Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Trotsky’s years on Prinkipo and the journey of My Life in Turkish
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The fourth annual International Commemoration of Leon Trotsky was held on August 16, 2026, at the Taş Mektep venue on Büyükada, hosted by the Adalar Municipality with the support of Mehring Yayıncılık and the World Socialist Web Site.
On Monday, August 10, a court in Pervomaisk, Ukraine, convicted the Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk of high treason under martial law and sentenced him to 15 years in prison for having called for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers against war.
The response to the verdict has been significant and widespread. Nearly 500 people in more than 40 countries, Ukraine and Russia among them, have signed the petition for Bogdan’s release or written letters of protest since the sentencing, and the petition now stands at more than 6,000 names. Historians, doctors, teachers and pensioners have written to the court demanding that the conviction be overturned.
This response stands in sharp contrast to the silence of the major media outlets in the United States and, in particular, the New York Times. The Times has never reported on Bogdan’s case, either his arrest and imprisonment on April 25, 2024, or his sentencing on August 10.
The Times cannot plead ignorance. On Tuesday, August 11, David North, the chairman of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) International Editorial Board, wrote to Philip Pan, the international editor of the Times, calling on the paper to cover the case. North pointed out that on the day of Bogdan’s sentencing the Times had published a report headlined “Russian Court Bars Country’s Only Antiwar Party From Running for Parliament,” which noted the seven-year sentence given to the Yabloko party’s deputy chairman, Maxim Kruglov, for a 2022 social media post, while the paper had printed nothing about a Ukrainian sentenced to more than twice that term.
“If the suppression of antiwar political activity in Russia warrants extensive reporting—and it certainly does—then the sentencing of a Ukrainian socialist to 15 years in prison for activities that include publishing antiwar articles warrants no less serious scrutiny,” North wrote.
The Times did not reply. One week after Bogdan’s sentencing, it published a front-page article titled “Held by Russia, Ukrainian Feels ‘Crushing’ Fear,” with a nine-minute produced audio version. It reports on Artem Murdid, a Ukrainian bank worker arrested in occupied Melitopol in March 2023 and sentenced by a Russian court to life in prison on terrorism charges.
Four journalists worked the story across Kiev, Berlin and Moscow. The Times has reporters inside Ukraine, in Kiev, a day’s drive from the Nikolaev region where Bogdan was tried and imprisoned.
The Times printed Murdid’s account of torture while conceding in its own words that it is “impossible to verify,” justifying publication because it is “consistent with dozens of accounts.” But Bogdan’s case requires no such justification: The verdict is a public document, the expert reports exist on paper, the WSWS articles cited as treason are published and readable by anyone. For Bogdan Syrotiuk the Times has provided not one line.
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The Times’ coverage of political persecution in Russia is voluminous. The paper has published a series of reports on Ukrainians held in Russian prisons—“Ukrainians Tell of Brutal Russian Repression in Occupied Territories” (October 30, 2024), “The Ukrainians Stuck in Russia’s New Gulag” (November 29, 2025) and now on Murdid—and on Russians jailed for criticizing the war. On Monday it ran its second report in a week on the banned Yabloko party, “Barred From Ballot, a Party Becomes a Vessel for Russians’ Discontent.”
In four and a half years of war the Times has not published a report on the conditions in Ukraine’s prisons or on the treason prosecutions of Ukrainian citizens for their political views. Its columnists instead urge Americans to fight for their democracy “as Hard … as Ukrainians Are Fighting to Save Theirs,” as Thomas Friedman’s headline put it on September 23, 2025.
The double standard is a policy of deliberate war propaganda, aimed at demonizing Russia and promoting the dictatorship of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a bastion of democracy against Russian “authoritarianism.” The Times cannot report Bogdan’s case because the case explodes that narrative.
Since 2016 the Times has been the principal organ of the faction of the American ruling class, centered in the Democratic Party and the intelligence agencies, that has made confrontation with Russia the central aim of American foreign policy. Its campaign over “Russian interference” in the 2016 election attacked US President Donald Trump from the right, as insufficiently hostile to Moscow, and prepared public opinion for the war in Ukraine. Since February 2022 the Times has spearheaded the pro-war campaign.
It is the journalistic flagship of substantial sections of the intelligence and military establishment that are pressing for deeper US intervention against Russia. Beyond those layers, the Times and the Democratic Party speak for sections of the upper middle class for whom hostility to Russia is an article of faith.
The Times’ relationship with the intelligence agencies goes back decades. In October 1977 Carl Bernstein reported in Rolling Stone that Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, had “signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA in the 1950s” and that, according to a CIA official, the paper had provided cover for CIA employees.
The Times’ silence on the persecution of Bogdan is entirely in keeping with this role. Its aim is to provide war propaganda, aimed at drumming up public support for the escalation of war with Russia.
This escalation is now taking place. Overnight into Sunday, Ukraine launched some 600 drones at Moscow, according to Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, and Russian missiles and drones hit Kiev the same night. Bogdan was jailed for opposing the US-NATO war, while rejecting the Russian invasion and calling for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers.
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Bogdan’s defense has until September 9 to lodge an appeal, and its challenge to his detention, filed at the European Court of Human Rights in spring 2025, is still pending.
