Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Özgür Özel’s New Party: A defense of Türkiye’s old order
The New Party's program, led by Özgür Özel, is not a response to the social and democratic aspirations of working people. It is a program designed to confine these aspirations within the framework of the capitalist profit system and the NATO alliance.
2. Debt-ridden local authorities in Germany plan further social cuts
The claim that “there is no money” for public services is a lie. Whether money is available or not is decided politically.
3. Workers in Türkiye defend Will Lehman against death threat from top UAW official
Workers and young people in Türkiye have sent letters to the World Socialist Web Site condemning the death threat made on social media against Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker in the United States, by Raymond L. Jensen Jr., a high-ranking official of the United Auto Workers.
4. Australia: Multiple fires on Sydney trams in 1 day highlight deepening safety crisis
There have now been six battery-related fires on Sydney’s light rail system in five months, including two within hours on July 11.
5. A “socialism” for the New York Times: Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara’s interview with Ross Douthat
On July 16, the New York Times published an interview conducted by its columnist Ross Douthat with Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin, president of the Nation, and for two decades a leading member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The episode of Douthat’s “Interesting Times” podcast ran under the headline “A Vision of a ‘Society Without Capitalism,’” followed by the telling subhead: “Can democratic socialism redeem the left without destroying capitalism?”
The question answers itself. The Times, the authoritative voice of the Democratic Party establishment, does not devote 29 pages to movements that threaten the social order. It devotes them to movements it is seeking to promote.
That Douthat was chosen for the assignment is itself significant. He is a right-wing Catholic conservative, a longtime intellectual voice of the Republican right. In the weeks since the interview with Sunkara was posted on the Times website, Douthat has been hired by Bari Weiss, the right-wing editor-in-chief of CBS News installed by pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison. Douthat was given a lucrative post as a correspondent for “60 Minutes” after most of the staff had been purged.
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What was perhaps most striking about the interview as a whole was the utter complacency that pervaded every word Sunkara uttered. The interview was conducted under conditions of an escalating campaign for dictatorship, an expanding global imperialist war and the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a capitalist oligarchy.
Not one of these issues was addressed in 29 pages of conversation about the prospects for socialism. Fascism was not mentioned. Nor was Iran. The Trump administration itself was referenced to in passing. The life-and-death questions confronting the working class were simply not present, nor were the mass protests that have erupted in the United States, or the developing strike movement.
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Douthat asked the question, “Is democratic socialism compatible with capitalism?” Sunkara’s reply: “In the long term, no. We’re anticapitalist... But in the short term, while we’re within a capitalist economy, of course, we need firms that are profitable, that are providing employment, that are providing taxation. So I think to govern in the short term as social democrats, we need profitable firms.”
The “long term,” as we have seen, is measured in centuries. For every timescale that matters to a living human being, the program is the administration of capitalism on the basis of its profitability.
It is worth measuring this “socialism” against the actual record of American capitalist politics. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed into law Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to education and the food stamp program, alongside a major expansion of public housing and the civil rights acts, while the top marginal income tax rate stood at 70 percent and the corporate rate at 48 percent.
Johnson was a ruthless bourgeois politician and imperialist, then escalating the war against Vietnam. The Great Society itself was wrecked within half a decade on the contradiction between social reform at home and the global war-mongering of American imperialism.
However, the baseline program of the Democratic Party at the height of the postwar boom, enacted by an imperialist president as a matter of routine capitalist statecraft, stands well to the left of what the founding editor of Jacobin now presents to the New York Times as the fighting program of “democratic socialism.”
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The political purpose of the interview runs through every exchange. Sunkara is making an argument, addressed through Douthat, to the New York Times and the Democratic Party establishment: The DSA is no threat. It is respectable, it is moderate, and it can be relied upon.
The examples follow one after another....
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More significant still were the silences. In 29 pages, Iran was never mentioned. The war against Russia was never mentioned, nor was Ukraine, nor NATO, nor the preparations for war with China, nor the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget.
For the ruling class, no question stands higher than war. A “socialist” tendency that maintains total silence on the war plans of American imperialism, while reducing US-Israeli genocide to an instrument of Democratic Party factionalism, is communicating something the Times understands perfectly: on the decisive question, the DSA will not be a problem.
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The socialism Sunkara presented to the Times has no relationship to the working class or the class struggle. Workers appeared in the interview as voters, taxpayers and consumers of social programs, never as a class in conflict with capital, never as the social force on which the socialist movement rests. What Sunkara outlined was not a program for the overthrow of capitalism, but the program of the DSA in power: the administration of the capitalist state, its police, its budgets and its wars, under a “socialist” label.
He stated the theoretical formula near the top of the interview: “American socialists are way more liberal than they themselves think… There’s been a sort of reconciliation of liberalism and socialism.”
An entire century of struggle between Marxism and liberalism—over the state, over war, over whether the working class required its own party—was dissolved into a “sort of reconciliation.” Those voting for DSA candidates believe they are voting for socialists. Their publicist assured the New York Times they are mistaken. It would be difficult to state the DSA’s function more precisely.
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Sunkara rooted this politics in a tradition. He was politicized, he said, “in the library books, reading books by people like Irving Howe, by Michael Harrington.” Harrington, he told Douthat, “was part of the organic establishment, to the left of social democracy, people who just wanted to make capitalism a little bit more humane—but also, you could say, to the right of a certain Leninism.”
