Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Gloria Steinem (1934–2026): The CIA, the Democratic Party and the politics of feminism
Gloria Steinem, for half a century a public face of American feminism, died at her home in New York City on Wednesday, September 2, at the age of 92.
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Amidst the endless tributes there is no significant analysis, let alone assessment, of Steinem’s political history and role, which included work with the CIA, the Democratic Party and a decades-long position as an honorary chairperson of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
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Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934, into a family made poor by the Depression. She studied government at Smith College, graduated in 1956, and spent two years in India on a fellowship. When she returned to the United States in 1958 her first job was as the paid co-director of an organization called the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth Festival, later renamed the Independent Research Service.
The organization was launched in response to the Soviet-sponsored World Festival of Youth and Students, to be held in Vienna in the summer of 1959. According to Karen Paget’s Patriotic Betrayal (2015), the most thorough study of the CIA’s operations among American students, the Agency developed “ambitious goals to ‘smash’ the festival, ‘take over’ the left-wing American delegation, and, most important, identify and recruit friendly foreign nationals from Africa and Asia to tie them more closely to the West, a plan later approved by the U.S. National Security Council.”
The Independent Service recruited roughly a hundred of the 350 Americans who went to Vienna, nearly all of whom knew nothing of the Agency’s role. It produced “research papers” and press material, and at the festival itself a daily newspaper in six languages, which Steinem put out with Samuel Walker, Jr., a vice president of the Free Europe Press, operating behind a front company created for the purpose, and with Clay Felker, whom she recruited from Esquire.
The money came from the CIA, through the conduits the Agency used throughout the 1950s and 1960s to finance the National Student Association, the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the rest of what it called the “non-Communist left.” Paget notes that Steinem drew on a “special account” managed by C. D. Jackson of Time Inc.—Eisenhower’s chief psychological warfare adviser during the war, a founder of the CIA-financed Radio Free Europe, and by 1959 a speechwriter and consultant to the president—who helped her find the corporate sponsors that camouflaged the Agency’s money.
Steinem received high marks for Vienna, and when the CIA prepared its counter-operation against the next festival, at Helsinki in 1962, she was asked to reprise the role and agreed.
Steinem knew where the money came from. Paget’s account of her recruitment begins in New Delhi, where Steinem held a fellowship after graduating from Smith. Clive Gray, an American student official who had turned down an offer to join the CIA full-time, looked her up at the suggestion of his CIA case officer and submitted her name to Harry Lunn, a CIA agent then operating under Department of Defense cover.
In Paget’s roster of the operation’s participants Steinem is listed, without qualification, as “witting”—a term Paget defines by reference to the CIA’s own glossary, in which an asset is “a person with a formal relationship characterized by a witting agreement and a degree of commitment and control and who provides information or services.” Paget writes that Steinem “was one of the few women in the NSA-CIA club.”
None of this was a secret after February 1967, when Ramparts magazine exposed the CIA’s financing of the National Student Association and the New York Times and Washington Post traced the youth-festival operation to Steinem within days. Her response to the exposure was not the response of someone who had been used. She did not claim to have been deceived. She defended the Agency.
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This was 1967. The CIA Steinem found liberal and honorable had by then overthrown the governments of Iran and Guatemala, organized the Bay of Pigs invasion, assisted in the murder of Patrice Lumumba and in the Indonesian massacres of 1965–66, and was at that moment running the Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam. Steinem’s defense of the CIA was a considered political position, and she held to it for the next fifty-nine years.
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A constituency had to be created before it could be delivered. In the years between Vienna and the founding of Ms. magazine in 1971, Steinem became a journalist, a Democratic Party operative and the public voice of a movement whose program she did more than anyone else to define. Her patron in these period was Clay Felker, whom she had recruited from Esquire to help produce the Vienna daily, and who brought her onto the founding staff of New York magazine in 1968 and funded the preview issue of Ms. at the end of 1971.
Her first feminist article, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” (New York, April 1969), announced in its title that the women’s movement was conceived from the outset as the next claimant in a sequence of identities. Marxism appears in the piece once, as a parenthesis, and is immediately turned on its head: “society can’t be restructured until the relationship between the sexes is restructured.” Sex before class, and the family before the mode of production. This was the theoretical content, such as it was, of the feminism Steinem promoted.
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Steinem went on to build a series of organizations, including the Women’s Action Alliance, the Coalition of Labor Union Women (a creation of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, 1974), Choice USA, and the Women’s Media Center. All had the common aim of promoting the Democratic Party. Her bestseller of 1992, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, marked where the trajectory led intellectually. “Without self-esteem,” she wrote, “the only change is an exchange of masters; with it, there is no need for masters.” The “revolution” was relocated inside the psyche of the comfortable individual.
In the last two decades of her life, as the Democratic Party abandoned even the pretense of social reform and turned to race and gender as its principal means of mobilization, Steinem sided ever more openly and directly with its most reactionary factions and served in particular as a booster for Hillary Clinton.
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The feminism Steinem personified did not emerge from the struggles of working-class women—the strikes of the textile and garment workers, the fight for the eight-hour day. It arose within the postwar expansion of the professional middle class, out of the demand of its female members for an equal share of its privileges, and it was sponsored, promoted and financed at every stage by the institutions of American liberalism. Its political role, from the National Women’s Political Caucus to the Clinton campaigns, was to divide the working class along the lines of gender and to channel the aspirations of working women into the political system that has presided over the immiseration of the great majority of them.
The democratic demands that the media tributes associate with Steinem—equal pay, child care, the right to abortion, divorce and access to contraception—were raised first by the socialist movement, and Marxists have fought for them from the beginning. Feminism is something else: the claim that women constitute a social group with common interests across classes, to be represented by a movement of women.