The World Socialist Web Site urges its readers to add their names at wsws.org/freebogdan. Write to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua and the Nikolaev Court of Appeal at inbox@mka.court.gov.ua, with a copy to freebogdan@wsws.org, demanding that the sentence be thrown out and Bogdan freed at once.
3. Socialist Equality Party (UK) calls on Britain’s Stop the War Coalition to defend Bogdan Syrotiuk
In a letter to STWC Convenor Lindsey German, the SEP’s Chris Marsden and Tom Scripps explained that 27-year-old Syrotiuk has been convicted of “high treason” for calling for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against the war.
4. Britain’s Jodrell Bank Observatory faces closure as £2.8 million science funding withdrawn
Publicly funded science is being reorganized around the requirements of British capital, with the open-ended investigation of nature squeezed out wherever there is no immediate commercial or strategic interest.
5. Strike by Egyptian textile workers: A turning point for the Middle East
Hundreds of workers at Misr El Amria Spinning and Weaving Company, Egypt’s largest textile conglomerate company, were locked-out by management on August 9. Rejecting management claims of a shutdown for “routine maintenance, inventory, and reviews,” workers have denounced a move to break their strike, ongoing since July 28, over a refusal to honor a promised pay increase.
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Cotton and textiles occupy a unique position in the Egyptian economy, spanning the entire value chain from cultivation and ginning through spinning and weaving to garment, home and technical textiles. The sector is a major exporter to Europe and the United States. Cotton cultivation alone is estimated to involve about 1.2 million of Egypt’s approximately 7 million agricultural workers, while textiles are the largest manufacturing employer—about 1.5 million workers in 7,000 enterprises, accounting for 27 percent of Egypt’s manufacturing output and 3 percent of its GDP.
The most profitable sectors are concentrated in the downstream, capital-intensive, privately owned and export-oriented segments—particularly finishing, garments, home textiles and technical textiles—while cotton-growers and workers in the labour-intensive state-owned spinning and weaving companies capture a much smaller share. The latter are often saddled with outdated machinery and chronic losses, even as they underpin the supply chains upon which the more profitable downstream businesses depend. Much of the value is captured even further down the chain, including by the international brands that benefit from Egypt’s high-quality cotton and low-cost labor.
The textile industry has been the epicenter of Egyptian labor militancy and political activism. In the period 1945-52, textile workers were at the center of the largest wave of strikes and protests in modern Egyptian history. The upheaval contributed to the crisis of the pro-British monarchy and culminated in the intervention of the Free Officers Coup under Colonel Abdul Nasser in 1952. The new regime moved to rescue and reorganise Egyptian capitalism, while suppressing the independent working-class movement.
Nasser arrested socialist and communist leaders, while nationalizing and expanding the textile mills.
Mahalla became the largest industrial complex in the Arab world. Independent trade unions were abolished and the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) established as the sole legal union, with a state-appointed and vetted leadership. A corporatist labor regime was created in which organized labor was incorporated into, rather than allowed to challenge, the political order. The union apparatus became a political shock absorber and police force for the regime—even when this necessitated concessions to the workers.
In the 1980s, under President Hosni Mubarak, the turn to neoliberal policies, international competition from East Asia and integration into globalized production transformed the sector. Parts of downstream manufacturing were privatized, while private garment factories and informal workshops proliferated. By the late 1980s, employment in the large state-owned mills and factories had fallen from more than 2 million to around 1.8 million. Yet textiles remained Egypt’s largest industrial employer and continued to occupy a central place in working-class politics. Strikes at Mahalla, Samanoud, or Alexandria were repeatedly met with repression by the security forces.
In 2006 textile workers in the massive Misr Spinning and Weaving Company mill in El-Mahalla El-Kubra launched a wave of industrial action that escalated over the following two years. Wider layers of workers demanded wage rises to compensate for the skyrocketing cost of living. These struggles, initially concentrated in state-owned industries and the public sector, spread into the private sector and developed into the biggest wave of industrial militancy since the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Workers raised national and political demands and acted independently of the reviled trade union leaders. Despite heavy security crackdowns, the deployment of riot police and troops and the arrest and trial of strike leaders, they won an increased national minimum wage. The strike committees helped lay the groundwork for grassroots labor organisation and independent trade unions outside state control.
Textile and other industrial workers played a key role in the 2011 uprising that toppled the hated dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. The experience of the 2006-08 Mahalla strikes helped establish militant workplace networks, demonstrating the capacity of industrial workers to challenge employers and the state. Although concentrated in North Africa and Egypt, the strikes spread internationally.
But the political gains made by the working class in 2006-08 were not consolidated. The 2011 uprising brought the question of political power to the fore. Without a perspective of struggle based upon the overthrow of the capitalist system and the socialist reorganization of society by the working class under a revolutionary leadership, workers were instead channeled behind various bourgeois forces competing to succeed Mubarak—military officers, bourgeois “liberal” parties and the Muslim Brotherhood—and betrayed. The military, under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, defense minister and commander of the armed forces, seized power in July 2013 and established a dictatorship that has ruthlessly suppressed the working class and rural poor.
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Egypt’s importance as a country with one of the region’s largest concentrations of industrial workers, public-sector workers and urban poor, and with a history of militancy and anti-imperialist struggle, is immense. For Washington, preventing a repeat of 2011 is a priority: a politically mobilized Egyptian working class would threaten US interests from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.
