Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
The global trade war Trump has unleashed since returning to the White House has hit Canada especially hard. But it is one front in Washington’s drive to secure control of the world’s markets, resources and strategic chokepoints through a violent redivision of the globe.
Trump, the would-be fascist dictator, is determined to crash the Canadian economy in order to reduce the country to a vassal state or annex it outright as the 51st state.
This is the content of the publicly proclaimed “Donroe Doctrine,” asserting unchallenged US dominance over the Western Hemisphere: plans to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal, the January invasion of Venezuela and abduction of its president, Nicolás Maduro, the bullying of Mexico, the strangling of Cuba. In this way American imperialism is laying the groundwork for a third world war, with China its main target. That war is, in fact, already underway: the US-NATO war against Russia and the war against Iran are its opening fronts.
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The terms Washington demanded before talks collapsed included restrictions on Canada’s right to negotiate trade agreements with countries outside North America and the gutting of cultural and sovereignty protections. In essence, Trump demanded that Canada surrender the attributes of an independent state. He has said as much, sneering that Canada wants “the benefits of being a State, without being one,” and declaring, “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US! They do 95% of their business with the U.S., with us, the exact opposite!”
The costs are already being paid by workers on both sides of the border. A tariff is a tax on imports passed on to consumers in higher prices. The 500-plus products covered by the latest round—plywood, cement, dairy, clothing, appliances, etc.—feed directly into American workers’ housing, grocery and utility bills. When steel tariffs were imposed in 2018, they created an estimated 1,000 jobs in steel and destroyed 75,000 in industries that use it.
The doubling of auto tariffs threatens a bloodbath in an industry whose parts cross the border multiple times before a vehicle is finished. Some 861,000 vehicles built in Canada were sold in the US last year. Trump’s post spelled out the blackmail: “Build in the U.S. and there are ZERO TARIFFS.” The aim is the wholesale transfer of production south of the border—the deindustrialization of Ontario and Quebec—with the whip of unemployment used to drive down wages in both countries.
Canadian workers have already borne years of this: 3,200 Stellantis workers in Brampton on layoff since early 2024, more than 1,000 jobs destroyed at GM’s CAMI plant in Ingersoll, and up to 90,000 jobs now at risk. American workers will be hit from the other side: Ottawa’s C$27.6 billion retaliation list—steel, dairy, appliances, farm equipment, pulp and paper, electronics—targets jobs in US industry and agriculture.
The Canadian bourgeoisie opposes Trump only insofar as his “America First” agenda cuts across its own imperialist interests. Using Trump as a foil, the Liberal governments of Justin Trudeau and Carney have shifted official politics sharply to the right—rearmament, ruthless austerity, and the gutting of workers’ democratic and social rights, including the right to strike.
Canada’s ruling class is no less vicious in its persecution of immigrants, going so far as to have its border guards hand people over to Trump’s fascistic ICE thugs. All Ottawa asks is recognition of its first “right” to the profits from exploiting Canada’s workers and resources, and a place as junior partner in a “Fortress North America” trade and military bloc.
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For its part, the union apparatus has embraced the trade war on both sides of the border. UAW President Shawn Fain hailed Stellantis for “bringing good jobs back to America” as Brampton workers sat on layoff. Unifor and the Canadian Labour Congress answer not by opposing tariffs but by demanding Canada’s own. Marty Warren, Canadian national director of the United Steelworkers—a union that purports to speak for workers in both countries—declared: “This isn’t a war as in guns and boots on the ground, but this is an economic war. It’s up to our generation to… not lose control of our sovereignty and our Canadian economy.”
This foul nationalism goes hand in hand with the bureaucracy’s support for rearmament and war preparations against China. It seeks to divert widespread popular hostility to Trump—to oligarchy, dictatorship and war—into reactionary channels. But workers cannot fight American imperialism by lining up behind Canada’s imperialist bourgeoisie or any of its factions.*****
We call on autoworkers, steelworkers, and all workers in the US, Canada and Mexico to build rank-and-file committees, unified through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. By mobilizing the industrial and political power of the continent’s working class, this movement will fight to: oppose every layoff and closure carried out in the name of the trade war; stop war and dictatorship; defend immigrant and refugee workers; and to link their struggles with workers throughout Latin America confronting the same imperialist violence.
The integrated economy of the Americas, built by the working class of every country in the hemisphere, must be taken out of private hands and reorganized on socialist foundations: the banks and major corporations transformed into public utilities under democratic workers’ control, production directed to social need rather than private profit and imperialist war. This requires the fight for workers’ power—for workers’ governments in the United States, Canada and throughout the hemisphere, and for the United Socialist States of the Americas.
The decisive question two weeks into the strike is whether we organize ourselves to win or allow the United Steelworkers bureaucracy to fritter away our strength until we are starved into accepting another sellout.
3. United States: Democratic Party think tank Third Way launches campaign against socialism
On August 6, Jonathan Cowan told the New York Times that his organization, the ostensibly “moderate” Democratic Party think tank Third Way, was “preparing for the next war that is coming.” Cowan was not referring to Donald Trump, the Republican Party and the accelerating descent into fascism, but rather a $15 million campaign to discredit socialism.
The phrase “third way” was used in the 1990s to describe the politics of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, US President Bill Clinton and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, supposedly dismissing the distinction between left and right as irrelevant. The 1999 Blair-Schröder paper “The Way Forward for Europe’s Social Democrats,” warned against equating social justice with equality of outcome, rejected public expenditure as a measure of social conscience, and called for transforming welfare into a “springboard to personal responsibility.”
The Washington think tank Third Way was founded in 2005 by Cowan, Bennett, Jim Kessler and Nancy Hale out of the gun control group Americans for Gun Safety. Staffed by Clinton administration veterans, its institutional ancestor was the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) established by Al From in 1985, which sought to replace the Democratic Party’s traditional connection to “organized labor” with an orientation toward the emerging technology sector. Clinton chaired it in 1990-91 and carried its program into the White House: NAFTA, the abolition of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act providing for bank regulation, and the passage of the 1994 crime bill.
By the time the DLC dissolved in 2011, Third Way had already assumed its functions. That January, Obama named JPMorgan Chase executive William Daley as White House chief of staff. Daley had joined Third Way’s board of trustees the previous July and described its agenda as “moderate, pro-business, and pro-growth.” Cowan called the appointment brilliant and praised Daley’s business credentials as a means of deepening relations with the private sector.
