Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The political legacy of Fidel Castro on the 100th anniversary of his birth
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Fidel Castro, the World Socialist Web Site is republishing below the statement “The political legacy of Fidel Castro,” written by Bill Van Auken, following Castro’s death in November 2016, which remains the most sober balance sheet of his political role.
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Castroism was among the clearest examples of the bankruptcy of the bourgeois nationalist movements in the postwar period that relied on the patronage of the Stalinist bureaucracy, and which was left without foundations once the bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991. Today the government in Havana is negotiating the terms of a settlement with the Trump administration, prepared to make every economic concession—privatizations, the stripping of labor protections, open invitations to exile capital—except the surrender of the privileges of the ruling stratum itself.
2. On the 86th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky
On the afternoon of August 20, 1940, Ramón Mercader, an agent of the Stalinist secret police (GPU), attacked Leon Trotsky as he sat at his desk in Coyoacán, Mexico. Trotsky died in a Mexico City hospital the next day, August 21.
Trotsky, born in the Ukrainian village of Yanovka in Kherson province, was the co-leader with Vladimir Lenin of the October Revolution of 1917, the commander of the Red Army and the founder of the Fourth International.
Trotsky’s assassination marked the consummation of a violent counter-revolutionary assault on the cadre and leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution. Its anniversary this year coincides with the 90th anniversary of the first Moscow Trial, which opened on August 19, 1936, and began the Great Terror.
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The conflict between Stalinism and Trotskyism was between two fundamentally opposed political perspectives. Thirteen years earlier, in 1923, Trotsky and the Left Opposition opened a fight against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Communist Party and the Soviet state—a degeneration personified by Joseph Stalin, who had become the party’s general secretary the year before.
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Trotsky was expelled from the party in 1927 and deported from the Soviet Union in 1929. Trotsky explained that Stalin had functioned as the “gravedigger of the revolution” and Stalinism as an agency of world imperialism. “As a conscious political force,” he wrote in The Revolution Betrayed in 1936, “the bureaucracy has betrayed the revolution” by enforcing bourgeois norms of distribution for the benefit of an upper stratum, it was “preparing a capitalist restoration.” The bureaucracy saw those who led the October Revolution as an impediment to be politically destroyed.
Soviet archival records count 681,692 executions in 1937 and 1938 alone. Of the 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee elected in 1934, 98 were arrested and shot, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in 1956.
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As the historian Vadim Rogovin documented, the terror extended far beyond the leadership of the Bolshevik Party: scientists, educators and literary figures were murdered en masse. The poet Osip Mandelstam died in a transit camp in 1938. The writer Isaac Babel was shot in 1940, and so was the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. The geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was left to starve in a Saratov prison, where he died in 1943.
Nor did the killing stop at the Soviet border. Spanish police seized Andrés Nin, the leader of the POUM, in Barcelona in June 1937 and handed him to the GPU, which tortured him to death. Erwin Wolf, who had been Trotsky’s secretary in Norway, was kidnapped in Barcelona that July and never seen again. In September the GPU gunned down Ignace Reiss, one of its own officers, on a road outside Lausanne after he broke publicly with Stalin and declared for the Fourth International.
This was political genocide: the targeted annihilation of an entire political generation. The terror cleared the way for the pact concluded between Stalin and Hitler on August 23, 1939, which gave Nazi Germany a free hand to begin the Second World War.
At the center of the terror stood the conspiracy to murder Trotsky, who even in exile remained Stalin’s most dangerous enemy. Millions inside the Soviet Union remembered his role in the October Revolution and the Civil War and knew that the campaign against him was built on lies. Pavel Sudoplatov, the secret police officer who ran the operation, recounted in his 1994 memoir Special Tasks that Stalin gave the order in March 1939: “If Trotsky is finished the threat will be eliminated.”
The assassination conspiracy was a massive political operation, and at its center was the infiltration of the Trotskyist movement itself. The GPU’s agents were in place years before Stalin gave the order—in Paris, New York and Coyoacán—as the International Committee of the Fourth International established in its investigation Security and the Fourth International.
