Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:

1. Oligarchy, dictatorship and the political radicalization of the American working class 

Joseph Kishore, the national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (US) reports to the party's Ninth Congress to introduce its second resolution: the fight against the drive to dictatorship must be waged not by relying on Trump's factional opponents within the ruling class or the Democratic Party, but through the independent political mobilization of the working class, organized in rank-and-file committees and armed with a revolutionary socialist program, to conquer political power.

With assistance from Socialism AI, here is a summary of his report:

Introduction

• The report introduced the second resolution, "The drive to dictatorship and the political radicalization in the United States," which was unanimously adopted
• David North's opening report established the framework: the Congress convenes at "a critical turning point in the political history of the United States and the world—the point of intersection of war, economic crisis, and rapidly growing social radicalization"
• The resolution takes up the political and social consequences of that intersection within the United States
• The analysis is the product of sustained historical work, not an impressionistic response to recent events
• The ruling class placed Trump in power believing "the interests of the oligarchy would be well cared for by a sociopathic gangster"
• The recently published Mehring Books volume Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy is "the documentary record of the analysis upon which the resolution rests"

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Part I: Oligarchy and the Record of the Party's Analysis of Trump

Two false interpretations of Trump

• Interpretation 1: Trump as "a monster risen from the depths, an inexplicable eruption into an otherwise healthy democracy" → task becomes restoration and electing Democrats
• Interpretation 2: Trump as "a satanic genius, imposing his will upon a helpless nation" → working class reduced to spectator, opposition limited to moral protest and appeals to the institutions that produced him

Five themes characterizing the SEP's analysis across the Trump period

1. Class analysis of Trump's rise

   • As early as March 3, 2016, David North wrote that Trump's candidacy could "no longer be dismissed" and was "of a distinctly fascistic character"
   • Rejected the Democratic Party/media explanation that Trump's rise was simply the product of racism and the supposed racism of white workers
   • Identified a sociopolitical process: Trump pitched his message to "the intense anger and frustration of tens of millions of Americans who feel—quite justifiably—neglected and scorned by a political system that is indifferent to the problems with which they are confronted every day"
   • Why did the right benefit rather than the left? The Democratic Party is "the political instrument of Wall Street and substantial sections of military and intelligence strategists," and the pseudo-left milieu is characterized by "complacency, self-absorption and, above all, contempt for the working class"
   • Prognosis from 2016: "Even if Trump were to disappear tomorrow, it would not be long before another fascistic demagogue would emerge to take his place"
   • Warning of "discontented military and police-intelligence operatives, with substantial combat experience and access to serious fighting forces, who are preparing to enter the political arena" — written five years before January 6
   • Repudiation of racialist interpretation: Niles Niemuth answered a New York Times op-ed claiming white men supported Trump to recover lost advantages; Eric London refuted the "inherent racism of the white working class" narrative with a detailed analysis of election returns
   • This fight anticipated the party's response to the 1619 Project three years later
   • The SEP statement on Trump's first inauguration: "History has caught up with American capitalism… Donald Trump personifies the corruption, ruthlessness, parasitism and essentially fascistic mindset of the capitalist oligarchs who control the United States"

2. Class anatomy of ruling-class opposition to Trump

   • The June 13, 2017 Political Committee statement, "Palace Coup or Class Struggle," delineated three forms of opposition to Trump, corresponding to three classes:
     • First: Opposition of a powerful faction within the capitalist class — "fundamentally antidemocratic, involving behind-the-scenes plotting with elements within the military-intelligence establishment and corporate-financial elite" — the methods of a palace coup. Its quarrel was over the anti-Russia campaign, not democratic rights or anti-working class policies
     • Second: Opposition of "affluent sections of the middle class" — the DSA, ISO, Socialist Alternative, Greens — whose function is "to maintain the domination of the ruling class over the working class"
     • Third: Opposition "between the ruling class and the working class, the broad mass of the population"
   • Strategic conclusion: The working class must fight for Trump's removal, but "this task must not be entrusted to Trump's factional opponents in the ruling class… It must develop its struggle against Trump under its own banner and with its own program"

3. Consistent warning of the fascist danger

   • October 2019: "No to American Fascism! Build a Mass Movement to Force Trump Out!" — declared "The old refrain, 'It can't happen here'… is hopelessly out of date." The source: "The massive concentration of wealth within the richest one percent of the population and the unprecedented level of social inequality are incompatible with traditional democratic forms of rule"
   • June 2, 2020: Following Trump's law-and-order broadcast and military assault on peaceful protests outside the White House — "will live in infamy as the beginning of a coup d'état by a criminal administration" (seven months before January 6)
   • November 11, 2020: The Political Committee set out the mechanism of the conspiracy in advance — Republican legislatures repudiating the popular vote, legal challenges before a packed Supreme Court, the precedent of Bush v. Gore — while Biden dismissed Trump's actions as "an embarrassment"
   • January 7, 2021: David North wrote: "Not only can a fascist coup happen here. It has happened here… even if the initial effort has fallen short of its goal, it will happen again"
   • Contrast with Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin, who tweeted he had "seen the stability of US republican institutions in the face of a right-wing mob"