Third Way’s current target is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose candidates won Democratic primaries in New York City, Denver, Detroit and statewide in Michigan and Florida. Cowan said the money would fund opposition research, polling, social media operations and political education for Democratic activists and officeholders. It would target not only DSA members but candidates such as Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, whom Cowan accused of performing the “DSA dodge” by accepting its support while remaining distant enough to avoid the label of socialist.
A week later, journalist Ken Klippenstein published a leaked Third Way email dated July 23 announcing the hiring of a “Director of Anti-Extremism” to counter what it called radical and illiberal forces within the party. DSA activists, the email claimed, “want something closer to Cuba than to Scandinavia.”
This is of course a grotesque anticommunist slander. The DSA actually advances a social program that falls well short of the Great Society liberalism of Lyndon Johnson, let alone Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. They do not seek the expropriation of the billionaire oligarchs, which is a prerequirement for genuine socialism, but minor reforms that would leave the financial aristocracy untouched, but give the Democratic Party a “left” fig leaf.
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Nine days after Cowan announced Third Way’s current “Anti-Extremism” campaign, DNC Chair Ken Martin closed the party’s summer meeting in Austin by calling the Democratic Party a “big tent,” urging members to stop applying litmus tests after delegates resolved their deadlock over whether to demand abolition of ICE or merely its reform by adopting both resolutions. A decision on Israel and Palestine was deferred until after the midterms.
The call for a “big tent” and the Third Way purge are two sides of the same operation. Asked how it defines extremism, Third Way spokesperson Kate DeGruyter said its effort targets the DSA, not liberal Democrats, without explaining where the line between them falls.
Cowan issued an open letter and op-ed against El-Sayed before the Michigan primary because of his DSA affiliation, although El-Sayed is not a DSA member and identifies as capitalist. Third Way senior fellow Yemisii Egbewole, a former Biden White House official, labeled Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong as “not a real person” after she called for a one-year moratorium on AI data center construction.
Third Way’s “anti-extremism” campaign defends specific corporate prerogatives, including the massive AI infrastructure buildout. In response to Trump’s AI Action Plan, Third Way published an agenda urging Democratic leaders to reject pessimism about the technology, allocate federal land for data centers and work with industry to accelerate development. On March 12 it circulated a memo advising Democratic campaigns on the issue.
Third Way’s own research shows the unpopularity of its position. Its polling found data centers less popular than every other category tested, including Trump and both major parties. A June focus group found swing voters, including self-identified liberals, siding with Tucker Carlson that data center campuses do not justify their costs. Yet Third Way commissioned this research and continues advising Democrats to support the buildout.
The organization’s political reach is reflected in its congressional Honorary Co-Chairs. Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Chris Coons joined in 2011, Representatives Suzan DelBene and Scott Peters in 2015, and Marc Veasey, Darren Soto, Sharice Davids and Marilyn Strickland in 2021.
Two positions are particularly significant. DelBene chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which in 2018 recruited an unprecedented number of former CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department personnel into Democratic congressional races. Ten of the 22 districts prioritized in the DCCC’s “Red to Blue” program went to military-intelligence candidates.
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Third Way is a policy and messaging operation for the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, financed by unidentified donors and staffed by former officials of administrations whose policies it defends. Its output supplies Democratic officeholders with the vocabulary for defining the limits of the politically permissible.
The final federal investigation into the fatal August 11, 2025 explosion at US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works exposes the failure of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to protect workers from hazards that management refuses to correct. For more than a decade, OSHA repeatedly inspected Clairton while conditions that contributed to the deaths of steelworkers Steven Menefee and Timothy Quinn remained uncorrected.
The US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) concluded that their deaths, as well as two of the five serious injuries, could have been prevented or reduced had occupied buildings been moved away from hazardous coke oven gas piping or constructed to withstand an explosion.
The danger had been identified decades earlier. In 2003, a US Steel Process Hazard Analysis team recommended studying the location of occupied buildings around the coke batteries. Management rejected the recommendation. Then, in 2010, another coke oven gas explosion injured 20 workers. Yet the company still did not conduct the siting study or move workers away from the danger.
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The failure at Clairton developed over successive Democratic and Republican administrations as workplace safety was increasingly subordinated to corporate interests.
Under Barack Obama, OSHA rescinded the interpretation US Steel had relied upon. But the administration’s broader regulatory policy required agencies to weigh the benefits of regulations against costs, economic growth and competitiveness, and to select the “least burdensome” means of achieving regulatory goals.
Trump made the pro-corporate logic explicit, ordering agencies during his first administration to eliminate two regulations for every new one issued. Biden revoked the order and claimed to restore workplace protections, but for four years OSHA still did not require US Steel to address the Clairton siting hazard.
Trump’s return brought an even broader attack, with agencies ordered to identify at least 10 regulations or guidance documents for elimination for every new one issued. His administration also sought to eliminate funding for the CSB, the agency whose report now documents how the Clairton deaths could have been prevented.
Yet the federal government showed an entirely different degree of determination when ownership of US Steel was declared a matter of “national security.”
Biden blocked Nippon Steel’s acquisition in January 2025. Trump, who had also opposed the takeover during the campaign, ordered another federal review and ultimately approved it under a National Security Agreement giving Washington extraordinary authority over specified US Steel decisions. The takeover closed less than two months before the Clairton explosion.
Presidents, cabinet officials and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States were mobilized to determine who would own US Steel and how the corporation would serve the strategic interests of American capitalism. Yet for more than a decade the government failed to ensure that Clairton workers were protected from hazards capable of killing them.
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Every element of the Clairton disaster exposes not only OSHA but the United Steelworkers bureaucracy, which has functioned for decades as a mechanism for suppressing rank-and-file opposition rather than a force fighting for workers’ lives.
The USW maintains joint labor-management safety committees at Clairton and every unionized US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs facility. These committees, built on the premise that the union and the company share a common interest in “safety,” gave the USW bureaucracy full knowledge of the unrepaired hazards, the unwritten water-washing procedure and the unresolved facility-siting question for years. At no point did the union mobilize its membership, authorize safety strikes, or make public the dangers its own representatives were aware of. Instead, safety was handled the way concessions have always been handled: behind closed doors, through joint committees insulated from any accountability to the membership.
Rather than mobilizing workers to force US Steel to eliminate the dangers at Clairton, the bureaucracy has tied steelworkers’ interests to the profitability and strategic interests of the American steel industry. This was expressed most clearly during the fight over Nippon Steel. The USW demanded that US Steel remain “domestically owned and operated,” praised Biden when he blocked the acquisition and praised Trump when he pledged to do the same. The union declared that foreign ownership threatened US “economic and national security” and argued that domestic steel production was essential to critical infrastructure and the military.
