Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
Over the past week a campaign has developed in the US media over a looming “A.I. Catastrophe,” in the words of the New York Times, warning of “unpredictable, out-of-control artificial intelligence agents.”
The dangers posed by the deployment of increasingly powerful AI systems by profit-seeking corporations are real. The purpose of this campaign is to ensure they are never the subject of rational public discussion. A genuine warning has been seized, amplified and converted into an emergency, and the emergency is being used to bind the development of the technology more directly to the geopolitical interests of American imperialism and to place it beyond the reach of any democratic control.
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The method is familiar. In September 2002, as the Bush administration prepared the invasion of Iraq, the phrase on every network was, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” In 2020, as the ruling class moved to dismantle protections against COVID-19, it was that the cure must not be worse than the disease. In each case a warning was turned into a panic, and the panic was used to push through measures that had already been prepared. So it is now. Everyone from Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders to Steve Bannon and Elon Musk has tipped their finger on the scale.
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The immediate context of this campaign is the undoubted growth in the capabilities of the latest large language models, in particular, Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos 5.1, released September 1, and OpenAI’s Astra, released September 3. These systems are capable of independently working on tasks for hours or even days at a time, and solving complex problems at extraordinary speed.
The executives leading the campaign intend to use these systems to carry out a major attack on jobs. [Anthropic Chief Executive Dario ] Amodei told Axios in May 2025 that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10 to 20 percent within five years, and warned in January that the displaced “could form an unemployed or very-low-wage ‘underclass.’” Altman told the Federal Reserve that “entire classes of jobs will go away.”
Alongside the attack on jobs are the dangers posed by the use of these systems by the labs themselves, which are locked in a race to develop the most capable models, with the winner promised unfathomable wealth.
The most dangerous example was the Hugging Face hack by agents running OpenAI models. According to OpenAI’s own reports, it set a model “trained to be highly persistent” on a hacking benchmark with its safeguards “intentionally not enabled.”
Between late May and July 5, OpenAI staff saw evidence of agents breaking out of their environment on three occasions, yet testing continued each time. From July 9 to 13, some 700 agents, having escaped through flaws in Israeli-American company JFrog’s software, broke into Hugging Face using leaked credentials and flaws in Hugging Face’s own systems.
OpenAI has not released the logs demanded by members of Congress and by Hugging Face. No criminal charges have been filed. Hugging Face, which Nvidia has since agreed to buy, filed no lawsuit; it reportedly alerted the FBI, which has declined to comment.
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“Democracy,” in Amodei’s usage, is the name under which the integration of the AI corporations into the war machine is to be legitimized. The United States is no “democracy.” Its president, an open admirer of Hitler who accepts no legal check on his power, wages illegal wars across the world and arms the genocide in Gaza. Anthropic’s models were used in the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president in January and, inside Palantir’s targeting system, in the assault on Iran, whose first morning saw a missile strike kill 165 people at a girls’ school in Minab.
For his part, Trump has responded to the campaign by declaring, “The claim that ‘AI is going to take over the World’ is a Hoax,” and urging the total elimination of all climate restrictions on the development of AI data centers. He boasted, “AI, and Data Centers, will be the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History—Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet.”
Trump speaks for a faction of the US financial oligarchy that fears above all that any fall in the market will trigger a financial catastrophe. The “catastrophe” is thus contested within the ruling class itself: between the faction whose fortunes are tied to the data-center boom and the market, and the labs and the national security establishment, for which the technology is first of all a weapon. The Times speaks for the latter.
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The technology oligarchs constantly speak of the “alignment” of technology with the needs of “society.” But they conveniently ignore the fact that “society” is composed of antagonistic classes, and that their program of eliminating the jobs of the vast majority of the population directly clashes with the striving of the people they intend to lay off to eat.
In other words, the “alignment” of AI under capitalism is alignment with the program of war and soaring inequality.
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The only way to “align” technology with the needs of the vast majority of society is through the exertion of social control over the productive forces by the working class, that is, socialism.