4. Historical and international framework

   • David North's lecture 11 days after the coup: "The main cause of the eruption of January 6 is to be found in the global crisis of the capitalist system, rather than in specifically American conditions"
   • The coup situated in the arc of American history since Kennedy's inauguration (60 years to the day before Biden's):
     • Kennedy's reformism was a strategy against socialism, resting on economic dominance that was beginning to shift
     • Nixon's ending of dollar-gold convertibility (August 15, 1971) was the turning point
     • "The abandonment of social reform required a turn toward increasing social repression. The trajectory of American democracy followed the trajectory of American capitalism—that is, downward"
     • Milestones: Watergate, Carter's Taft-Hartley against striking miners, Reagan's destruction of PATCO, Iran-Contra and Rex 84, theft of the 2000 election, Patriot Act and Guantanamo, Obama's targeted assassination of US citizens without due process
     • Growth of financial parasitism from the 1990s through the pandemic bailouts
   • "January 6 marks a new stage in a protracted process of democratic breakdown"
   • Basic alternatives: "Where is America going? Will it go toward fascism, or will it go toward socialism? … If democracy is to survive … power must pass into the hands of the working class"

5. Continuity — through Biden to Trump's return and the present drive to dictatorship

   • The Biden years as "an interregnum within a single process," not a rupture
   • Biden two days after the coup: "We need a Republican Party. We need an opposition that is principled and strong"
   • The Democrats' investigation concluded the central cause of January 6 was one man — "to whitewash the role of pillars of the US government that were deeply involved in the coup"
   • The Justice Department prosecuted foot soldiers and left the network of officials, operatives, and financiers untouched
   • The Democratic Party "feared the population more than it feared the coup"
   • Biden policy: initiation and escalation of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia; arming, financing, and shielding the Israeli genocide in Gaza; shoring up ruling-class consensus behind American imperialism
   • Trump's return: no mass surge of support — he gained three million votes; Harris fell 6.3 million below Biden and improved only among voters earning above $200,000/year
   • Among the 29% of voters describing themselves as angry, Trump won 71 to 27
   • Trump's return represents "the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States"
   • Record of the second Trump administration: Nazi-inspired "state of exception," ICE as paramilitary force, ICE murder, deployment of federal troops into American cities, invasion of Venezuela, war against Iran, systematic erection of political dictatorship
   • September 2025: "Trump's Fascist Conspiracy and How to Fight It" — the drive to dictatorship will continue even if Trump is removed; starting point is a break with the Democratic Party; fight must be based on industrial mobilization through rank-and-file committees
   • David North's November 2025 lecture, "Where Is America Going? Oligarchy, Dictatorship, and the Revolutionary Crisis of Capitalism":
     • Central thesis: the political structure is being brought into alignment with the class structure
     • Trump's cabinet and top appointees command a collective net worth above $60 billion — "This is not symbolic representation. It is direct rule by the oligarchy"
     • Historical law: "It is a characteristic of every ruling class that as it heads for extinction, it becomes increasingly aggressive"
     • Political conclusion: America is going to socialism — not as inevitability but as objective tendency, raising the imperative of political leadership
     • "The most politically conservative working class, supposedly immune to the appeal of socialism, is now being politically radicalized"
     • At this lecture, David North announced the initiation of Socialism AI

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Part II: The Political Role and History of the DSA

The developing radicalization

• Trump's first inauguration statement: the administration "is, in the final analysis, the product of the desperate crisis that afflicts American capitalism. Its reckless policies will set into motion forces both within the United States and internationally that it cannot control." Those forces are now in motion
• Under the blows of impossible living costs, endless war, ICE murder, open dictatorship, and extreme social inequality, millions are being propelled into political life and moving to the left
• Polling: nearly 40% of registered voters would consider a socialist presidential candidate (46% among voters under 30); roughly one-third of Democrats identify as "democratic socialists" and are more likely to earn under $100,000/year
• This has found initial expression in growth of the DSA and votes for DSA-endorsed candidates
• The millions voting for such candidates are "not voting for the Democratic Party's record but against capitalism, for candidates they understand to be socialists"
• "The objective significance of this growth must be acknowledged: it registers a leftward movement of masses of workers and young people and the collapse of the decades-long anti-socialist taboo. But acknowledgment is not adaptation"

The DSA is not a socialist party

• It is "a faction of the Democratic Party, and its principal role is to block the development of an independent political movement of the working class, to capture the movement toward socialism and bind it back to the capitalist two-party system"
• It is a 44-year-old organization resting on a political lineage of nearly 90 years, every stage defined by a break from Marxism and from the working class

Historical roots

• Shachtmanite origins: The roots lie in Max Shachtman's 1940 break from Trotsky and the SWP over the class nature of the Soviet Union. Trotsky's essays in In Defense of Marxism established that what was at issue was method and class orientation — the abandonment of dialectical materialism for petty-bourgeois pragmatism. Trotsky insisted the theoretical capitulation would be followed by a political one; he was proved correct within a decade
• Shachtman's trajectory: refused to defend the USSR → by 1950, defending US imperialism in Korea → supported Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War → integrated followers into the anti-communist apparatus of the AFL-CIO under George Meany
• Michael Harrington: Shachtman's protégé, shared his pro-imperialist politics. At Port Huron (1962), attacked the SDS draft statement as insufficiently anti-communist
• DSOC (1972): Founded on the program of "realignment" — socialists working within the Democratic Party, functioning as "the left wing of the possible," the possible being defined by what the Democratic Party and ruling class would permit. "This was a founding programmatic renunciation of the political independence of the working class, and it remains the program of the DSA today"
• Harrington's break with Shachtman reflected ruling-class shifts — the McGovern campaign and the Democratic Party's turn toward middle-class politics (environmentalism, feminism, identity politics). Shachtman's acolytes ended up in the Republican Party and the neoconservative movement
• DSA formed 1982: merger of Harrington's DSOC with the New American Movement (NAM). The name itself is revealing: not a party but a "movement"; not socialist or communist but "American"; above all, "new" — in relation to Marxism, the Russian Revolution, and the entire strategic experience of the international working class, all to be left behind
• NAM: founded 1971 out of the wreckage of the SDS, gathered the residue of the New Left — Gramscian vocabulary, former Stalinists and CP family members bringing Popular Front sensibilities
• The DSA is "the organizational fusion of these two repudiations of Marxism: the Shachtmanite renunciation of the defense of the workers state and its adaptation to imperialism, and the New Left renunciation of the working class itself"