The same nationalism underlies the USW’s support for tariffs and trade-war measures. In 2025, the union welcomed Trump’s steel tariffs as a means of combating China and protecting an industry it called the backbone of US “critical infrastructure and national security.”
This perspective identifies workers’ interests with those of “their” corporation and national government. Instead of mobilizing steelworkers internationally against the corporations, the USW tells workers that their future depends upon strengthening US Steel, defending American manufacturing and increasing US competitiveness and military power. Once workers are told their jobs depend upon the profitability and competitiveness of “their” company, demands that interfere with production—from higher wages to shutting down dangerous equipment—are presented as threats to the industry workers are supposed to defend.
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This is the same bureaucracy now negotiating the future of 23,000 US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs workers, with the current contracts set to expire September 1. Master bargaining opened July 20, and US Steel has already shown its hand: a five-year wage proposal it promoted publicly while concealing, until a follow-up meeting, a plan to shift major medical, drug and vision costs onto workers and their families. The USW’s own bargaining update accused the company of deliberately hiding the healthcare takeaways behind the wage numbers.
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Rank-and-file committees, independent of the USW apparatus, must be built in every plant and mine to:
- Reject any contract negotiated behind closed doors and demand full membership control over bargaining demands and ratification;
- Prepare and coordinate joint strike action across US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs to recover decades of lost wages, gutted pensions and other concessions handed to the companies by the bureaucracy;
- Abolish the joint USW-management safety committees, which function to manage and conceal hazards on behalf of the corporations rather than eliminate them, and replace them with safety committees controlled by and accountable only to workers;
- Establish workers’ control over production quotas and health and safety decisions, including the unconditional right to stop production when dangerous conditions exist, without retaliation or loss of pay, and full access to OSHA inspections, maintenance records, Process Hazard Analyses and internal safety studies;
- Launch an independent rank-and-file investigation into the deaths of Menefee, Quinn, Nelson and Stepp, and hold accountable everyone responsible for their deaths, in management and in the union bureaucracy alike.
Such committees, linked through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, would unite workers across plants and national borders. American steelworkers have no interest in competing against workers in Japan, China, Canada, Mexico or anywhere else for the benefit of US Steel, Cleveland-Cliffs or Nippon Steel. Their common interest is in fighting the corporations’ drive for greater production and lower costs at workers’ expense—and in wresting control over their safety and their livelihoods away from a bureaucracy that has shown, at Clairton and everywhere else, that it will not do so on their behalf.
In a powerful interview that aired Tuesday on ABC’s Good Morning America, the family of Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse at the Department of Veterans Affairs who was shot and killed more than seven months ago by Customs and Border Protection agents, spoke at length with George Stephanopoulos about the US government’s ongoing cover-up of their son’s murder.
Pretti was the second US citizen murdered in Minneapolis during “Operation Metro Surge,” one of several immigration kidnapping operations targeting large cities as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation operation. On January 7, Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross.
Neither Ross nor the Customs and Border Protection thugs who shot Pretti in the back have been charged with a crime more than seven months after their murderous actions were caught on camera.
Michael Pretti, Alex’s father, began the interview by stating, “We really want to get the facts out of what happened to Alex that day... We’ve seen what happened, the videos are pretty clear, but we want justice, we want accountability from the people that did this to Alex.
“He was a good man, he cared deeply about his community. Minneapolis was his community. He wanted people to be treated fairly, no matter what walk of life, what their background was.”
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ABC’s George Stephanopoulos correctly observed that following Pretti’s killing, a series of Trump administration officials made public statements blaming Pretti for being shot and killed by the immigration police.
Former US Border Patrol commander and neo-fascist Greg Bovino claimed without evidence following the shooting that it appeared Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
Then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Pretti “committed an act of domestic terrorism,” while White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller characterized Pretti as “an assassin.” Pretti never fired or even pulled out the pistol he was legally carrying. Miller’s message was reposted on social media by Vice President JD Vance.
“Disgusting is what that was,” Michael said in response to the Trump officials’ smears of their murdered son.
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After reviewing the slanders issued by the fascists in Washington following Pretti’s murder, Stephanopoulos asked whether any Trump administration officials had reached out in the months since to retract their statements, apologize or otherwise speak to the family about Alex.
The family confirmed that no officials had.
“What does that tell you?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“They don’t care,” the family replied.
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The killing was not an aberration. Customs and Border Protection agents were deployed to Minneapolis as part of a military-style occupation directed against immigrants and the entire working class. Like the police, the immigration Gestapo exists to enforce the interests of the capitalist ruling class through intimidation and violence. The vast apparatus built up by Republican and Democratic administrations alike has now been placed at the disposal of Trump’s erection of a presidential dictatorship.
The fight for justice for Alex Pretti and Renee Good requires the independent political mobilization of the working class. It cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party, whose officials helped build the deportation and police state apparatus, or to the federal agencies carrying out the cover-up. Workers must demand the identification, arrest and prosecution of Pretti’s killers, the withdrawal of federal agents from American cities and the dismantling of the immigration Gestapo.
6. With “economic D-Day” against Iran, Washington escalates conflict with China
The Trump administration on Monday launched what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called an “economic D-Day” against Iran—a campaign of secondary sanctions aimed at every country, bank and company that trades with Tehran, above all China, which took roughly nine-tenths of Iran’s oil exports before the US blockade choked them off.
Six months of US and Israeli bombardment, which killed at least 3,468 people in Iran by June 10, has not brought down the government in Tehran, and most shipping still avoids the Strait of Hormuz. The administration is now carrying the war into the world economy, on a course that leads to confrontation with China.
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The war was conceived as a means of seizing the chokepoint of the world’s oil supply and gaining a decisive advantage over China. Instead, the United States confronts a political debacle, and it is China’s position that has been strengthened.
The sanctions campaign is an attempt to recoup by economic force what could not be won by bombing, and it aims that force at Beijing. Washington has paused the bombing since late July but has not renounced it; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday that “by no means are we foreclosing using kinetic strikes anywhere in the Strait of Hormuz or around Iran.”