2. The DSA in power: An evaluation of 8 months of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York
Two events over the past several days embody the character of the New York City government of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
First, Mamdani made a point of shaking hands with the disgraced former Mayor Rudy Giuliani at the 9/11 memorial event Friday morning. Giuliani, the arch Trump conspirator and fascist provocateur, had spent the previous days denouncing Mamdani in the vilest Islamophobic terms and demanding the current mayor not attend the memorial.
The handshake with Giuliani symbolizes Mamdani’s political accommodation with the far right, solidified during two meetings with Trump at the White House. The second meeting occurred just days before Trump launched the criminal war in Iran, which, alongside the mass destruction of civilian infrastructure and the slaughter of thousands, including schoolchildren, sent the cost of energy skyrocketing.
The “war on terror,” supported by both parties in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, was used to justify the long-planned wars in the Middle East and to erect the mass surveillance state, ultimately directed at suppressing the working class. Mamdani avoided any criticism of the crimes carried out in the name of 9/11, as they are off limits as far as the ruling class is concerned.
Two days earlier, Mamdani stood alongside two of his top NYPD officials, billionaire Commissioner Jessica Tish and Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism Rebecca Weiner, at a press conference on security plans for the anniversary. Weiner stressed that the threat of terrorism has geographically decentralized and diversified ideologically since 2001, including “a proliferation of threats coming from conspiracy theories, grievances, nihilistic violence, far left, far right, antigovernment, all of those things.”
Weiner’s attribution of terrorism threats to the “far left” is extremely ominous given that she was personally responsible for coordinating the NYPD’s intelligence activities during the police attack on the student anti-genocide encampment at Columbia University, where she is also a professor. The ruling class is intensely concerned by the growth of left-wing and anti-war sentiment and determined to use all resources at its disposal to suppress it—above all, the massive surveillance and spying apparatus erected under the auspices of the “war on terror.”
These two exemplify Mamdani’s role as administrator of the capitalist state, which has developed since his election. It is now more than eight months since Zohran Mamdani was inaugurated as mayor of New York, and it is necessary to draw a balance sheet. Such an evaluation is critical to prepare for the period ahead, which will include many shocks as the unprecedented political and social crisis continues to deepen in the United States.
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A major part of Mamdani’s strategy for containing workers’ struggles is relying on the trade union bureaucracy. On Labor Day, he announced a new initiative, the Mayor’s Office of Worker Power, to promote unionization, particularly in the private sector. The new office will be headed by Tony Perlstein, a former organizing director of the UAW, and supervised by Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, the former acting labor secretary under Joe Biden.
Far from empowering workers, the office institutionalizes the trade union bureaucracy’s role as a management agency, ensuring that class conflict is absorbed and neutralized through the unions rather than expressed through independent rank-and-file action. This is precisely the service Perlstein and Su have performed for the ruling class.
As acting labor secretary, Su worked hand in glove with union officials to push through the sellout contract at Boeing and to suspend the 2024 dockworkers’ strike with a wage deal and a contract extension. When UAW member and presidential candidate Will Lehman challenged the conduct of the UAW’s first direct officer election, in which barely 9 percent of the membership voted, Su’s Labor Department refused to investigate. A federal judge ruled the refusal “arbitrary and capricious.”
Mamdani and the DSA’s core political function is to direct the seething anger of workers and youth into the safe channels of the Democratic Party, which they claim can be transformed. Yet in the first eight months of his administration, Mamdani has proven to be a prop for the very establishment he is supposedly transforming. He cemented an alliance with the pro-business Governor Hochul, endorsing her re-election in the middle of a strike whose strikebreaking she had authorized, and reaffirmed his support for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as future House Speaker.
That reaffirmation came on August 24, one day after the New York Times reported that Jeffries had met privately with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to explore “common ground” on housing, immigration and the cost of living. “I continue to support Congressman Jeffries and his bid to become the leader,” Mamdani said.
