Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
A message from a member of the National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee:
The main obstacle we have to deal with in taking forward our fight is the United Steelworkers (USW) bureaucracy. The nationalist, pro-capitalist USW apparatus has enforced round after round of concessions on us and wants to do the same again this year. Like all of the trade union bureaucracies in Canada and the US, they prioritize their close working relationships with their respective governments and the corporate bosses.
To understand why this is so and advance an alternative program based on the independent political power of workers on the shop floor in alliance with our brothers and sisters across Canada, the US and beyond through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, we must examine the history of the USW and its nationalist, anti-worker record.
*****
The United Steelworkers of America (the present-day USW) emerged out of the mass movement for industrial unionism that erupted amid the bitter privations of the Great Depression. This movement—which saw the organization of steel, auto, rubber, electrical and other industries under the banner of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)—overcame the furious resistance of the employers and the state to worker organization through militant struggle. This included defying company goons and court injunctions, and employing new class-struggle methods like the sit-down strike and the flying picket.
It also involved a rebellion against the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and its Canadian counterpart, the Trades and Labour Congress. These craft-based union federations were led by a conservative bureaucracy that excluded the vast majority of workers, whom they deemed “unskilled” and “unworthy.”
The mass movement for industrial unionism was initiated by American workers, but workers in Canada rallied to support the CIO, because they recognized that they were fighting a common struggle, often against the very same giant corporations.
Socialist-minded workers played a catalyzing role in a wave of struggles that preceded the CIO’s launch and the sit-down strikes that followed. This is exemplified by the leading role played by the Trotskyist movement in the Minneapolis general strike of 1934.
The Steelworkers Organizing Committee (SWOC) the predecessor of the USWA/USW was a component part of the CIO from its founding in 1935.
However, the leadership of the SWOC was dominated, from its inception, by a right-wing, pro-capitalist bureaucratic layer that had ties to the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party in the United States. Moreover, the CIO leadership, joined by the Stalinist Communist Party, blocked the working-class industrial offensive from becoming a political challenge to capitalism, that is the subordination of all socioeconomic life to the profit drive of a clique of bankers and factory owners.
Subsequently, during the “Red Scare” of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the conservative union leadership connived with powerful sections of the ruling class that were witch-hunting left-wing figures in all areas of social and political life to drive out the socialist militants who built the unions. That is to say, this bureaucratic layer purged the unions of the very ideas and people the bosses feared! This paved the way for the CIO to merge with the AFL in 1955 and bury the class struggle tradition that the industrial unions were founded on under a pile of pro-capitalist, nationalist, anti-communist, bureaucratic conservatism.
In Canada in particular, these developments coincided with the establishment of the pro-employer “collective bargaining” system. In exchange for union recognition, it requires the union apparatus to suppress all strikes and worker job-action, unless expressly sanctioned by the state (i.e., after a contract has expired and the union has passed through conciliation and other hoops designed to frustrate worker action.)
For a period from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, workers were able to obtain significant concessions from the ruling class by waging militant and determined struggles through these industrial unions (the USW, UAW, CWA, etc.). These gains were thanks above all to the temporary restabilization of capitalism after World War II, which meant the bosses and governments could afford to concede improved living standards and conditions to workers in order to prevent more radical opposition emerging to their social order.
*****
All of this changed in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. A global crisis in capitalism had arrived, marked by rampant inflation, growing international competition and falling profit rates. With the Volcker interest rate shock of 1979-1980 that deliberately induced a recession, and the Reagan administration’s firing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union of 1981, the American ruling class declared war on the working class. The response of the union bureaucracy was to shift sharply to the right. Contract-reopenings and concessions became the order of the day. The entire AFL-CIO, including the USW, refused to organize a single solidarity strike in support of the fired PATCO workers.
In Canada, the Pierre-Elliot Trudeau Liberal government imposed three years of wage controls from 1975. When the postal workers’ union defied a government back-to-work order in 1978, Trudeau threatened to fire postal workers en masse and the Liberal government ordered the arrest and imprisonment of the union’s leader, Jean-Claude Parrot, to demonstrate that the Canadian ruling class was shifting, like its US counterpart, towards a counteroffensive against the working class aimed at clawing back all the concessions it had been compelled to make following the war.
*****
The socioeconomic conditions that had enabled the USW and other labor bureaucracies to maintain “labor peace” while rank-and-file workers obtained limited gains had come to an abrupt end. Technological advances enabled a fundamental change in the production process, creating for the first time companies engaged in globalized production that cut the ground from under the nationalist foundations that the trade unions always rested upon. The bureaucrats responded by embracing corporatism and doubling down on nationalism. In the years to come, they would integrate the union apparatuses ever more completely with management and the capitalist state, becoming the enforcers of concessions and austerity on the working class.
During the 1980s, the USW’s nationalist-corporatist character came to the fore. Corporatist union-management collaboration, based on the insistence that workers must tie their fortune to the unconditional defense of “their own” corporations against their global competitors, became a major feature of the unions’ program.
The USW promoted national chauvinism and “Buy American” campaigns, including anti-Japanese bumper stickers carrying the slogan “Remember Pearl Harbor.” This foul nationalism was the ideological form of the USW’s class collaboration—its chosen weapon for obscuring from workers the fact that it had become, in practice, an industrial police force for management.
Meanwhile, the betrayals continued and accumulated. At Phelps Dodge in 1983, nearly 3,000 miners represented by the USW were on strike for three years against concessions, enduring police and National Guard repression. The USW International refused sympathy strikes and meaningful financial support, and even attempted to bribe the strike leader Jorge O’Leary with $175,000 to call off the strike. When O’Leary refused and asked for the money to go into the strike fund, the USW kept the cash. The strike was crushed.
*****
The collapse in steel employment was driven both by the globalization of production and the capitalists’ use of new technologies to ratchet up exploitation. Global production networks allowed corporations to outsource production to wherever labor costs were cheapest and business regulations most lax. The subordination of the latest technological developments to the accumulation of private profit meant that, rather than being used to lighten workers’ workloads with no loss of pay, new advances were deployed to accelerate speed-up and slash jobs.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the USW actively collaborated with Wall Street vulture capitalists—most infamously, billionaire Wilbur Ross, later Trump’s commerce secretary—to restructure the steel industry on the backs of workers and retirees. The USW hired investment banker Ron Bloom in 1996 specifically to work with management on “competitiveness,” which in practice meant overseeing layoffs, pension cuts, and health care elimination for thousands of workers and retirees.
The union bureaucracy won its reward: control of billions of dollars in the Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA), which transformed union officials into wealth managers with a direct material stake in the stock market. During this period, the number of steelworkers in the US fell by 65 percent between 1979 and 2019, yet the USW’s total assets rose six-fold to over $1.5 billion. By 2025, they had grown to over $2 billion.
*****
The USW bills itself as an “international” union because it represents workers on both sides of the US-Canada border. In reality, the USW separates contract struggles by workers in Canada from those of their colleagues south of the border, even under conditions where production chains directly link Canadian and US facilities and a common fight would increase workers’ leverage to push for immediate economic demands. The division of Canadian and US workers in every contract struggle is enforced just as ferociously as the isolation of each workers’ struggle to their own work site within Canada itself.
There is no clearer exposure of the Steelworkers’ fraudulent “internationalism” than its role as one of the most aggressive promoters of nationalism in each country. In Canada, the USW has consistently collaborated with the Trudeau-Carney federal Liberal government, the Ontario Tory Doug Ford and other right-wing premiers to whip up “Team Canada” sentiment against the trade war initiated by US President Donald Trump last year.
Behind a crescendo of Canadian nationalist “Team Canada,” “we’re all in it together” tub-thumping and with the support of their Steelworker, CLC and Unifor partners, the Carney government and ruling class are implementing Trump-like policies. This includes massive military spending increases to be paid for through an austerity drive targeting public services and the workers who administer them, and a massive assault on workers’ right to strike.