“Most of those bourgeois women who act like lionesses in the struggle against ‘male prerogatives,’” the great Marxist Rosa Luxemburg declared in May 1912, in words that could be said, changing what needs to be changed, of Steinem, “would trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage.” The women of the propertied classes, she said, “will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.” Against them she counterposed the standpoint of the working class: “The current mass struggle for women’s political rights is only an expression and a part of the proletariat’s general struggle for liberation.”
The various demands of the feminist movement that could be met without touching capitalist property—access to the professions, to management, to office—were met. Those that required social expenditure were abandoned. The Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, which would have created a national system of child care, was vetoed by Nixon that December and has never been revived by any Democratic administration in the 55 years since. The right to abortion, entrusted to the Democratic Party and the courts, was repealed in 2022 by the fascists and reactionaries that have been installed in highest judicial body.
A handful of women sit in the boardrooms, while they make up a quarter of the Senate and four out of nine on the Supreme Court (as against the all-male court which issued the Roe v. Wade decision). Tens of millions of women work for wages that do not cover rent, without child care, without health care and without secure hours. These are the conditions over which the party Steinem served has presided.
That the entire Democratic Party, from Clinton to Mamdani, joined in her eulogy this week is fitting. She was one of them. The emancipation of the working class, including working class women, requires precisely what Steinem’s career was devoted to opposing: the political independence of the working class from the Democratic Party, and the struggle for socialism.
2. San Francisco Opera musicians strike against wage cuts, the attack on art and culture
The San Francisco Opera strike follows a series of similar confrontations at the Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Baltimore symphony orchestras, among others. In every case, management, backed by boards loaded with billionaires, has demanded pay cuts, pension reductions and the dismantling of hard-won working conditions. In each case, musicians were told that art must pay for itself, that the market must decide what culture is worth.
This is the logic of a system in which the wealth of society is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, while every social need is subordinated to the accumulation of private profit. The National Endowment for the Arts receives roughly $207 million a year, about the cost of two F-35 fighter jets at roughly $92 million apiece. Trillions are poured into the military machine and into speculation, while arts, education, healthcare and every social program are sacrificed to the financial orgy.
Nor is this a matter of one party. The San Francisco Opera is located in California, a state run by the Democratic Party, the richest state of the richest country on earth. Yet in California, as across the country, arts, education and social services are perpetually on the chopping block. Democratic governors from Jerry Brown to Gavin Newsom have presided over repeated rounds of austerity, slashing billions from welfare, healthcare and public education while shielding the wealthy from any burden.
The Democrats’ “support” for striking workers consists of photo opportunities and empty letters of solidarity from multimillionaire politicians like Nancy Pelosi, who has overseen more than three decades of cuts to arts and education.
Trump is the latest and most visible perpetrator of these policies, but the destruction of culture and social life is not his invention. It is the product of a profit system that both parties serve. The working class has no stake in either party of the financial oligarchy.
The trade unions, far from defending workers against this assault, function as instruments for imposing it. In the present dispute, AFM Local 6 has argued that the Opera is not a company in trouble. It asserts that six Opera productions have sold out over the past three years, that ticket sales and subscriptions have been rising, and that donations have increased by $8 million compared with the previous year.
This may or not be the case, but the union presents this kind of argument to avoid the central issues in the conflict. It accepts the premise that the financial condition of a company should determine whether workers have jobs and whether art can find its full expression as a social need. After all, what if ticket sales and subscriptions were not rising? By implication, under those implications, the union would oblige itself to accept concessions at the expense of musicians.
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The musicians of San Francisco must draw the necessary conclusion. The struggle cannot be left in the hands of the union bureaucracy. It must be taken up by the rank and file themselves, through independent rank-and-file committees that can mobilize the broader working class in defense of the orchestra.
The strike is not simply an economic dispute over wages. It is a political and cultural struggle. The musicians are not fighting to preserve a privileged niche. They are fighting to defend the very possibility of serious art in a society governed by profit, drawing a line against the attempt to make workers bear the costs of a crisis produced by capitalism itself.
The wealth exists in staggering abundance to fund the arts, to provide artists with economic security and to make culture freely accessible to the entire population. But that wealth is hoarded by a handful of billionaires (some sitting on the Opera board) who speculate on the stock market and enrich themselves through the business of war while demanding austerity from the working class. The survival and progress of art is incompatible with the corporate stranglehold over every major aspect of life.
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The musicians have the support of workers, students and the public at large, who understand that their fight is a fight for everyone who values culture. But that support must be organized and given political direction. The only genuine answer lies in conscious opposition to the corporate elite and in the mobilization of the working class, in the United States and internationally, to defend art, culture and every social right, and ultimately to replace the profit system with a socialist society in which culture is the possession of all.
Note: Mainstream news outlets are now reporting that a TA, or tentative agreement has been reached to end the musicians' strike.
What does a tentative agreement mean? According to Socialism AI:
A "tentative agreement" today is the union bureaucracy's instrument for ending a fight it never wanted, dressing up concessions to the company as a victory, and pressuring workers to vote "yes" before they can organize against it. The decisive question is never what the officials say about the TA, but whether the workers can read the full contract, deliberate collectively, and vote it down — which is why the WSWS and the rank-and-file committees it supports consistently call for a "no" vote and for workers to take control of the strike out of the hands of the bureaucracy.
3. Trump closes the Kennedy Center: The oligarchy declares war on American culture
The closure represents the most brazen act in a systematic campaign to subordinate cultural life to the vanity and political agenda of the fascist Trump administration.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain and Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed delivered anti-Chinese tirades Tuesday at the UAW Michigan Community Action Program conference in Lansing. They attacked President Donald Trump from the right for saying he would permit Chinese automakers to build US plants, demanding the exclusion of Chinese-owned production in the name of “American jobs” and “national security.”