Mark Zborowski, the GPU’s man beside Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov in Paris, prepared the murders of Reiss and of Sedov himself, who died in February 1938 in a clinic Zborowski had chosen. Sylvia Callen, who worked as Socialist Workers Party leader James P. Cannon’s personal secretary, admitted before a federal grand jury in 1958 that she had been a GPU agent; Joseph Hansen, one of Trotsky’s secretaries in the Coyoacán household, was working for the GPU. An investigation published by the World Socialist Web Site in 2021 concluded that the evidence “leads overwhelmingly to the conclusion” that Sylvia Ageloff, who gave Mercader his entry into the household, “was an agent of the GPU who played a critical role in the assassination of Leon Trotsky.”
The murder of Trotsky was the most consequential political assassination of the 20th century—the political decapitation of the socialist movement.
Amidst all of this—the escalating campaign of terror, the betrayal of the Spanish Revolution, the approach of Stalin’s alliance with Hitler—Trotsky established the Fourth International, which held its Founding Congress in secrecy outside Paris on September 3, 1938. Central to its founding was Trotsky’s insistence that unless the Stalinist bureaucracy was overthrown by the working class, it would restore capitalism in the USSR. The political revolution he called for was a component of the program of world socialist revolution.
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Trotsky’s prognosis proved correct. Thirty-five years ago this week, the failed coup of August 19–21, 1991, opened the final act of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
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The dissolution carved the Soviet Union into more than a dozen capitalist states. In each of them, a new ruling class was formed through the plunder of state property. In Ukraine this process has produced an oligarchy tied to Washington and Berlin; in Russia, a regime resting on Great Russian nationalism. The war between them, now in its fifth year, is the direct product of 1991. Instigated by NATO, it is conducted on the Russian side by a regime that fights not in defense of the interests of the masses but in the interests of the capitalist class that emerged from the restoration.
Ninety years after the Moscow Trials, in a new period of capitalist crisis, the agencies of world reaction are again seeking to suppress the Trotskyist movement by force. On August 10, 2026, the Pervomaisk City District Court in the Nikolaev region sentenced Bogdan Syrotiuk—a Ukrainian socialist and the leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, young Trotskyists in political solidarity with the International Committee of the Fourth International—to 15 years with confiscation of property, convicting him of high treason under martial law. It also ordered the destruction of the organization’s program and printed literature.
In prosecuting Bogdan, the Ukrainian state was explicit that what it was punishing was the dissemination of the ideas of Leon Trotsky, declaring that Bogdan and the WSWS promote “communist ideology” in the tradition of “the political current of ‘Trotskyism.’”
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For advocacy of the perspective of Trotskyism, Bogdan has been sentenced to 15 years in prison. His persecution is a measure of the fear that the perspective of Trotskyism inspires in the ruling classes.
Throughout the world, workers and young people are entering into struggle against a social order that offers them war, inequality and dictatorship. This will produce an enormous growth of Trotskyism—the authentic Marxism of our epoch, whose heritage the International Committee of the Fourth International has defended through decades of struggle. In the perspective for which Trotsky lived and died, the program of world socialist revolution, they must and will find the way forward.
3. Fauci adviser David Morens pleads guilty, as Trump escalates war on science
For the first time, the American state has obtained a criminal conviction against a scientist for defending the truth about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. David M. Morens, 78, a former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland, to conspiracy to defraud the United States. He faces up to five years in prison and will be sentenced on November 12.
The prosecution of Morens is the reactionary outcome of years of an anti-science campaign spearheaded by the Trump administration and fascist Republicans, such as Senator Rand Paul, sustained with Democratic votes at every stage, and whose object is to beat the scientific community into silence.
The charges are a complete fraud. The “crime” supposedly committed by Morens was to route emails through a personal account. That is the whole of it. But the Justice Department’s announcement states that this was somehow part of a conspiracy to “counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.” The official act named in the accompanying bribery count is a scientific paper, a commentary Morens wrote arguing that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, had natural origins. The government has written a scientific conclusion into a criminal indictment and called it corruption.
More than 1.5 million people have died of COVID-19 in the United States, and some 30 million worldwide, according to excess death estimates. Not one of those actually responsible for this mass death has been charged with any crime. These include Trump himself, who spearheaded the reopening of workplaces and schools as bodies were stacked in refrigerated trucks; Elon Musk, who called stay-at-home orders “fascist” and reopened his Fremont Tesla plant in defiance of county health authorities; Thomas Friedman, who supplied the reopening slogan in the New York Times, writing that the “cure cannot be worse than the disease;” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who built a career on vaccine disinformation and now runs the Department of Health and Human Services; and Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration’s demand for mass infection, who now directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The one person convicted is a scientist who used his personal email account.