*****
The USW has long been an open promoter of US and Canadian imperialist war preparations against China. As early as 2016, USW President Leo Gerard testified before Congress that “manufacturing, and the critical steel sector, is vital to America’s national and economic security,” calling protectionist measures essential to US “warfighters.” Gerard was delivering this testimony side-by-side with the very executives who were simultaneously demanding sweeping wage concessions and destroying thousands of jobs. The only criticism the USW has made of “America First” tariffs against Canada is that they are short-sighted, because Canadian steel and raw materials are crucial for US fighter jets and other military equipment. In other words, they advocate a “Fortress North America” with the belief that this is a more effective way to organize the continent to fight another world war.
*****
Workers at NSC have experienced some of the most disastrous consequences of the USW’s nationalist, corporatist record. The industrial murders of Fraser Cowan, Collin Grayley, and Quoc Le between 2020 and 2022 resulted in a grand total of $650,000 in fines and not a single criminal prosecution. The root cause of their deaths is brutal capitalist exploitation aimed at maximizing corporate profit, expressed most brazenly in the barbaric piecework system that drives us to sacrifice our safety for extra pay.
*****
The USW is not a “broken union” that can change if the “correct leadership is elected.” Its apparatus is comprised of a caste of high-paid functionaries with interests different and opposed to the workers they claim to represent. The government has skewed the collective bargaining system in favor of the bosses, but the USW bureaucrats insist workers must remain straitjacketed within it, because it upholds the bureaucracy’s privileges.
The USW’s nationalism and corporatism are not aberrations produced by corrupt individuals. The claim that the trade unions are fine just the way they are, if only the current “poor” leadership were replaced with a more militant one is a completely misguided position. The current AFL-CIO-CLC trade union apparatus and bureaucracy rest on a definite social and political perspective: the acceptance of capitalism and the framework of the nation-state. Any attempt to “reform” the union apparatus while leaving the foundation intact will reproduce the same results. The officials will change, their function will not.
This is why our fight for rank-and-file committees—specifically their development as part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC)—is not merely a tactical proposal for better contract negotiations. It’s a political question about who controls the struggle and to what ends.
Rank-and-file committees are the organizational form through which workers can begin to exercise independent class power—to break with the pro-employer “collective bargaining” framework that as our May 2026 statement rightly identifies, exists not to protect workers but to protect capital and keep workers under the thumb of the bureaucracies that police them.
For us at National Steel Car, this means understanding our contract fight as a political struggle, not just an economic one. The demand for a 25 percent wage increase to offset decades of real wage cuts, the abolition of piecework without any reduction in take-home pay (something the USW Local 7135 leadership has failed to call for, let alone fight for), and the end to speed-up are correct and necessary demands.
But we can only achieve them if we fight for a broader perspective. When the union tells workers that the company’s “profitability” sets limits on what is possible, the rank-and-file committee must answer: we reject profitability as the criterion for what we need. National Steel Car is a profitable enterprise that continues to augment Greg Aziz’s fortune and workers can and must be paid accordingly, fully, and safely. The safety of every worker should take priority over corporate profits.
When the union and the Canadian government tell workers to rally behind “Buy Canadian” and trade-war nationalism, the committee must answer: our allies are in the US, in Mexico, and in China—the workers making steel, making rail cars, building the material infrastructure of society everywhere.
When Trump’s war on Iran drives up food and energy costs and hammers the global economy, the committee must answer: this is capitalism’s logic. Production for profit and war, not for human need. The only lasting answer is the socialist transformation of the economy.
The connection to the IWA-RFC is the organizational expression of the political principle of internationalism. The IWA-RFC connects workers across sectors and borders—steel, auto, logistics, health care, education—who face the same transnational corporations, nationalist union bureaucracies, and political establishments committed to war and austerity.
*****
The USW is neither “international” nor a union in any meaningful sense of the word. It is a business whose stock portfolio grows as its members’ jobs disappear, whose officials earn management-level salaries off our backs while delivering starvation-level strike pay, and whose nationalism—whether it takes the form of “Remember Pearl Harbor,” “Buy American,” or “Team Canada”—has always chained workers to their own ruling class and divided them from their brothers and sisters across the world.
The National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee was built in opposition to that. The task is now to take this fight to the next stage—connecting the immediate fight over the August contract to the broader political struggle—against austerity, war and the state suppression of the right to strike—and for a socialist program through the IWA-RFC. As our May 2026 statement declared: “Production today is an international process, and the counter-offensive of rank-and-file workers must reflect that reality.”
At least 53 immigrants have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since Donald Trump returned to the White House 18 months ago, an unprecedented death toll produced by the deliberate overcrowding of holding cells and detention centers, the denial of medical care and the transformation of immigration detention into a sprawling system of for-profit concentration camps.
Fifty-two of the deaths occurred during the administration’s first 500 days, according to a June report by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights. The organizations found that the mortality rate in ICE custody has more than doubled since Trump’s return and is now nearly four times what it was under the Biden administration.
Since the report’s June 4 cutoff, 45-year-old Venezuelan immigrant Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva died while being transported between ICE detention centers in Georgia. His family said immigration officials had repeatedly denied him necessary medication. He was the 22nd immigrant reported dead in ICE custody during the first seven months of 2026.
The deadly conditions documented by Human Rights Watch are not confined to the network of massive detention centers and private prisons. A Washington Post investigation published Wednesday revealed that the Trump administration is also cramming thousands of immigrants into temporary holding rooms wholly unequipped for prolonged detention
The report is based on records supplied by ICE to the Deportation Data Project, a research initiative at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles. The data show that the average number of people confined in ICE’s 177 temporary holding rooms skyrocketed from fewer than 500 under the Biden administration to more than 1,500 in 2026.
These rooms were designed to hold people for only a few hours while they are processed. Workers and their family members are now being imprisoned in them for days or even weeks.
Conditions inside are predictably abhorrent. The rooms have no showers, forcing detainees to languish in filth for days on end. They have no beds. Those imprisoned in what are essentially windowless rooms furnished only with benches must sleep sitting upright, often with nothing more than a foil blanket.
*****
The Trump administration has defended imprisoning people in rooms without adequate medical care, access to lawyers, showers or edible food by claiming that it lacks sufficient space to hold the thousands being kidnapped by its immigration Gestapo. In other words, the administration cites the scale of its own mass deportation operation as justification for subjecting its victims to conditions known to endanger their health and lives.
*****
During World War II, the Democratic administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt used Fort Bliss as one of several Texas military bases for the incarceration of people of Japanese descent, along with German and Italian immigrants. In 2021, the Biden administration used the same base to detain unaccompanied children who had crossed the US-Mexico border.
Then as now, thousands were imprisoned on a military base because of their nationality or immigration status. Camp East Montana is also home to the headquarters of the U.S. Army’s 1st Armored Division, further erasing the line between military operations abroad and police state repression within the United States.
Immigrants are forced to live for months inside canvas tents in the El Paso desert. The temperature reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit (36.6 degrees C) on Wednesday and is forecast to climb to 104 degrees (40 degrees C) on Thursday and 106 degrees (41 degrees C) Friday.
Based on interviews with detainees, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU concluded that conditions at the camp amounted to “enforced disappearance, cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment, excessive use of force including one extrajudicial killing, life-threatening medical neglect, barriers to legal representation, and coercive third-country removals.”
In “interview after interview,” detainees reported being “beaten by guards, denied necessary medical care, and prevented from contacting family members or lawyers.” One woman was denied emergency treatment and now risks permanently losing her eyesight. Another man said guards groped his testicles while beating him and arbitrarily placed him in solitary confinement.
Detainees described overcrowded housing areas, bathrooms covered in feces and urine, and living quarters flooded with filthy water and dust. The failure to clean the pods, provide adequate ventilation or distribute basic hygiene supplies, including soap and hand sanitizer, has produced infections and other illnesses.