The same day, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, Bernie Sanders and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon appeared at the so-called Pro-Human AI conference in Washington D.C.. The two events expressed the growing alignment of the union apparatus, Democratic Party figures and the extreme right around economic nationalism, trade war and conflict with China.
Four days earlier, Trump told Fox News that he was open to Chinese automakers expanding production into the United States. “If China wanted to come in and open a plant to build their cars here, I’d be okay with that.” Trump said, “Japan does it, but they hire our people. The big thing is they hire our people.” This followed remarks made earlier in January to the same effect to the Detroit Economic Club.
El-Sayed called Trump’s proposal “a huge capitulation.” Adopting the standpoint of the auto executives, he declared, “If I’m the Big Three right now, I’m pissed off as hell at Donald Trump. He just pulled the rug out from underneath them.” He complained that Trump had built his political rise on “defeating China” and demanded a government industrial policy to produce a $25,000 American electric vehicle that would “beat the hell out of whatever China is putting out.”
Fain called Chinese-owned production “a slap in the face to America” and a national-security threat. After denouncing Chinese “slave labor,” he accused politicians who condemn communism at election time of standing “at the door with their hand out” when profits were available. In effect, his charge was that Trump had failed to carry his own anticommunist program through to its conclusion.
Fain’s invocation of “slave labor” is the height of hypocrisy. For nearly half a century, the UAW apparatus has collaborated in eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs, closing scores of plants and imposing tiered wages, temporary employment and punishing schedules. Since Fain took office, Stellantis fired roughly 2,000 temporary workers and announced thousands more layoffs, including up to 2,450 at Warren Truck. General Motors and Ford have also laid off thousands at EV and battery plants, including the GM Factory Zero in Detroit. The UAW responded by issuing occasional denunciations while mobilizing no one.
The bureaucracy is reviving some of the ugliest traditions in UAW history. During Chrysler’s collapse at the end of the 1970s, UAW President Douglas Fraser imposed massive concessions and joined the company’s board. As jobs disappeared, the union blamed Japanese workers, promoted “Buy American” campaigns and staged the smashing of Japanese cars. This chauvinist atmosphere formed the background to the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American draftsman beaten to death by Chrysler foreman Ronald Ebens and laid-off autoworker Michael Nitz after they mistook him for Japanese and blamed him for the industry’s crisis.
Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers confirmed the agreement across the official political spectrum. “We can’t let the Chinese Communist Party undercut the Big Three here in Michigan,” his campaign declared.
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The trade war against China is bound up with preparations for a shooting war to eliminate US capitalism’s principal economic competitor. The bureaucracy supports this drive, presenting the conversion of industry to weapons production as a jobs program. In March 2025, Fain cited the World War II conversion of auto plants to produce “tanks and planes and bombs and engines” and said the same unused capacity existed today. GM Defense is now working with Lockheed Martin to manufacture housing components for PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptors. Union bureaucracies in the United States and Canada demand government support for weapons work in the plants they administer. Their bid for a seat in industrial planning encompasses the mobilization of production and workers for war.
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Workers in the United States have no interest in defending GM, Ford and Stellantis against Chinese manufacturers, and Chinese workers have no interest in the ambitions of the Chinese ruling elite. The answer to tariffs, industrial mobilization and war is the unity of workers in the United States, China, Mexico, Canada and throughout the world against every capitalist government. This requires a rebellion against the nationalist union apparatus and the building of rank-and-file organizations in every workplace, and the development of a mass movement of the working class based on socialist internationalism and the common class interests of workers everywhere.
5. Australia: Post offices closures to escalate amid ongoing Post30 restructure
Australia Post (AP) chief executive Paul Graham faced questions in a Senate inquiry hearing last week over a document leaked in June, allegedly revealing plans to shut down or strip back hundreds more post offices across the country than previously acknowledged.
The closure of post offices, already underway, is part of AP’s broader Post30 restructuring operation, aimed at transforming the state-owned mail service into a profit-driven parcel delivery business. Carried out with the full support of the federal Labor government and the Communication Workers Union (CWU), this will mean the slashing of full-time jobs and the evisceration of pay and conditions in order to compete with Amazon and other gig-economy operators.
The leaked business case, approved by the AP board in May, outlined a plan called “Licensed Post Office Reimagined,” the Australian reported, under which, “core functions would be stripped away, postal services consolidated in or relocated to businesses such as pharmacies, newsagents or convenience stores or downsized to parcel agents.”
Licensed post offices (LPOs) are privately run businesses contracted by Australia Post to provide postal, banking and bill-payment services, with licensees responsible for their own premises and staff.
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The driving force behind the gutting of the post office network is not, as management and the media would have it, the inexorable decline of the letter. It is the determination of AP to secure and expand its market share in the lucrative parcel delivery sector, and to maintain its competitive position against Amazon and a swarm of gig-economy operators.
As the World Socialist Web Site reported in July, the Post30 program represents “an escalation of the Post26 program, aimed at transforming the public postal service into a profit-driven parcel logistics corporation subordinated to the demands of e-commerce giants and major retailers.”
The letters business, which requires a large, full-time, relatively secure workforce delivering to every address, is anathema to this model. It must be run down, its service cut, its prices raised and its workforce thinned, so that capital can be diverted into the parcel operations competing for the spoils of the e-commerce boom.
The financial results released in August make the orientation explicit. In 2025–26, AP’s revenue rose to $9.83 billion, led by $8.01 billion from Parcels and Services. Letter volume fell 14.7 percent to 1.42 billion, resulting in a reported loss of $63.2 million on that side of the business. Although the corporation reported a $31.8 million pre-tax profit, it recorded an underlying pre-tax loss of $107.6 million after excluding $139.4 million in property-divestment gains.