Since the Camp David Accords in 1979 marking the end of Egypt’s military confrontation with Israel, Washington has provided $1.3 billion annually in military assistance. In return, Egypt has become a key pillar of US regional security architecture. Washington relies on Egypt to contain conflicts on multiple fronts: Libya, Sudan, Gaza and nuclear diplomacy with Iran.
El-Sisi has played a key role in the Gaza genocide: enabling and containing it on behalf of his paymasters. While Egypt publicly condemned Israeli actions and delivered humanitarian aid to Gaza, its intelligence agencies work closely with the US and Israel to block weapons flows and monitor Islamist groups in Sinai. El-Sisi views Hamas as an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood he overthrew in 2013. His control of the Rafah crossing, the only Gaza exit not controlled by Israel, is crucial. He largely kept the border shut to prevent Palestinians from fleeing Israel’s bombardment and maintain Israel’s siege of the enclave.
Even after Israeli provocations on its border, Cairo prevented the Gaza war from expanding into a regional conflict, isolating the Palestinians and preventing multi-front pressure on Israel. El-Sisi played an active role in negotiations for ceasefires and the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement which he hosted. He thus enabled Israel to secure the release of the remaining hostages while continuing its assault on Gaza at a lower level of intensity.
His repression of Egypt’s own working-class strikes, unions and political opposition also serves to stabilize the regional order by preventing the emergence of a mass, anti-imperialist political force in the Arab world’s largest country. At least 65,000 political activists are held in Egyptian jails, including more than 1,000 women.
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The crucial lesson of the 2011-13 Egyptian Revolution is the necessity of building an independent revolutionary leadership before mass struggles break out. Only in this way can the working class secure its political independence from the bourgeoisie and its petty-bourgeois allies, arm the mass movement with a socialist program and develop the perspective of permanent revolution necessary to overthrow capitalism.
6. New York City workers respond to Mamdani’s firing of Haitian workers
New York City workers denounced Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s firing of Haitian city employees, connected the attack on immigrants to the conditions facing the entire working class and called for rank-and-file organization and strike action.
7. 645 million go hungry as global military spending hits a record $2.9 trillion
Nearly one in three people on earth cannot afford a healthy diet, according to the UN's annual report on food security.
8. Fiji’s Vatukoula goldminers receive a paltry payout after 35-year battle
According to Fijian media, a majority of 368 former workers of the Vatukoula gold mine, which closed in 2006, have received the final tranches of $FJ25,000 ($US11,320) in phased payments relating to a dispute that stretches back 35 years. The payouts are a settlement of the longest strike in Fiji’s history which began in February 1991.
The miserly payout has been made by the government of Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, which took office in 2023. Under an agreement with the Fiji Mine Workers Union (FMWU) and Fiji Trades Union Congress, in October 2024 Rabuka announced a total compensation package of $FJ9.2 million ($US4.2 million). The first installments of $FJ10,000 were paid with the remaining $FJ15,000 allocated in the 2025–26 budget.
It is estimated that some 190 workers died before they could receive anything, leaving families to pursue claims through a protracted legal and administrative process.
During his 2024 announcement Rabuka issued a phony apology for not addressing the issue during his first term as prime minister (1992–1999) and said the payout had been “long awaited.” FMWU president Josefa Sadreu expressed his “gratitude,” praising the government for finally responding to workers’ calls for justice.
Sadreu noted that workers had then been waiting for 33 years under 11 different governments. These included brutal anti-worker regimes that followed military coups in 1987—led by Rabuka—and in 2000 and 2006. Labour Party governments in April–May 1987 and May 1999–May 2000 were overthrown by the coups.
The belated and derisory payouts cannot restore the wages, homes, health and lives lost. The long-drawn out settlement enables Rabuka to set aside a historic crime against the working class as cheaply as possible, while enlisting the unions to absolve a succession of multinational companies of any financial or legal culpability.
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The final settlement exposes the duplicitous role of the trade union leadership throughout the long struggle. There was never any attempt to mobilise broad working class industrial action to secure a victory. The miners were left isolated for decades while the futile appeals were made to successive governments, including military regimes.
In the face of the company intransigence and repression imposed by successive governments, a genuine struggle would have required mobilizing workers both in Fiji and internationally. This was not a perspective that any trade union was prepared to take up.
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For decades the union leaders would periodically issue statements feigning “support” for the strikers and holding out hope for an illusory settlement. In 2010, the FMWU appealed to the International Labor Organization and the UN Human Rights Council to intervene and resolve the dispute; negotiations were held with the government but no deal was reached.
The strike and lockout were never solely about Fiji. The atrocious conditions imposed on the mineworkers were part of the worldwide offensive by finance capital that accelerated sharply during the 1980s due to the unprecedented globalization of production. Across the Pacific and internationally, workers confronted private corporations which extracted enormous value from natural resources while governments like the Rabuka regime used police-state methods to suppress resistance.
Tied to the perspective of national reformism, the union bureaucracies were incapable of responding in a progressive fashion to the rapid integration of the world economy, the emergence of transnational corporations, and demands for intensified exploitation in the name of global competitiveness. Unions were transformed into the direct agencies of corporations and the state, and became the chief enforcers of mass layoffs, speed-ups, wage cuts and attacks on conditions.