These conditions are deliberately employed to terrorize immigrants into abandoning their legal cases and accepting deportation. At least 50 detainees told investigators that the government used violence, threats and deception to pressure them into giving up their immigration claims. Guards threatened immigrants with indefinite imprisonment or deportation to countries where they had never lived and could face persecution, torture or death.
Between August 2025 and early March 2026, the Department of Homeland Security transferred nearly 1,350 people from Camp East Montana to Mexico, including immigrants from countries other than Mexico. Human Rights Watch documented cases in which shackled Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants were taken to the border in secret and ordered to cross without deportation orders or hearings.
One Cuban immigrant recalled being told: “Your country won’t take you; leave now or we’ll lock you up for life.” Those who resisted were threatened with criminal charges and, in some cases, beaten by guards.
The defense of immigrants and democratic rights is therefore a class question. It cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party, which built and funded the deportation apparatus now wielded by Trump, or to the courts and politicians responsible for legitimizing it.
Workers of the world have no country. Workers have a right to live and work in the country of their choice, with full citizenship and democratic rights. The immigration concentration camps must be abolished through the independent political mobilization of the international working class against capitalism and its historically outmoded nation-state system.
3. Opposition mounts to death threat against UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman
Opposition continues to grow among autoworkers to the death threat issued by a high-ranking United Auto Workers official against Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president. On Tuesday, Lehman’s campaign released a powerful statement by Lehman on the threat and urging workers to oppose it. The campaign also posted a second video containing statements from workers at the Bridgewater Interiors plant and the Stellantis Warren Truck Assembly Plant in suburban Detroit defending the candidate.
In his video statement, Lehman explained that on July 16, Raymond L. Jensen Jr., until recently assistant director of UAW Region 9 and still holding what Lehman called a “cushy seat” as a UAW International staffer, posted a threat on Lehman’s public Facebook page. Under Lehman’s statement on the federal criminal investigation into UAW President Shawn Fain, Jensen posted an AI-generated image of Lehman bound, gagged and bleeding, with a masked man aiming a rifle at his back.
Lehman said Jensen, who collected over $200,000 last year, according to the union’s LM-2 filing—five times the average earnings of the workers whose dues he collects—displayed an “I Support Shawn Fain” badge on his Facebook page.
“This is a federal crime, specifically threatening a union member for speaking out on candidates and union affairs,” Lehman said, adding that his attorney Eric Lee has demanded the court-appointed Monitor suspend Jensen without pay and refer the matter to federal law enforcement, writing that “the message transmitted to the UAW membership is unmistakable. Extreme violence against Will Lehman is encouraged and enjoys the sanction of the union leadership.”
Lehman noted the Monitor’s own office found that Fain created a “climate of retribution” and threatened to “slit the throats” of his opponents.
Jensen’s threat, Lehman said, “is no different from Donald Trump threatening the opponents he brands as the radical left. Both fear any action from below.”
What the bureaucracy fears, Lehman explained, is the wave of contract rejections sweeping plants nominally represented by the UAW—since 2021 alone, workers at Columbia University, New River Valley Volvo, John Deere, Dana, Dakkota, Clarios and Nexteer have each voted down multiple tentative agreements, with the intensity of rejections only increasing. The officials have likewise watched 90-plus percent strike authorization votes and walkouts they cannot stop. “This frightens them,” Lehman said, “knowing their privileged positions are becoming increasingly at risk from a force they find increasingly unable to hold back.”
Far from retreating, Lehman’s campaign has expanded in the days since the threat was posted. Campaign teams have distributed his statement and leaflets at the Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, the Detroit Assembly Complex-Jefferson plant, the Bridgewater Interiors and Dana plants in Warren, Michigan, the Stellantis Warren Truck Assembly, Sterling Heights Assembly and Sterling Stamping plants, and the Nexteer Automotive plant in Saginaw, Michigan. The campaign team has been joined by auto parts workers and workers from Stellantis Jefferson and GM Flint Assembly.
The second video contains statements from workers who rallied to Lehman’s defense when he campaigned Monday at Bridgewater Interiors and the Warren Truck Assembly Plant. “They’re trying to shut you up,” a young Bridgewater worker told Lehman. “And they usually only do that when somebody’s telling the truth.”
*****
Nearly a week after the threat was posted, neither [current UAW president Shawn] Fain nor any officer of the UAW International Executive Board (IEB) has repudiated it, and Jensen remains on the union’s payroll.
But the growing response at the factory gates and the statements of opposition confirms that the threat, far from intimidating workers, has become a catalyst for the very rank-and-file rebellion the apparatus fears. As Lehman stated, “The apparatus resorts to intimidation because it fears you. The answer is not to retreat but to organize.”
4. The specter of “AI communism”: Chinese open-weight models and the crisis of the American AI bubble
The release of two Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) models ranking with the most advanced American systems, timed to coincide with the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, has provoked panic in Washington and Silicon Valley, exposing the fragility of the speculative bubble on which the entire American stock market now rests.
On Thursday, the day before the conference opened, the Beijing-based firm Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, which, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, the principal organ of American finance capital, “jolted global markets” and is “seen as ranking with the world’s best.” Three days later, Alibaba previewed Qwen 3.8 Max, claiming to have surpassed Kimi K3.
*****
What has provoked the crisis is the openness of the new models. Both are “open weight”: Moonshot will publish the full weights of Kimi K3 by July 27, with Alibaba promising the same. Once the weights are released, anyone can download, inspect, modify and run them on their own hardware, owing nothing to the American AI corporations.
The entire aim of the American AI industry has been to monetize and monopolize this technology. The hundreds of billions invested and the trillions projected for data centers rest on the premise that frontier artificial intelligence will remain a scarce, monopolized commodity from which a handful of corporations extract rents. If the highest quality AI models can be freely reproduced, their price must fall toward the basic cost of the electricity and silicon needed to run them. What evaporates is the rent, and the rent is all that sustains the valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which are preparing public stock offerings.
Investors’ faith that the American companies would keep their hold on the frontier, the Journal writes, “has been at the heart of the boom, helping to justify trillions of dollars in spending on infrastructure.” Yet the entire edifice is unprofitable. According to figures compiled from SEC filings and earnings reports, the major American technology companies have poured roughly $1.4 trillion into AI against roughly $700 billion in cumulative revenue, and only Nvidia, which sells the hardware the others burn through, operates in the black.
AI-linked stocks now account for a record 45 percent of the market capitalization of the S&P 500 and have supplied roughly three-quarters of the index’s returns over the past three years. Excluding AI, the American stock market has barely risen at all: Virtually its entire advance in recent years has been a bet on the permanence of the AI monopoly—a colossal mass of fictitious capital, paper claims on future monopoly profits that the arrival of comparable open models is now rendering worthless.
The AI bubble can burst at any moment, and the events of the past week indicate that the moment may come sooner rather than later. On Friday, the Nasdaq fell 1.4 percent, leaving it roughly 6 percent below the record it set six weeks ago, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index completed its worst week in more than 15 months, down 12.5 percent. Whether the present slide marks the onset of the collapse or merely another tremor cannot be foretold.
Rarely do the defenders of private property state their case so frankly as Dean Ball, a former Trump administration official who is now OpenAI’s “head of strategic futures.” A world dominated by open-weight models, Ball declared on X, would amount to “full AI communism,” in which artificial intelligence would cease to be “a market product” and become instead a “public good” provided by the state, a prospect he denounced as a “dystopian hellscape.”
The statement is an inadvertent confession. What terrifies the AI oligarchs is that artificial intelligence will slip the leash of private ownership and become what it is already in essence: a social product, created from the knowledge, language, and labor of all mankind, and belonging by right to all mankind.