The DSA's present program and character

• The DSA's 2026 convention program, "Workers Deserve More": "a compendium of reform proposals entirely oriented to working within the state, and particularly the Democratic Party"
• Its complaint against the Democratic Party is that it is "asleep at the wheel" — a party of Wall Street and the Pentagon described as a negligent institution
• No call for a workers party, no break with the two-party system, no analysis of imperialism, nothing on the war against Russia, nothing on Iran
• Convention programming: "Governing as Socialists: The DSA Difference," promising "co-governance with Socialists in Office" — a formulation assuming the permanence of the capitalist state
• DSA New York co-chair on Fox News: "building allies with, like, perhaps Governor Newsom in California"

Internal crisis of the DSA

• The elevation of the DSA into the apparatus of the capitalist state is producing a crisis within the organization
• Factional conflict crystallized around a possible AOC presidential campaign in 2028
• The National Political Committee voted 15–8 to eliminate the all-membership poll for deciding endorsement
• Red Star faction: opposes AOC endorsement because she "endorsed Biden in the midst of his genocide of Palestinians"
• Reform and Revolution: fuller indictment — AOC voted to ban the railroad strike (2022), endorsed Biden and Harris (2024), voted to fund the Ukraine war, called Israel's Iron Dome "a positive good," takes no "consistent, oppositional stance towards the two parties of Wall Street" — "devastating indictments of the DSA and of Ocasio-Cortez, largely drawn from the World Socialist Web Site"
• Marxist Unity Group: "if we pool our resources and launch a serious campaign in 2027, we have a decent shot at electing AOC President, thus completely destroying our own movement almost overnight"
• None of the factions has principled differences with the DSA's politics — their conclusions are organizational adjustments, not a break with the Democratic Party
• Cosmonaut magazine published expelled ISA members who declared: "The correctness of our positions should be judged on the strength of our analysis, not fidelity to any 'tradition'" — specifically the Trotskyist tradition
• What is rejected across the entire milieu: "any appeal to principled politics, to history, to the strategic experience of the international workers' movement… 'Tradition' is placed in quotation marks and set aside as an encumbrance"

The DSA in power

• Bhaskar Sunkara in a New York Times interview: defended Zohran Mamdani — "Zohran Mamdani right now is administrating a police department with over 30,000 armed men and women, and he's administrating it by all accounts very well"
• "I think in practice, the experience of governance, of competing in elections, is a moderating force on a lot of these issues"
• Mamdani's record: implementation of austerity, betrayal of the nurses' strike, conflict with teachers, two meetings with Trump in the White House — including two days before the Iran war
• Sunkara on the economy: "Any form of social democracy is grow, give. There needs to be profitability in order to have something to redistribute." Socialism would emerge "centuries from now." In the short term, "we need firms that are profitable"
• On immigration: abolish ICE, but "Obviously, we still need some sort of border enforcement and customs"
• On Biden: "his failures were fundamentally the failure to communicate"
• The governing formula: "American socialists are way more liberal than they themselves think" — meaning DSA politics is the politics of the Democratic Party

Class character of the DSA

• Not a working-class organization — arose from two petty-bourgeois tendencies, rests on affluent layers of the professional middle class
• Its function is not to represent workers but to manage them on behalf of the Democratic Party
• It is pro-imperialist
• It brings the worst traditions of two currents: the accommodation to imperialism of social democracy, and the subordination of the working class to bourgeois parties (the cardinal service of Stalinism to American capitalism)
• Stalinism in the DSA: Sunkara's Socialist Manifesto upholds the CP's Popular Front policies of the 1930s as a model. In 2021, DSA officials posted memes celebrating the assassination of Trotsky — never repudiated by the national secretary
• Neither the DSA nor any pseudo-left group has said anything about the death threat against Will Lehman by Raymond Jensen, a high-ranking UAW official who supports Shawn Fain
• The DSA is "the American representative of an international phenomenon: the pseudo-left, the political tendency of affluent layers of the middle class that employs socialist phrases in defense of capitalism." Parallels: Syriza, Podemos, Germany's Left Party, the Corbyn movement — wherever in power, "it has administered the capitalist state against the working class"

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Conclusion: The Socialist Alternative

The program of the SEP

• Counterposed to pseudo-left politics: not better reforms, but a revolutionary and internationalist program
• Socialism is "the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production and the conquest of political power by the working class. It means the expropriation of the financial-corporate oligarchy and the transformation of the banks and major corporations into public property under democratic control. It means social equality… And it must be international. The program of the SEP is the program of world socialist revolution"

Objective conditions and party building

• The same crisis producing global war and placing a fascist gangster in the White House is driving the working class into struggle
• The 2010 prognosis — "the change in objective conditions will lead American workers to change their minds" — is being confirmed
• Conditions for significant growth of the party exist
• "Above all, the building of the party in the working class"

Practical tasks

• Will Lehman's UAW presidential campaign: a spearhead for intervention into the industrial working class and the working class as a whole
• Rank-and-file committees: must be built in every factory, workplace, and neighborhood where the party is active, in all industries and sectors
• IYSSE branches: must be built on campuses throughout the country
• Socialism AI: must be brought into daily political activity for educating and training a new generation
• The Oligarchy book: must be distributed and studied on the widest possible scale