The scientists now being hunted are those who worked to tell people the truth about a disease that was killing them. In defending the scientific record, they defended the lives of workers, who were driven into unsafe factories, warehouses, schools and hospitals and told there was nothing to fear. Their defense is now a question for the working class. Workers must take up the fight against this witch-hunt as their own, because the persecution of scientists clears the way for the next mass killing
The Wuhan lab conspiracy theory has no scientific basis. Writing in Science in 2022, Michael Worobey, Jonathan Pekar and their colleagues traced the earliest cases to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan and found two genetically distinct forms of the virus circulating there, meaning it crossed into humans at that market at least twice, which no laboratory accident can explain. In In Cell in 2024, Alexander Crits-Christoph and colleagues found the virus and the DNA of raccoon dogs and other animals known to carry it in the same swabs, from the wildlife stalls in one corner of that market. Pekar and colleagues reported in Cell in 2025 that the nearest known bat relatives of both SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 were found far from the cities where each outbreak began, the same pattern seen in the 2002 epidemic whose natural origin no one disputes. No agency claiming a laboratory origin has ever produced evidence for it.
Where, then, did this “theory” come from? It was manufactured in early 2020 by the fascist Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, and Miles Guo, an exiled Chinese billionaire, who took up a Hong Kong virologist, Li-Meng Yan, installed her in a safe house, hired her lawyers and a media coach, and commissioned papers claiming the virus was an engineered Chinese bioweapon. The papers, never peer reviewed, listed two Bannon-Guo outfits where a scientific affiliation belongs, and the virologists who examined them found the central claims unsupported, but Yan was booked onto Fox News and the claim entered the American media.
When Joe Biden took office, the Democratic Party and the corporate media took up the conspiracy manufactured by the far right. In May 2021, Biden ordered the intelligence agencies to report within 90 days, giving the Wuhan lab lie official standing. In February 2023, the Energy Department and the FBI announced they favored a laboratory origin, the former with low confidence and the latter with moderate confidence, and neither citing new evidence, and the press gave them front-page coverage. Congress then passed the COVID-19 Origin Act, which cleared the Senate by unanimous consent and the House by 419 to 0 before Biden signed it. The select subcommittee endorsed the lab leak findings with Democratic votes in December 2024, and in April 2025 the second Trump administration replaced covid.gov’s public health resources with a page headed, “Lab Leak: The True Origins of COVID-19.”
Why did a career scientist begin routing his correspondence around the records system? Consider what was being done to scientists in the spring of 2020. Asked at a White House briefing on April 17 about the NIAID grant held by EcoHealth Alliance, on the basis of a false claim then circulating in the right-wing press, Trump replied, “We will end that grant very quickly.” Seven days later the NIH terminated the award, which its own reviewers had renewed in 2019 with a high priority score, giving no scientific reason. Seventy-seven Nobel laureates demanded a review, and the department’s inspector general later found the termination improper. It was already plain that the Wuhan lab lie would be wielded as a weapon against scientists, and it was that month that Morens began using his personal account.
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The World Socialist Web Site has been unsparing in its criticism of both Morens and Fauci. On March 31, 2022, with COVID-19 killing thousands of Americans every week, Morens, Gregory Folkers and Fauci published a perspective in the Journal of Infectious Diseases holding that elimination of the virus was almost certainly unattainable and that the population could live with it by “optimizing population protection without prohibitive restrictions on our daily lives.” The authors did not say what those restrictions were. In the spring of 2022 they were masks, ventilation, paid isolation and the closure of unsafe workplaces, and they were being stripped away one after another at the demand of the banks and corporations that needed workers back on the line. The paper lent that demand the authority of the country’s most senior infectious disease scientists, which the WSWS opposed.
But the defense of Morens does not rest on agreement with him. He is being prosecuted for the conclusion he got right, that the virus emerged through a natural spillover event, because that conclusion obstructs the effort to pin American mass death on China. Biden, for his part, pardoned Fauci alone and left the others to the prosecutors. What is prosecuted here is not the harm done to the working class. It is the refusal to endorse the Wuhan lab lie.
As the WSWS has written from the beginning, the Wuhan lab lie serves to divert attention from the policies that produced mass death and to whip up nationalist hatred in preparation for war with China. What has happened to Morens goes far beyond one man. A scientific finding will now be judged by whether it serves the state that funds the research, and this at a moment when disease surveillance is being dismantled, vaccination programs wrecked and preventable diseases allowed to spread.