This is why letter delivery has already been cut to every second business day—a change that Graham claims saved the business $188 million—why stamp prices have risen 165 percent in a decade, to $1.85, and why Graham now openly floats the prospect of once-a-week delivery and a $4 stamp.
It is why Australia Post has acquired Rendr, an artificial intelligence-driven “delivery orchestration” platform that coordinates deliveries across multiple courier services, placing posties on an equal footing with gig-economy operators like Amazon Flex, Uber and DoorDash. And it is why the retail network—the post offices that are the most visible face of the public service—must be stripped down and dispersed into private shopfronts.
AP is not waiting for post offices to decline; it is consciously running down their revenue. Management has instructed posties to deliver parcels to parcel lockers rather than to post offices, which have traditionally earned income from holding parcels for collection.
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Jobs, wages and conditions in the postal service cannot be fought for within the framework of the CWU, which functions as an arm of management, or through appeals to the Labor Party, which has presided over every stage of the restructure since the corporatisation of the service under the Hawke-Keating government in 1989.
What is required is the building of rank-and-file committees in every depot and post office, democratically controlled by workers themselves and independent of the union bureaucracy. Through these committees, postal workers can link up with the super-exploited drivers and riders of Amazon, Uber and DoorDash, whose struggles are inseparable from the fight against cost-cutting and restructuring at AP.
The assault on postal workers is not confined to Australia. It is part of a global offensive—from the gutting of the US Postal Service and Britain’s Royal Mail, where the CWU’s British counterpart has likewise collaborated in the destruction of jobs and conditions, to the drive to casualize postal work everywhere through gig-economy “last mile” delivery. The same processes are at work in every country, and the fight against them is one fight.
The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC), formed by Australia Post workers in 2021 in opposition to the ADM and the complicit CWU bureaucracy, fights for this perspective. The PWRFC rejects outright the premise that an essential public service must turn a profit, and that workers must pay for its “losses” with their jobs and living standards.
Above all, the defense of the postal service poses the necessity of a political struggle against capitalism itself. AP must be placed under genuine public ownership and democratic workers’ control, along with the banks and major corporations, organized to meet social need, not corporate gain.
6. Canada: Over 250,000 Ontario education workers on collision course with right-wing Ford government
During his eight years in power, Premier Doug Ford has overseen a vicious attack on public education that he and his Tory government are determined to escalate during the current bargaining. Over the past year, the government has sought to significantly curtail democratic control over local school boards by limiting the powers of school board trustees, and placed several boards, deemed by the government to be financially dysfunctional, under government trusteeship so as to force through major cuts.
Since June 2025, the Ford government has imposed provincial oversight on eight school boards out of a province-wide total of 72 under the false pretext of “poor fiscal mismanagement” and “bloated deficits.” As a result, provincial administrators rather than locally elected trustees determine the day-to-day operations of boards covering schools attended by some 750,000 students.
Bill 101, the Putting Student Achievement First Act, became law in May and significantly reduces the powers of school board trustees. Rather than the trustees directing the work of the director of education, each board will now have a CEO with expanded powers, and the province can also intervene in board decisions via the Ministry of Education.
These administrative changes flow from the Ford government’s agenda of deepening the ruthless cost-cutting drive it has enforced on public education. Since 2018, the government has made funding cuts worth $1,500 per student, amounting to over $6.4 billion in eight years. This has produced catastrophic learning and working conditions for students, teachers and support staff. Ontario schools were already stretched to the breaking point after over a decade and a half of Liberal-imposed attacks on education workers and school funding prior to 2018.
Ford’s austerity program has been imposed hand in hand with the federal Liberal government, under both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his successor Mark Carney. The Progressive Conservative premier has become one of the loudest voices promoting the reactionary nationalist “Team Canada” mantra in the trade war with the United States, demanding that workers make “sacrifices” to safeguard the profits of the corporations and financial oligarchy, while Ford takes an axe to the public services on which millions depend.
The Ford government is also a firm supporter of the Liberals’ rearmament program to make Canadian imperialism ready for world war. The province’s defense industrial strategy, released in May, just three months after the federal Liberal government’s own document, aims to transform much of Ontario’s manufacturing sector into a base for war production and co-opt the secondary and post-secondary education systems to funnel young people into military-related industries or prepare them as army recruits.
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Millions of workers across Ontario oppose this class war agenda and Ford personally, whom they rightly view as one of the most vicious representatives of Canadian capital and the corporate elite. But the fact of the matter remains, despite their widespread unpopularity, Ford and his Progressive Conservatives have been able to gut public services for over eight years and have played a major role in shifting politics across Canada far to the right. The inability of the working class to defeat the Tory government is due entirely to the trade unions, their political mouthpieces in the NDP, and their satellites in the pseudo-left organizations, who have systematically sabotaged workers’ mobilization and diverted opposition to Ford into fruitless protest actions.
The most revealing example of this process was the November 2022 school support staff strike. Some 55,000 OSBCU (Ontario School Board Council of Unions) members walked off the job in defiance of Bill 28, which invoked the constitution’s “notwithstanding clause” to pre-emptively illegalize their strike and impose new concessionary contracts by government decree. The defiance of the government by the education support workers, among the lowest-paid public sector workers, had a galvanizing effect—this despite the express orders of the teachers’ unions that their 200,000 members should cross picket lines during the strike.
The strike began on a Friday and triggered spontaneous mobilizations by workers across the province over the following weekend, with calls raised from the rank and file for a general strike against Ford.
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Far from representing workers, the union bureaucracy is a privileged caste of highly paid functionaries, with interests different and opposed to those of education workers and the working class as a whole. Via the much-vaunted “collective bargaining” process, they have helped to impose the opposite of what Spring claims—lower wages, less jobs and deteriorating public services—for years.