The decisive point: history and theory

• "The growth of the party is not a merely quantitative process. Recruitment must be accompanied by—and is, in fact, inseparable from—the systematic education of the cadre… Marxist theory is not an ornament of the party's practice but its foundation"
• The task: transform political radicalization into a conscious revolutionary movement, arm workers and youth with knowledge of the history of the Marxist movement, train them as cadre of the Fourth International
• What stands between workers and youth moving toward socialism and the fight they seek is "a body of political experience that has not yet been assimilated, embodied in the history of the International Committee of the Fourth International"
• Warning of the Socialist Labour League against the drift of the OCI: "There is always a danger… that a revolutionary party responds to the situation in the working class not in a revolutionary way, but by adaptation to the level of struggle to which the workers are restricted by their own experience under the old leaderships"
• The safeguard is historical education — orientation cannot be improvised from the events of the week; it is "derived from the strategic experiences of the international workers movement"
• The five phases in the history of the Trotskyist movement are "the accumulated strategic capital of the world socialist revolution"
• The politicization of workers and youth "poses, above all, the questions of program, perspective, and leadership" — with a definite historical answer: "Trotskyism is the Marxism of the 21st century"
• "On the outcome of this fight—more than on anything that Trump does, that the ruling class does—depends the answer to the question: socialism or barbarism?"
• The resolution is moved for adoption.

2. Mamdani silent on NYPD surveillance of New York City public housing tenants

On August 6, Brooklyn Defender Services and the civil rights law firm Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP sued New York City, the New York Police Department and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch on behalf of tenant associations at the Langston Hughes Houses and Samuel Tilden Houses, challenging the city’s covert integration of public housing security cameras into the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System (DAS).

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has not commented on the suit, much less call a halt to the program. Mamdani’s silence is the third major attack by his administration in a single month on the working class, particularly its poorest and most vulnerable sections. 

*****

Roughly 330,000 of the poorest New Yorkers live in NYCHA public housing, where rents remain far below the average asking price of more than $4,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. Without public housing, many would face vastly higher housing costs or homelessness. This layer of the working class is being directly squeezed by the Trump Administration: an estimated tens of thousands of NYCHA residents are directly affected by the federal SNAP cuts and expanded work rules.

Decades of chronic disinvestment have left the aging housing stock with an estimated $78 billion capital repair backlog. Residents endure dangerous conditions: toxic mold from deteriorated plumbing, winter heat and hot water outages, persistent elevator breakdowns, lead paint hazards and deteriorating facades. Mamdani’s Block-by-Block housing program allocates only $5.6 billion to NYCHA over five years, less than one-thirteenth of the authority’s estimated $78 billion capital repair backlog.

The class character of the NYCHA surveillance program was highlighted this week when Mamdani backed proposed legislation forbidding “places of public accommodation” from using biometric recognition to identify customers. The bill, sponsored by DSA council member Shahana Hanif, targets facial recognition used by Trump ally James Dolan, the billionaire owner of the Knicks and Madison Square Garden, to track and expel attorneys from firms involved in litigation against MSG.

Significantly, the proposed legislation would leave the NYPD’s own use of facial recognition untouched. It expressly exempts the collection, storage, sharing and use of biometric information by government agencies. Police could therefore apply facial recognition to footage obtained from MSG or other private camera systems, even though the businesses themselves would be prohibited from doing so.

While MSG’s use of facial recognition at its venues is reactionary and must be opposed, Mamdani’s defense of MSG shareholders over working people in NYCHA—who could scarcely afford a Knicks ticket—is telling. It demonstrates that the class orientation of the DSA is to the NYPD, the Trump administration, and a capitalist oligarchy which is increasingly terrified of any eruption of mass dissent.

*****

Mamdani’s silence on the NYCHA spying is part of a rapid escalation in his war against the working class. On August 7, after the Supreme Court upheld the revocation of Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Haitians, Mamdani announced Haitian city employees would be terminated—directly enforcing the fascistic anti-immigrant machinery of an administration whose leader has called Haiti a “shithole country” and accused Haitian immigrants of eating pets. He made no call for protests, strikes or legal challenges, instead directing appeals to Trump himself, with whom he has met twice in the White House and boasted of a “partnership.”

This came days after he reversed his pledge to support a $10,000 bonus for paraprofessional school aides—among the city’s most exploited workers, starting at $33,222—invoking the anti-labor Taylor Law to block the measure, in capitulation to Wall Street and the corporate media.

In the case of the Haitian workers, as with NYCHA surveillance, Mamdani acts as a direct instrument of the capitalist state’s repressive apparatus, stripping workers of their livelihoods and legal right to remain, delivering them to a deportation regime that may send them back to gang violence and possible death in Haiti.

These actions are not aberrations but the logical culmination of Mamdani’s record since taking office: he has slashed school and homeless programs, deferred city pension contributions, reneged on free bus service, and created a commission to prepare permanent austerity.

This is the DSA in power. Mamdani and the DSA are not “socialists” who have compromised, but a faction of the Democratic Party whose function is to channel working-class opposition back into the capitalist state, block an independent political movement of the working class, and directly implement state repression against it. Social tensions are growing in America’s largest and most unequal city every day and must invariably find an outlet. The mass surveillance of NYCHA residents is a critical part of the state’s preparations to contain the inevitable eruption of social opposition.

