Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Perspective: Execution in Wisconsin: Only the working class can stop police state terror
The police execution of Corey Ruiz in Madison, Wisconsin on Wednesday has provoked an eruption of social anger throughout the state and across the country.
Ruiz, a 38-year-old father and longtime Madison resident, was identified by police as a “suspect” after he was reportedly seen looking into parked cars. Police have not alleged that he broke into a vehicle, stole anything or committed any crime whatsoever.
*****
As of Friday, more than 48 hours after the killing, the officer who executed Ruiz had not been publicly identified, much less arrested or charged with a crime.
The intersection where Ruiz was murdered remained closed through Friday as residents transformed it into a memorial. Hundreds of workers and young people of every race have participated in protests and vigils demanding “Justice for Corey.” Additional demonstrations are planned throughout the weekend.
*****
What was carried out on a Madison street was the local expression of a national policy directed against the working class. The objective source of this violence is the historic crisis of American capitalism. The financial oligarchy is accumulating wealth on a scale without precedent while tens of millions of workers struggle to afford food, housing and medical care.
The wealth of the world’s billionaires has climbed from $4.5 trillion 15 years ago to $20.1 trillion today. It increased by approximately 40 percent in only two years.
At the opposite pole, workers employed by some of the largest and most profitable corporations depend on government assistance to survive. The number of Amazon workers receiving food stamps or Medicaid nearly tripled between February 2020 and September 2025. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub and Instacart collectively rank among the largest employers of workers receiving federal aid.
Public assistance is used to subsidize the poverty wages paid by giant corporations and enrich billionaires such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Now even this inadequate aid is being taken away. An estimated 4 million people, including 1.5 million children, have been removed from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over the last year.
While children are denied food, the House of Representatives this week approved a National Defense Authorization Act allocating $1.15 trillion to the military. Six Democrats voted for the bill, providing the margin to pass it. The legislation forms a central component of the Trump administration’s proposed $1.5 trillion military budget.
These resources will finance the expanding war against Iran, continued support for the Gaza genocide, the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and preparations for war against China. The violence inflicted by American imperialism overseas is increasingly being directed against the working class within the United States. The military occupation of foreign countries and the occupation of American cities are two fronts of the same war.
Social inequality on this scale is incompatible with democracy. The oligarchy cannot impose poverty, war and social devastation through democratic methods. This is why Trump was returned to the White House by the oligarchy and given free rein to construct the apparatus of a presidential dictatorship.
*****
On average, American police kill more than three people every day. The perpetrators are routinely placed on paid leave, shielded from public identification and cleared by prosecutors and internal investigations.
The Democrats and their political satellites seek to present police violence as the product of “white supremacy.” The racialist explanation conceals the essential class function of the police. The police exist to defend capitalist property and the wealth and power of the financial oligarchy against the working class.
In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels explained that the state is not an impartial institution standing above society. It emerges from society’s division into irreconcilably hostile classes.
The state’s essential foundation, Engels explained, is a “public force” consisting “not merely of armed men, but also of material appendages, prisons and coercive institutions of all kinds.” This force grows stronger as class antagonisms sharpen. This is precisely what is taking place in the United States.
The fight to stop police violence, abolish ICE and dismantle the immigration death squads is therefore inseparable from the fight against capitalism and for socialism.
2. Perspective: Mamdani, Netanyahu and the capitalist state
[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is scheduled to attend a meeting of the UN in New York City in September, and [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani had earlier stated that Netanyahu would be arrested if he did so. In the video released on Tuesday, however, Mamdani conceded that “we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.” He concluded: “The federal government, however, does, and I call on them to join the ICC [International Criminal Court] and execute this warrant.”
The denunciations and slanders came within hours. Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, called Mamdani “an evil antisemite who deliberately lies about serious things like ‘genocide’ to stoke Jew hate” and added: “If anyone should be arrested, it’s the Mayor of NY for incitement.” Zionist organizations repeated the same line, with AIPAC declaring that the video is “based on a modern blood libel and outrageous lies.”
The popular response was very different and of objective significance. Within a day, Mamdani’s video had been viewed more than 13 million times. Mamdani won the mayoralty of the city with the largest Jewish population in the United States, many who voted for him, while denouncing Netanyahu as a war criminal. His statements about the genocide of Palestinians resonate with millions of young people who have participated in demonstrations against the genocide for nearly three years.