Hundreds of mine workers and their families showed immense determination and courage throughout the decades-long Vatukoula dispute. What was lacking, however, was an organization that genuinely represented their interests and that was capable of leading a struggle to unite workers across Fiji with workers in Australia, NZ and across the Asia-Pacific region.
The lesson of Vatukoula is that workers need new organizations: rank-and-file committees that they control, completely independent of the trade union bureaucracy and every capitalist party. Such committees must be built in the mining industry, the sugar and tourism industries, and in workplaces across the public sector, to organise a struggle against the Rabuka government’s austerity measures and attacks on democratic rights.
9. Once again in defense of the American Revolution: A reply to a Brazilian historian
The WSWS replies to Brazilian historian Mário Maestri, who argues that the American Revolution, like Brazilian independence, failed to bring about a “class-based transformation” and therefore does not merit the designation of a revolution.
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The American Revolution shattered the remnants of aristocratic and feudal property law: primogeniture and entail were abolished, quitrents eliminated, the inheritance of public office as personal property ended, and royal and proprietary claims to immense tracts of land swept away. This transformation was bound up with the mass character of the Revolution. Tens of thousands of Loyalists—including many of the richest, most politically powerful and largest landowning families in the colonies—were driven into exile, their estates confiscated and in many cases broken up and sold. The Navigation Acts, Crown monopolies and mercantilist restrictions that had subordinated colonial economic development to Britain were overthrown. The old system of royal patronage and privilege was dismantled. Land and commerce were freed from the restraints of the colonial order, while inherited rank and relations of personal dependency suffered powerful blows, clearing the way for the rapid development of capitalist relations and the elevation of free labor in the early republic. Changes reached into the very language of the people. The word “master,” common before the Revolution throughout the colonies, vanished from the northern states, replaced by the Dutch-derived neologism “boss.”
The political transformation was no less far-reaching. Thirteen colonies governed under a hereditary monarchy became independent republics. Royal governors, Crown authority and inherited political privilege were abolished. Written constitutions grounded political authority not in dynasty or divine right but in claims to popular sovereignty. Political participation expanded dramatically among free men, property qualifications were weakened or abolished in a number of states and soon in all, and the Revolution unleashed a mass democratic political culture hostile to hereditary rank and aristocratic deference. Thus the Revolution destroyed the political framework of the colonial ancien régime and created new forms of republican government resting upon a radically different conception of the source and legitimacy of political power.
That political culture made slavery... a political problem for the first time in modern history. During and after the Revolution, the first organized antislavery movement in world history emerged in Philadelphia, where the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, founded in 1775 and reorganized after independence under the presidency of Benjamin Franklin. Northern states enacted gradual emancipation and, one by one, abolished slavery. Yet even as slavery receded in the North, the rise of cotton as a global commodity—the key to British industrialization—entrenched slavery ever more deeply in the South, setting a slave economy against a rapidly expanding free-labor economy within the same republic, an antagonism that intensified over the following decades and culminated in the election of Lincoln and the secession of the southern states in 1860.
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That revolutionary process destroyed slavery in North America “four score and seven years” after independence and contributed decisively to its destruction throughout the Atlantic world. The principles of the First American Revolution passed into the French Revolution of 1789 and, through it, into the largest and most far-reaching slave revolt in history, the Haitian Revolution of 1791. American independence also shattered key elements of the mercantilist system linking Britain’s mainland colonies, Caribbean plantations and the Atlantic slave trade. As Eric Williams demonstrated in Capitalism and Slavery, it “marked the beginning of their uninterrupted decline.” The resulting weakening of the West Indian interest, combined with the rise of industrial capitalism, created the conditions for the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and slavery throughout most of the British Empire in 1833. The Civil War then struck the final, decisive blow against slavery in the New World in 1861–65. Had the slaveholders’ rebellion succeeded, there is no reason to suppose slavery would have disappeared from the hemisphere when it did in Cuba in 1886 and Brazil in 1888.
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This brings us to the comparison with Brazilian independence in 1822. Let us state the matter categorically: Brazilian independence was not a triumphant bourgeois revolution at all. It was, in its outcome, a political reorganization carried out by the existing ruling class to preserve its own position. Measured against the democratic tasks that the classic bourgeois revolutions set themselves and, however unevenly, accomplished, the contrast with 1776 is stark.
The Portuguese monarchy and the old colonial aristocracy were compelled by the crisis of the colonial order to make concessions to the times. Independence was one of them. The regime that emerged preserved the monarchy, preserved the privileges and the vast landed property of the slaveholding elite, and preserved the de facto colonial status of Brazil, transferred from a decaying Portugal to an ascendant Britain. The Brazilian state was born in continuity with the absolutist structure of the Portuguese empire, not in rupture with it.
The crisis of colonial rule in Brazil had been developing for decades, nurturing revolutionary currents drawn to the principles of the American and French revolutions. In 1789 came the Minas Gerais Conspiracy, whose leaders had established direct contact with Thomas Jefferson. Nine years later the Bahian Conspiracy of 1798 broke out, carried out by artisans, soldiers and free men of color who looked to the Haitian Revolution. In 1817 the Pernambucan Revolution established a republic in that province, which lasted two months and issued a constitution modeled on the documents of the American Revolution. None of these movements were able to break out of their local boundaries and take on a national character. They tended toward conciliation with the old order and were violently suppressed by the Portuguese state—a recurring pattern whose social roots we examine further on.