Who can take the claim seriously that workers can “force concessions through negotiations” after the experience of 2022 and countless other contract struggles throughout the public sector and industry over the past four decades? On the contrary, the only “concessions” forced through “negotiations” take place when the union bureaucracy teams up with governments and the employers to ram concession-filled contracts down workers’ throats. As for striking to “shut down schools altogether,” this is of course a powerful weapon, but 2022 demonstrated that workers can only exercise it in struggle against the union bureaucracies, who shut down strikes at the first opportunity to defend their “collective bargaining” privileges and the stability of bourgeois rule.
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The expiration of contracts for 275,000 Ontario education workers certainly provides a major opportunity to develop a worker-led mobilization in defence of public education and against austerity, war and attacks on workers’ rights. But such a movement will only develop through a decisive break from the “collective bargaining” framework and bankrupt protest politics promoted by the unions and groups like Spring. It must be based on a rank-and-file rebellion against the education union bureaucracies to seize control of the contract fight and expand it into an industrial and political counteroffensive of the working class against the Ford government, his Liberal allies at the federal level and the ruling financial oligarchy.
This fight demands the building of rank-and-file committees in every school and educational institution to put power into the hands of education workers and unite with their class brothers and sisters across Canada, the US and internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
Millions of workers across Canada and the US are engaging in insurgent struggles against the fascist US President Trump and the dictatorship of the oligarchy he represents. Workers in Canada are also being radicalized by the rising cost of living, a spate of workplace deaths, sweeping state attacks on the right to strike, and the attempt by big business and its political representatives to offload the costs of the trade war onto workers, behind a wave of nationalist propaganda about “Team Canada.” This radicalization finds expression in the ongoing strike by over 1,200 National Steel Car workers in Hamilton, Ontario, against the exploitative piecework system at their plant.
Workers across the North American continent are the allies to whom Ontario education workers must turn in their fight to defend public education. They must do so with the understanding that they must wage a working-class political struggle. They must fight for the seizure of the vast resources currently squandered on the financial oligarchy, rearmament and war, so that they can be deployed to secure fully-funded free education through the post-secondary level and provide quality public services for all. This can be achieved only through the establishment of a workers’ government committed to the socialist reorganization of socio-economic life, so as to make social needs, not private profit, its animating principle.
7. UN report finds “reasonable grounds” for US war crimes in missile strike on girls’ school in Iran
A United Nations (UN) fact-finding mission has concluded that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that the United States committed war crimes in air strikes on two civilian sites in Iran at the opening of the US-Israeli war.
The findings are a devastating exposure of the criminal character of the unprovoked imperialist war launched on February 28, 2026, by the Trump administration with the assistance of the Israeli government.
The report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran identifies the February 28 strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, Hormozgan Province, as an indiscriminate attack on an unmistakably civilian target. Iranian local authorities put the death toll at between 156 and 157 people, including 120 to 123 children.
The lesser-known second airstrike analyzed in the report was on the same date and hit a sports center and residential area in Lamerd, Fars Province. The death toll from this attack was 22 people, including two schoolgirls and two schoolboys, and a two-year-old girl who was playing in front of her home.
The girls’ school in Minab was struck as the US and Israel began a massive air assault against Iran. The school stood beside an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) naval complex, itself reportedly attacked that day. UN investigators found that proximity to a military installation does not turn a functioning primary school into a lawful target.
The school was “clearly identifiable,” and the mission found “no evidence that it was being used for military purposes.” The UN report’s conclusion is unambiguous: “The Mission finds reasonable grounds to believe that the US committed the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack resulting in loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects.”
The mission rejected the central implication of the US government’s early efforts to depict the school’s destruction as an accident arising from an attack on the nearby IRGC facility. It concluded that “the building of the school was the intended point of impact and that the damage did not result from an errant strike or collateral damage” from the strike on the naval complex.
This conclusion rested in part on survivor accounts that the school was struck twice. It also rested on the physical character of the target, its visibility as a school and the lack of any information showing military use.
The death of more than 120 children in one attack demonstrates the methods employed by US imperialism: overwhelming military violence, combined with contempt for the lives of civilians in the targeted country and an official apparatus dedicated to concealment and impunity.
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The circumstances surrounding the UN investigation underline the bullying imperialist character of Washington’s response. The US military has not publicly released the results of its own investigation into the Minab school bombing, despite earlier acknowledgment that an inquiry was underway.
The refusal to disclose its targeting intelligence, weapons data, operational orders and internal findings sharply limits independent verification. This response also permits the US government to alternate between evasion, partial admission and categorical denial without being subjected to scrutiny.
The UN investigation proceeded amid a wider humanitarian catastrophe. Its report stressed that Iranian civilians were being caught between deadly US-Israeli airstrikes and the Iranian state’s repression of protests that began in late 2025. The mission found that the Iranian government had committed crimes against humanity during the crackdown, including murder, imprisonment and torture.
That finding regarding the Iranian state does not diminish in any way the responsibility of US imperialism for its own crimes. On the contrary, as US imperialism has done repeatedly for more than a century, the invocation by the Trump administration of the democratic rights for the Iranian people is a familiar pretext for military aggression.
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The UN report is a devastating exposure of the war crimes committed at the beginning of the US war against Iran. Its documentation of attacks on civilian facilities strips away the official propaganda that the assault was a limited or defensive operation aimed solely at military targets.
The war was not launched over concern for the Iranian population or, as Trump stated in his late-night address at the outset, to ensure Iran “will never have a nuclear weapon.” The Iran war is part of Washington’s broader effort to reassert US dominance in the Middle East, secure strategic control over a region central to the world’s energy supplies and transport routes and subordinate Iran to US global hegemony.