Mamdani’s declaration that he will not arrest Netanyahu is, as a factual matter, a reversal. As a candidate, he pledged to arrest Netanyahu if he came to New York, and as recently as July 18 he said in an interview with the New York Times that he was in “active conversation” with the city’s law department about enforcing the ICC warrant.
Many of those who took these pledges seriously have responded to the reversal with anger. The essential criticism of Mamdani’s conduct, however, is not that he has failed to carry out a single pledge. Far more important is the light the episode sheds on the underlying bankruptcy of his entire political perspective.
Netanyahu, when he arrives in New York, will do so under the protection of the federal government—that is, of the most powerful sections of the American ruling class....
*****
That is, aside from the issues of jurisdiction involved in arresting Netanyahu, the individual Mamdani declares a war criminal enjoys the protection of the entire state apparatus, including his own government.
It is no different with Mamdani’s pledges to defend the living standards of the working class. His promise of universal childcare has been scaled down to fit the budget of a city he cannot finance, because he cannot tax the wealthy without the permission of Albany, which will not grant it. His pledge to defend immigrants has not stopped ICE from carrying out operations in New York. He has kept the NYPD budget at $6.4 billion, while a $5.4 billion deficit prepares austerity against the workers who elected him. Each verbal proclamation has run up against the same reality. Power is in the hands of the ruling class, and the election of a “socialist” mayor has not altered that fact by one iota.
The entire perspective of the DSA is premised on a rejection of the basic principle of Marxism, that the state is not a neutral body but an instrument of class rule. The DSA promotes the fiction that the interests of the working class can be advanced within the framework of the capitalist state—and, in particular, through the Democratic Party—without the development of a movement of the working class against it.
Mamdani has drawn the practical conclusions. Since his election he has cultivated a working relationship with Trump, traveling to the White House twice to pledge collaboration. At every point where his electoral promises clashed with the interests of the ruling class, he has come down on the side of the latter. He endorsed Governor Hochul for reelection even as she issued emergency orders supplying scab labor against striking New York nurses, dispatched the NYPD to protect ICE agents from protesters, and granted permits and police protection to the pro-genocide Israel Day parade.
It is necessary to address another political issue. The focus on Netanyahu as an individual obscures what the genocide is. Netanyahu deserves to be prosecuted, but his crimes are the crimes of imperialism. Mamdani notes in his video that the bombs dropped on Gaza are made in America. But he does not indict the American state that financed and delivered them, and certainly not the Democratic Party, which under Biden organized and armed the genocide that Trump now continues.
Nor does the genocide stand alone. It is the spearhead of an eruption of imperialist violence on a world scale and of a war against the working class at home, waged through mass deportations, the destruction of democratic rights and the buildup of the apparatus of dictatorship.
*****
Netanyahu, and all those responsible for the genocide of the Palestinian people, can and will be brought to account for their crimes. But this will be done not through the courts of the imperialist powers or the appeals of their left-wing managers but through the independent political mobilization of the international working class against the capitalist system itself.
3. Australia: Online public meeting: Fight NDIS cuts and Labor’s war on the working class!
The meeting will outline the socialist perspective needed to oppose the Labor government’s assault on disabled people, as part of its broader offensive against the working class.
4. Pattern bargaining opens for 23,000 US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs workers
The USW’s isolation of 800 locked-out BP Whiting oil refinery workers shows why steelworkers must organize independently of the union bureaucracy.
5. Australian industrial workers denounce death threat against Will Lehman
“When I saw the picture posted it made me feel sick to my stomach. It shows that the UAW leadership are scared of Will. Why else would you threaten him and try to intimidate him?”
6. Sturgis Hospital closes in rural Michigan
The destruction of rural healthcare is neither an oversight nor ineffective policymaking. It flows from a political and economic system in crisis, where an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power can only be maintained by plundering social resources for private profit and militarism.
7. Break the collusion between the union and management at Volkswagen!
At its online meeting July 15, the VW Action Committee launched an intensive campaign to break the control of the IG Metall union apparatus and its plant officials and begin a serious fight in defense of jobs.
8. Canadian imperialism complicit in Trump’s regime change operation in Cuba
Canadian imperialism is fully complicit in the Trump administration’s efforts to strangle Cuba’s economy and starve its people in preparation for a potential military invasion.
Since it attacked Venezuela in January, kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro, and seized control of its oil exports, the US has imposed an oil embargo on Cuba. The move marks a massive escalation of Washington’s decades-long economic war on the island-country and its people, whom American imperialism has never forgiven for the Cuban revolution of 1959.
