Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. From the first to the third American Revolution
This is the sixth and final resolution adopted unanimously by the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), held from August 2 to 7, 2026. The resolution was introduced by the report from Tom Mackaman.
1. July 4, 2026 marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, one of the great revolutionary documents in human history. In the year of the semiquincentennial, the Trump administration and the capitalist oligarchy are constructing a presidential dictatorship.
2. The first American Revolution overthrew the power of monarchy and proclaimed in universal terms—“all men are created equal”—principles that would inspire revolutionary movements for the next two and a half centuries. The second American Revolution, the Civil War of 1861-65, destroyed chattel slavery in the most thoroughgoing confiscation of property in history to that point, under the leadership of Lincoln, whose cause Marx and the First International championed. In contrast to the petty-bourgeois condemnation of the American Revolution, the Marxist movement has never dismissed the bourgeois revolutions as mere masks for property; it defends them as world-historical advances whose promises the bourgeoisie itself would betray.
3. The “self-evident truth” proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal now confronts a society in which a single individual commands a trillion dollars, the top one percent holds a greater share of wealth than has ever been recorded, and the bottom half of the population holds 2.5 percent—an aristocracy of money exceeding in its privileges the monarchical order against which the Revolution was made. The existence of this oligarchy is incompatible with democratic forms of rule.
4. The heritage of the bourgeois democratic revolutions in the United States is under assault from two directions. The Trumpist right drapes its program of dictatorship in the stolen symbols of 1776, converting the Revolution into an exceptionalist nationalist mythology deployed in the service of mass deportations and presidential dictatorship. The racialist school of the New York Times‘ 1619 Project, speaking for the Democratic Party and privileged layers of the middle class, recasts the Revolution as a war for the preservation of slavery and American history as an unbroken racial struggle—dissolving class into race and delegitimizing the democratic tradition itself.
5. Against both falsifications stands the sustained historical work of the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee. Beginning in 2019, the WSWS organized the definitive answer to the 1619 Project, publishing interviews with the leading historians of the American Revolution and the Civil War and collecting this work in The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History (2021). This intervention demonstrated that the defense of historical truth is not an academic exercise but a political task: the racialist falsification of history is directed against the unity of the working class. Nor did it come from nowhere. Thirty years have passed since David North’s Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism (1996), which defended the Enlightenment and the egalitarian heritage of the bourgeois revolutions when they were under attack from every section of the political establishment.
6. The party’s defense of the American Revolution against the petty-bourgeois left has been vindicated by events. On the eve of the greatest assault on democratic rights in American history, the pseudo-left prepared the ground for it: the Revolution was recast as a crime, the Declaration of Independence dismissed as a slaveholder’s lie, and statues of Washington, Jefferson, and even Lincoln defaced and torn down. In teaching a generation that the democratic heritage of 1776 was nothing but a mask for oppression, the pseudo-left disarmed opposition to the real conspiracy against democratic rights and ceded the symbols of the Revolution to the fascist right.
7. This work has been continued and deepened in the anniversary year. On June 25, 2026, the WSWS convened the webinar “The American Revolution and Its Place in History: From the War Against Monarchy to ‘No Kings’,” bringing together eminent historians of the Revolution and the Civil War. Its title draws the connection between the revolutionary struggle against monarchy in 1776 and the movement of millions today against an American would-be king. This Congress endorses this initiative and its extension through the anniversary period.
8. Political equality is a fiction where economic life is ruled by an oligarchy; the “consent of the governed” is a fiction where the state is owned by the rich. The defense of democratic rights is therefore inseparable from the conquest of political power by the working class, the expropriation of the oligarchy and the great corporations, and their transformation into public property under democratic working-class control, carried out as a component of the world socialist revolution.
9. This Congress resolves: to make the defense of the revolutionary tradition and the fight for its socialist completion a sustained axis of the work of the SEP, the IYSSE and the WSWS throughout the anniversary period; to extend the webinar and lecture series and the collaboration with serious historians of the Revolution and the Civil War; and to bring this historical work into the factories, workplaces and campuses, drawing the connection between the revolutionary traditions of the American people and the socialist revolution that will complete them.
2. The pseudo-left and the UAW elections: How Labor Notes, Jacobin and UAWD cover for Fain
Ballots in the election for the top officers of the United Auto Workers went out August 21 and are due back October 5. Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and socialist, is running as the rank-and-file opposition to the administration of UAW President Shawn Fain, calling for the abolition of the union bureaucracy and the transfer of power to workers on the shop floor through rank-and-file committees in every workplace.
The Fain administration came to power in 2023 with the support and assistance of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Labor Notes and the caucus they built inside the UAW, Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD). When he won, they entered his administration as highly paid staffers and advisers. They told autoworkers that Fain’s election would usher in an era of “class struggle unionism.”