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The nearly half century separating American and Brazilian independence saw a decisive shift in the international situation. The America of 1776 and the France of 1789 had acted at the flood tide of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. By 1822 the revolutionary wave was at its lowest ebb, and Europe was ruled by the triumphant counterrevolution organized at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Engels described the order it established:
The treaties of Vienna are the epitome of the great victory of reactionary Europe over revolutionary France. They are the classic form in which European reaction ruled for fifteen years during the Restoration period. They restore legitimacy, monarchy by divine right, feudal aristocracy, clerical rule, and patriarchal jurisdiction and administration. But since victory was won with the help of the English, German, Italian, Spanish and especially the French bourgeoisie, concessions had also to be made to the bourgeoisie. While the sovereigns, aristocrats, priests and bureaucrats divided the rich spoils among themselves, the bourgeoisie was put off with promissory notes drawn on the future, which were not honored and which nobody had any intention of honoring.
This was the international context in which Brazilian independence took its shape. It was proclaimed by Dom Pedro I, who had governed Brazil as prince regent ever since his father, King Dom João VI, returned to Portugal in 1821 to confront the constitutionalist uprising that had broken out the previous year in Porto. The same man who had stood at the apex of Portuguese royal authority in Brazil transferred that authority to himself as emperor. Sovereignty was not seized by a rising class from below; it passed from one representative of the Braganza dynasty to another.
Brazilian independence developed, nonetheless, as a violent political and military struggle involving masses of people. Portuguese garrisons had to be fought out of Bahia, Maranhão, Pará, Piauí and the Cisplatine province in campaigns running well into 1823. This civil war was waged by provincial militias and ordenanças—untrained, unpaid, amateur reserve forces raised by the plantation lords—drawn overwhelmingly from the free poor and backed by a navy under foreign mercenary command. The siege of Salvador, Brazil’s first planned city and first official capital, alone mobilized some 22,000 combatants, and hundreds were killed. But neither the scale of that mobilization nor the bloodshed made it a genuinely popular revolution. Brazil produced no equivalent of the Committees of Correspondence, Sons of Liberty, and Committees of Public Safety which organized the popular masses of the American colonies into an independent political force.
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The two processes are to be measured by what they made possible. The American Revolution of 1776 opened the path to the mighty development of capitalism in the United States and to the completion of the bourgeois revolution in its second act, the Civil War.
Brazilian independence secured the prolongation, for as long as it could be sustained, of the slave-based agrarian export economy and of the country’s de facto colonial condition. The tasks that the classic bourgeois-democratic revolutions carried through remain unfinished in Brazil to this day.
Genuine economic independence—a sovereign domestic market and financial system, free of foreign financial and commercial domination—was one of these tasks, and Brazil’s independence, in this sense too, was fictional. It was, in the most literal sense, bought. Recognition came not through the defeat of the metropolis, but through British mediation: a series of conferences in London between 1824 and 1825, overseen by foreign secretary George Canning, concluding in a treaty framed as a dynastic donation, by which João VI “transferred of his own free will” the crown to his son. Brazil paid Portugal £2 million in indemnity, of which £1.4 million consisted of the loan Portugal had contracted in London to finance its war against Brazilian independence. The new nation thus assumed the debt incurred to crush it and contracted a further loan in London to meet the obligation. Its negotiators had objected at the outset that neither Holland nor Portugal itself had paid Spain anything upon their own separation from the Spanish crown, and the United States had given nothing to Britain for its own. The objection did not survive British pressure.
Like Argentina, which you also invoke as a condemnatory comparison, Brazil passed after 1822 not into sovereign development, but into Britain’s informal empire in Latin America. Preferential tariffs secured for British imports, together with British domination of finance, insurance and trade, constrained the development of an independent domestic market and financial system—a condition that remained the defining feature of Brazilian economic and political life until the early 20th century, when American imperialist capital emerged as a rival to British dominance.
The same British capital that drove the expansion of cotton slavery in the postrevolutionary American South, discussed above, stood equally behind the semi-colonial subordination of “independent” Brazil. But this shared entanglement with British capital points to a real difference, not merely a further parallel. In the South, dependence on the British cotton market coexisted with, and was ultimately subordinated to, the rise of an independent national economy centered in the North, whose industrial capitalist class was strong enough, by 1861, to break the political power of the planters and complete the country’s economic as well as political independence. Brazil produced no equivalent counterweight to its own dependence on British capital, and none would emerge for the better part of a century.
The divergence originated in the class composition of the two societies at the moment of their independence. The revolution in North America drew on a broad stratum of merchants, professionals and traders and, above all, on a vast yeomanry of small farmers who made up the great majority of the free population. As with the French Third Estate in 1789, it was the productive strata struggling against the restraints of the old order, and not an already dominant capitalist class, that carried out the revolution. In both 1776 and 1789, it was the revolution itself—sweeping away monarchy, aristocratic privilege and the legal apparatus of the old order—that cleared the ground upon which capitalist relations could take root. The revolution in North America, completed only by the Civil War, created the conditions for the triumph of American capitalism, not the reverse.