Preparations for a military assault are far advanced. The Pentagon has positioned forces for an imminent strike, awaiting, according to media reports, only the White House’s final go-ahead. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is working to fabricate a pretext for yet another illegal, unprovoked war of plunder. This includes touting lurid, unsubstantiated claims that Cuba has received a handful of drones from Russia and Iran as proof that Cuba represents a threat to US national security.
*****
Cuba is Canada’s largest bilateral trading partner in the Caribbean, with close to $1 billion exchanged per year, and Canada is Cuba’s second largest trading partner after the European Union. Canada provides Cuba with critical dietary staples, including wheat, pork and peas. Canadian tourism companies Sunwing and Blue Diamond Resorts, in partnership with the Cuban military-run Gaviota Corporation, have invested billions in the country.
With the criminal blockade of fuel supplies to Cuba, these operations have ground to a complete halt. Canadian air carriers have suspended all flights due to the inability to obtain jet fuel in Cuba or to service their aircraft there. Hotels, resorts and restaurants have shut down, throwing hundreds of thousands of Cubans out of work. Blackouts have shut down much of the country.
*****
Canadian imperialism’s investments in Cuba have been based on the assertion of its “independent” capitalist interests in the Caribbean. Canada, along with Mexico, were the only countries in the Western Hemisphere which maintained diplomatic relations with Cuba after the 1959 Revolution.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canadian prime minister from 1968 to 1979, famously visited Fidel Castro in 1976, developing a close personal friendship, such that Castro was one of the pallbearers at Trudeau’s funeral in 2000. In a speech to tens of thousands in Cienfuegos, Trudeau angered Canada’s US allies by declaring, “Viva Cuba y el pueblo Cubano! Viva el primer ministro comandante Fidel Castro!” But this political theater had nothing to do with any imagined support for “socialism” and everything to do with opening up a diplomatic relationship with Cuba independent of the United States, to assert Canadian imperialist interests.
When the US Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act in 1996, sanctioning foreign investors in Cuba, Canadian imperialism responded with the Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act, which protects Canadian companies from US sanctions via a suite of measures, including state-backed counter lawsuits against US claimants.
Thirty years later, the irresolvable contradictions of world capitalist development under private ownership and national management are driving American imperialism to abandon the international legal norms and arrangements which permitted both the “independent” existence of Cuba on a bourgeois nationalist basis and the “independent” interests of its erstwhile Canadian ally in Cuba’s economy.
The imperialist powers, Canada among them, are seeking to redivide the world by force. Washington has asserted the so-called “Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” which declares American imperialism’s claim to complete economic and military domination over the entire Western Hemisphere, including both Cuba and Canada.
“Canada, more than probably any other nation, is caught in a vise grip,” said Mark Entwistle, Canada’s envoy to Havana from 1993 to 1997, in an interview with Bloomberg about the vulnerability of Canada’s Cuban investments. Entwistle referred to the ongoing attempt to renegotiate favorable Canadian trade terms with the United States. Canadian interests in Cuba, he said, were being held hostage at gunpoint in these “negotiations.”
*****
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which has long maintained relations with Cuba’s National Union of Public Administration Workers in Havana (SNTAP), launched a parliamentary petition in April under NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice, calling for the Carney government to “stand with Cuba” by opposing all military action and economic coercion, and expanding Canadian economic and humanitarian activities on the island. It was signed by 12,296 people and presented to parliament on May 7, but it was not debated and does not appear to have prompted a response from the Liberal government to date.
The Canadian Network on Cuba, which is supported by both the Stalinist Communist Party of Canada and the pseudo-left Socialist Action group, issued a nationalist, pro-capitalist statement demanding “the right of Canadian companies to conduct lawful business free from foreign coercion and intimidation.” It called on the government to enforce the Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act in defense of Canadian capitalist interests.
NDP leader Avi Lewis has made similar bankrupt appeals, in remarks to the CUPE Ontario convention that were picked up by the Cuban embassy in Canada, he declaimed that Canadian imperialism “must come to the defense of Cuba, and fight for a free Palestine.”
What a fraud! Lewis, Socialist Action and the Communist Party know full well that the right-wing Liberal government of Mark Carney will do no such thing. Their primary purpose in making these bankrupt appeals is to divert the growing opposition to imperialist wars and aggression among workers in youth in Canada behind Canadian nationalism and impotent appeals to the political establishment. This goes hand in hand with the continued promotion of the Castro regime as “socialist” and justifications of its attempts to buy its survival by demonstrating through sweeping privatizations and other pro-market reforms that it can transform the island into a profitable source of cheap labor and natural resources for US corporations.