The opposite took place. The “record” contracts of 2023 were followed by thousands of layoffs, including 1,000 jobs eliminated at GM’s Factory Zero plant this year. At Mack Trucks, 4,000 workers rejected by 73 percent a deal Fain had called “record”-setting. Fain endorsed Biden and Harris, then embraced Trump’s tariffs against Canadian and Mexican workers. A ceasefire resolution on Gaza was passed and disavowed. And the corruption the federal monitor was installed to end continues: the monitor’s own reports accuse Fain of seeking favors for his fiancée and her sister.
All of this has exposed what the DSA, Labor Notes and UAWD claimed in 2022. It has also exposed their bitter hostility to Lehman in that election, when he warned autoworkers that if Fain were elected the only thing that would change was the salary of the president. UAWD has since broken apart. One faction, regrouped as “UAW Member Action,” is campaigning for Fain’s reelection. The remnant which retains the UAWD name voted last month not to endorse anyone.
The two factions [UAWD and UAW Member Action] disagree about Fain, but they both regard Lehman’s call for the abolition of the bureaucracy as an existential threat to their interests.
The first position is represented by Labor Notes. An article by Luis Feliz Leon and Labor Notes founder Jane Slaughter, republished by the DSA-aligned Jacobin, presents the election as deciding “whether President Shawn Fain, who became famous for leading 2023’s ‘stand-up strike’ against the Big Three automakers, will be able to continue the union’s about-face from its previous employer-friendly ways.”
They quote William Hughes of Local 249 at Ford Kansas City: “During my twenty-seven years in the union, I’ve never seen anything even close to the amount of gains that we've been getting in all these contracts.” Fain’s opponents, they write, “have downplayed the gains made in the last three years, asserting that any president could have won them.” Lehman appears once, in a list of five challengers. Not a word is said about his program.
The article cannot avoid admitting what it is defending. Fain’s slate, it reports, “includes candidates who ran against him in the last election as members of the ‘Administration Caucus’ that had run the union since the 1940s and overseen multiple waves of concessions in recent decades. Some have been won over by the impressive contract results that Fain’s bold approach has achieved; others may be inclined to go with the one in power.”
Thus, according to Labor Notes, the “gains” Fain has secured are so impressive that they have won over the very apparatus that spent decades selling workers out! One is asked to believe that the enforcers of tiers, plant closures and the 2007 and 2009 concessions have been converted to militancy by the force of Fain’s example. The truth is simpler. Fain is a creature of the apparatus, and his “opposition” to it was always a fiction. Now, under conditions of growing rank-and-file anger, the apparatus is circling the wagons, and Labor Notes has taken up its position inside the circle.
The second position, taken by what remains of UAWD, is in fact the same position in the garb of neutrality. An August 24 statement by steering committee members Jeremy Bunyaner, Dave Park and Andrew Bergman, published on the website Daily Struggle, recalls that UAWD “raised over $200,000 for our campaign, and mobilized hundreds of UAWD volunteers” in 2022.
“We are proud of the organizing that UAWD did four years ago to defeat Ray Curry and elect our UAW Members United Slate, led by President Shawn Fain—but the reality is that our slate was not capable of meaningfully undermining the rule of the old-guard Administration Caucus (AC) in the UAW. Fain has instead been co-opted as the more progressive face of the AC, re-entrenched his former antagonists, and been realigned as their new leader.”
His slate, they write, is “a warmed-over reconstitution of the Administration Caucus.”
Lehman told autoworkers in 2022, when UAWD was spending $200,000 to denounce him for saying it, that the election of Fain was merely rearranging positions within the apparatus. But having conceded the fact, the authors refuse the conclusion. Instead they hand Fain an alibi. “A UAW president doesn’t govern independently—they’re tightly constrained by the staff of Solidarity House and the IEB members they sit in coalition with.”
Fain “has rightfully argued that he was unable to accomplish as much as he would have liked because he was weighed down by the poor performance and poor politics of his former slate.” And: “While a union president can set a strategic direction, there’s little they can do to change conditions directly for workers on the shop floor.”
So the president of a union of 400,000 members, commanding hundreds of staffers and a strike fund of hundreds of millions of dollars, is a prisoner of his own payroll. Fain, in this telling, was not a 20-year functionary who recited what his DSA advisers wrote for him; he was a militant “ensnared” by circumstances, and the circumstances were the people UAWD put on his slate. This is not an analysis of the bureaucracy. It is the bureaucracy’s self-justification, composed by people who were until recently on its staff.