Harrington was the central figure of a tendency, descended from Max Shachtman’s 1940 break with Trotskyism, that spent the postwar decades moving steadily to the right, into the anticommunist apparatus of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy and the orbit of the State Department. Its strategic doctrine was “realignment”: the dissolution of independent socialist politics into the Democratic Party, summarized in Harrington’s formula of seeking the “left wing of the possible.” The “possible” being defined at every point by what the Democratic Party, the trade union apparatus and the ruling class would permit.
When the test came over Vietnam, deference to George Meany’s pro-war AFL-CIO prevailed. Harrington opposed the demand for withdrawal for years and helped organize Negotiations Now, a front group whose principal function was to denounce the antiwar movement as “objectively pro-Communist.” The DSA, founded in 1982, carried this politics forward intact.
As for the “certain Leninism,” Douthat supplied the translation: “Stalin. To the right of Joseph Stalin.” Sunkara’s answer: “Of course, as we should all aspire to be.” So he pledged to be “to the right” of the man responsible for the greatest slaughter of revolutionaries in history.
The amalgam of Leninism with Stalinism is the foundational lie shared by Stalinist and imperialist historiography alike. It is refuted by the entire history of the Trotskyist Left Opposition and Fourth International, whose cadre were exterminated by Stalin precisely because they embodied the continuity of Leninism, that is, revolutionary internationalism.
Sunkara, who slanders Leninism as Stalinism, in fact shares a great deal with Stalinism. In the United States, the cardinal service of the Communist Party to American capitalism was the subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party under the banner of the popular front. In his book The Socialist Manifesto, Sunkara upholds precisely this policy of the CP in the 1930s as a model, counterposing it favorably to the Socialist Party of the day, which still ran candidates independently of and against Roosevelt.
Sunkara’s objection to Stalinism is not that it became an openly counter-revolutionary force, exterminated the Bolshevik leadership, culminating in the assassination of Trotsky in 1940, but that it remained associated, however fraudulently, with the Russian Revolution. What he retains from it is what the American ruling class always found most useful: the channeling of every movement of workers and youth back into the Democratic Party.
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Read as a whole, the interview is a brief, submitted to the ruling class through its principal newspaper, at a moment when sections of that class are debating what to do about the DSA. Trump’s answer is to criminalize it, deport it, “cut it out.” The Times’ answer, embodied in Douthat’s courteous curiosity, is to examine it, domesticate it, employ it.
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The entire history of the 20th century testifies to how quickly the ruling class discards its “left” auxiliaries once they have served their purpose, or once the movement they were meant to contain escapes their control. For such a turn, figures like Sunkara, who respond to the threats of dictatorship by pledging their reliability to the state, are completely unprepared and are preparing no one.
Millions of workers and young people are beginning to draw revolutionary conclusions from a social order that offers them war, dictatorship and extreme inequality. The votes for candidates who call themselves socialists are an initial expression of this radicalization, but the DSA, as a faction of the Democratic Party, is organically incapable of addressing the objective crisis that is driving it. Its program of minor social reforms within the framework of the capitalist system—without touching the wealth of the oligarchy, without the class struggle, without any challenge to the state—is historically and politically bankrupt.
Genuine socialism is not a redistributive preference on the part of those already comfortable, but the revolutionary movement of the international working class against the capitalist system. Its first condition is the political independence of the working class from the Democratic Party and every party of the ruling class. Against dictatorship and war it advances not the better administration of the capitalist state, but its abolition and the reorganization of economic life on socialist foundations by the working class itself.
The task is not to “redeem the left without destroying capitalism.” It is to build in the working class a revolutionary leadership that treats socialism not as a centuries-distant aspiration, but as the practical program of our time.
6. Australian government establishes inquiry to prepare for war
This is not a general inquiry into “defense” but an examination of how to operationally wage a major war in the near-term, including by suppressing opposition from the population.
7. As NATO and Ukraine’s war against Russia escalates, drone attacks on ships in the Black Sea increase
As NATO’s war against Russia escalates, seafarers in the Black Sea are paying with their lives.
8. Senate committee holds Fauci in contempt as multiple outbreaks rage across the US
The same government prosecuting the scientists who study infectious disease has dismantled the surveillance systems that would measure its return.
The three heritage sites have come under assault from Israel and its military.
10. Yen intervention points to US financial vulnerabilities
There was growing concern that the selling of Treasuries by Japan to support the yen would lift US interest rates and impact the AI stock market boom.
11. Workers welcome 2-year suspension of UAW International staffer for death threat against Will Lehman
On August 4, the court-appointed UAW Monitor stripped Raymond Jensen Jr., an organizer for the UAW Department of Bargaining Strategy, of his membership for two years and barred him for life from union office after ruling that his threat violated federal election rules.
12. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Egypt:
Kenya:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
France:
Rail workers across Normandy strike for better working conditions
Germany:
Thousands of Audi auto workers in Neckarsulm protest over planned plant closure
Ireland:
Criminal legal aid solicitors in ongoing strike over new payment scheme
Spain:
Ground-based workers at Barcelona airport strike over working conditions
United Kingdom:
Rail support staff at rail company walk out over low pay
Strike of council workers in Great Yarmouth over pay
Further stoppage by lecturers at Scotland’s Glasgow Caledonian University over job cuts
Food production workers in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland walk out over pay
Middle East
Gaza:
Rally of journalists calls for release of imprisoned colleagues
15. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