The war the sanctions are meant to salvage began on February 28, when Washington and Tel Aviv started the bombing. A cease-fire in April and a June 17 memorandum with Tehran lifted the blockade and let Iran export oil until Washington broke the arrangement in early July by sending ships through a route in the strait to which Iran had not agreed. When Iran fired on the ships the US struck back, and on July 8 Trump declared the cease-fire over. The blockade was reimposed. On August 17, the day the memorandum expired, Trump said of Oman, with which Iran is negotiating a shipping corridor, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”
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Asked on Monday why the sanctions were not being imposed at once, Bessent replied: “Well, we are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior. Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”
Bessent’s statements are an admission of the provocative character of US actions. Desperate to shore up its geopolitical position, it is taking a series of increasingly reckless and desperate steps, whose impact is to widen the global scope of the war.
The Financial Times wrote in an editorial Tuesday that the operation “seemed more like a series of warning shots fired from far offshore,” and concluded that it “amounts to another risky gamble on a road that, for both sides, ultimately has to lead back to the negotiating table.”
However, the sequence Washington has followed does not lead to a negotiating table. It leads to a widening global conflagration, centrally targeting Russia and China.
7. Campaign to free Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk discussed on NZ Māori radio
Members of the Socialist Equality Group (New Zealand) exposed the fascist Ukrainian court’s frame-up of the young Trotskyist leader, who is sentenced to 15 years in prison for “treason” for opposing the war.
8. “MAGA’s Man in LatAm” jailed in Bolivia over political assassination plot
Fernando Cerimedo, the Argentine political operative described by The Economist as “MAGA’s man in LatAm,” is being held in preventive detention in Bolivia, accused of ordering the attempted murder of his former partner, the lawyer and activist Nadia Beller.
Cerimedo was among the most prominent propagandists at the intersection of the Trump administration, the US intelligence apparatus and the installation of far-right governments from Buenos Aires to Tegucigalpa.
Beller, 33 and four months pregnant, was shot three times outside a hotel in Santa Cruz de la Sierra on the night of August 17 by two assailants dressed as delivery drivers who arrived on a stolen motorcycle. She survived the attempt.
Cerimedo was detained the following morning at Viru Viru airport attempting to board a flight to Buenos Aires. A judge imposed the maximum term of preventive detention, 180 days. A search of his residence reportedly turned up evidence of a bot farm and large quantities of cash. He is being held in a section of the prison reserved for state officials and members of the security forces.
Cerimedo denies involvement. His lawyer has advanced the theory that Beller staged the shooting herself in order to “destabilize” the Bolivian government—a claim amplified by Argentine President Javier Milei, who reposted messages questioning whether her wounds were real.
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The prosecution’s case rests on material extracted from Cerimedo’s telephone. According to Beller’s attorney, Jerjes Justiniano, one message reads: “Don’t tell anyone. But Enrique’s friend sold us out, remember? Nadia. Either we eliminate her now or we’re screwed. Do you know anyone who can do the job?”
Other messages recovered from the device were sent by an individual identified as E.C.G. on the day of the shooting. “Brother, they just shot her,” one reads. Afterward: “We have the phone just in case,” and “Apparently no organs were compromised.” Investigators reportedly found 11 deleted calls between the two men that day.
E.C.G. has been identified as Erik Correa González, intelligence chief under Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz. Former President Evo Morales has stated that the operation was designed to pin the killing on him: Beller was lured to the hotel by an anonymous message offering information about a complaint against Morales, and Cerimedo—according to Beller’s own account—encouraged her to go despite her expressed fears for her safety.
Beller has called the attack a “state crime,” charging involvement by the government and the police. From her hospital bed she stated that she decided to speak publicly because “until I speak directly to the Bolivian people, they are going to finish what they attempted to do.”
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The Paz government came to office this year committed to placing the full weight of Bolivia’s prolonged economic crisis on the backs of the working class. The response was a massive 50-day general strike. That movement was betrayed by the union leadership of the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), which channeled the immense militancy of miners, teachers and other workers back into negotiations with a government that had answered the movement with a state of exception and the deployment of troops in the streets.
The assassination attempt, with the participation of a state intelligence officer, against a politician who claims she opposed the government, is not a private matter, but a political action.
The plot is the logical culmination of Cerimedo’s political trajectory as a key operative serving Washington’s interests across the region.
His back story is murky at best. He has claimed to have been offered a full scholarship to attend Harvard University, to have trained with the US Navy Seals and to have served in the Obama White House. There is no credible evidence to support any of this.
Until 2019, he was working for the nominally “left” faction of Peronism, organizing digital operations for the Peronist Youth in La Matanza and running social media campaigns that re-elected Peronist mayors in the province of Buenos Aires. He crossed over, he says, for love: “My wife is a fan of Javier Milei.” More likely than not, he followed more lucrative opportunities.
During the pandemic, his outlet La Derecha Diario attacked public health measures and published disinformation about vaccines, including the fabricated claim that Argentina’s regulatory agency had confirmed doses contained graphene.
His first operation of continental significance came in Brazil in 2022. Days after Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat, Cerimedo hosted a livestream titled “Brazil Was Stolen,” alleging that voting machines had been manipulated. He repeated the claims before the Brazilian Senate. Days later, Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed Congress and the presidential palace in Brasília in a failed coup attempt organized from the highest levels of the state.
He then joined Milei’s 2023 campaign, claiming credit for the chainsaw brandished at rallies. In Chile he commissioned polling used to influence the constitutional referendum that would have replaced the constitution inherited from Pinochet. In Bolivia, his Numen Academy trained Catalina Paz, the president’s daughter, now an adviser to his government. And in Honduras he says he coordinated Trump’s Truth Social post endorsing Nasry Asfura—the same Asfura exposed in the “Hondurasgate” recordings discussing the financing of “information cells” to destabilize Mexico and Colombia, and the imprisonment or assassination of opponents.
Cerimedo’s business partner is Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, who supplies the voter-targeting technology through their Buenos Aires consultancy Numen. “Brad set up all the infrastructure that I work with,” Cerimedo has said.
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The decisive connection, however, runs through Washington and Miami.
In May 2023, Cerimedo registered NUMEN Advisors LLC in North Miami. Three months later, a memorandum filed with the US Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) records a contract between Numen and Damián Merlo’s Latin America Advisory Group to work on Milei’s campaign—including approaches to members of Congress with emphasis on south Florida, and to the Heritage Foundation, CSIS, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council.
Merlo’s own record is documented in the same FARA filings. He worked for the US Interests Section in Havana in 1996-97 under State Department contract, screening Cuban applicants for emigration. From 2002 to 2007 he was a program officer at the International Republican Institute responsible for its Cuba, Mexico and Brazil programs, including a grant to the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Directorate in Miami.