If Fain really is a prisoner of the apparatus, then the conclusion follows that the apparatus must be abolished. That is Lehman’s program. It is the one conclusion, however, that the UAWD absolutely rejects. Of the six, candidates the statement says, only Fain and Lehman “even engage in rhetoric of needing to build a working-class fight against the bosses,” but Lehman “uses a clear language of class struggle but without any record of shop-floor militancy and is dragged down by a politics that puts his narrow sect over a vision of class struggle unionism.”
The UAWD’s claim that Lehman puts his “narrow sect” over a vision of “class struggle unionism” expressed its opposition to Lehman’s insistence that workers cannot fight through the apparatus but only against it. By “class struggle unionism,” the UAWD means a program for replacing one set of officials with another, in which the DSA supplies the rhetoric and takes the staff positions. Lehman’s “sectarianism” consists of telling workers this in advance. He did so in 2022, and everything since has confirmed it.
Who is writing this? Bunyaner is a member of Local 2325, the legal aid attorneys’ local in New York. Park is a member of Local 2110, which includes clerical and technical workers at New York universities and museums. Bergman, a former official of the DSA-dominated Harvard Graduate Students Union, was dispatched to Detroit to campaign for Fain and is now in Local 22 at Factory Zero, where he did nothing to oppose the elimination of 1,000 jobs. He was also a featured speaker at the recent pro-war Socialism Conference. This is the social layer that accuses a Mack Trucks assembly worker of having “no record of shop-floor militancy.”
Lehman’s record is known to tens of thousands of autoworkers. In 2021 he helped organize Mack workers’ opposition to handling scab truck cabs during the Volvo strike, out of which the Mack Workers Rank-and-File Committee was formed. In 2023 he led the fight at Mack that defeated Fain's “record” contract, a rebellion the trade publication FreightWaves attributed to the “Lehman factor.”
In 2022 Lehman ran for president, exposed the disenfranchisement of the membership under the monitor and called for a unified strike of all Big Three workers against Fain’s “Stand Up” fraud. Since then he has helped build rank-and-file committees at Nexteer, Eaton, GE Aerospace and several universities, led the IWA-RFC investigation into the death of Ronald Adams Sr. at Stellantis’ Dundee Engine plant, and organized workers against the genocide in Gaza and Trump’s war on immigrants.
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The UAW apparatus is a machine of hundreds of full-time officers and staff, paid $107 million in salaries in 2025 according to the union's LM-2 filing, with 560 International staffers drawing more than $100,000 a year and Fain himself $276,378, more than six times the earnings of the average member. Its income does not depend on winning anything for workers. It depends on the dues of 400,000 members—$226.5 million last year—collected under contracts that keep the plants running, and on the goodwill of the companies and the government with which it negotiates.
The DSA and Labor Notes layer that entered this apparatus in 2023 did not come to dismantle it but to draw its salaries and supply it with a vocabulary. Lehman’s program—the abolition of the apparatus and the transfer of its powers and resources to committees of workers on the shop floor—would end the position of every one of them.
3. United Kingdom: Canary and George Galloway de-banking: wartime censorship escalates
While Canary has been driven to the brink of bankruptcy and Galloway cannot access UK banking facilities, far-right leader Nigel Farage has secured donations this past week from two British crypto-billionaires worth £72 million.
4. Houthis seize control of the Red Sea, threatening Saudi oil production and a wider war
The narrow waterway linking the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean carries 12 percent of maritime world trade. With the Strait of Hormuz closed, this portends the opening of another front in the wider regional war between the US-Israeli bloc and Iran.
5. UN reports that the earth will “overshoot” the 1.5 degree warming limit
The goal of limiting the global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial average that was agreed upon in the 2015 Paris climate accord will be entirely missed, with devastating consequences.
6. Rapper Macklemore booted from tour for pro-Palestinian remarks, other bands drop out in solidarity
All the musicians on the tour—except headliner Ed Sheeran—have withdrawn in solidarity with the outspoken artist, who has steadfastly opposed the genocide.
The PQ’s Blue Book advocates for Quebec’s secession on the basis of national exclusivism, anti-immigrant chauvinism, massive social cuts, and an even more pronounced strategic alignment with US imperialism under the leadership of the would-be dictator Donald Trump.
8. UPS worker Paul Roberts killed on the job 13 days before retirement
Roberts is the latest in a series of UPS workers to die on the job, as the company carries out a massive restructuring effort which has axed tens of thousands of jobs.
9. Turkish government escalates crackdown on left-wing parties, LGBTQ+ associations and media outlets
Over three days, police raided LGBTQ+ associations in 15 provinces, hundreds of social media accounts were blocked and 39 leftists were detained, including the SYKP co-chair.
The Trump administration has placed weapons in orbit around the earth, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink announced Monday. The United States “now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” Meink told the Air & Space Forces Association conference.