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Scientific knowledge and public health are conquests of humanity, won over generations by the labor and intellect of millions, and a ruling class that treats every social gain as an obstacle to profit and war is destroying them. The working class alone has both the interest and the power to defend them. Workers must come to the defense of the scientists being hunted by the state and take up the fight for socialism, in which science serves human needs rather than private profit.
4. Australia: Allied health workers strike against Victorian Labor’s deepening cuts
August 11 was the second 24-hour strike by the radiographers, physiotherapists, podiatrists, pharmacists, speech pathologists, occupational therapists and other health professionals, in a 10-month enterprise bargaining dispute with the state government.
5. Bessent’s bond market intervention falls flat as turbulence continues
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s announcement that the Treasury is going to double its buyback of long-dated US bonds from $2 billion to $4 billion has fallen flat. After an initial fall in yields, they have started to rise again and are back near the multi-year highs recorded earlier this week.
This was despite Bessent saying in an interview with the business channel CNBC that the buyback could be more than the $4 billion that he initially announced. The general sentiment in the market is that the growing bond market turbulence is not going to be calmed by such interventions because more fundamental issues—above all, the rise of US debt to $40 trillion—are involved.
There are growing concerns that the US is in a “doom loop” because of the rise in interest payments to more than $1 trillion a year, creating a situation where the government must borrow money just to pay the interest bill on past debt.
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The turbulence in the bond market is extending into Wall Street trading. Yesterday, quant hedge funds, which use statistics, historical data and algorithms to make their bets, suffered what was characterized as their worst day in two years.
One of the factors was the near tripling of the shares of Moderna after it announced successful trials for the treatment of skin cancer. This hit traders who had shorted its shares, expecting they would fall.
Summing up the situation, one hedge fund trader told the Financial Times: “Volatility is exceptional, so options makers are losing money left and right. The market is rotating every day, so what makes money today is almost always down tomorrow.”
The volatility follows what has been described as a “brutal July,” in which AI-related chip stocks fell sharply, leading to the collapse of the hedge fund Situational Awareness and delivering a loss to the major Wall Street trading firm Jane Street of $15 billion in a single month.
"The drive to dictatorship and the political radicalization in the United States" is the second of six resolutions adopted unanimously by the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US). A video of the SEP National Secretary Joseph Kishore's introduction and presentation can be accessed here.
Fishermen in northern Sri Lanka have recently held protests against commercial fishing vessels from India, whose bottom-trawling operations are inflicting serious damage on their livelihoods.
The fishermen are being squeezed from two sides: by big fishing corporations and by the IMF-dictated austerity measures implemented by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna-led National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government.
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The economic foundations of small-scale fishing are collapsing. Kumareswaran Santhini, the wife of a 60-year-old fisherman, told the WSWS they had managed with the low costs, but the situation had changed: “Now fuel prices have risen enormously. No one can afford to finance a fishing trip alone. That is why four or five people now pool their money to buy nets, purchase fuel and operate a single boat together.” If one net is lost, the burden will fall on those families invested in the boat, pushing them deeper into debt.
Women stand at the centre of this crisis. They prepare nets, arrange loans, repay installments and struggle to sustain the household budget. As one woman told the WSWS: “Many families do not know how they will repay their loans. We borrow money to repay one debt, then borrow again and pay interest on that as well. Our lives are trapped in this endless cycle.”
The fishing season itself has become a trap. The northeast monsoon months from Karthigai to Panguni offer the best earnings of the year, but also the greatest danger. “One storm is enough for the nets to disappear, the boats to be damaged and everything bought with borrowed money to be destroyed overnight.”
A vast gulf separates these poor families from the officials who dominate the fishermen’s organizations. While local cooperatives include poor fishermen, the upper levels of the federations have close political connections to the Tamil elite and relations with government institutions, including the Ministry of Fisheries and the Navy.
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The crisis confronting northern fishermen cannot be solved by pitting them against poor fishermen in Tamil Nadu, who face the same crisis. Their catches have been depleted, and they suffer the same damage caused by big fishing trawlers. Ninety percent of Indian fishermen live below the poverty line, while big fishing businesses thrive with the backing of the New Delhi government and state administrations.
The real class divide does not run along the Palk Strait. It runs between the working class and the oppressed, including poor fishermen, on the one hand, and the capitalist interests that exploit them in both countries.