As explained by a La Jornada investigation, FARA disclosures record Merlo’s meetings with Viviana Bovo, longtime adviser to Marco Rubio; with Ricardo Pita, former Ted Cruz aide and now senior adviser for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department; with Florida Republican Representatives Mario Díaz-Balart and María Elvira Salazar; and, on January 13 of this year—10 days after the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—with Joseph Humire, who heads Americas security affairs at the Department of Defense, the office supervising regional security cooperation and military sales.
Parscale, meanwhile, attended a meeting at Mar-a-Lago also attended by Rubio and Salazar.
When Cerimedo engaged Merlo in 2023, he was securing much more than a publicity deal. He was being integrated into the institutional circuit—Miami, the Cuban fascistic organizations, south Florida legislators, the hemispheric security bureaucracy—through which US policy toward Latin America is made.
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The reaction of the regimes implicated has been immediate. Milei declared Cerimedo “someone who is not part of our space and has no connection with us of any kind,” despite official records showing 13 visits to the Casa Rosada after Milei took office. He then attributed the affair to a conspiracy involving Evo Morales, Lula and “castrochavismo.” In Chile, the chief adviser to President José Antonio Kast’s election campaign has been formally questioned in Congress over his ties to Cerimedo. Bolivia’s Paz has not appeared in public since the arrest.
In fact, what has been exposed is a US-backed transnational apparatus of disinformation, subversion and violence, operating with the participation of intelligence services and reaching into the highest levels of the Trump administration. Fifty years after Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras convened his counterparts in Santiago to establish Operation Condor’s joint information bank and multinational task forces, the same methods are being reconstructed.
The nominally left governments of the region offer no alternative. Despite their current denunciations of this fascistic conspiracy, their consistent accommodation to Trump demonstrates that bourgeois nationalism provides no means of opposing imperialism or fascism.
9. Australia: PepsiCo demands more real pay cuts at Brisbane Smith’s crisps factory
As part of a global cost-cutting offensive, food and beverage giant PepsiCo is seeking to impose further cuts to real wages and working conditions at its Smith’s Snackfood factory in the Brisbane suburb of Tingalpa.
Aggressively, the management has announced a ballot to try to push through its demands without agreement from the three trade unions covering the more than 400 workers at the site, while counting on the union officials to stifle workers’ anger.
Workers should vote No as a first step to fighting for better conditions and winning support from other PepsiCo workers nationally and internationally.
The management’s move follows talks with the Australian Workers Union (AWU) and United Workers Union (UWU), which have production and warehouse members, and the Electrical Trades Union (ETU), which has members among maintenance workers.
Together with a factory at Regency Park in Adelaide, the Brisbane plant produces potato chips and other snacks, under brands including Smith’s, Doritos, Red Rock Deli, Twisties and Burger Rings.
As well as workers’ pay demands, the company has rejected virtually all the limited claims submitted by the unions, such as higher duties payments, limits on CCTV surveillance, a 30 percent night time shift allowance and allowances for workers’ licences and tickets. The only concession is a first aid allowance of just $22.26 per week.
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According to the latest “Priced Out” report by Everybody’s Home, a housing advocacy group, renting a mid-priced unit in Brisbane or any of Australia’s capital cities now costs more than half a single worker’s median take-home pay of $70,000. Over the past five years, median apartment rent in Brisbane has risen by more than 62 percent.
For workers paying off a mortgage, the situation is just as serious. Three central bank rate rises this year, endorsed by the Albanese Labor government, have cost an average homebuyer, paying off a $735,000 loan, nearly $4,000 a year.
PepsiCo’s low wages are part of a drive to dramatically boost profits at the expense of its workers around the world, half of whom are in the United States.
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Following pressure from activist investor Elliott Investment Management, which took a $4 billion stake in the company, or 2 percent, PepsiCo embarked on a global efficiency drive. From late 2025, this included the company cutting its workforce from 319,000 to 306,000.
The latest cuts included 105 permanent jobs at its Main Street distribution and bottling site in Columbia, South Carolina, the shutting down of warehouse operations at its Skelly Drive facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma, laying off 184 local logistics and forklift operators, and production line closures at several locations, including two Frito-Lay plants in Orlando, Florida.
PepsiCo chairman and CEO Ramon Laguarta was paid $US28,814,759 in total compensation for fiscal year 2024, while the median PepsiCo employee was paid just $US53,551 that same year. That works out to a pay ratio of 538 to 1. PepsiCo’s median employee would need to work more than five centuries to match what Laguarta made in a single year.
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Last week, a worker at the Adelaide plant told a World Socialist Web Site campaign team that UWU members want to quit the union because it does not fight for them and does not even respond to their calls for assistance. Another said some workers were working 60 hours a week to survive. That is happening in Brisbane as well.
To avoid another sellout, Smith’s workers need to take matters into their own hands. This means building a rank-and-file committee to direct the struggle, led by workers on the shop floor, not highly paid union bureaucrats. This committee must be open to all workers, permanent or casual, directly employed or labour-hire, union or non-union.
This committee would draw up demands based on workers’ needs and a plan of action through which to fight for them, including strikes and other industrial action. Such demands could include:
- An immediate 40 percent pay rise across the board, to recoup previous losses.
- Monthly cost-of-living adjustments to prevent further real wage cuts amid soaring inflation.
- No more labour-hire—secure jobs for all! All labour-hire workers to be offered direct employment. All casuals to be offered permanent positions.
- No speed-ups! A safe workload clause, so production targets cannot be used to justify unsafe pace or unreasonable pressure.
- All improvements to wages and conditions to be extended to all PepsiCo employees, including at the Adelaide factory and internationally.
The way forward is through a unified struggle—bringing Smith’s workers together with those in other PepsiCo facilities throughout the food industry and beyond, across Australia and globally—against the onslaught on wages, conditions and jobs.
10. Electric shock gloves sought by ICE were used on Omaha schoolchildren
Police in Omaha, Nebraska, have been forced to stop carrying electric shock gloves in most Omaha Public Schools (OPS) following public outrage over their use on two students, including a child in a special-education program. But police officers from the suburb of Bellevue who are assigned to two OPS schools continue to carry the devices, as do officers in several neighboring districts.
The shock gloves are the same which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to spend up to $20 million purchasing for federal agents.