The announcement is a major step in the militarization of space and the escalation of war plans targeting nuclear-armed Russia and China. Meink spoke more than six months into the US-Israeli war on Iran, a day after Russian forces struck a passenger train near the Polish border and 10 days before Chinese President Xi Jinping is due at the White House.
The Wall Street Journal, praising the move in a Tuesday editorial, noted that it takes place ahead of Xi’s arrival: “The timing of the space announcement may be no accident coming ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington next week.”
Meink refused to say what the weapons are, how many there are or when they were launched. The Space Force said in a statement to ABC News published Tuesday that the weapons “can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes at the direction of combatant commands.”
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In January 2025, US President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to build “proliferated space-based interceptors,” a program named Golden Dome that he priced at $175 billion that May. The Congressional Budget Office estimated this May that such a system would cost $1.2 trillion over 20 years, most of it for about 7,800 space-based interceptors.
The administration is asking $71.3 billion for the Space Force next fiscal year, nearly double the $40.1 billion requested a year earlier, inside the $1.5 trillion military budget it requested in April, a 44 percent increase over this year’s and the largest since World War II.
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, to which 118 states, including the United States, are party, commits its signatories “not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction.”
It reserves the moon and other celestial bodies “exclusively for peaceful purposes” but says nothing about conventional weapons in orbit, and the Space Force said Monday that its operations comply with it.
The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between Washington and Moscow barred each side from developing, testing or deploying missile-defense systems that are “sea-based, air-based, space-based, or mobile land-based.” US President George W. Bush withdrew from it in 2002, and Golden Dome’s space-based interceptors are the type of weapons it barred.
The Trump administration has abandoned or bypassed a series of arms-control agreements. In 2018, Trump pulled out of the nuclear agreement with Iran, and in 2019, out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which had banned a class of US and Russian missiles. In 2020, he left the Open Skies Treaty, which had allowed unarmed surveillance flights.
New START, the last treaty limiting US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons, expired February 5; Trump had given no formal answer to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer to observe its limits for another year.
On October 30, 2025, Trump ordered the Pentagon “to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” and the next day the United States cast, for the first time, the lone vote against the annual resolution of the UN disarmament committee backing the moratorium on nuclear testing. The United States has not set off a nuclear explosive test since 1992.
On November 4, Alison Storsve, the US delegate, told the committee that the United States “must vote NO on the resolution” titled “Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space.”
“I don’t want to tell Beijing and Moscow what I’ve done,” Lieutenant General Gregory Gagnon, head of Space Force Combat Forces Command, said of measures to protect US satellites in February. “We also need, as part of our joint force, the ability to attack.” In December 2025, the administration announced a record $11 billion arms package for Taiwan.
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Other imperialist powers are arming for space. French President Emmanuel Macron, opening the French military’s space command center in Toulouse in November 2025, said, “Space is no longer a sanctuary; it has become a battlefield.” Pistorius announced in September 2025 that Germany would spend €35 billion on military space over five years to “defend and deter in space.”
The space weapons the Journal credits with opening the door to the assault on Iran are now aimed at Russia and China.
Neither party in Washington opposes the program. The military spending bill that pays for the Space Force, $839 billion this year, passed the House in January with 149 Democratic votes. By Tuesday night no member of Congress had been quoted objecting to weapons in orbit.
11. A hollow show of unity at the BRICS summit
The BRICS declaration called for peace and cooperation and criticized the use of unilateral tariffs and economic sanctions but failed to name US imperialism as the chief author of escalating international economic and military conflict.
12. Jewish-Kurdish Conference in London: Kurdish nationalism in the Türkiye-Israel rivalry
Israel does not want to abandon the effort to forge an alliance with the Kurdish movement, both in the war against Iran and in its rivalry with Türkiye.
13. Australia: 600 jobs slashed at Whyalla steelworks
Labor government-appointed administrator KordaMentha announced Monday that efforts to repair and restart the plant’s 60-year-old blast furnace would be permanently abandoned.
14. Trump’s torture boxes for immigrant detainees: Guantánamo Bay comes to America
From the torture cages in Florida to the killings in Minneapolis, the state is turning methods used against “enemies abroad” on those it treats as “the enemy within.”
15. Germany: Protest marches against the far-right AfD in Berlin: “Capitalism is the biggest problem”
The parties now promising to stop the AfD are the ones that cleared its path to power. Only an independent movement of the working class against war and capitalism can halt it.
Oscar Robayo, a 39-year-old ramp agent at the Montréal-Trudeau International Airport, was crushed to death during a routine pushback maneuver on an Airbus A350 late last month.
Anthropologist and retired Harvard professor John Comaroff has submitted a letter in “outraged protest” against the conviction and sentencing of socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk by a Ukrainian court on charges of high treason.
18. 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.