The Brazilian slaveholding caste commanded a concentration of wealth and coercive power considerably greater than that of its counterpart in the American South of 1776, where the large slaveholders were themselves divided, some backing the Crown and others independence. Brazil’s urban middle strata were far thinner, and it had nothing resembling the American yeomanry. The mass of the free poor were not smallholders integrated into a market economy but a propertyless population living on the margins of the plantation system—“without a raison d’être,” as one historian has put it—within the logic of an export economy built on slave labor.
This ruling class lived under the permanent threat of a popular and slave revolution, and its authoritarianism was the direct expression of that fear. Dispersed across a continental territory, divided by province and by export commodity, bound together by no national market, it was also incapable of governing in its own name. Trotsky’s analysis of the Spanish monarchy, developed out of Marx’s writings on Spain, describes a situation of striking similarity:
The predominance of the centrifugal tendency over the centripetal in economy as well as in politics undermined the ground beneath Spanish parliamentarism. […] The monarchy was doubly necessary to the disconnected and decentralized ruling classes, incapable of governing the country in their own name.”
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That is why Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution possesses such profound contemporary significance. It explains not only why the democratic revolution remained unfinished in countries such as Brazil, but also why, in the US itself, the defense of the democratic conquests achieved in the First and Second American Revolutions now falls to the working class as part of the struggle for a Third American Revolution—the socialist transformation of society. The crisis of democracy is not a specifically American or Brazilian phenomenon, but the expression of a world crisis of capitalism, whose solution lies only in the international struggle of the working class.
10. Brazil: Railway workers strike exposes privatization disaster in São Paulo
After just three days of private operation, delays, crowded platforms, and a train fire sent passengers into a panic.
11. Postal workers: Organize now to stop the deepest cuts in US Postal Service’s history!
Management plans to spend the next four months preparing the attack. The bureaucracy of the postal unions will use the same period to block opposition from the rank and file. Postal workers need a plan of our own.
12. California: LAUSD imposes sweeping screen-time limits months after mass student walkouts
Over 400,000 students have returned to Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) schools for the 2026-27 year under sweeping new restrictions on classroom screen time, building on a cellphone and social media ban that took effect last year in the nation’s second-largest district.
The Board of Education approved a resolution in April directing the district to develop firm screen-time limits, then adopted the final policy unanimously on June 23. It bars screen use entirely through first grade and imposes rising limits on school-issued devices for older students. Grades two through five are capped at 60 minutes a day or 300 minutes a week, middle and high school students at 120 minutes a day or 600 minutes a week, homework included.
Unsupervised student use of YouTube and social media on district devices is barred outright, and existing technology contracts face review. Parents must now opt in for a student to take a district device home, and the district will spend $1 million a year on software to track screen time and block content. A separate cellphone policy, in effect since February 2025, prohibits smartphones, smartwatches and earbuds throughout the school day, including lunch and passing periods.
LAUSD is not acting on its own initiative but rather fulfilling a state mandate. California’s Phone-Free School Act (AB 3216), signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2024, requires every district, charter school and county office of education in the state to adopt a policy restricting student smartphones by July 1, 2026. The measure passed with bipartisan support.
The district frames the crackdown as a defense of student concentration. Board member Nick Melvoin speaks of restoring “balance.” Superintendent Andrés Chait, appointed after Alberto Carvalho resigned under federal investigation, invokes “purposeful” technology use.
Educators are not indifferent to the problems posed by the pervasiveness of screens and their misuse in schools. Those difficulties are real, and there is genuine confusion about how to address them. This is reflected in broad support for restrictions. A 2024 National Education Association (NEA) survey found 90 percent of teachers favor banning cellphones during instructional time, and 75 percent favor comprehensive “bell-to-bell” limits.
But the claim that screens are the source of the crisis conceals the underlying causes. Widespread distraction in the classroom is the inevitable product of the systematic underfunding and overcrowding of schools, the transformation of education into test-prep and credentialing, the commodification of attention by the tech corporations, and the broader social crisis of capitalism. LAUSD, like districts across the country, has presided over decades of austerity that have stripped schools of librarians, counselors, nurses and arts programs.
The classrooms capable of holding students’ attention have been gutted by decades of bipartisan slashing of school funds, the non-renewal of ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) funds, the ongoing destruction of the Department of Education and federal grant funding and the Trump administration’s drive to privatize public education wholesale.
13. Salzburg Festival sacks its acclaimed director for refusing to blacklist Russian artists
As Europe rearms against Russia, Austria’s Salzburg Festival has dismissed its acclaimed director for resisting political pressure to purge Russian artists.
14. Amazon delivery driver in Florida found dead in van
Jaylene Vargas Gonzalez was found in the back of her van after it had been parked for hours.
15. Deadly Indonesian earthquake exposes unsafe housing and rescue cuts
At least 68 people have been killed and more than 200 injured after a powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Flores before dawn on August 15. Thousands have been driven from their homes and are awaiting aid, while rescue workers continue to search damaged buildings and communities isolated by landslides and blocked roads.
The earthquake struck at a shallow depth north of Flores and was caused by thrust movement along the Flores Back-Arc fault system. Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency issued its first tsunami warning just two minutes and 16 seconds after the quake. Tsunami waves were subsequently recorded at 16 locations, reaching 1.605 meters at Pota in East Manggarai. By late Monday morning, the agency had detected 1,624 aftershocks, including 23 above magnitude 5.