This is why the oligarchs now seek to criminalize open-weight models, a campaign that is already well advanced. Security officials in the Trump administration, the Journal and Axios report, have weighed trade blacklists, federal security warnings and an executive order targeting open-weight models, with internal disagreement so far preventing action.
*****
Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis, who head OpenAI, Anthropic and Google’s DeepMind, built their fortunes on the mythology of the untrammeled free market and now clamor for heavy handed state intervention against competitors they cannot defeat. The Trump administration, a government of oligarchs, will shape whatever measures emerge to loot the public and enrich the financial aristocracy.
*****
Confronted with this crisis, the American ruling class responds as it has to every challenge to its dominance, with economic nationalism and preparations for war. But an open-weight model crosses every border on earth in the time it takes to transfer a file, and no tariff can be levied on the propagation of knowledge.
Precisely because Chinese technology cannot be defeated in open competition, the campaign against it is inseparable from the export controls, the trade war and the military buildup in the Pacific. Down this road lies the breakup of the world’s scientific culture into hostile blocs and, at its end, war between nuclear-armed powers.
*****
As public infrastructure, AI would facilitate the rational and democratic planning of production on a global scale, directed to human need rather than private profit. The same systems now used for surveillance and war could be turned to the conquest of disease, the transition beyond fossil fuels, and the freeing of billions of people from deadening toil.
The Chinese capitalist state, which pursues its own national agenda, will not deliver that future. Only the international working class can. The International Committee of the Fourth International has already demonstrated the revolutionary application of this technology with Socialism AI, launched by the World Socialist Web Site on December 12, 2025, to turn AI toward the socialist education of workers and youth and place the accumulated lessons of more than 150 years of the Marxist movement at their disposal.
The significance of the past week lies not in the triumph of one national capitalism over another. Productive forces created by globally integrated labor have outgrown private ownership and the nation-state system alike, and the convulsions on the American exchanges register that contradiction in the language of the market. It will be resolved in one of two ways: by the capitalist classes, through economic collapse, dictatorship and war, or by the international working class, through the socialist reorganization of economic life on a world scale. A specter is haunting the AI oligarchs—the specter of “AI communism.” Their terror is well founded.
5. "The Fall of the American Orchestra" documented
The state of the symphony orchestra is no small matter. The performance of some of the greatest music of the past and present is vital to the general cultural, intellectual and moral life of a country. The symphony orchestra in the US is associated with immortal names: Gustav Mahler, Leopold Stokowski, Arturo Toscanini, George Szell, Fritz Reiner, Eugene Ormandy, Serge Koussevitzky, George Solti, Leonard Bernstein and many others.
What does it say about American capitalism, corrupt and rotting where it stands, and presided over by a reactionary imbecile-swindler, that it cannot sustain such cultural institutions?
In May, “The Fall of the American Orchestra” on Cadenza Work asserted bluntly that the “American symphony orchestra is, in 2026, the most institutionally distressed cultural form in the country.”
*****
The Cadenza report noted that the symphony orchestra in the US was the “only major classical-music institutional model in the developed world that operates as a predominantly private-philanthropy entity. Every other major Western country underwrites its major orchestras with substantial public funding, either at the national or municipal level or both. The American exception is not partial. It is structural, and it is enormous.”
After adding up the financing derived from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), state and local arts councils and charitable tax exemptions, public funding amounts to the derisory total of 13 cents on the revenue dollar. The remaining 87 cents is derived from ticket sales (40 cents), private contributions (43 cents) and endowment income (4-5 cents).
*****
The Cadenza piece goes on to note that the audiences for classical concerts were aging and that “the customer base is dying faster than it is being replaced.” There has been a 29 percent decline in classical music audiences since 2002. Only four percent of US adults attended a classical performance in 2022. But, of course, this is itself an indictment of the ruling elite, its war on culture, its devastation of arts and music education, its encouragement and glorification of every ounce of backwardness. The decline in the audience is in line with the general crisis in cultural and intellectual life. It is entirely reversible, but not by American capitalism.
*****
Another factor in the orchestras’ difficulties, not often discussed, is the disappearance of
a substantive recording-industry contribution. The Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, and New York Philharmonic each maintained long-running recording contracts with major labels … through the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The contracts produced earned revenue, individual-musician royalties or session pay, and—perhaps more importantly—a global reputational platform that supported touring, subscriber acquisition, and donor confidence in the institutional brand.
That recording revenue has now collapsed.
The overall picture the Cadenza authors draw is bleak. The “structural fix” they identify is increased public funding, but
The political conditions for that restoration … are absent. The NEA has been eliminated. The state arts councils mirror the federal posture. The Republican policy framework treats classical-music funding as an elite priority not warranting taxpayer support. The Democratic policy framework has not, in any administration of the last three decades, made cultural funding restoration a top-twenty priority. The political fix is therefore the most effective intervention and the least likely to occur.
The authors don’t dare to state it, but the conclusion stares the more politically vigilant reader in the face: parasitic, speculation-driven, crisis-ridden American capitalism is incompatible with healthy, thriving and meaningful cultural life. The accumulation of unimaginably vast fortunes occurs on the same plane as the devastation and destruction of the arts.
*****
All of this material powerfully and unequivocally vindicates the positions outlined in the 2010 program of the Socialist Equality Party:
Access to art and culture is a basic component of a healthy society. Yet, like everything else, it is under relentless attack. American culture—film, television, music—was once a pole of attraction because of its innovation and powerful democratic and humanistic spirit. The subordination of culture to the profit motive has led to an immense degeneration….
To enable all working people to have full access to art and culture requires massive public funding and the creation of new schools and centers for music, dance, drama and art, either at a nominal fee or for free. Decisions on subsidies and grants for the arts must be taken out of the hands of the politicians and bureaucrats and placed under the control of committees of artists, musicians and other cultural workers.
6. Trump cuts end food aid for 1.5 million children
An estimated 1.5 million children have been cut off food stamps over the past year, according to a report issued Tuesday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). The cuts are a consequence of Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” enacted by Congress last year, which featured a tax cut for the wealthy and slashed more than $1 trillion over 10 years from Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the official name for food stamps.
*****
The figures for some of the largest states are particularly staggering. Texas led the way, as it does in many areas of political and social reaction, reducing food stamp rolls by 597,353, of whom 317,316, more than half, were children. The largest percentage decline came in Arizona, with a Democratic-controlled state government, which saw a 48 percent decline in the food stamp rolls, and 49 percent for children, with 182,058 children losing their benefits.
Other states with large numbers of children cut off benefits include California, 156,440; Louisiana, 82,064; Massachusetts, 61,647; Pennsylvania, 59,750; Ohio, 50,477; and Michigan, 41,174. The cuts were carried out by state government of both capitalist parties: 11 have Democratic governors, eight have Republicans.
A handful of large states have not yet made public their food stamp cutoffs, including Florida, New York, Illinois, Georgia and North Carolina.
There are two main mechanisms in the 2025 legislation to compel states to cut benefits. SNAP is administered by the states, but the benefits are paid by the federal Department of Agriculture. The One Big Beautiful Bill extended work requirements to older food stamp recipients, those aged 55 to 64, who were previously exempt. Workers who lose their jobs at that age have particular difficulty finding new work at a decent pay rate.
States report an “error rate” to the US Department of Agriculture, which measures overpayments or underpayments, primarily due to clerical errors in the administration of the program, rather than benefits paid to ineligible or fraudulent claimants. The national average error rate was 11 percent, but the 2025 bill arbitrarily requires states to lower their error rates below 6 percent by October 2027 or face penalties of up to 15 percent of the total amount of benefits paid out to their residents.
*****
More than 200 mayors, both Democrats and Republicans, issued a statement on behalf of the US Conference of Mayors asking the Senate Agriculture Committee to reconsider the SNAP cutbacks. They warned that impoverished urban areas would be devastated by the food stamp cuts and sought to have the October 2027 deadline pushed back.