In June 2025, the Omaha City Council approved, as part of the police department’s consent agenda (a block of items voted on without separate discussion), a $65,924 purchase of 40 pairs of G.L.O.V.E. devices—Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters—for school resource officers, a routine budget item that drew no public debate at the time. The gloves were used twice during the 2025-26 school year, both times on students. In the first case, an officer shocked a trespassing student’s wrist for roughly two seconds during a fight at Omaha South High School. In the second, at the district’s Integrated Learning Program, which serves students with social, emotional, behavioral and learning needs, a student who had thrown a chair and struck a security guard was shocked twice, once for about a second and again for two to three seconds.
Democratic Mayor John Ewing, a former Omaha police deputy chief, and Police Chief Todd Schmaderer reviewed both incidents and pronounced them, in their own words, “the safest use-of-force option in the rare times when it is used.”
That assessment was not shared by the roughly 30 parents, students and community members who packed an Omaha Public Schools board meeting on August 17 to denounce the devices, after the story broke nationally. Omaha Central High School student Lux Tipton told the board her twin brother has autism and that a shock device could compound rather than de-escalate his outbursts, saying his safety could be put at risk “not only mentally but also physically.”
11. Boeing engineers and technical workers reject contract, vote to authorize strike
A strike would disrupt both commercial-aircraft certification and military production under conditions of expanding US wars and preparations for conflict with China.
12. 26-year-old South Australian worker killed in woodchipper accident
Josh Thomson-Parkin had raised concerns about the reliability and safety of the machine in the days before his death.
One year ago this month, on August 11, 2025, President Donald Trump stood before cameras at the White House and declared “liberation day” for the nation’s capital and ordered the military occupation of the city.
Washington has not seen a sustained armed military presence of this scale and duration since the Civil War, when Union forces garrisoned the city against Confederate attack. At its peak, the roughly 5,000 troops deployed were more than the number that General Robert Ross and Rear Admiral George Cockburn brought in 1814 when British forces sacked and burnt the capital.
Trump, invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act—a provision permitting the president to commandeer the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under conditions of “an emergency nature”—announced that Attorney General Pam Bondi would assume direct control of the city’s police force. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was directed to “coordinate with governors” to “authorize the … National Guard as he deems necessary” and to be “prepared to send the military if needed.”
Some 800 National Guard troops from several Republican-governed states flooded the streets of Washington. In any other location, this would have been a flagrant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the use of federal military forces for domestic law enforcement. But the District of Columbia, under direct congressional rule, is an exception.
The pretext was as transparent as it was cynical. Violent crime in Washington had been falling since 2023. The city’s crime rates in 2024 were already at their lowest levels in three decades, according to the Department of Justice’s own figures—and remain so today, one year on. Nevertheless, Trump seized on the attempted carjacking of a 19-year-old former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) operative to declare a “public safety emergency,” despite the two teenage suspects already being in police custody.
“The National Guard are not protecting or serving for my benefit,” said Regina, a Washington D.C. resident, to the World Socialist Web Site. “I think what Trump is doing is ridiculous. It’s not helping … he’s doing it because this is who he serves: the banks, the billionaires. He’s got billionaire people on his team.” She added, “He’s a monster and we need to get him out of here.”
Stopping crime was never the point. With each successive deadline, rather than withdrawing, the administration has escalated. Deployment end dates have shifted half a dozen times, from November 30, 2025, to January 20, 2029—the day Trump is constitutionally required to leave office. What began as 800 troops—legally authorized for no more than 30 days under the Home Rule Act’s provision, which expired September 10, 2025—metastasized into a permanent military presence exceeding 5,000 at its peak during last month’s July 4 festivities.
On November 20, 2025, U.S. District Judge Jia M. Cobb found the deployment unlawful, ruling it usurped the role of civilian police. The administration’s appeal has served only to buy time to maintain and expand it.
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Among the grievances enumerated in the Declaration of Independence against King George III was precisely the stationing of standing armies among the civilian population without the consent of the governed. That the 250th anniversary of that document was used as a subterfuge for assembling an occupying force is a calculated obscenity against every principle the Declaration represents.
Troops have conducted “presence patrols” through federal parks, Metro stations and residential neighborhoods, enforced youth curfews, supported ICE operations and conducted homelessness sweeps. NPR has reported that “legal experts, activists and watchdog groups worry the Trump administration could fundamentally change the way the military is used on U.S. soil,” citing the “upcoming 2026 midterm elections” as a flashpoint for “what armed troops on the streets could mean as voters cast ballots.”
More significant still is the role such a force could play in a future contested election. On January 6, 2021, Trump’s fascist foot soldiers besieged the U.S. Capitol to prevent the transfer of power following his 2020 electoral defeat. Mobs constructed gallows on the steps of the legislature. Armed thugs moved through the building searching for members of Congress. For three and a half hours, the military did nothing—intervening only once it was clear the coup had failed on the ground.
The lesson Trump drew was not that his objectives were wrong, but that his methods were insufficient. Since returning to power, he has moved deliberately to correct those deficiencies: building up military presence gradually, staffing it from loyalist states, normalizing it incrementally. The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling granting presidential immunity for “official acts” has removed the last formal legal constraint on this process.
The occupation of Washington has not unfolded in isolation. It has run alongside ICE deployments across the country, including the effective occupation of Minneapolis, which provoked mass protests nationally. As agents were withdrawn from some cities in the face of popular resistance, they were redeployed—critically, to the nation’s airports. In March 2026, the WSWS reported that “the administration is normalizing the use of armed immigration agents in major civilian spaces under the pretext of ‘security,’ while its political allies openly describe these measures as preparation for election intervention.”
The deployment has been sustained by the political capitulation of local Democratic officials and the complicity of the national party. As the anniversary arrived, the military occupation of the capital has been treated as a local issue; no prominent national Democratic leaders issued statements. When Trump first ordered the occupation, the Washington Post editorial board treated it as a well-intentioned tactical error, writing that the city’s non-existent crime problems “are not the types of problems that can be easily tackled from the Oval Office or by swarming the city’s streets with Humvees.” Instead, the editorial advised Trump to pursue “sustainable fixes” like hiring more police officers.
Collaboration, not opposition, has been the Democratic Party’s organizing principle throughout. When the 30-day window elapsed, outgoing Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser provided the administration a critical workaround, pledging in September 2025 to give Trump full operational collaboration with the Metropolitan Police without further invocation of the Home Rule Act.
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The national pattern is identical. In November 2025, DSA New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani traveled to the White House—one day after Trump had called for the execution of Democratic lawmakers—to announce a “partnership” with the fascist president. As the WSWS wrote at the time, this “represents the upper middle class that the DSA speaks for aligning itself with the oligarchy for which Trump governs. These forces are more afraid of social revolution than they are of fascism.”
