.
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The terms of all Provincial Councils ended at different times between 2017 and 2019. The Sri Lankan Constitution requires that elections be held within four weeks of the end of a council’s term or its dissolution. This constitutional requirement has been flagrantly violated for nearly a decade by every government that has held office.
All the opposition parties are pressing for the election so as to exploit widespread popular hostility to the government’s IMF-driven austerity agenda. In the North and East, Tamil bourgeois parties view the provincial councils as the means to secure their own power and privileges at the expense of Tamil workers and peasants.
The provincial council system was not a product of a democratic development but was imposed through the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord signed by Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayawardene. The Accord was a bid to end Sri Lanka’s civil war that erupted in 1983. So-called Indian peacekeepers were sent to the north and east of Sri Lanka to disarm the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in return for provincial councils to provide a limited power-sharing arrangement for the Tamil bourgeoisie.
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The Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), opposed the Indo-Lanka Accord from the standpoint of uniting the working class in the fight for socialism. It demanded the withdrawal of both Indian and Sri Lankan troops from the North and East, warning that the accord would neither end discrimination against Tamils nor secure democratic rights. It called on Tamil, Sinhala, and Muslim workers to unite in the struggle for a Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam as part of a socialist federation of South Asia. The RCL paid a heavy price for this stand, with three prominent members murdered by JVP-linked gunmen.
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Successive governments have delayed Provincial Council elections for clear political reasons. Mahinda Rajapakse, despite holding the first Northern Provincial Council election in 2013 under international pressure, was unwilling to permit even limited devolution. The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration used the 2017 electoral amendment to suspend elections across all provinces indefinitely, exposing the gap between its phony democratic rhetoric and practice.
Gotabhaya Rajapakse continued the postponement, citing the COVID pandemic, economic crisis, and legal obstacles and refused to fulfill promises to hold polls. While other factors were involved, the major reasons for not holding Provincial Council elections was the dominant anti-Tamil communalism of the Colombo political establishment.
The communal agenda of the JVP-led government is certainly a major factor in postponing the election in the North and East. But the decision is also bound up with fears of losing mass support across the island. Mass opposition is intensifying against the government as it implements IMF austerity measures that attack the living standards of workers.
The government is imposing the impact of the Iran war on working people, increasing fuel prices by nearly 50 percent since March. The rupee has been devalued by around 14 percent, leading to soaring prices for essential goods and services. The government has reaffirmed its commitment to cost-recovery pricing for electricity and fuel which means further cuts to price subsidies. These measures are driving growing poverty, hunger, and malnutrition.
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All of the opposition parties, including ITAK, are seeking to exploit the mounting opposition to the JVP-led government for their own venal purposes.
Workers cannot rely on any of the capitalist parties to defend their democratic and rights. The struggle for democratic rights is inseparable from the fight against IMF-imposed austerity and the capitalist system lies at the root of the economic and social crisis.
The only genuine alternative lies in the united mobilization of Tamil, Sinhala, and Muslim workers on the basis of a socialist program. That can only be achieved through a political struggle against all forms of nationalism and communalism—both the Sinhala chauvinism of the JVP and Colombo political establish, and the divisive Tamil nationalist politics of ITAK and other Tamil bourgeois parties.
14. Britain seizes Russian tanker as drumbeat for more military spending grows louder
Royal Marines, two Royal Navy ships and multiple Royal Air Force (RAF) aircraft took part in a six-hour mission to seize an oil tanker sailing through the Channel under a Cameroonian flag, alleged to be part of Russia’s “shadow fleet”. The Smyrtos, en route from Russia to India, was seized in the early hours of Sunday morning.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer celebrated by posting a video of the operation to TikTok, gloating in infantile terms, “Another bad day to be Vladimir Putin.”
Although the Ministry of Defense claims the action was planned for weeks, this is clearly Starmer’s attempt to mollify critics of his Defense Investment Plan. The military brass, and Starmer’s own Defense Secretary John Healey and armed forces minister Al Carns, all publicly declared the funding came up short.
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The Trump administration is an ally in this war drive. US Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby reposted Healey’s resignation letter on X with the comment: “There is again a great need for more British military strength in this critical time. We urge the UK to meet that need with urgency, scale, and determination…
“Our purpose now must be to… restore our home fronts that can, once again, supply overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions.”
Starmer has responded to this pressure by repeatedly raising his commitments and authorizing military actions to prove his readiness to confront Russia. Prior to the broadsides from Healey and Carns, he had already promised to hike defense spending to 2.68 percent of GDP by 2030. The Defence Investment Plan shaves 1 percent off the capital budgets of multiple other government departments to free up an additional £13.5 billion for the armed forces over the next four years.
Now more will be forthcoming. The seizure of the Smyrtos was followed by new Defense Secretary (and former paratrooper) Dan Jarvis promising to help “reprioritize” military funding. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy told the BBC discussions were “ongoing”.
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If Starmer does not succeed in meeting the demands of the warmongers, then replacements are waiting in the wings to implement their agenda. Prospective Labour leadership challenger Andy Burnham told the Times last Friday he was “not squeamish about saying that the plan would be to reduce the welfare bill”. The other main contender, former Health Secretary Wes Streeting, said the same this April.
15. Mobilize resident doctors against the BMA sellout deal with Starmer government
As a matter of principle, no offer should be used to call off mandated strike action before British Medical Association members have been given time to scrutinise its contents and determine whether it meets their demands.
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.