The killing of children in Minab and Lamerd is an outcome from these predatory aims. When the wars’ objectives are global geopolitical domination, civilian life becomes an expendable obstacle, and atrocities are followed by false narratives.
The barbarism unleashed against Iran and the stonewalling by the White House over US war crimes find a corollary in the assault on democratic rights within the US. The armed federal agents who killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis—one month before the missiles rained down in Minab and Lamerd—have not been arrested or charged, and the shooters are being protected by the US Justice Department. The Trump administration is simultaneously blocking the investigation of war crimes in Iran and the murder of citizens by federal agents on the streets of American cities.
8. Podemos blames Morocco for Ceuta migrant deaths
On July 30-31, some 70,000 people entered into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from Morocco, with an estimated 140 dying by drowning along the way. Most of those who entered were rapidly expelled by Spanish army and police deployed by Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Sumar government. The approximately 13,000 people remaining in Ceuta, including 2,500 minors, face miserable conditions, without adequate housing, food or healthcare, and exposed to attacks by fascist mobs.
The Spanish right and far right, led by the Popular Party and Vox, have seized upon the Ceuta migrant crisis to escalate their racist campaign against immigration, calling to reinforce the military and police in particular along the border.
Pseudo-left parties like Podemos, the PSOE’s former government coalition partner, have responded by fanning the flames of Spanish chauvinism, blaming the crisis on Morocco. Podemos has denounced the crisis as deliberately provoked by Morocco against Spain, attacked Morocco as a “dictatorship,” accused it of acting in alliance with Washington and Israel, and demanded a more forceful policy against Rabat.
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The Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, established in 1912 as a result of the Franco-Spanish colonial partition of Moroccan territory, formed part of the process of European imperialist expansion that divided Africa among the great powers.
The defense of this protectorate was marked by extreme brutality. During the intermittent wars against the Rif tribes between 1909 and 1927, Madrid’s “pacification” campaigns massacred civilians, bombed markets and settlements, and used incendiary bombs to set fire to undefended villages and farmland. Madrid employed rape and poison gas attacks as weapons of war against the civilian population.
These wars trained a generation of colonial officers, including General Francisco Franco, who subsequently applied their skills for mass murder against the Spanish working class in the fascist July 1936 coup, the ensuing Civil War and four decades of Francoist dictatorship.
Morocco’s independence in 1956 did not end Spain’s colonial presence in North Africa. Spain retained not only Ceuta and Melilla, but also the territory of Ifni, on the Atlantic coast, as well as so-called Spanish West Africa, which included what became Western Sahara. Morocco’s claim to these territories led to the so-called Ifni War, in 1957-1958, when the Moroccan Army of Liberation attacked Spanish positions in Ifni and the Sahara.
With military support from France, which was then waging a bloody war in neighboring Algeria to defend its colonial rule, Madrid responded in Ifni with aerial bombardment, the use of napalm and indiscriminate attacks of civilians. Spain only ceded Ifni to Morocco in 1969, and it maintained control over Western Sahara until 1975. That year, amid the terminal crisis of the Francoist dictatorship, it transferred the administration of the territory to Morocco and Mauritania without consulting the population.
The opposition of African workers and oppressed masses to Spanish imperialism and the disintegration of Spanish colonial rule played a major role in encouraging a political offensive of the working class in Spain against the Francoist dictatorship. The withdrawal of Spain from the Sahara in 1975-1976 encouraged the wave of militant strikes in Spain that ultimately led to the downfall of Francoism.
The 1978 Transition to parliamentary rule in Spain was not a socialist revolution. Instead, the Stalinist Spanish Communist Party worked to stabilize capitalist rule on the basis of parliamentary institutions. The struggles of the working class in the 1970s, however significant, did not overthrow Spanish imperialism.
In 2002, Spain and Morocco nearly came into military conflict in a border dispute over a small island, Parsley or Leila island, off the Moroccan coast.
The defence by Podemos of “Spanish sovereignty” over Ceuta and Melilla and its threats against Morocco are not democratic. Podemos is seeking to tie workers and youth to a pro-imperialist opposition to government policy, cut them off from traditions of revolutionary struggle, and defend capitalist rule in Spain.
There is no solution to the crisis that has caused the deaths of migrants in Ceuta and Melilla inside the capitalist nation-state system. The poverty that forces tens of thousands of people to leave Africa and the austerity that impoverishes workers in Spain are not separate national problems, but expressions of the crisis of world capitalism. Only the international unification of the working class, through the struggle for political power and the socialist reorganization of society, can put an end to imperialism, social crises and war.
9. United Kingdom: CWU restructuring plan “DM26” unravels at Royal Mail
Communication Workers Union officials are working to stifle opposition to restructuring among postal workers.
10. Trump lashes out after Supreme Court blocks mail-in ballot rules
Monday’s Supreme Court ruling, striking down President Donald Trump’s March 31 executive order to curtail the use of mail-in ballots in the midterm election, provoked a furious response from the White House. In a lengthy social media post Tuesday, Trump was especially bitter towards the three justices he had nominated during his first term, who were part of the majority against him, saying they were “not the people I interviewed.”The 7-2 ruling saw all three of Trump’s appointees—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—join Chief Justice John Roberts and the three justices appointed by Democratic presidents, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Kavanaugh filed a concurring opinion for himself alone, indicating that there was some possibility of the White House prevailing in the case, but that it was too close to the election to make the changes in mail-ballot procedures that Trump ordered last March.
The only remarkable aspect of the court’s ruling was that there was even a single vote, much less two, for Trump’s attempted takeover of election procedures, given that the Constitution clearly assigns the administration of elections to the states, with Congress setting certain ground rules, and no role for the president.
Under the executive order, Trump would do an end run around the Constitution by using the Postal Service, which would refuse to deliver mail ballots to voters in states that did not provide the Trump administration with voter data, and would not accept envelopes containing mail ballots that lacked barcodes approved in advance by USPS.