Throughout this year, cities across the country and internationally have seen mass protests, with workers and young people demonstrating genuine courage and determination. The fatal flaw has not been the absence of numbers but the persistent orientation of these mobilizations toward pressuring Congress and the Democratic Party—institutions that have demonstrated, again and again, that they will not act.
The WSWS and the Socialist Equality Party have advanced the construction of independent rank-and-file committees in workplaces, schools, hospitals and neighborhoods—organizations capable of mobilizing the working class independently of both corporate parties against assaults on living standards and democratic rights alike. Such committees have their precedent in the revolutionary Committees of Correspondence and Committees of Safety through which American colonists organized their revolt against the British crown—updated now to the conditions of the 21st century and to the task of working class emancipation from the oligarchy that has seized the republic those committees helped found.
These organizations must be guided by a program aimed not at pressuring the Democratic Party, but at mobilizing the industrial and social power of the working class to force the fascist government out of the streets, the airports, and Washington itself as part of an international movement for socialism.
Speaking at the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei Berlin state election campaign launch, the party's honorary chairman explains that 35 years ago it was not socialism but Stalinism that collapsed, and that today's crisis demands the working class reclaim its revolutionary traditions.
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Created with the assistance of Socialism AI, below is a English bulleted outline of Ulrich Rippert's presentation:
I. Introduction: A Completely Changed Political Situation
- The Berlin state election takes place in a fundamentally transformed context — "nothing is as it was before"
- The capitalist system is in an advanced stage of collapse, not only in Germany but worldwide
- Daily announcements of mass layoffs, plant closures, wage cuts, and social spending cuts
- AI and modern technology are being used to destroy jobs and drive exploitation to immeasurable extremes
- Capitalism, based on the exploitation of wage labor, is destroying the very foundation of its own existence
- The ruling class is responding to this historic crisis as it did in 1914 and 1939: with war and dictatorship
II. The War Hysteria and Historical Amnesia
- Rippert asks: have they lost their minds in the Chancellery and Berlin's City Hall? Have they forgotten what Berlin, Germany, and Europe looked like at the end of WWII? Have they forgotten Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
- The present war hysteria — permeating every pore of propaganda and politics — expresses the desperation of the ruling class in the face of capitalism's historic crisis
III. Why Capitalism Survived After WWII — and Why Those Conditions No Longer Exist
- After WWII, German capitalism survived for only two reasons:
- The United States financed reconstruction with billions in credit
- Workers' revolutionary struggles were suppressed by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union
- Neither condition exists any longer
- The postwar decades featured close transatlantic cooperation — Kennedy rode with Willy Brandt through West Berlin and declared "Ich bin ein Berliner!" at Schöneberg Town Hall
- Today, the center of the capitalist world crisis lies in the United States
- A "gangster named Trump" sits in the White House, representing the reactionary interests of an oligarchy of multibillionaires, using increasingly brutal and fascistic methods
- Transatlantic cooperation has become transatlantic confrontation — a tariff and trade war
- To MAGA, the German government responds with "Deutschland über alles!" and presents itself as Europe's leading military power
- But the government is mistaken if it believes it can simply repeat the war terror of the two world wars — resistance is growing worldwide
IV. The Mood Among Workers and the Political Realignment
- In conversations with colleagues, relatives, and acquaintances, one keeps hearing: "Things simply cannot go on like this!"
- Everyone senses not only the threat but the unease — a tremendous social upheaval is in the air
- Workers are asking: what can be done against rearmament, the drive toward war, mass layoffs, the rise of the AfD, and the return of the fascist threat?
- It is becoming ever clearer that the fight against war requires a fight against capitalism — and that this demands a socialist programme and an international strategy
- In the face of growing resistance, all establishment parties are drawing closer together and circling the wagons
- The Left Party calls for cooperation with the CDU; a large part of the CDU/CSU already cooperates with the AfD
- They are united in a party of war, social cuts, and dictatorship, stretching from the Left Party to the AfD
- Great class battles have already begun; the Berlin election must be seen as part of a tremendous counteroffensive against the government and its all-party alliance
V. The Revolutionary Traditions of the Working Class
- Quoting the SGP election statement: "Just as the ruling class is reviving its reactionary traditions of imperialism, war and fascism, the working class must revive its revolutionary, socialist and internationalist traditions."
- The Berlin election coincides with an important anniversary: 35 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991), two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification
VI. What Really Happened in 1989–1991
- The events were accompanied by a deafening propaganda campaign claiming socialism had failed and capitalism had triumphed — that freedom, democracy, and prosperity for all were beginning
- The reality was entirely different: thousands of enterprises were shut down; hundreds of thousands lost their jobs, incomes, and social security; thousands of libraries and cultural institutions were closed; every social achievement in the GDR and Soviet Union was smashed
- Today, faced with mass layoffs and war, the memory of that social devastation is returning
VII. The Kelvion Strike and the Lessons of the Past
- Employees at the Kelvion machine factory in Thuringia began an indefinite all-out strike to prevent relocation and plant closure (~300 workers producing heat exchangers; Kelvion has 3,000+ employees total)
- IG Metall is trying to prevent the strike from spreading, fearing a chain reaction; the strikers are reaching out to colleagues at other sites
- The significance: an interesting discussion has begun among the workers, partly reflected on social media
- One female worker reports that many remember their experiences from the post-Wall period — it feels like déjà vu: "Back then we made a mistake and allowed all of that to happen. We must not make that mistake again today."
- The lesson: to fight successfully today, the lessons of the past must be drawn. To understand what "went wrong" 35 years ago, one must answer: what is socialism, and why were the GDR and the Soviet Union not socialism but Stalinist regimes?