*****
But these pleas, addressed to the same capitalist politicians who approved the cuts last year, will fall on deaf ears. Congress is now engaged in funding a massive expansion of the US military as part of Trump’s war in Iran and the US-NATO war in Ukraine, both backed by the Democrats as well as the Republicans.
A separate report by the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the number of Amazon and gig economy workers receiving food stamps and Medicaid has skyrocketed over the past five years, with SNAP effectively serving as a subsidy for the low wages paid to workers in these superexploited occupations.
The number of Amazon workers relying on federal programs for the poor nearly tripled between February 2020 and September 2025, in part because of the huge increase in the company’s workforce in response to the COVID pandemic. Amazon was the second-biggest employer of food stamp and Medicaid recipients, following only Walmart, the largest US employer and the largest employer of low-wage labor.
Third place on that list of shame is occupied by ride-hailing and food delivery companies operating on internet apps: Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub and Instacart. They were actually the biggest employer of workers receiving food stamps, but in third place in employing Medicaid recipients, a much larger group.
Other companies with large numbers of food stamp or Medicaid recipients in their workforce included McDonald’s, FedEx, Dollar Tree and Dollar General.
7. Sri Lanka: Families of 12 sentenced to death over killing of MP appeal for financial aid
The families of the 12 people sentenced to death in February over the killing of parliamentarian Amarakeerthi Athukorala and his police bodyguard in May 2022 during Sri Lanka’s mass uprising have formed the Nittambuwa People’s Collective (NPC) to raise funds for their legal appeals.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) opposed these convictions and the death sentences when handed down on February 11. We condemned the verdict stating: “On the basis of threadbare evidence and flawed legal reasoning, the court has sentenced 12 people to death for the killing of Athukorala. This amounts to an act of class vengeance, designed to intimidate rising opposition to the austerity program of the present Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government.”
*****
The families’ difficulties are staggering. “For the past four years we have suffered immensely. In order to continue these legal proceedings, many of us have had to sell our houses, land and other properties. Now we simply do not have any money left to spend. We are under tremendous strain,” the representative explained.
The Gampaha High Court is currently preparing the case records for the appeal. The record for just one defendant amounts to approximately 17,000 pages. Photocopying these documents alone involves an enormous financial burden. Lawyers’ fees are estimated at around 18 million rupees ($US53,565) in total—roughly 1.5 million rupees per person.
These enormous costs show how the judicial system is rigged against poor and working people. Those without the means to pay are effectively denied the right to defend themselves. The 12 convicted men are not wealthy individuals with access to powerful legal teams. They are ordinary working people who were caught up in the tumultuous events of May 9, 2022.
*****
The families delivered a letter to the Presidential Secretariat on February 23 explaining the injustice they had been subjected to. They received no reply. All the capitalist parties have remained silent while some Colombo media outlets hailed the verdict as a necessary “lesson.”
The FSP’s response to the case is in line with its broader political role of propping up the JVP/NPP government. It opposes the call for the working class to mobilize in opposition to the convictions.
The SEP and the IYSSE call on workers, students and youth—in Sri Lanka and internationally—to demand the dropping of all charges against the 12 persons sentenced to death and their unconditional release. They should demand the abolition of capital punishment, a barbaric instrument used to intimidate and suppress the oppressed.
The real criminals on May 9, 2022—those who organized violent attacks on unarmed protesters—are the ones who must be prosecuted.
The decision to sentence 12 protesters to death is a warning that the ruling class will stop at nothing to suppress the growing opposition to the deepening assault on living conditions. The government is already resorting to police state measures, including a strike ban in designated industries.
We call on workers, young people, and all those who defend democratic rights, to attend the SEP and IYSSE Zoom meeting “Lessons of the 2022 Mass Uprising,” on Sunday, July 26 at 7:00 p.m. Please register here to attend.
Here is a link to a brief AI summary of the events described in this article.
8. Third in a Four-Part Series: Kast’s National Reconstruction Plan for Chile: Chicago Boys 2.0
On June 17, the Chamber of Deputies approved a bill authorizing an additional US$6.2 billion in public borrowing for 2026, with 94 votes in favor, 52 against, and one abstention. The government argued that the 2026 budget had been inadequately funded by the previous administration and that additional borrowing was necessary to meet obligations, including payments to suppliers.
Moody’s noted that “last year’s fiscal deviation was particularly pronounced,” with the deficit exceeding the target by more than two percentage points of GDP. The public debt, while still below the prudential limit of 45 percent of GDP, is projected to breach that ceiling by 2028. Interest payments on the debt are projected to grow from US$5.2 billion in 2026 to over US$8 billion by 2030, money that will flow to bondholders rather than to hospitals, schools and pensions.
Budget Director José Pablo Gómez was candid about the consequences if the debt authorization was rejected: “Everyone’s budgets will have to be adjusted” and “we will not be able to service the debt.” The government essentially blackmailed Congress to approve the borrowing by threatening to make even deeper cuts.
The debt authorization is to facilitate what is the centerpiece of the Kast government’s agenda: the National Reconstruction and Economic and Social Development plan, or, the “mega-reform,” which constitutes the most ambitious restructuring of the Chilean state’s relationship to capital since the Pinochet dictatorship.
*****
The real content of the bill [initiated under the guise of recovering from devastating wildfires] is a comprehensive program of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, deregulation for investors, and austerity for everyone else. The reform rests on five pillars, as President Kast outlined in his April 15 national address: tax competitiveness, strengthening formal employment, regulatory streamlining, legal and regulatory certainty and containment of public spending. These pillars translate into approximately 40 measures spanning tax policy, labor regulation, environmental law, housing and public administration.
The package passed the Chamber of Deputies in May and was approved by the Senate on June 25 with 26 votes in favor, 23 against and one abstention. The bill now proceeds to its detailed debate, where amendments will be considered before final passage.
*****
According to Socialism AI in a summary of this article:
The centerpiece of the bill is the restoration of the fully integrated corporate tax system designed by the "Chicago Boys" (disciples of the University of Chicago economist, Milton Friedman) under Pinochet. This allows business owners to credit 100 percent of corporate taxes paid against their personal income taxes and defer personal tax indefinitely by keeping profits inside the company. The corporate tax rate will be cut from 27 to 23 percent, while small and medium enterprises face a rate increase. The combined fiscal cost is approximately US$2.35 billion annually — a direct transfer from the public treasury to the largest corporations and their shareholders.
Key provisions of the bill include:
- Tax stability lock-ins of up to 20 years for large foreign investments, modeled directly on Pinochet's Decree Law 600, insulating capital from democratic accountability for a generation.
- A capital repatriation amnesty allowing hidden offshore wealth to be legalized at just 7–10 percent — the third such amnesty in a decade. The article stresses that the tens of billions parked offshore is "congealed surplus value extracted from the labor of Chilean miners, factory workers, agricultural laborers, transport workers and service employees."
- Elimination of capital gains tax on stock market transactions — "class legislation in its purest form," privileging the unearned income of the rentier over wages.
- A US$1.4 billion employment tax credit that subsidizes employers without increasing workers' take-home pay by a single peso.
- Environmental deregulation that makes the state the insurer against judicial review of projects, chilling legitimate environmental litigation.
- Reforms to the Indigenous Act eliminating restrictions on Mapuche land use, facilitating the piecemeal transfer of ancestral lands to forestry companies and agribusiness — the economic complement to the military occupation of the Araucanía.
Historical context: The class struggles that provoked this ruling-class offensive were the massive student revolt of 2011, and the social uprising of 2019–2020. These resulted in the Chilean bourgeoisie transnationalizing its wealth — over US$155 billion by 2023. Kast's election has not reversed this capital flight. The reform is the bourgeoisie's answer: locking in its class privileges against any future democratic challenge.