3. More than two-thirds of UPS’ US package volume now handled in automated facilities

UPS is now handling 68.5 percent of its US package volume through automated facilities, up from 64 percent a year ago, an increase equivalent to 337 million additional packages handled through automation, according to the company’s quarterly earnings call on July 28. The company is combining this automation drive with the largest consolidation of its network in its history. UPS Chief Financial Officer Brian Dykes said in the company’s second-quarter earnings call, “We will have eliminated 50 million hours through the course of last year and this year, nearly 78,000 operational positions that were associated with that volume, and we’ll close nearly 150 buildings.”

These developments further expose the Teamsters’ so-called “historic” 2023 contract as an historic sellout. The contract dropped the demands of part-time workers, while wage increases for some workers were to be more than compensated for by massive attacks on jobs through automation. The jobs assault began almost immediately, with UPS eliminating entire shifts in late 2023 and announcing plans to cut 12,000 primarily management positions in early 2024, a precursor to the large-scale reductions in drivers and operational staff that have mounted since.

Since the beginning of this jobs onslaught, the Teamsters bureaucracy has organized no struggle against the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs. General President Sean O’Brien has occasionally claimed the union would “fight” if UPS violates the existing contract, but the bureaucracy has been almost entirely silent on the deepest layoffs in the history of UPS. Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which backed O’Brien’s election, acknowledged last year that automation would cause permanent job losses but declared, “we can’t stop it altogether,” directing workers instead toward grievances, seniority rules and other provisions of the contract.

The bureaucracy’s claims that the 2023 agreement secured thousands of full-time jobs and protected workers from layoffs have been exposed as a sham. The contract requires UPS to fill 22,500 permanent full-time positions with existing part-time workers and create 7,500 additional full-time jobs in its final three years, but it does not bar the company from eliminating far larger numbers of jobs elsewhere through automation, closures and attrition.

*****

The scale of the attack is clear from UPS’ own figures. The company reported 370,000 US employees at the end of 2025, down from 414,000 at the end of 2023; about 295,000 US workers were covered by the national Teamsters agreement at the end of 2025. UPS says it reduced its operational workforce by 48,000 positions in 2025, including 15,000 fewer seasonal positions. Its second-quarter 2026 figure of nearly 78,000 operational positions eliminated across last year and this year shows that the assault is still accelerating.

The technology being introduced goes far beyond faster conveyor belts. UPS is deploying robotic systems to unload trailers, pick and sort small packages, and autonomous guided vehicles to move packages and heavy or irregular shipments through facilities. These systems directly automate work traditionally performed by package handlers inside the hubs.

UPS is also automating the identification and routing of packages. Its Smart Package Smart Facility system uses RFID sensors to register packages as they move through buildings and vehicles, reducing the need for repeated manual scans. Network-planning software and a digital twin of UPS’ facilities, air and ground networks and package flows are used to model volume and reroute work across the system.

These technologies function together as part of UPS’ “Network of the Future.” Automation allows the company to consolidate sorts into fewer buildings, shift volume to highly automated hubs and reduce the number of workers needed for a given package volume. UPS itself says the program combines automation with operational sort consolidation and has already led to reductions in facilities, vehicles, aircraft and workforce.

Essential to this process has been UPS’ deliberate reduction of its Amazon business. By the end of the second quarter, UPS had completed a reduction of more than 50 percent in Amazon volume from 2024 levels, shedding roughly two million lower-margin packages per day. The company is replacing this volume with higher-margin business, particularly healthcare, business-to-business and international shipping, while concentrating the remaining work in a smaller and more automated network.

*****

UPS is part of a much broader drive to use automation to reduce labor costs. Internal Amazon planning documents reported last year projected that robotics could allow the company to avoid hiring more than 600,000 US workers by 2033.

The enormous increase in productivity raises the decisive issue of which class will control the technology and for what purpose. UPS has demonstrated that new machinery and software can move packages with far less human labor. Under corporate ownership, however, every hour of labor saved becomes a target for elimination from the payroll, so that the greater the advance in productivity, the greater the threat to workers’ livelihoods.

The working class has the opposite interest. If technology allows the same work to be done in fewer hours, it should mean a shorter workweek with no loss in pay, lighter workloads and safer conditions, not unemployment and intensified exploitation for those who remain. Realizing that potential requires taking control over production and the deployment of technology out of the hands of UPS management and Wall Street and placing it under the democratic control of the workers themselves.

The fight against layoffs at UPS therefore requires the building of rank-and-file committees in every workplace, independent of the Teamsters bureaucracy, to organize action against closures and job cuts rather than bargain over their effects after management has decided them. These committees must unite workers across the logistics industry and internationally in a struggle for workers’ control and the socialist transformation of society, so that the vast productive gains from automation are used to shorten the workweek, raise living standards and improve safety instead of destroying jobs and enriching corporate executives and Wall Street investors.

4. Chilean miners’ families fight alone as management walks free and unions look the other way

The corporatized union apparatus aligned to the Chilean “left” has done nothing but issue statements, observe moments of silence and light candles.

5. Ex-Left Party leader helps pave the way for far-right rule in eastern Germany

Sahra Wagenknecht’s rapprochement with the AfD has been apparent for years. Now, she is not only moving closer to the far-right party in terms of policy, but is helping it attain power. 

6. Federal monitor allows UAW official who issued death threat against Will Lehman to collect his $200,000 salary 

More than a month after a high-ranking official of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Raymond Jensen, posted a death threat against Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president, that official remains an employee of the UAW International, drawing a salary of $202,000 a year from the dues of the membership.

Lehman reported on X that, late last week, a lawyer for the court-appointed Monitor overseeing the UAW informed his legal team that “the Union is presently considering next steps with respect to Mr. Jensen’s employment.” Lehman’s team was told to contact the UAW Legal Department “if you have any further questions about their process.”