The desperate conditions confronting survivors were evident two days after the earthquake. In Ranukolo village, about 70 residents still lacked clean water, and children had developed diarrhea. Residents said no aid had reached them. In nearby areas, families whose homes were no longer habitable were surviving on little more than plain rice. In Reo, one of the worst-hit communities, a resident asked: “Why isn’t there a public kitchen?”
“We’re on our own here,” one resident, Junaidin, said to an Al Jazeera reporter. “As for help from the government, there hasn’t been any—no tents, no medicine, no food, no drinking water, nothing.”
These facts expose the lie that the death and destruction were simply an unavoidable “natural disaster.” The earthquake itself was a geological event. However, the collapse of homes, damage to medical facilities, disruption of water supplies and delayed arrival of essential assistance are social questions, bound up with entrenched poverty and decades of government neglect.
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Indonesia sits in one of the most earthquake-prone regions in the world, with dispersed communities across a mountainous island chain undoubtedly complicating relief operations. That only underscores the need for permanently staffed and equipped rescue, medical and logistics facilities rather than improvised operations.
The disaster cast a pall over official celebrations marking Indonesia’s Independence Day on Monday. President Prabowo Subianto presided over ceremonies in Jakarta, 1,500 kilometres from the disaster zone. Prabowo is a former commander of the notorious Kopassus special forces under the Suharto dictatorship, implicated in atrocities in East Timor, West Papua and Aceh and in the abduction and torture of student activists during the regime’s collapse in 1998. That such a figure could be rehabilitated and ultimately elevated to the presidency is itself an indictment of the entire post-Suharto political establishment and underscores the contempt in which Indonesia’s ruling class holds the general population.
Asked about the celebrations, one displaced Flores resident told Reuters, “I don’t think about that anymore… I just think about the safety of my wife and four-year-old twins.” The gulf between the pageantry in the capital and the conditions confronting rural workers and poor families could hardly have been sharper.
16. New reactionary Trump measures to intensify trade war
The Trump administration is seeking to open a new front in its global trade war by accusing a wide range of countries of participating in schemes to allow Chinese goods into the US at a lower rate of tariff than they would otherwise be charged.
The new initiative is set out in a document issued by the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy earlier this month, entitled “The Great Transshipment Scam.” In a crude attempt to link up with interest in the Christopher Nolan movie Odyssey the document features a Trojan-style wooden horse on the front cover.
The department is headed by the rabid anti-China hawk Peter Navarro.
Commenting in the report he said: “For years, the great transshipment scam has let communist China launder its exports to more than 40 countries, rob our Treasury of billions of dollars and steal the pay cheques of billions of American workers.”
The basis of the report is that virtually the entire world is somehow involved in a giant conspiracy against the US.
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At first glance it might appear that the report is the expression of some kind of madness. But there is an underlying logic and economic reality.
The driving force of the US railing against a giant Chinese conspiracy is the vast change in the structure of the global economy over the past 40 years. This is the development of a highly integrated global production system with complex transportation, communication, and financial interconnections which has undermined previous US economic supremacy.
Navarro is just one of the more extreme expressions of the thinking in key sections of the US ruling class that its economic decline must be countered by all means available, including tariffs, financial sanctions and war, above all against China, which is being actively prepared.
The document is based on the big lie which sits at very centre of US tariff policy—that tariffs are an impost on the exporter, rather than a tax paid by the importer in the US, which is often then passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
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It is doubtful that a more chaotic trade and tariff policy has ever been devised. But its contradictions—creating an illegality where none existed before—do not spring from the fevered brains of Trump and members of his administration but from the fact their policies are in the deepest historical sense reactionary.
That is, they are advanced on the basis of a nationalist economic agenda, trying to secure the maintenance of American economic hegemony, under conditions where the foundations on which the nation-state system and US hegemony rested have been swept aside by the development of globalised production.
A commodity can no longer be stamped as made in China, made in Germany, made in the US or any other country but is the product of global labour—the integration of high-tech developments, manufacture of components, the assembly of final products into a unified system of production.
These objective developments, rooted in the development of the productive forces themselves, make clear not only the possibility of a planned world socialist economy but its necessity for the resolution of the contradictions of the capitalist system because the response of the Trump regime is to double down on its irrational and reactionary agenda.
17. CIA ran secret drone campaign against Ecuadorian fishermen—prosecutor investigating it was murdered
Drone strikes on three Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galapagos Islands were carried out under a covert CIA program of the type authorized personally by the president and never publicly acknowledged, the Washington Post reported last Thursday.
That same day, in Panama, US War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the doctrine behind it. Anyone trafficking drugs, he declared, is “a target, just like ISIS or al-Qaida.” Washington had spent 25 years refining “the kill chain on how to diagnose and target networks halfway around the world,” he added, and would now apply those skills in the hemisphere “ruthlessly.”
Two months earlier, the prosecutor whose case files included those exact three attacks was shot dead in the street. Gloria Alexandra Bravo Cedeño, 46, was killed on June 14 in central Manta by a gunman on a motorcycle as she walked to her car. Her sister Olinda was also killed trying to shield her. Not one of the international reports on the CIA revelations has mentioned her name and made the connection.