Following is a summary of the WSWS article assisted by Socialism AI:
Ten weeks before a state election in the German capital, the conservative party has replaced its lead candidate. The incumbent mayor withdrew after poor polling, and the finance senator has been elevated to the top of the ticket. The switch is less about the mayor's past missteps than about the party's electoral decline, with polls showing it trailing the post-communist left party for the first time.
The new lead candidate is effectively indistinguishable from the far-right opposition. As finance senator, Stefan Evers has been the principal architect of a harsh austerity regime imposed by the conservative–social democratic coalition government. Schools, health facilities, and social services have all seen their budgets slashed. The cultural sector was hit especially hard, with roughly 130 million euros — nearly 12 percent of planned funding — cut from theatres, music venues, and the independent arts scene. The two-year budget extending into next year continues the devastation.
Evers has called the city's fiscal situation an "alarm signal" and demanded welfare state reform — meaning deeper social cutbacks. While the federal government mobilizes hundreds of billions for rearmament and militarization, the costs are loaded onto workers, pensioners, the sick, and cultural workers. He has criticized spending on rent subsidies while catering to the greed of real estate corporations, including pushing to build on a major public field against the population's declared will.
Shortly after his appointment, he openly advocated forced labor for welfare recipients in a major newspaper interview. Those receiving state benefits who are able to work, he argued, should be compelled to perform cleaning work to "give something back." He also wants to cut free school meals and rails against every social gain — the language of a politics that disciplines and harasses the poorest while leaving fortunes at the top untouched.
The second pillar of his campaign is hysterical agitation against "the left." He warns that the post-communist left party seeks to destroy the "social market economy" through expropriations, and calls its supporters "extremists." This is cynical: that party and its predecessor participated in the city's government for 16 years, cutting tens of thousands of public sector jobs, reducing wages, undermining collective pay standards, and selling off 150,000 council flats to financial investors. After a referendum calling for the city's largest private landlord to be expropriated passed by a large majority, the left-led government simply refused to implement it. The left party's own lead candidate, under the pretext of combating antisemitism, refuses to criticize the Israeli regime and fiercely condemned a resolution in another state that denounced the genocide in Gaza.
Tellingly, the conservative candidate applies the term "extremists" exclusively to the social democrats, the left party, and the Greens — never to the far right. This is no accident. He is notorious for right-wing rhetoric: in a 2017 social media post he called for a house occupied by left-wing activists to be "smoked out" — a term the Nazis routinely used for their political opponents. He has also used other phrases with heavy Nazi connotations against left-wing figures.
The demonization of left-wing and social opposition prepares the ground for possible collaboration with the far right. The outgoing mayor had been regarded as too moderate and had categorically rejected working with the far-right party. The new candidate, by contrast, has declared he "will do everything to prevent a left-Green state executive" — a formulation that includes the possibility of collaboration with the far right. At the district level, the conservative party already repeatedly votes with the far right, and on immigration policy and domestic security the two parties are in complete agreement. The finance senator's department blocked a family reunification program for refugees, while police and security authorities continue to expand despite alleged "fiscal constraints."
Evers' candidacy demonstrates that the establishment parties are responding to the growing crisis with an ever-sharper turn to the right. The left party offers no counter; it is itself part of the catastrophic policy of rearmament, war, and social attacks. The article concludes by urging support for the Socialist Equality Party's election campaign as the starting point for building a new socialist workers' party.
10. Australia: Oppose Labor’s NDIS cuts: Defend disabled people, fight austerity and war!
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) calls for the entire working class to oppose and politically mobilise against the Albanese Labor government’s massive assault on disabled people, which is an attack on the most vulnerable and sets a new benchmark for vicious government austerity.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) Amendment Bill 2026 seeks to strip $38 billion over four years from the NDIS, the country’s principal disability support program. It is the largest single cut to a government social program in Australian history and the centrepiece of a May budget that slashes $63.8 billion from social spending.
Never before has an Australian government so nakedly sought to remove hundreds of thousands of people from a major national social program. Of the more than 750,000 disabled people receiving NDIS support, government modelling points to the removal of more than 240,000 existing participants by 2031, while a further 110,000 will be denied access altogether. The bill represents the opening stage of a broader offensive against the social rights of the entire working class.
The main targets are disabled children. Almost two-thirds of those Labor intends to remove from the scheme are under the age of 18. They are to be forced into so-called foundational supports such as Thriving Kids, a limited program that does not yet exist, while those still on the NDIS will face sweeping reductions to assistance on which they depend.
The consequences will be devastating. Families will be forced to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for care and therapy, or to abandon their own jobs, as the government dumps the cost and burden of providing support onto them. Underfunded hospitals and deteriorating schools will be inundated with those thrown off the scheme. Teachers, healthcare and support workers will face the impossible task of filling the gap.
There is no question that the Labour government’s plans will cost lives and already have. Disabled people will be denied essential care, families will be pushed beyond breaking point, and preventable deaths will become an inevitable consequence.
What is driving this onslaught is the deepest crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression. Labor’s attack on the NDIS is part of a global offensive on the social rights of the working class. Across the world, governments are slashing healthcare, education and welfare services to boost the profits of the super wealthy and divert tens of billions into militarism and war.
*****
The Socialist Equality Party advances the following demands:
- Withdraw the NDIS Amendment Bill. Reinstate every participant removed from the scheme and restore every funding cut.
- Redirect the billions squandered on war and the military to disability care, health, education and other essential social services. Place disability and health services under public ownership and democratic workers control, organised according to social need, not private profit.
These demands cannot be realized through appeals to Labor, the Liberal-National Coalition, the Greens or the trade union apparatus. They require the independent political mobilization of the working class against the capitalist system itself.
The Health Workers Rank-and-File Committee has already taken up this fight, adopting a resolution against the NDIS cuts and beginning to mobilize health workers. Disabled people, their families, workers in disability, health, education and every industry should follow its example, establishing rank-and-file committees independent of the trade union bureaucracy and every capitalist party.
The working class as a whole must come to the defense of one of the most vulnerable layers of the population. If the ruling class can strip essential support from the disabled in order to finance war and corporate profit, it will stop at nothing. Every social right from healthcare, and education to pensions and wages, is in its sights.
11. James Talarico: The Democrats’ preacher
In March, James Talarico won the Texas Democratic Party’s US Senate primary. In November, he will face off against the state’s attorney general, Trump-loving proto-fascist Republican Ken Paxton.
The contest is being closely watched. Several polls predict a win for Talarico. If this happens, it will be the first time in 34 years that a Democrat represented Texas in the Senate. Even if Paxton succeeds, Talarico’s rise signals that popular moods in the state, the second most populous in the US, with an economy larger than that of Russia, are shifting sharply against right-wing politics.
This is part of a larger trend. Trump’s support is falling among virtually every demographic in the US.
The erosion of MAGA illusions only intensifies the drive of the Democratic Party to try to contain popular anger. In New York City, Colorado, Seattle, and elsewhere, it turns to the DSA and figures like Zohran Mamdani to convince people that the Democrats will do something—anything—to halt the country’s descent into dictatorship.
In Texas, the man for the job is James Talarico—a Christ-loving “progressive” who promises to bring about universal improvement, condemns wars in the Middle East, and cuts down the far-right with Jesus’ words.
*****
Talarico’s pitch is scripted for the religiously minded who are disgusted by the far-right’s abuse of the Bible. It also plays on the misconception, promoted by the Democratic Party and the left, that the Christian far-right, not the profit-system, is the real problem. With a sigh of relief, everyone can now watch Talarico set the Bible thumpers straight.
Talarico defends the separation of church and state not because it is a democratic principle, but because, based on his reading of scripture, it is Christian. He studiously avoids all reference to democracy as the principle that authority is lodged with the people.
The seminarian’s love for his neighbor lasts about as long as his viral video clips. When ICE murdered Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 9, Talarico posted five sentences on X calling for “accountability” and a “full, independent investigation.” He has said nothing since.