That is, the Monitor, vested by a federal court with sweeping disciplinary powers, has handed the fate of a self-confessed author of a death threat to the apparatus headed by UAW President Shawn Fain—the man whose re-election campaign badge Raymond Jensen Jr. still has on his Facebook page, and on whose behalf the threat was made.

*****

The Monitor claimed that it had determined a penalty “to reflect the seriousness of his conduct and to deter similar misconduct by others.” It stipulated, and Jensen agreed to, a two-year suspension from UAW membership, a permanent ban on him running for any elected union position, a prohibition on campaigning for any candidate in this election cycle, and making a formal apology to Lehman.

Workers welcomed the sanctions and drew the obvious conclusion that Jensen would not be allowed to continue his position as a UAW “organizer.” This is clearly what “suspension from the UAW” implied, and any worker who issued a death threat would be immediately terminated from their position. 

According to the UAW, however, Jensen can be “suspended” as a UAW member while remaining employed by the UAW. Indeed, the only practical consequence is that Jensen no longer has to pay union dues. In other words, an official who violated federal election rules and likely federal criminal law will not only continue to be fully paid, but also receive a bonus!

The Monitor cannot claim it lacks the power to do more. The 2021 consent decree gives it “the authority and duty to bring disciplinary charges against individuals,” including the power to fine them, strip their benefits or “otherwise discipline” them. When it found last December that Fain’s chief of staff, Chris Brooks, had conspired with Fain to strip Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock of her duties and then lied to its investigators, Brooks was removed from his position within two weeks. Lying to the Monitor is evidently a firing offense. Threatening to shoot the opposition candidate is a personnel matter, under review.

*****

Certain truths emerge from this episode and the response to it.

First, the character of the apparatus. As Lehman has insisted from the beginning, the threat was never about just himself. It was the answer of the apparatus to rank-and-file opposition—an organization of 560 functionaries taking home more than $100,000 a year, which has presided over decades of concessions, plant closures and the deaths of workers, and which cannot answer opposition with arguments.

Jensen's image only put into a picture what workers confront every day from an apparatus that functions as an arm of corporate management: the 'toxic climate of retribution' the Monitor itself found Fain to have presided over, and the contempt for every worker who votes down a contract, raises a question at a meeting or dares to run against it. 

Second, the role of the Monitor. Acting on behalf of the capitalist state, it functions not to democratize the UAW but to protect the apparatus—certifying an election in which Fain was installed with the votes of 6 percent of the membership, and now leaving Jensen's paycheck in Fain's hands.

Third, the bureaucracy cannot be reformed, whether from within or by federal oversight. It must be abolished, and settling accounts with it is the task of rank-and-file workers themselves. That is the significance of Lehman's campaign: not to occupy an office at Solidarity House, but to develop a movement of the rank and file—committees in every plant, controlled by workers themselves, linked across industries and borders, with power transferred to the shop floor. 

7. Forklift safety expert calls for independent investigation into catastrophic accident at GM Flint Assembly

While forklifts can be equipped with cameras, proximity detectors and collision-warning systems, workers appear to remain dependent largely upon horns, painted lines, mirrors and the ability of a forklift driver to twist around and look backward.

8. Private credit market under growing stress

Loan defaults are rising and the number of companies financed by private credit being placed on a watch list is growing.

9. Philippine impeachment trial advances Marcos’ consolidation of state power

Behind the constitutional theater in the Philippine Senate, the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte is being staged to eliminate the last significant political obstacle to Washington’s transformation of the archipelago into a forward base for war with China.

10. Russia and Ukraine bleed as NATO’s war threatens to engulf Europe

The UK’s supply of Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine in May 2023 and formal authorization of their use against targets inside Russia a year later prompted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova to state that Russia might hit British targets “on Ukraine’s territory and beyond its borders.”

What no one in the imperialist governments or media will say is that the world is teetering on the brink of one of these threats being acted upon, leading to direct conflict between nuclear-armed powers.

*****

The danger of escalation beyond the borders of Russia and Ukraine reflects the savage intensity of the war within them. Aerial strikes are claiming a rising toll of civilian lives. According to the New York Times, 327 Russian civilians were killed in the first seven months of the year, up from 145 in the same period last year. Another 2,366 were wounded—double last year’s total.

Ukraine suffered its worst month of civilian casualties since 2022 this July, according to the UN: 437 killed and 2,610 injured—a 30 percent increase compared to June and a 70 percent increase compared to July 2025. 

Across the first seven months of the year, 1,830 civilians were killed—taking the war’s total to over 16,000—and 10,638 injured. The overall figure is a 44 percent increase over the same period in 2025 and more than double the same period in 2024.

Workers and their families are being killed as part of a campaign of strikes against industrial facilities, transport, energy and export infrastructure. In Ukraine, multiple ports have been hit—primarily Odessa and Izmail, major terminals for agricultural exports—as have cargo ships like the Golden Leo and Venturo.

Energy infrastructure has been a constant target, especially in the lead-up to and during the winter months, with large numbers of strikes on electricity generation, transmission and distribution facilities, plus heat and power plants, repeatedly taking chunks of power generation capacity offline. Hundreds of strikes, escalating in 2026, have been launched against rail infrastructure.

In Russia, at least two dozen large oil refineries have been hit, leading to a 33 percent month-on-month fall in Russian seaborne oil exports in July 2026. Seven major ports have been damaged, mostly involved in the export of oil, but including the grain-exporting Novorossiysk. Ten Wildberries warehouses, Russia’s Amazon equivalent, have been struck, with Ukraine claiming seven were disabled, affecting up to 20 percent of warehouse space.