The Castroite regime has made no appeal to the international working class for support. As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, its current prostration before imperialism is the outcome of its bourgeois nationalist character and capitalist program. It was always hostile to the independent power of the working class. This was manifested both in its suppression of all forms of working class political and economic self-organization on the island, and the bargain that it made with the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy, under which, in return for economic aid, it supported the Kremlin’s strangling of world revolution.
Canadian workers must unequivocally oppose Washington’s criminal campaign to starve the Cuban working class and reverse the little that remains of the social gains of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and Canadian imperialism’s complicity in it.
Such a campaign cannot be left to the trade union bureaucracy or the NDP, and it cannot be based upon appeals to American imperialism for “rights and freedoms” for Canadian mining corporations or for the political representatives of the Canadian imperialism to come to the aid of the Cuban people. It must be animated by a socialist internationalist program—that is, the fight to mobilize workers across the Americas in a common struggle to put an end to imperialist militarism and the capitalist system that is its source.
9. US bombards Iran for 13th straight night as White House plans “major” escalation
American warplanes and missiles struck Iran for a 13th consecutive night late Thursday and into Friday morning, hitting sites from the Strait of Hormuz to the Caspian Sea coast.
An American attack on the city of Ahvaz killed four people and wounded five, the state broadcaster IRIB reported.
*****
The forces for the escalation are already in place. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday on the surge of special operations forces, fighter squadrons and medics to the region.
The Times reported Friday:
Additional Air Force F-16 fighters from Germany and stealthy F-35 jets from Britain have arrived in the Middle East in recent days, joining scores of warplanes and attack drones already positioned at land bases or on two aircraft carriers, according to several U.S. military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
B-2 and B-52 crews in the United States have been placed on alert, according to the same report, and a fleet of nearly 20 warships is operating in and around the Arabian Sea. Some 50,000 American troops are assigned to the war in the region and Europe.
The Journal also reported Wednesday that more than 150 additional medics had been dispatched to the US military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany—preparation for American casualties on a scale the war has not yet produced.
*****
As it prepares a wider war, the administration is concealing the cost of the war to date. On Friday, the Pentagon’s official count of American dead in the war stood at 14, cut from 18—the deleted four being the soldiers killed in Iran’s mid-July attacks in Jordan and Iraq, whose remains Trump received at Dover Air Force Base on Wednesday.
*****
The official count of wounded was cut the same week, from 482 to 420, without explanation. Officials have told Reuters that the true number of wounded exceeds 500. The Pentagon last briefed the press in detail in May.
Inside Iran, the death toll is mounting. The Iranian health ministry on Friday put the toll since Trump renewed the bombing campaign in late June at 59 dead and 666 wounded, in a war that has killed thousands of Iranians.
*****
The war is strangling the world economy. After the Houthis struck Saudi tankers in the Red Sea this week, Brent crude topped $100 a barrel for the first time since May, before easing to about $96 on Friday.
A single tanker passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, the fewest since May 7. War-risk insurance for the southern Red Sea doubled for some shippers, and rerouting around Africa adds at least four weeks to a tanker’s voyage.
*****
The conflict is widening into a regional war. The Journal reported Friday that Bahrain and Kuwait, with Emirati intelligence and air cover, secretly bombed military sites inside Iran early this month—their first direct attacks on the country. The strikes hit drone and missile storage depots, the Journal wrote, after weeks in which Iran had concentrated its fire on the two states, both of which host American bases.
Israel, which launched the war alongside Washington in February, is continuing its onslaught in Gaza. Israeli strikes killed 12 people there on Tuesday, medics said, among them a father, his wife and their four children, whose home in Gaza City was set ablaze.
10. Australian regulator deepens attack on health workers opposing Gaza genocide
In a further tightening of its censorship regime, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), in line with the federal Labor government’s pro-Zionist agenda, has formally integrated the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism into its regulatory framework.
The move, announced on June 17 in a joint statement with Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal, represents a direct attack on the fundamental democratic rights of medical professionals. It establishes a punitive apparatus designed to intimidate and silence doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers who dare to speak out against the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
11. Southern California grocery pharmacists authorize strike
Hundreds of grocery pharmacists have authorized strike action after months of bargaining over unsafe staffing, mounting workloads and wages at Ralphs, Albertsons, Vons and Pavilions.