- It was not socialism that collapsed, but Stalinism
VIII. The Early Revolutionary Workers' Movement in Germany
- The cradle of socialism stood in Germany — Marx and Engels' ideas won great influence among the working class
- The Communist Manifesto became the foundation for building the first great socialist workers' party under August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, who awakened the working class to political life
- Workers were highly conscious of their role in society and of their economic and political power — they knew they created all of society's wealth and that a general strike would make clear who actually keeps society running
- Everything that exists in Germany in the way of democratic and social rights was created by the working class under revolutionary Marxist leadership: universal, equal, and general suffrage; public education and the modern school system; freedom of opinion and of the press against censorship; social insurance and the state pension system
- The ruling class always stood on the side of reaction — supporting the Kaiser and his authoritarian state; later, after the 1918 November Revolution overthrew the monarchy, the industrial barons and banks financed the Nazi Party and brought Hitler to power in 1933
- If one asks why the ruling class is once again ruthlessly abolishing basic democratic rights and building a brutal police state that paves the way for the far right, the answer is: the bourgeois class in Germany has no democratic traditions whatsoever and has always stood on the side of reaction
IX. The SPD's Betrayal of 1914 and Its Consequences
- With the early SPD's success, a strong opportunist current grew — arguing for gradual transition to socialism and rejecting revolutionary seizure of power
- At the decisive moment — the start of WWI in 1914, when the question of war or revolution was on the agenda — the SPD leadership capitulated and voted for the Kaiser's war credits
- This was a fundamental betrayal and a shock for the working class, the effects of which lasted for a long time
- Since then, the SPD has been a loyal pillar of capitalist rule, playing a key role in every subsequent crisis in suppressing workers' revolutionary struggles and securing bourgeois rule
- Today: the SPD is one of the main war parties, sitting in government with the CDU/CSU; its defense minister demands Germany be made "war ready"; its finance minister organizes social devastation far outstripping "Agenda 2010"; together with the trade union bureaucracy, it pushes through mass layoffs and social cuts
- The SPD is rightly hated by millions of workers
X. The Russian Revolution and the Birth of Stalinism
- With the SPD's betrayal, the leadership of the workers' revolutionary struggle shifted to Russia
- The Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky drew the correct conclusions: the same contradictions of capitalism that lead to war also lead to revolution
- When the tsarist system collapsed in early 1917, they were prepared — they seized power and established the first workers' state
- The Russian Revolution inspired and mobilized millions worldwide; new revolutionary communist parties were founded
- The revolution was the beginning of world revolution and could not survive within a national framework
- When the revolution spread to Germany in the November Revolution, the Social Democratic government under Ebert and Noske strangled it and murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht
- After the initial revolutionary wave was halted, capitalist countries attacked the first workers' state on 14 fronts, exerting massive economic, political, and military pressure
- Under this pressure, Stalinism emerged: a privileged layer developed within the revolutionary party and state apparatus that abolished workers' democracy and established a bureaucratic dictatorship
- Against Marx's internationalist slogan "Workers of all countries, unite!", Stalin advanced the nationalist position of "socialism in one country"
- On this nationalist basis, Stalinism became the most important counter-revolutionary force within the working class
XI. Trotsky, the Left Opposition, and the Fourth International
- Trotsky built the Left Opposition — the socialist opposition to Stalinism
- A virtual civil war developed within the Soviet Union; tens of thousands of revolutionary workers and intellectuals were convicted on false charges and murdered in the Moscow show trials of the 1930s
- Trotsky was murdered by a Stalinist agent in 1940
- Two years earlier, he founded the Fourth International, which continued the fight to defend the socialist perspective and drew the lessons from the betrayals of both social democracy and Stalinism
XII. Stalinism's Disastrous Role in Germany
- In Germany, Stalinism had especially disastrous consequences: Stalin's theory of "social fascism" — branding the Social Democrats as "social fascists" — split the working class and paved Hitler's way to power
- Trotsky and the Left Opposition tirelessly fought against this and for a united front — a joint mobilization of all workers through which Hitler and the Nazi terror could have been prevented
- After 1945, the Stalinists again played a key role in disarming the workers and preventing a revolutionary uprising
- The reactionary policies of Stalinist governments, pursued in the name of socialism, fueled anti-communist sentiments
- But as long as the Soviet Union existed, it still exerted pressure on capitalism; many postwar reforms were the product of its very existence
XIII. The Dissolution of the Soviet Union and Its Consequences
- The contradiction between the nationalist policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the increasing globalization of production followed a relentless logic — the Soviet Union had to be integrated into the world market
- The Trotskyist position at the time: there were only two possibilities — either the Stalinist bureaucracy would be overthrown by the working class in a political revolution and the world revolution carried forward, or capitalist relations would be restored
- Out of fear of the working class in the Soviet Union and worldwide, the Stalinist bureaucracy fled into the arms of imperialism, smashed up state property, and re-established capitalist relations, with devastating consequences for the working class
- The dissolution of the Soviet Union set in motion a process in which the leading capitalist powers — above all the US — deployed their military might to assert dominant positions as world powers; one war followed another
- Today's situation — the Ukraine war as a NATO staging ground against Russia, the genocide in Gaza, the war against Iran, preparations for war in the Pacific against China, US military intervention in Latin America — is the form in which the Third World War is developing
- This process began with the dissolution of the Soviet Union
- The very same driving forces of the world economy that triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union are also acting on the capitalist states and are leading either to world war or world revolution
XIV. Why History Matters for the Election Campaign
- Rippert anticipates the question: why speak about history at such length when this is about the Berlin election?
- The answer: the election is taking place at a time when all the ghosts of the past have returned. The historic crisis of capitalism is taking ever sharper forms. Mass layoffs are reaching a scale not seen since the Great Depression. The ruling class is once again turning to war, social cuts, and dictatorship.
- Not a single problem in Berlin state or federal politics can be solved without breaking the power of the financial aristocracy and its banks and corporations
- The working class must prepare for revolutionary struggles; for this, it needs a revolutionary socialist party
- "We are that party. We are Trotskyists."
- The strength and confidence of the SGP stem from having drawn the lessons of history — fighting for many years without compromise against every form of opportunism and nationalism, defending the international socialist programme that is gaining ever greater significance today
XV. Call to Action
- Make this election campaign a powerful political offensive
- Study the SGP's election statement and programme; become a member of the party
- Distribute and discuss the election statement with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances
- Vote SGP on September 20
- Make the Berlin state election the starting point of a rebellion against the policies of war and social devastation
15. Socialist Equality Group (Brazil) demands freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk
The criminalization of thought in Ukraine is a dress rehearsal for what capitalist governments worldwide, including in Brazil, have in store for all those who rise up against war and fascism.
16. Prison sentences for mayors in politically motivated trial in Türkiye
Workers and young people must oppose the use of the judiciary as a weapon to suppress and neutralize political opposition, and must defend democratic rights.
17. Britain’s Stop the War Coalition calls for release of Bogdan Syrotiuk
The statement followed a letter from the Socialist Equality Party (UK) to STWC Convenor Lindsey German on August 14. It is a blow against efforts to silence Bogdan’s defense campaign, including a mass media blackout.
18. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