Mounting drone and missile “deep strikes” are a response to the fact that the frontline has been fought to a bloody standstill—in a meatgrinder of trenches, artillery and drones. According to the Institute for the Study of War, Russian forces gained just 7.87 percent as much territory in the first half of 2026 as they did in the first half of 2025.

Each side throws tens of thousands of bodies into the maw every month. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an imperialist think tank which has every reason to downplay these figures, roughly 125,000-150,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and up to 475,000 left wounded or missing since the war began.

The CSIS claims 400,000-450,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, out of a total 1.4 million casualties. Russian exile oppositionist news site Mediazona, working with the BBC’s Russian service, has identified 239,000 dead Russian soldiers through relatives’ social media posts, local media reports, and statements from regional officials. They estimate a real figure of 352,000 based on excess male mortality, using data from the national Probate Registry.

No figures can be entirely trusted, but it is clear the overall toll is horrific. In this brutal war of attrition, the intention is to put enough pressure on the other side’s society to force a collapse. Ukraine, a client state of NATO, is pursuing regime change in Russia to the advantage of the imperialist powers. Russia is trying to break the back of Ukraine to prevent this outcome.

*****

With NATO foreclosing a peace deal with terms that would finish the Putin government and prepare a NATO-backed assault against Crimea, the pressure is on the Russian government to escalate its way out of the situation. Meanwhile, Ukraine continues to develop its ability to strike at Russia.

However, the intensification of the war and its costs mean strengthening opposition in the working class. Klepach warned, “No one expected the February Revolution, let me remind you. Lenin wrote in December 1916 that ‘we won’t live to see it,’ but he did just a few months later.”

This is the deathly fear of the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchies both, driving their repression of anti-war sentiment.

The most significant political prisoner of the war, because he represents what the ruling class most fears, is Bogdan Syrotiuk. Sentenced to 15 years by a Ukrainian court for six articles written for the World Socialist Web Site, he is a fighter for the united socialist struggle of Russian, Ukrainian and European workers against the war.

Only by taking up the revolutionary internationalist perspective fought for by Bogdan and the International Committee of the Fourth International can the working class fight its way out of the bloodbath in Russia-Ukraine and the catastrophe looming over Europe. 

11. Trump turns screws on South Korea to join Iran war

Incensed by South Korea’s refusal to join the US war of aggression against Iran, Trump has unilaterally reduced major joint war games that began Monday and announced plans for talks with North Korea.

12. Australia: SEP meeting discusses how to fight Labor government’s attack on National Disability Insurance Scheme

Speakers exposed the disastrous consequences of the evisceration of the NDIS and its impact on the disabled and their families, and the jobs and conditions of health, education and welfare workers.

13. Ukrainian government reinters another Nazi collaborator

The fascistic Ukrainian regime under President Volodymyr Zelensky has repatriated the remains of the founder of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Yehven Konovalets, from the Crooswijk cemetery in Rotterdam, where his body has lain since his assassination by Soviet agent Pavel Sudoplatov in 1938. 

Konovalets’ OUN was subsequently led by the Nazi collaborator Andriy Melnkyk, from whom Konovalets was inseparable. The OUN went on to collaborate in the Holocaust of European Jewry and the Nazi war of extermination against the Soviet Union, in which at least 27 million people were murdered. Konovalets was himself a remorseless fascist and a collaborator with German imperialism in Ukraine since the Civil War that followed the 1917 October Revolution, in which he fought against and was defeated by the Bolsheviks.

Zelensky personally participated in the ceremony and delivered a speech glorifying Konovalets as a national hero. “We are returning home an outstanding son of the Ukrainian people,” he declared. “This is an exemplary warrior and a significant statesman of Ukraine, Colonel Yevhen Konovalets. Together with him, Ukraine has returned a part of itself, of its memory, of Ukrainian experience, of our national history, of all those who lived and fought for Ukraine, our independence, and an independent state at various times. Colonel Yevhen Konovalets is exactly such a figure.”

Zelensky’s personal role gives the lie to all claims that the glorification of Ukrainian fascism is a marginal phenomenon or merely the activity of isolated far-right forces. The head of the Ukrainian state has openly placed himself at the center of the rehabilitation of the OUN and its leaders as “national heroes.”

14.  International support surges for jailed Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk

Bogdan Syrotiuk with a copy of John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World

The wave of opposition to this political frame-up has continued to broaden.

Ukrainian Holocaust historian Marta Havryshko, who has extensively documented the role of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and other far-right and pro-Nazi forces in horrific atrocities during WWII and in contemporary Ukrainian politics, signed the petition on Monday.

“Bogdan is a victim of political repression in Ukraine under Zelensky,” she wrote. “We must protect him.”

Volodymyr Ishchenko, a Ukrainian political sociologist at the Osteuropa-Institut of the Free University of Berlin, commented Tuesday that the prosecution “looks like a typical case of fabricated evidence and framing against Syrotiuk.”

Ishchenko noted that one of the sensational claims originally circulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU)—concerning a Russian military uniform and epaulettes allegedly found during the search of Bogdan’s home—“did not even make it into the main part of the verdict. Even the prosecutor did not use it.”

His comments underscore the fraudulent character of the prosecution. When Bogdan was arrested in April 2024, the SBU publicly portrayed him as an agent of Russia. More than two years later, the court convicted him without establishing any act of espionage or concrete collaboration with the Russian state. A 65-page expert report by leading Ukrainian criminologist Yuri Irkhin found no propaganda in Bogdan’s writings supporting the Russian invasion. Even a subsequent state-commissioned examination found no calls for overthrowing the government, seizing power, committing subversive acts or altering Ukraine’s borders.