12. Five workers killed in helmet factory fire in Sri Lanka
The inferno in the Katuwana Industrial Zone is a case of industrial murder—the direct and inevitable product of a capitalist system that subordinates human life to the relentless drive for profit.
13. Jacobin falsifies Trotsky and historical record to promote popular front in Argentina
Martín Mosquera, editor-in-chief of Jacobin América Latina, has published a lengthy strategy document, “How to Defeat Milei,” whose purpose is to supply a theoretical justification for subordinating the Argentine working class to Peronism and a “broader progressive bloc” ahead of the 2027 elections.
Jacobin Magazine is the semi-official press organ of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA is a faction of the Democratic Party in the United States. Its international wing formally affiliated in 2023 with the São Paulo Forum, the regional bloc of Chavista, Peronist, and other bourgeois-nationalist parties.
The argument is as follows: the Argentine working class has suffered a “social defeat” that rules out revolution. The fight against the fascistic administration of President Javier Milei will therefore be decided on the electoral terrain, where the left must offer Peronism “specific, critical and delimited” support; and this requires abandoning any “sectarian” insistence on working class political independence in favor of “unitary” blocs that include bourgeois and reformist forces.
Attempting to dress up his position with pseudo-Marxist credentials, Mosquera falsifies the positions of Leon Trotsky and revives a decades-old slander that Trotsky was “sectarian” on France and Spain in order to rehabilitate the Popular Front. Every element of this argument is false.
*****
To make this program respectable, Mosquera imports the claim made by Perry Anderson, the longtime editor of New Left Review, that Trotsky showed “flexibility” toward alliances with non-working class sectors against Nazism and during the Kornilov affair of August 1917, yet fell into “sectarian errors” in opposing the Popular Front in France and Spain. This is a grotesque fabrication.
It erases the distinction Trotsky spent years elaborating between a united front of workers’ organizations for defensive struggle, and a Popular Front government that subordinates the working class politically to its class enemies.
In Germany, Trotsky called for a united front of Communist (KPD) and Social Democratic (SPD) workers against the Nazis—joint action between two workers’ parties, each retaining full political independence. He never proposed a coalition government with the SPD, still less with bourgeois parties. In December 1931 he wrote: “No common platform with the Social Democracy... March separately, but strike together!” The Stalinist KPD rejected even this minimal unity, branding the SPD “social fascists”; the German working class was divided and crushed, and Hitler took power in January 1933.
The Kornilov affair, which Mosquera cites via Anderson as proof of Trotsky’s supposed flexibility, in fact demonstrates the very method he later applied to France. In August 1917 the Bolsheviks fought General Kornilov’s coup alongside troops loyal to the Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky, while granting Kerensky himself no political support. Lenin’s instruction, which Trotsky quoted in 1931, was: “We shall fight against Kornilov, but we do not support Kerensky... The distinction is delicate but must not be forgotten.”
This was exactly Trotsky’s approach to Léon Blum’s Popular Front government. He did not call for frontal opposition; Mosquera quotes a June 1936 letter from Trotsky to his French supporters where he predicted that the workers’ next wave of action would be directed not at Blum but at “the two hundred families,” the Radicals, the Senate and the army command. “We do not put Léon Blum in the same sack as [the fascists] de Wendel and La Rocque,” he wrote—precisely as the Bolsheviks had distinguished Kerensky from Kornilov while fighting both. What Trotsky opposed was the Popular Front coalition itself between Blum’s Socialist Party and the Radical Party: a government answerable to the Radical Party, the party of French capital, whose function was to prevent the working class from using its own strength to take power.
Mosquera credits the Popular Front’s 1936 election victory with detonating the French general strike wave that followed, and Spain’s parallel mobilization against Franco, as proof that “confidence” in reformist leaderships can itself trigger radicalization. The record says otherwise. The June 1936 strikes expressed a revolutionary upsurge already building since the fascist riots of February 1934; the Popular Front’s actual function, once installed, was to shut that upsurge down. Stalinist leader Maurice Thorez, whose Communist Party gave outside support to the Popular Front, declared, “One must know how to end a strike,” as the Matignon accords were signed, trading temporary concessions for ordering workers back to the factories—concessions the bourgeoisie clawed back within two years.
Trotsky called the Popular Front “a society for insuring Radical bankrupts at the expense of the capital of the workers’ organizations.” By 1938, the same Radical Party was ruling by decree against the working class; and by 1940, much of it had gone over to Vichy and collaboration with the Nazi occupation forces.