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Before each attack, the Post established from flight and ship-tracking data that a Cessna Citation Longitude airplane fitted with surveillance equipment flew from Ilopango airport, El Salvador toward the fishing boats. Radio transmissions recorded it arriving from Tennessee with a crew of six in November and taxiing to a military section of the airport.
It flew under a US registration number that appears in no FAA record—federal law exempts “aircraft of the national defense forces of the United States”—reserved by a company with no evident website, listing as its address a mailbox at a UPS store in Virginia, a detail first reported by the New York Times the previous day.
On January 20, the day the Fiorella vanished, the tower recorded the plane’s pre-dawn departure. “FENIX 701,” the pilot said in English with an American accent. It had flown toward the Fiorella’s position on January 17, 18 and 20, covering 750 miles on the last flight before dropping off public tracking, and landed back at Ilopango at 9:30 a.m. The Fiorella transmitted its position for the last time two and a half hours later.
Ilopango is no arbitrary choice. In 1985 and 1986, the airport served as the hub through which US military and CIA officers funneled weapons and logistics to the Nicaraguan contras in their terrorist war against the Sandinista government. US imperialism has resumed operations from the same runway four decades on. Former ambassador John Feeley told the Post the operation appeared to be run “out of a very nontraditional command.”
Trump has signed an authorization for CIA operations against transnational criminal organizations, including through lethal force. Most recently, threatening a similar CIA action like the tracking of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro before his abduction by US Special Operations Forces in January, the White House authorized covert CIA operations against the Cuban leadership.
The survivors’ accounts make clear that the plan was a mass execution and abduction. Quadcopter drones dropped explosives onto the galley of the Negra Francisca Duarte II, where the gas cylinders were stored, destroying much of the vessel instantly. One crewman was thrown into a diesel tank; another lost most of the vision in one eye. The range of such drones means the operators were close by.
The men reached a blue ship they took for a rescue vessel. Armed men in brown camouflage, some with US flag patches, leveled rifles at them, then cuffed and hooded them on deck. “They took us to the bow. We heard: ‘Boom! Boom!’ I managed to lift the hood and saw them blowing up the boat,” one survivor recounted. The Americans opened beers in front of the hooded fishermen and remarked on how cold they were.
After eight days the men were handed to the Salvadoran coast guard and deported home. “Why did they hand us over to foreigners when we were near the Ecuadorian coast guard?” they asked.
An Ecuadorian patrol vessel had inspected the Negra Francisca before the attack and found nothing illicit. Of the 46 crew across the three boats, Human Rights Watch found only four had any criminal record—none for trafficking or violence.
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In Washington, the response has been silence. Members of the congressional intelligence committees contacted by the Post declined to comment. Covert action requires a presidential finding reported to those committees: either the ranking Democrats were briefed on a program that disappeared eight fishermen and said nothing for seven months, or they were not briefed and will not say so now.
A June 11 letter from Representatives Joaquín Castro and Bill Keating demanding answers went unanswered past its July 10 deadline, and Keating’s amendment to force release of unclassified footage of the three incidents was defeated on the House floor. The same party voted overwhelmingly for the $901 billion military budget that pays for all of it.
In Ecuador, the story was buried within 48 hours. El Universo, Expreso, Extra, El Diario and others ran the same EFE wire copy, paragraph for paragraph, as did outlets across Latin America. No editorials. No summons of the foreign minister before the National Assembly. No investigative follow-up. Televistazo alone put the question to the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry and the US Embassy, and received no answer from any of them.
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The Post stresses that the CIA program is separate, institutionally and methodologically, from Operation Southern Spear. Southern Spear is overt: uniformed forces carrying out strikes announced on social media by Hegseth himself. The Galapagos operation sought to leave no fingerprint, employing an unregistered aircraft, a shell company, an unmarked ship. The survivors were seized, hooded, held at sea for eight days, and then delivered to a third country, which processed them as shipwreck victims.
That is the method of Operation Condor—the network through which the US-backed dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil coordinated to abduct, torture and disappear opponents across each other’s borders. Tens of thousands were killed. Its purpose was to decapitate left-wing forces and the workers’ movement across the continent. The stage is being set for operations of precisely that character.
Trump’s “Shield of the Americas,” launched in March, aligns Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panama behind Washington’s command. The same Bukele government that opened Ilopango to the surveillance flights, and whose coast guard helped with the abduction of fishermen, opened the CECOT prison to hundreds of deportees expelled from the United States. The machinery that disappears Ecuadorian fishermen and the machinery that disappears immigrant workers from American cities are one and the same.
Hegseth was explicit about the geography. The “kill chain” he pledged to employ ruthlessly extends through the Pentagon’s SOUTHCOM and NORTHCOM together. NORTHCOM’s area of responsibility is the continental United States, Mexico and Canada. The apparatus being built is not aimed at cartels. It is aimed at the working class throughout the Americas.
18. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Brazil:
Canada:
Nova Scotia ambulance dispatchers in fifth week of strike
Chile:
Paraguay :
Puerto Rico:
United States:
Botanical garden workers in Richmond, Virginia, reject final offer, consider strike
Illinois IKEA warehouse workers strike
Uruguay:
19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