The assertion by Trump’s Department of Justice that the president could use his authority over the US Postal Service to force states to conform to his wishes on mail voting was a brazen assertion of unlimited presidential power with no basis either in law, the Constitution or US political traditions. But nonetheless, the two most right-wing justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, sided with Trump and issued an eight-page dissent.
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While leading Democrats hailed the Supreme Court ruling, other efforts to manipulate the election and intimidate voters are still proceeding, with no effort by the Democrats to mobilize any popular opposition. The supposed opposition party is relying entirely on lawsuits brought in courts packed with right-wing judges, topped by a Supreme Court with a 6-3 ultra-right majority.
The Justice Department is suing 30 states demanding they turn over voter rolls, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, to the Department of Homeland Security, which would supposedly check for non-citizens.
The DOJ has reportedly lost 23 of the 30 suits at the district court level, but 16 of these defeats are now on appeal. Seven cases are still pending in district courts. The DOJ has not won a single court order at any level in support of its demands.
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This series of court setbacks means that to enforce restrictions on voting, Trump would have to rely on brute force, through the deployment of federal agents or troops at polling stations and ballot counting centers. Federal law forbids the dispatch of “any troops or armed men” to the polls except for those who are casting their own votes, but there is no reason to believe that the president who instigated the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 will observe such restrictions.
Top Trump aides such as Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel and White House “border czar” Tom Homan have all denied that there are any plans to send large numbers of immigration or FBI agents to the polls on November 3. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine likewise denied any plans to deploy uniformed military personnel on Election Day.
But Trump himself has left open the possibility. Speaking on the podcast of ultra-right broadcaster Wayne Allyn Root on August 11, he responded to an appeal by the host that he declare a national security emergency for the midterm elections and impose restrictions on voting with the remark “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.”
The realignment of the European powers and Canada is an escalation of inter-imperialist antagonisms. While neither Von der Leyen nor Carney directly addressed the United States or its fascist-minded President Donald Trump, it was clear that the targets of their new alliance are not only Moscow and Beijing, but also Washington.
McCullum’s death comes as more than 40,000 MTA workers in TWU Local 100 have been working under an expired contract since May 15.
13. Following massive contract rejection 1,200 Bradford White workers strike in western Michigan
Workers at Bradford White in Middleville, Michigan, members of the United Auto Workers, struck Wednesday after voting by 96 percent to reject management’s last offer.
14. Fifty-eight Democrats join House vote to grant Trump additional war and tariff powers
Fifty-eight Democrats in the House of Representatives voted with Republicans Wednesday to grant US President Donald Trump additional war and tariff powers, including the authority to put tariffs as high as 100 percent on goods from China and India.
The 58 House Democrats included former Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, former Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina and former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who co-wrote the bill in the House.
The vote is only the latest expression of the fact that the Democrats, far from opposing Trump’s program of global war, support escalating it and criticize Trump for being insufficiently aggressive against Russia.
The majority of House Democrats, who voted against the bill, fully support the sanctions against Russia and Iran, and the ongoing wars but objected to giving Trump additional tariff authority.
The bill is named after the warmongering Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who died suddenly in July after returning from a trip to Kiev. It comes amid a spiraling escalation of the Ukraine war. On Sunday Russian forces struck a passenger train with a drone at Yahodyn station, 2 kilometers from the Polish border, shortly after a train carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had left it.
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The Democratic leaders who voted no and the Democrats who voted yes both demand that Trump confront Russia more aggressively.
All factions of the US political establishment support the US-NATO war against Russia, the subjugation of Iran and the preparations for war with nuclear-armed China. The working class must oppose these wars independently of both parties.
15. US railroad CSX announces hundreds of track maintenance worker layoffs
The shareholders and executives are awash in record profits while workers prepare for a cold winter of layoffs.
16. Brazil’s Supreme Court crisis deepens ahead of general elections
Rival factions of Brazil’s ruling class are waging open warfare inside the Supreme Court, exposing the terminal crisis of the political regime just weeks before the October elections.
From August 24 to 27, ICE agents detained nearly 100 people across Connecticut, including more than 60 in Danbury.
SGP speakers traced the rise of the AfD to three decades of social decline and militarism driven from above by the entire political establishment, and called for the independent mobilisation of the working class to defeat it.
19. Factory occupation against union-related layoffs at Smart Solar in Türkiye
The struggle of the Smart workers is part of the growing wave of workers’ struggles and wildcat strikes in Türkiye against wages eroded by inflation, the stripping away of rights and attacks on the right to organize.
20. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Kenya:
Morocco:
Nigeria:
Senegal:
South Africa:
Belgium:
Air traffic controllers at Charleroi Airport strike over pay shortfall
France:
Electricity and gas workers strike to retain tariff allowance
Italy:
Workers in supply chain ILVA steelworks strike and protest to defend jobs
Spain:
Teachers in Valencia and Alicante protest for improvements in pay and working conditions
Türkiye:
Municipal workers in Samsun in hunger protest for payment of wage arrears
United Kingdom:
Bus manufacturer workers in Scarborough, UK launch further series of strikes over pay
Operating theater staff at four hospitals in Greater Manchester, England in further strike over overtime pay
Hospital biomedics at north west England hospitals hold further stoppages over holiday pay
Strike by care workers in Wirral, UK over pay
Strike by dockers at Eastham on Merseyside, UK over pay and conditions
Middle East
Gaza:
Protest by dentists over shortage of essential medical supplies
Iran:
Ongoing protests over deteriorating conditions
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) has been campaigning at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, to build support for Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison by a fascistic court on August 10.