*****
Talarico’s condemnations of “forever wars” do not apply to the Ukraine war, which he supports. His criticisms of the Iran war are an allowance extended to him by the Democratic Party leadership for campaign purposes.
In a March interview on CBS Mornings, Talarico issued his standard denunciation of “forever wars.” An anchor asked him, “But are the leaders in your party, specifically Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, bringing that message home to the Republicans, to the president?” He replied, dishonestly, “I don’t know. All I know is what’s happening in Texas.”
On the Gaza genocide, Talarico questions Benjamin Netanyahu’s right to “use forced famine and collective punishment as tactics,” but endorses Israel’s “right to defend itself” and describes October 7, 2023 absurdly as “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.” He insists that Hamas be “disarmed” and a “democratic” Palestine created, i.e., led by puppets hand-picked by Washington.
As for Talarico’s intention to “fight the power,” this is more mythmaking. In 2021 and 2025, when Texas Republicans sought to redraw congressional maps, Talarico and other Democrats fled the state to prevent a vote. He highlights these events on his website.
*****
Equally false is Talarico’s narrative of himself as the downtrodden, now risen.
*****
Talarico references ad nauseam his time as a teacher at a middle school in a high poverty, predominantly Mexican American area of Texas. What is his actual history?
Talarico worked as an educator for two years after college as part of Teach for America (TFA). TFA is, as the Texas Observer explains, a “finishing school for future decision-makers in the multilayered technocracy of education policy, one dominated by elites who have historically boosted charter school expansion.”
*****
Charter schools funnel public money not just to private industry, but also to churches. In 2023, the Network for Public Education published a report outlining the religious right’s growing presence in the charter school business, which it uses to inject Christian teaching into curriculum.
In short, Talarico’s “time as a teacher” was a carefully chosen step on the path to political power, corporate money and right-wing interests hostile to the public school system. The reason he can claim to have “never taken a dime of corporate PAC money” is that his backers funnel money through Super PACs, which are nominally independent of corporations.
*****
What of his other positions?
[The author provides a detailed list of what Talarico claims to stand for.]
*****
Talarico is a particular American social type, the upper-middle class religious huckster and confidence man. If he appears to be even remotely “left,” it is only because his counterparts in Texas politics are so far to the right.
When Talarico speaks of barefoot rabbis “turning over the tables of injustice,” he does so as a politician playing for votes. When workers observe, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God,” they are expressing class anger filtered through religion. These sentiments have nothing in common.
12. Burnham plunges UK deeper into war against Russia and Iran
Just two days into his premiership, Prime Minister Andy Burnham has taken British imperialism deeper into the two major geopolitical conflicts.
As he took office, Burnham’s bellicose rhetoric against Moscow provoked an incident with a Russian warship in the Channel. Within 24 hours he then agreed to deepen collaboration with the Trump administration in its strikes against Iran.
On Monday, Russian Baltic Fleet frigate warship Neustrashimy carried out a live-fire exercise in the Channel, 40 nautical miles off Plymouth on England’s south coast. Neustrashimy fired its main gun for around 30 minutes between 9am and 10am—roughly two hours before Starmer delivered his farewell speech in Downing Street. Burnham was invited by King Charles to form a government that afternoon.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Burnham had approved the US use of some UK bases with the bogus proviso that they would conduct “defensive” air strikes on Iran. This was a continuation of a policy introduced by his predecessor Keir Starmer. In virtually his final task in office last Friday, Starmer chaired a meeting of his senior ministers agreeing that US bombers could continue using Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. Bloomberg noted that Burnham, prior to becoming prime minister, was briefed and agreed.
On Tuesday evening, the Daily Express reported that US bombers were again leaving Fairford for the Middle East as Washington recklessly threatened Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain nuclear facility. The “defensive” designation is a legal fiction concealing Britain’s complicity in a war of aggression.
Monday’s Russian naval exercise took place in international waters, outside British and French territorial limits, in accordance with maritime law. The Neustrashimy informed the Royal Navy offshore patrol vessel HMS Tyne, which had been shadowing them, of their intention to conduct gunnery activity and requested that it withdraw to a safer distance.
HMS Tyne moved from around two nautical miles out to five. A French military aircraft made radio contact requesting the Neustrashimy clarify its intentions. No vessel was fired upon by the Neustrashimy and nobody was injured.
*****
Upon entering Downing Street, and before even finalizing his Cabinet, Burnham was flaunting his militarist agenda. His first call to a world leader was to Donald Trump, with talks centered on North Sea oil, trade, the US/UK military alliance and the demining of the Strait of Hormuz. Burnham then spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, with a Downing Street readout recording that Burnham “began by reaffirming his and the UK’s resolute commitment to the people of Ukraine and underscored that there would be absolutely no change in the UK’s approach, including when it came to bearing down on Russia.”
The war against Russia is the one foreign policy commitment Burnham has made without qualification. Under first a Conservative government and then Labour under Starmer, almost £22 billion (£21.8 billion) has been squandered on the NATO-backed war on Russia. Since February 2022, there is also a standing commitment of £3 billion in military aid every year until at least 2030/31 and “for as long as it takes”.
13. Fifteen years since fascist Anders Behring Breivik massacred 77 people in Norway
Fifteen years ago, on July 22, 2011, 32-year-old fascist Anders Behring Breivik massacred 77 people on the island of Utøya and in Norway’s nearby capital, Oslo. Breivik’s mass murder of dozens of overwhelmingly young people attending a summer camp run by the ruling social democratic Labour Party was a political crime motivated by hatred of “communists,” “cultural Marxism” and Islam that the ruling classes of Europe and North America had systematically legitimized.The terrorist attack began in Oslo’s government district, where Breivik detonated a 1-ton bomb at about 3:25 p.m. The blast killed eight people and injured dozens more. Amid the ensuing chaos, Breivik was able to leave the city unhindered and drive to the ferry crossing to Utøya. Posing as a police officer sent to protect the summer camp following the explosion, he traveled heavily armed the 600 metres by boat to the island. Upon his arrival shortly after 5 p.m., he launched a killing spree lasting almost 90 minutes that claimed the lives of 69 people. He was finally detained by the police at 6:34 p.m.
*****
It would later emerge that the authorities failed to respond to obvious signs that Breivik was plotting mass murder. Seven months prior to the July 22, Norwegian customs flagged large quantities of explosives purchased by Breivik from Poland. In March 2011, he even notified the police that he was planning an attack, information that was allegedly not passed on to the appropriate department until after July 22. Neighbours notified the authorities of strange activity at Breivik’s farm, but no action was taken.
Hours before launching his attack, Breivik sent a 1,500-page manifesto to over 1,000 contacts from far-right organisations in Norway and throughout Europe. He described himself during two calls to the police during the massacre on Utøya as a “commander in the Norwegian resistance movement against communism and the Islamisation of Europe.”
Notwithstanding all of this, a concerted campaign was launched by official media outlets and politicians across Europe to portray Breivik as a “loan wolf” and deny that anyone else bore responsibility for creating the foul political and intellectual atmosphere within which his hideous crime could occur. Repeated attempts were made to declare Breivik insane, transforming his calculated political crime into the inexplicable outburst of a psychotic madman. A Norwegian court in the end ruled him fit to stand trial and sentenced him to 21 years in prison, the maximum penalty possible under Norwegian law. His sentence can, however, be extended indefinitely if a court deems Breivik remains a danger to society.
*****
Fifteen years later, it is no longer a matter of pointing merely to aspects of Breivik’s demented world outlook that correspond with mainstream political discourse. A fascist now sits in the White House. US President Donald Trump routinely rails against “communists” and “illegal immigrants” as the greatest threat to the US, presides over a Nazi-like Gestapo in ICE that regularly murders immigrants and political opponents, and launches bloody wars of aggression without so much as a democratic fig-leaf. In February, Trump announced the beginning of the war on Iran in the dead of night like a dictator. Within hours, US forces under his command had assassinated Iran’s head of state, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other family members, and slaughtered at least 160 children aged between 7 and 12 in a missile strike on a girls’ school.