The Socialist Equality Party in Sri Lanka calls on all fishers and workers across Sri Lanka and India to unite in a powerful common struggle across national borders and communal divisions. We call on Sri Lankan fishers to reject the nationalist and militarist poison spread by the Tamil bourgeois parties and union bureaucrats, which serves to weaken and divide working people.
The SEP calls on fishermen to form their own action committees, independent of the bureaucratic federations, to fight for the following demands:
- Increase subsidies and provide affordable fishing inputs for small fishermen!
- Cancel usurious debts!
- End restrictions imposed on poor fishermen in Sri Lanka and India!
- End exploitation by middlemen and provide proper marketing facilities!
More than four months after tens of thousands of workers in the industrial suburbs surrounding Delhi walked off the job demanding wage increases and basic dignity, the Uttar Pradesh government of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath continues its campaign of legal persecution against those who supported them. Adityanath, a Hindu-fascistic politician is a close ally of the Hindu-supremacist Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
Eight activists associated with the labor advocacy group Mazdoor Bigul (Workers’ Bugle) remain in jail, booked under 11 separate First Information Reports (FIRs) across five police stations. Two of them—Aakriti Chaudhry and Satyam Verma—have been subjected to the colonial-era National Security Act (NSA), which permits 12 months of detention without charge or trial.
The WSWS spoke to Keshav, a student and trade union activist in Delhi’s Bawana industrial area. Keshav is the brother of Aditya Anand, whom the police have falsely targeted as the “mastermind” of the violence that occurred on April 13. Keshav has been closely involved in the legal defense of the jailed workers and activists. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The WSWS will continue to follow the Noida workers’ struggle and the legal persecution of those who stood in solidarity with them. The criminalization of the Noida protests is an attack on the entire working class. The Modi government wants these most exploited workers to labor under brutal conditions without complaint.
As the Maruti Suzuki frame-up demonstrated, the Indian ruling class—whether under the BJP or the Congress Party—will stop at nothing to defend India’s status as a cheap-labor haven for transnational capital. The answer lies in building independent rank-and-file committees to rebel against the pro-capitalist trade union bureaucracies and fight for the international unity of the working class.
9. Tyson Foods shutters beef plants in Illinois and Utah, eliminating 3,200 jobs
On August 13, 2026, Tyson Foods abruptly announced it was shutting down its major beef slaughter and processing facility in Joslin, Illinois, and its meat packaging plant in Eagle Mountain, Utah. Tyson also revealed plans to sell its beef processing plant in Pasco, Washington.
Since 2023, Tyson has shut down six chicken plants, a pork plant in Perry, Iowa, a beef plant in Lexington, Nebraska, and several other sites—cutting over 10,000 jobs.
The latest closures, which took effect immediately, affected over 3,200 direct production workers across both locations. The Joslin facility employed nearly 2,500 workers, drawing labor from across the Quad Cities metropolitan region and surrounding rural counties in western Illinois and eastern Iowa. The plant in Eagle Mountain, Utah, employed 723 workers. The operational fallout quickly extended to secondary contractors, with specialized sanitation provider Fortrex issuing an emergency notice laying off 103 workers at the Joslin site after receiving notification that Tyson had terminated operations.
Videos circulating online show workers scrambling into a packed room as company officials chaotically inform them that they no longer have jobs.
The closure of the Joslin plant has already produced major shocks throughout the regional agricultural supply chain. The plant accounted for a major share of total slaughter capacity along the Mississippi River corridor, drawing finished cattle primarily from feedlots across Illinois, Iowa and Ohio. Independent cattle feeders across the Midwest now face hauling distances of 160 to 400 miles to reach alternative processing facilities in neighboring states, adding substantial transport costs, especially as fuel prices remain high.
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Tyson Foods has publicly justified the liquidation of its Joslin and Eagle Mountain facilities as an unavoidable corporate restructuring driven by structural headwinds in the US beef sector. In official statements, executive leadership cited a severe, multi-year contraction in the national cattle supply, which has elevated live cattle procurement costs and compressed beef packing profit margins.
In response to the change in the market, Tyson Chief Executive Officer Donnie King initiated a strategy to consolidate the company’s beef operations into three mega-facilities located in Dakota City, Nebraska; Holcomb, Kansas; and Amarillo, Texas. To support this centralizing strategy, Tyson plans to restore a second production shift at its Amarillo facility as cattle supply permits, effectively shifting processing volume away from unionized regional plants in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest to high-volume hubs in the Southern Plains.