Pascal Lottaz, associate professor for Neutrality Studies at Kyoto University’s Faculty of Law and Hakubi Center, shared Havryshko’s comments on the case. Referring to Bogdan’s criticism of “the glorification of the OUN and UPA, the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, and the use of Nazi and far-right imagery in the military, including Azov and other units,” Lottaz wrote:

“15 years of prison for criticizing” these forces. “I’m certain this news won’t make it to mainstream.”

Irish journalist Chay Bowes, who has more than 289,000 followers on X, circulated the WSWS petition appeal, writing: “15 years for daring to tell the truth. 15 years for challenging the Dictatorship. Ukraine is a basket case Dictatorship. Zelensky is a criminal.”

French investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker Paul Moreira, of Premières Lignes, shared the WSWS statement on Bogdan’s sentencing, commenting in French: “15 years in prison for this Trotskyist journalist critical of” the Ukrainian government.

French journalist Alexis Poulin also took up Bogdan’s case on his program Le revue de presse avec Alexis Poulin, calling on his audience of more than 320,000 followers to sign the petition demanding Bogdan’s freedom.

The Italian international-reportage outlet InsideOver published an extensive report on Bogdan’s sentencing Tuesday. The article drew attention both to Havryshko’s research on the neo-Nazi networks embedded in the Ukrainian military and to the denial of necessary medical care to Bogdan during his more than two years in detention.

*****

Italian artist Costantino Ciervo, whose exhibition COMUNE—The Paradox of Similarity in the Middle East Conflict has itself faced attempted censorship on false allegations of antisemitism, declared his support for Bogdan.

Ciervo stated that if Bogdan was being prosecuted for exposing “Ukraine’s historical culpability in abetting the Nazi advance during the Second World War,” this was “not a crime, but a plain historical truth.”

“To be incarcerated for articulating what every pre-eminent historian has repeatedly affirmed in public is nothing short of criminal and scandalous,” he wrote.

Berlin author, publicist and songwriter Wolfgang Herzberg sent a protest letter to the Pervomaisk City District Court, with a copy to the WSWS. He called on the court to “immediately overturn the harsh sentence against Mr. Bogdan Syrotiuk.”

“He merely exercised his right to freedom of expression, which is constitutionally protected in Western democracies, including Germany,” Herzberg wrote. “Ukraine wants to become a member of the EU. It therefore cannot issue such a miscarriage of justice when there is apparently no evidence of concrete, conspiratorial—that is, military—collaboration with Russia.”

Herzberg wrote that he, too, is a staunch opponent of war and stressed that opposition to the war “against both sides” was entirely legitimate and covered by the democratic right to freedom of expression.

The Partisan Defence Committee (Britain), which had already protested Bogdan’s arrest, signed the petition Monday. “The Partisan Defence Committee (Britain) protested Bogdan’s arrest and will strongly add our voice to the growing chorus of protest at this outrageous sentence,” it stated. The organization subsequently issued an appeal on social media: “Free Bogdan Syrotiuk! … sign and circulate it today.”

The Communist Party of Sweden has now also covered the case in its newspaper Riktpunkt. While explicitly noting its political differences with Trotskyism, the article insists on the fundamental democratic principle involved. “Political texts, criticism of the government or demands for international workers’ unity cannot in themselves be equated with high treason,” it states.

*****

Sheldon Richard from Canada wrote: “Bogdan correctly stated that pressure from both sides of the border was the true way to end the war, and for that he was jailed. I assumed that constitutionally protected free speech was a hallmark of the democratic nation of Ukraine.”

Loren Parker in the United States commented: “The Ukrainian regime can’t pretend to be a besieged citadel of democracy when it persecutes dissidents for speech—especially speech which says nothing untrue.”

From New Zealand, Alexia George wrote: “He is a young man who does not support war and has chosen to write about peace between Ukrainians and Russians, not from a pro Russian or Ukrainian position but from a position that values life and peace. That is not treason.”

Jonathan Hall in Britain pointed directly to the internationalist content of Bogdan’s politics: “The spurious charge of ‘treason,’ for which he is condemned, is an instrument of the nationalism which pits the Ukrainian and Russian working classes against each other.”

Brian Dick, from the United States, wrote: “The Zelensky regime has jailed a 27-year-old socialist for 15 years—not for spying, not for sabotage, but for ideas. His books and leaflets were ordered destroyed.”

*****

German supporter Gustav Kemper noted that August 19 marks the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the First Moscow Trial, in which the Stalinist bureaucracy began the public show trials that provided the judicial framework for the extermination of the leaders of the October Revolution and socialist opposition.

“The verdict against Bogdan,” Kemper wrote, “is an attempt by the ‘Western democracies’ to revive the politics of the Moscow Trials because they fear the growing influence of the Fourth International.”

*****

The International Committee of the Fourth International and WSWS will intensify the campaign for Bogdan’s freedom.

We call on workers and young people, critical intellectuals and academics, artists and journalists, trade unions, civil liberties organizations and anti-war groups throughout the world: Take up Bogdan’s defense. Sign and circulate the petition. Pass resolutions demanding his freedom. Send protest letters to the Ukrainian courts. Break the media silence surrounding his case.

Write to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua and the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal at inbox@mka.court.gov.ua, with a copy to freebogdan@wsws.org, demanding that Bogdan’s conviction be overturned and that he be released immediately.

The defense of Bogdan is inseparably connected to the fight against war, dictatorship and fascism. His freedom must be won through the mobilization of the international working class and all principled defenders of democratic rights.

Sign the petition at wsws.org/freebogdan and join the fight to free Bogdan Syrotiuk! 

15.  Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.