Bogdan was arrested in April 2024 and convicted of “treason” more than two years later. His “crime” is writing articles for the World Socialist Web Site, opposing both sides in the US-NATO proxy war with Russia. He called on workers in Ukraine and Russia to unite against both oligarchic regimes.
An appeal lodged by Bogdan’s lawyers on September 9 exposed the verdict as a political frame-up, an attack on freedom of expression and the criminalisation of socialist and anti-war views.
IYSSE members at VUW have spoken with students to promote the petition for Bogdan’s immediate release. The club also submitted an article to the weekly student magazine Salient titled “Free Bogdan Syrotiuk: Ukrainian socialist sentenced to 15 years in prison!”
The article was published on September 7 but was removed from Salient’s website a few hours later. While it can be read in a digitised copy here on pages 9-10, the censorship of the online version severely limited the article’s potential readership.
The IYSSE emailed the editor of Salient to ask for an explanation. The club received a reply not from the editor, but from Matt Tucker, chief executive of the Victoria University of Wellington Students Association (VUWSA).
Tucker wrote: “After concerns were raised about the factual accuracy of certain aspects of the article, I reviewed the matter in my capacity as Chief Executive Officer of VUWSA and publisher of Salient and decided to have the article removed from publication.” He said the decision “was not made lightly.”
When the IYSSE asked what concerns had been raised, who had raised them, and what inaccuracies had been identified, Tucker refused to answer. He replied: “I do not intend to enter into a detailed debate about the merits of the article, nor do I intend to disclose communications received from third parties regarding the matter.”
At an IYSSE speakout on September 10, the Socialist Equality Group’s Tom Peters said Tucker’s action was “part of a pattern of censorship. The media in New Zealand has refused to cover the imprisonment of Bogdan Syrotiuk or the reality of life for ordinary people living under an authoritarian dictatorship in Ukraine.”
Meanwhile, “the New Zealand government and the Labour Party spread lies that this is a ‘good war,’ a war for democracy and against Russia’s autocracy.” In fact, the Zelensky regime has placed Ukraine at the service of the US and NATO powers, which are fighting Russia in a war over vast natural resources and profits.
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Helena, a mathematics and philosophy student who attended the IYSSE’s meeting, said Bogdan was facing “unlivable conditions in prison, an unfair trial, and no free speech. For a 27-year-old to be put in such conditions is not evidence of a very liberal place.”
She praised the work of the IYSSE, saying that “the world has turned a blind eye to Ukraine and the Ukrainian citizens that have been suffering from the Russian invasion and their own government. There’s just nowhere safe for them, and I think it’s so hard for us to understand that kind of devastation and the conditions they are in.” She urged others to sign the petition demanding Bogdan’s release and to oppose the censorship of the IYSSE’s Salient article.
22. SEP Sri Lanka Congress resolution: Free Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The Fourth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Sri Lanka, held on September 11-13, unanimously passed the following resolution in support of the campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk, the Ukrainian socialist sentenced to 15 years in prison for opposing war. For more information on the campaign to free Bogdan, visit freebogdan.org.
1. This Fourth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) declares that fighting for the release of Bogdan Syrotiuk, the Ukrainian socialist sentenced on August 11 to 15 years’ imprisonment for opposing the war, is a central political task of our party. Bogdan was convicted not for any act of espionage or sabotage but for his ideas — six articles published on the World Socialist Web Site. The verdict is a verdict against Trotskyism itself, and against the historical truth for which the Fourth International has been fighting since 1938.
2. The prosecution of Bogdan is inseparable from the Zelensky regime’s hostility to the working class and to the mounting anti-war sentiment within Ukraine. The regime rehabilitates the Nazi collaborator Bandera and the Waffen-SS Galicia Division as “national heroes”; it rules by martial law decree with elections canceled and opposition parties banned; it has filed more than 300,000 criminal cases against soldiers for desertion; and two-thirds of the population, by 2025, sought a negotiated end to the war. The sentencing of Bogdan is the regime’s attempt to terrorize this opposition — to demonstrate that opposition to the war carries such harsh penalties. In condemning Bogdan, the fascist court has laid bare the fraud of the “war for democracy” that justifies the NATO proxy war against Russia.
3. The Congress notes with the utmost seriousness the growing popular support for the campaign to free Bogdan, and the conspiracy of silence by which the capitalist media has responded to it. Workers and youth across the world — postal workers in Britain, Maruti Suzuki workers in India, workers in Australia, Germany, Sri Lanka and the United States, Eastern European immigrant workers, students and artists, historians — have demanded Bogdan’s release. Yet not one major Western news outlet has reported the case, and the WSWS itself has been banned in Ukraine. This is not an oversight. The media silence —aside from a handful who have dared to stand with the campaign — is the political protection of the Zelensky regime, and it is the clearest proof that the bourgeois media of every country, like the ruling classes they serve, stands with the fascist Ukrainian state against the working class. To break this silence is itself a revolutionary act.
4. The Congress therefore resolves that the campaign to free Bogdan is not a secondary or humanitarian task. It is the fight against the war in its most developed form, because it poses the central question — the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian workers against both regimes — in a concrete and winnable struggle. Every worker won to Bogdan's defense is won to the fight against war.
5. The Congress commits the party to the following tasks: to build the campaign in the factories and workplaces through rank-and-file committees and resolutions, independent of the pro-war trade union bureaucracies; to orient the campaign toward youth and students through the IYSSE; to expose the censorship and the silence of the media and the pseudo-left as political, not accidental; and to unite the campaign with the defense of democratic rights.
6. The Congress pledges to redouble all efforts to develop the campaign until Bogdan is free. His freedom will be won not by the courts of a fascist state, but by the mobilization of the international working class — the same force that alone can end the war and overthrow the regimes on both sides of it. Workers of Russia and Ukraine, unite!
23. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