Tyson projects a loss of $500 million to $650 million for its beef department in Fiscal Year 2026. But looking at Tyson as a whole, the company is far from struggling. Tyson operates as a massive meat monopoly, using high profits in chicken, pork and prepared foods to offset downturns in beef.
But workers were made to pay for the earlier period of historic high profits during the initial years of the coronavirus pandemic with their lives. COVID-19 ran rampant throughout the meatpacking industry, including at Tyson facilities where dozens of workers died. In December of 2020, it was revealed that Tyson managers at an Iowa facility—rather than take any measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19—organized a cash betting ring on how many workers had tested positive for infection.
At the average wage of around $20 per hour, it would take a Joslin plant worker over 800 years of full-time work to earn $35 million—what Tyson CEO Donnie King received in just one year.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) took over Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD) in October 2025, due to low test scores at a single school for five consecutive years. Within three months of the move, nearly 800 teachers had resigned their positions, which is more than the total for the entire previous school year.
To make up for the shortfall, FWISD has had a massive increase in the number of uncertified teachers.
Over the entire 2025-26 school year, 1,026 teachers resigned, out of a total of approximately 4,700 (one-sixth of the total), compared with 648 for the previous year. To start the 2026-27 school, the district will employ, at the most recent count, 308 uncertified teachers, compared with 40 to 50 over the past five years. The increase since the previous school year is 569 percent, when there were 46 uncertified teachers.
To become certified in Texas, teachers must have a Bachelor’s degree, complete an approved educator preparation program, pass certification exams, submit a state application, and pass a criminal background check. Under Texas law, uncertified teachers may not teach core classes. However, FWISD’s Board of Managers, which the TEA brought in to replace the elected school board, applied for a waiver to hire more uncertified teachers over the next two years. The newly hired uncertified teachers will be required to pass an alternative certification program over the next two years.
The Texas state government, as with state and local governments across the country controlled by both parties, is engaged in a huge attack on public education. Instead of dedicating more funding for schools, Governor Gregg Abbott has championed a school voucher program. The largest beneficiaries of this are the private and charter schools, whose lobbyists have contributed millions of dollars to the Texas governor’s campaigns.
11. General Motors Mexico workers defend Bogdan Syrotiuk and support Will Lehman’s campaign
Workers at the General Motors complex in Silao, Guanajuato—one of the largest and most profitable auto assembly operations in North America—have issued statements demanding the freedom of the Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk, supporting the campaign of socialist autoworker Will Lehman for president of the United Auto Workers, and denouncing the slap on the wrist to the UAW official who threatened Lehman to death.
“We are ready to form rank-and-file committees to support Will Lehman’s campaign and defend Bogdan Syrotiuk,” one Silao worker told the WSWS. “I am against his imprisonment because they are denying him the right to free expression. And secondly, because opposing a pointless war and calling on others not to take part in it is also his right, and they must not repress it. Much less send him to prison. This is a completely reprehensible act.”
The statements from Mexican autoworkers linking the two cases cut through the nationalist divisions that the corporations, governments and the union apparatus work ceaselessly to foment.
12. WSWS readers and left press in Türkiye demand the release of Bogdan Syrotiuk
Protests are mounting in Türkiye, as in the rest of the world, against the August 10, 2026 sentencing of Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk to 15 years in prison on charges of “high treason under martial law.” Readers of the Turkish edition of the World Socialist Web Site have sent letters of protest to the Pervomaisk City District Court and the verdict has been reported in sections of the Turkish left press.
In little more than a week since the verdict was announced, some 1,000 more people from dozens of countries have signed the petition demanding Bogdan’s immediate release, bringing the total number of signatories to 6,300. The 27-year-old Trotskyist, a leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), was convicted for authoring six political articles published by the World Socialist Web Site, without any evidence of espionage, sabotage or collaboration with any military force having been produced against him. The court ordered the confiscation of his property and the destruction of the socialist books, pamphlets and programmatic documents seized from him.
Readers in Türkiye sent copies of their letters to the court and to the WSWS.
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Despite the guilty silence maintained by the international bourgeois media, including in Türkiye, the sentence handed down to Bogdan found a rapid response in a section of the Turkish left press.