*****
Across Europe, far-right and outright fascist parties are either already in power or on the verge of taking it. Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is an admirer of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and leader of the far-right Fratelli D’Italia, while in Sweden, Norway’s neighbour to the east, the current right-wing government holds a parliamentary majority thanks to the votes of the Sweden Democrats, whose origins lie in the country’s neo-Nazi milieu. Marine Le Pen is a serious candidate to win France’s presidential election next year for the National Rally and the Alternative for Germany is likely to assume power in a German state government for the first time following elections later this year.
In Norway, Progress has become the main opposition party, finishing a few percentage points behind Labour in last year’s election. While Progress sought to distance itself from Breivik and deny any responsibility for his 2011 murder spree, it has deepened the far-right agitation against immigrants and “multiculturalism” that fuelled the fascist terrorist’s killing spree.
The revival of far-right and fascist politics throughout the world is inseparable from the domination of social and economic life by the financial oligarchy, and the sharpening conflicts between the major powers amid a new violent redivision of the world. Both of these features of crisis-ridden capitalism have intensified dramatically over the past 15 years.
*****
The vast majority of workers oppose fascism and everything it represents, including war, dictatorship, the persecution of immigrants and the left, and terrorist violence. However, they are prevented from fighting the growth of fascism by the parties of the official “left,” which have adopted key elements of the far right’s program and smothered the class struggle with the aid of the trade union bureaucracy.
Pseudo-left parties who argue that fascism must be fought in alliance with these organizations, in a 21st-century edition of the disastrous Stalinist “popular front” policy of the 1930s, are no less complicit in paving the way to power for the fascists. The subordination of working class opposition to fascism to the supposed “democratic” bourgeoisie through the “popular front” led to the consolidation of fascist dictatorships across Europe and World War II.
The most politically appropriate way to commemorate the deaths of the dozens of young people slaughtered by Breivik is to take up the struggle for the political independence of the international working class from all factions of the bourgeoisie in the fight against the far-right danger. Workers must build new forms of democratic organization, rank-and-file committees, to intensify the class struggle and unify globally against the capitalist profit system that gives rise to fascism and its associated horrors. The program required to guide this struggle is socialist internationalism.
14. The way forward in the struggle of Istanbul’s Çapa Medical Faculty refectory workers
The fight of roughly 100 refectory workers dismissed from Istanbul University’s Çapa Medical Faculty Hospital is completing its second week. On July 9, after the subcontracting company running food production and service changed hands in a tender [*], the workers were thrown out of their jobs without payment of their severance and notice compensation or accumulated back wages.
*****
In hospitals, universities and public institutions across Türkiye, tens of thousands of refectory, cleaning and security workers are employed under precarious conditions within the subcontracting system. Every tender period means the threat of unemployment and the usurpation of rights for the workers. While subcontracting companies grow into conglomerates on public tenders, workers are subjected to wages that do not rise even at the official rate of inflation, unpaid compensation and mounting pressure.
This deepening regime of exploitation is an integral part of the austerity program implemented by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government in line with the demands of the capitalist oligarchy. While resources allocated to health care and education are slashed and public services are marketized, an ever-growing share of the budget is funneled into militarism, the corporations and interest payments.
As imperialist war and aggression—led by Türkiye’s NATO ally, the United States—escalate across the Middle East and the wider world, ruling classes everywhere are sacrificing social spending to the demands of militarism. The unemployment and insecurity being imposed on the Çapa workers are part of a single program being enforced on the entire working class, from the United States to Germany and from Argentina to South Korea.
*****
The struggle of the Çapa workers must appeal directly to the tens of thousands of subcontracted workers and health workers in every hospital in Istanbul and throughout Türkiye: workers’ jobs, livelihoods and rights are not subject to tender. A campaign should be organized demanding the nationalization of healthcare services, as well as a substantial increase in resources. This should be part of a broader programme appealing to other sections of the working class.
The resistance at Çapa is part of a rising wave of class struggle in Türkiye. In recent months, many sections of the working class, above all the miners, have entered into battle for their unpaid wages and rights.
*****
The Çapa refectory workers are continuing their struggle by contacting Gıda-İş, affiliated with the “oppositional” DİSK. Whatever union the workers may belong to, control of the struggle must not belong to officials who negotiate behind closed doors, but to rank-and-file committees composed of representatives elected by the workers themselves, accountable to them and subject to recall at any moment. Only such committees can unite all workers in a common struggle, transcending union, sector, workplace, and country divisions.
Urgent demands such as permanent, secure, and decent wages for all, the abolition of the subcontracting system, and the nationalization of health services and other essential social services under the democratic control of the workers require a planned economy on a global scale, based not on capitalist profit but on the needs of society.
* in this case, Istanbul University puts the food service contract out to bid. Private subcontracting companies compete to win it. The company that offers to run the service at the lowest cost wins the tender — and that cost-cutting is achieved by slashing labor costs.
15. Split in Turkish opposition CHP becomes official: Özgür Özel announces new party
The official split in the CHP has resonated widely in the international press. Reuters described the split as a development that deepens the difficulties confronting Erdoğan’s rivals. It noted that the new distribution of parties in parliament could affect the calling of the early elections that Erdoğan requires in order to stand again as a presidential candidate. Although the constitution states, “A person may be elected President of the Republic twice at most,” Erdoğan is currently serving his third term and is preparing to stand for a fourth time in 2028.
The Financial Times described Özel’s new party initiative as a “bold move” capable of reshaping Turkish politics. It wrote that the new party could unite a fragmented opposition and mobilize disaffected voters, and that it was ahead of the AKP in recent polls. Deutsche Welle assessed the announcement as a “historic break” in the CHP.
The significance of the split in the CHP cannot be denied, but in terms of their fundamental orientation there is no difference of principle between Erdoğan, Kılıçdaroğlu and Özel. Each of them is a political representative of a ruling class deeply committed to imperialism and to the US-NATO military-strategic alliance.
16. Burnham government a “firm friend” to a “pleased as punch” military
New UK Defense Secretary Wes Streeting has signaled more spending on the military by Andy Burnham’s Labour government.
In a speech at the AGF Defense Summit at Farnborough airshow, Streeting told military and industrial leaders, “The first duty of any government is to keep our country safe” and that his job was “to maximize our deterrence, and ensure that should deterrence fail, we have the capability to fight and to win. That means investment.”
US President Donald Trump, he added, had “called on Europe to carry a greater share of the burden for our own defense, and he is right to do so. The UK has always been a leading light on defense spending, but the world is changing, and in these dangerous, uncertain times, it is clear that we have needed to go further.”
This was why former prime minister Keir Starmer and now Burnham had committed “£298 billion over the next four years, including an additional £15 billion on top of last year’s Spending Review settlement” and “reaffirmed our commitment to 3.5 percent [GDP spending on the military] by [20]35.”
Asked how he would find the money for any further increases, Streeting replied, “As to future fiscal events, it’s for the chancellor to make announcements on those matters but I certainly feel like we’ve got a firm friend in His Majesty’s Treasury.”
17. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Democratic Republic of the Congo:
Egypt:
Eswatini (formerly Swaziland):
Kenya:
Mozambique:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Belgium:
Firefighters in Brussels strike over staff shortages and poor working conditions
Ireland:
Engineers for the Republic of Ireland Electricity Supply Board strike for overtime pay
Romania:
Health workers in national walkout over government health cuts
United Kingdom:
Ancillary staff at London hospital walk out over parity claims and union recognition
Strikes planned at rail company over safety fears
Strike of housing association workers in London over pension attacks
Middle East
Iraq:
Protests over power shortages
Israeli-occupied West Bank:
Protest over planned school demolition
Yemen:
Protests over deteriorating living conditions
18. 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.