During the Spanish Revolution, workers and peasants took up arms, collectivized land and factories and built militias not because the Popular Front, including the Socialists, the Stalinist CP and the Republicans, had won the 1936 elections, but because they understood, correctly, that a fascist victory meant their annihilation. The developing social revolution was in fact systematically strangled by the Popular Front government, under Stalinist direction: disarming the militias, restoring bourgeois property relations and physically liquidating revolutionaries and centrists, particularly in the POUM. Trotsky’s verdict in December 1937 was blunt: “Victory will go either to the socialist revolution or to fascism.” That was not sectarianism, but a prediction confirmed with the taking of power of Franco in 1939.
*****
The theoretical core of Mosquera’s argument is the claim that “in many cases, the masses do not radicalize despite trusting reformist leaderships, but through that trust”—that popular mobilization typically begins only once broad sectors perceive a political force capable of translating their demands into concrete results.
This inverts the historical record examined above. The working class took power in October 1917 only because they had broken politically with Kerensky and come under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. Trust in reformist and Stalinist leaderships produced not revolutionary victory but catastrophic defeat: German workers trusted the SPD and KPD, and Hitler triumphed; the independent strike wave French workers had built was demobilized by the very government they had just elected; the Spanish revolution was strangled by the Popular Front.
*****
Jacobin says openly that the masses radicalize “through trust” in reformist leaderships, so the left must work through and inside a broad electoral front behind Peronism. The Morenoite PTS says the same thing in more militant-sounding language: the task is not to win the working class to revolutionary politics against Peronism and the union bureaucracy, but to build standing bodies in which Peronists, the politically unaffiliated and revolutionary-minded fight “together,” on the premise that programmatic clarification can wait indefinitely. Both positions converge in their opposition to tackling the same essential task—the building of an independent revolutionary party fighting for the political independence of the working class.
This convergence is not accidental. It has a definite class content. As the WSWS has explained, the pseudo-left is not a wing of the socialist movement that has made mistaken tactical choices. It is the political expression of a privileged, upper-middle-class layer—hostile to Marxism and to the independent revolutionary movement of the working class. Its material position is bound up with the parliamentary apparatus, the trade union bureaucracy, the universities and certain professions. Its historic function is to corral movements of social protest back within the safe confines of the institutions of bourgeois rule, dressed variously in the language of identity politics, national reformism or “left” electoralism.
*****
What is missing is the revolutionary party Trotsky spent his life building against exactly this kind of “left” cover for capitalist rule. Obstructing the construction of that party is the real function shared by Jacobin’s open support for Peronism and PTS’s centrism. The International Committee of the Fourth International alone is fighting to build it in Argentina and internationally.
14. T. rex fossil sold for $50.1 million
Ever larger amounts on such “trophies” are being spent by members of the wealthy elite while support for basic science is slashed.
15. Ebola deaths pass 1,000 in the DRC, faster than any previous outbreak
It took 67 days for this outbreak to cross the grim 1,000-death milestone. The West Africa epidemic, declared on March 23, 2014, took 142 days to reach the same toll, more than twice as long.
If current growth rates hold, the outbreak would reach West Africa’s 28,616 cases about five months after declaration and its 11,310 deaths in four. West Africa took 27 months. Such projections carry uncertainty; epidemic curves bend. What is certain is that no licensed vaccine or treatment exists, and that the surveillance which would narrow the uncertainty has been cut.
*****
Under capitalism, which diseases get medicines is decided by profit and national security priority. In the United States, countermeasures against Ebola are funded not as public health but as biodefense. The trigger is a determination by the Department of Homeland Security that a pathogen poses a material threat to national health security, which releases procurement money through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the Pentagon’s chemical and biological defense office.
*****
The international working class must take the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries out of private hands and place them under its own democratic control, so that what is developed answers to human need. It must turn the wealth now consumed by the war over eastern Congo’s minerals to the health infrastructure the Congolese population has been denied. This requires a unified political struggle by workers in Africa, Europe and the Americas against the imperialist order that has organized global medicine around its own security, and the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The capacity to build a defense against Bundibugyo has existed for a decade. It was never pointed at the people now dying of it.
In a sharp escalation of Washington’s imperialist offensive against Latin America, the Trump administration is openly intervening in Brazil’s October presidential election to bring fascist candidate Flávio Bolsonaro to power.
17. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:
Bangladesh:
Cambodia:
India:
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.