The daily Evrensel published a detailed report based on the WSWS editorial board statement on August 11. It reported that the only evidence in the case file consists of Bogdan’s articles and his correspondence with WSWS editors; that the court was obliged to withdraw one article from the indictment after its own forensic panel found no criminal content in it; that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has been unable in more than two years to substantiate its claim that he was an “agent of the Russian government”; and that he has been denied necessary medical treatment throughout his detention. The report cited the roughly 20,000 criminal cases brought in Ukraine under the “treason and collaboration” laws. It also cited documentation by the United Nations Human Rights Office of torture and ill-treatment of detainees, and the more than 300,000 cases opened since 2022 on charges of desertion.
A short report on the verdict was posted on Özgür Düş Postası, a Facebook page that describes itself as examining current issues from the standpoint of working people. The post drew nearly 500 responses, and nearly all of the more than 25 comments condemned the verdict. One commenter drew attention to the position of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government, writing: “And the support from Türkiye for this fascist Ukrainian government continues.”
The ETHA news agency reported the verdict on August 11, emphasizing that the court had treated Bogdan’s criticisms of the war policy as a crime. The same day, vicdaniret.org published a report based on Evrensel’s coverage.
On August 12, marksist.org reproduced extensive excerpts from the WSWS statement calling for international solidarity and provided a link to the petition for Bogdan’s freedom. Sosyalist Gündem and Socialist Middle East concluded an article published on August 13 with the call, “Bogdan Syrotiuk must be freed immediately!” The same day, Enternasyonal Dayanışma reported the verdict.
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), its Turkish section, the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi, and the WSWS will intensify the campaign for Bogdan’s freedom. We call on workers and young people, trade unions, student organizations, civil liberties groups, intellectuals and journalists in Türkiye and internationally to take up Bogdan’s defense: Sign and circulate the petition. Pass resolutions in your workplaces, unions and schools demanding Bogdan’s release. Send letters of protest to the Ukrainian courts.
Write to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua and the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal at inbox@mka.court.gov.ua, with a copy to freebogdan@wsws.org, demanding that Bogdan’s conviction be overturned and that he be released immediately.
The defense of Bogdan is inseparably connected to the fight against war, dictatorship and fascism. His freedom must be won through the mobilization of the international working class and all principled defenders of democratic rights.
Sign the petition here and join the fight to free Bogdan Syrotiuk.
A member of the British section of the Pabloites is acting as a political provocateur on behalf of the Ukrainian regime and NATO.
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In a brief note published to his “Red Mole” Substack page, Chapel assembles a collection of lies so brazen that not even Ukraine’s kangaroo court included them in its charges.
He accuses Bogdan of being “a Russian-backed Ukrainian paid to submit pro-Russian war propaganda to the WSWS website,” in communication with a “handler” and in possession of “several Russian military items.” Chapel concludes: “he looks like a paid operative rather than a political prisoner.”
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... [I]f there was any shred of plausibility to these accusations, they would have been made central to the prosecution’s treason case and every item listed would have been paraded in court.
They were not. The judgment instead orders these mythical items to be destroyed.
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The only credible interpretation of Chapel’s actions is that he set out to mount a provocation at the earliest possible opportunity against a defense campaign that is rapidly gaining support, and which is politically damaging to the NATO war, the Zelensky regime and their apologists.
This is confirmed by Chapel’s writings, which center on denunciations of any individual or political tendency which does not wholeheartedly support the war against Russia. This has included an attack on Britain’s Stop the War Coalition for “betraying Ukraine.”
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The ICFI demands that International Viewpoint publicly repudiate this provocation by a member of their British section and a regular contributor to their press.
The World Socialist Web Site calls on its readers and all defenders of democratic rights to answer Chapel’s provocation by joining the fight for Bogdan Syrotiuk’s freedom.
14. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Egypt:
Residents of Warraq Island in Cairo in a silent march to oppose displacement of residents for redevelopment
Kenya:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
France:
Firefighters stop work and protest for more staff and resources amidst record summer temperatures
EasyJet cabin crew strike for improved working conditions
Germany:
Thousands of port workers in warning stoppage for pay increase
Greece:
Tax officials strike over pay and working conditions
United Kingdom:
Cancer research facility staff escalate strike action for pay restoration
Food production workers in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland escalate strike over pay
Lifeboat manufacturing and maintenance workers on the Isle of Wight strike over closure of center and redundancy terms
Strike of art gallery attendants at Edinburgh’s National Galleries of Scotland over cuts
Middle East
Iran:
Protests continue due to economy ravaged by sanctions and war
15. 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.