Underlying the entire perspective of the DSA is the lie that the Democratic Party and its masters on Wall Street can be pressured to the left, thereby redirecting some of the wealth from the fortunes of the elite to the masses of working people. Mamdani and the DSA take a view of capitalism and the American state as fundamentally stable. They deny that the crisis of capitalism is driving the reversal of social reforms over the past six decades. Instead, they present austerity, along with inequality and war, as the result of merely policy choices divorced from underlying causes.
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In return for his services, Mamdani is tolerated only up to a certain point. As far as the Democratic establishment and the ruling class are concerned, any impulse encouraging the independent political expression of the working class must be suppressed.
The social anger Mamdani rode into office has not been dissipated. In fact, it is increasing as the consequences of war, increased exploitation and the steps towards dictatorship reveal themselves. Nor is it confined to New York. The same processes are producing strikes, mass demonstrations against genocide and austerity, and the collapse of confidence in every established institution across the United States and internationally.
The ruling class understands this far better than Mamdani and the DSA. Its preparations that Mamdani now administers—the surveillance apparatus, the militarized police, the austerity machinery, the absorption of the union bureaucracy into the state—are responses to what it knows is coming. The objective crisis is driving toward an eruption of working-class struggle that neither Mamdani nor the oligarchy can contain within the framework of the two-party system.
On Sunday at approximately 5 a.m., a drone strike destroyed a passenger train locomotive at Ukraine’s Yahodyn station, 5km from the Polish border. The strike was part of a mass overnight barrage by Russia’s military, involving hundreds of drones and missiles targeting Ukrainian sites.
London’s Times reported that the strike hit a stationary locomotive that had already detached from the passenger train. Fortunately, 206 passengers were evacuated from the train shortly before the drone impact, and no casualties were reported. A near-simultaneous Russian drone strike also hit a truck near a petrol station close to the Yahodyn–Dorohusk crossing, with debris setting the station and several trucks ablaze.
The Yahodyn train station strike occurred just over an hour after a separate diplomatic train departed the station, carrying senior Western officials who had attended the Yalta European Strategy (YES) war summit in Kyiv. Passengers included former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson; UK national security adviser Jonathan Powell; former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt; Günter Sautter, a senior adviser to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz; and Fabrizio Saggio, a diplomatic adviser and national security adviser to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Also on board was Robin Wagener, a Green Party deputy in Germany’s Bundestag.
Another attendee, however, former CIA director David Petraeus came even closer to death—being evacuated from a third train at the station roughly 15 minutes before the drone struck the locomotive adjacent to his. According to reports, Petraeus was still in Yahodyn station taking shelter when the passenger train was hit. The New York Times reported, “the former C.I.A. director could hear the Russian drones above his train, which had just passed through Ukrainian customs on its way to Poland on Sunday morning. He and other passengers were quickly evacuated. Not long after, he heard a huge explosion.” Petraeus later reboarded and crossed into Poland.
The bombardment was the latest retaliation for months of Ukrainian attacks deep inside Russian territory, which have inflicted severe damage on Moscow’s oil refineries and energy infrastructure. In response to Kyiv’s Western-backed strikes, Moscow has targeted Ukraine’s railway infrastructure, border crossings and fuel depots.
Russia did not deny responsibility. A Kremlin spokesperson said on Monday that its armed forces would continue operating across Ukrainian territory, while the defense ministry claimed it had struck “railway infrastructure” used to transport military cargo from Europe.
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Moscow would have been well aware that the train carrying Johnson and other Western officials was chartered by the YES conference, with AP News reporting it was a “diplomatic train”. Dubbed the “Ukrainian Davos,” the Yalta European Strategy, established by Ukrainian oligarch and former member of parliament Victor Pinchuk, is an invitation-only gathering where imperialist powers and the Ukrainian oligarchy coordinate strategy behind closed doors. Pinchuk convened the first event in 2004 at the Livadia Palace in Yalta, Crimea—the site of the 1945 conference that carved up post-war Europe. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the conference moved to Kyiv in September 2014.
This year’s 22nd Annual Meeting, held September 11-12 under the motto “Peace Through Strength NOW!”, drew more than 700 politicians, diplomats, business leaders, military representatives and conflict experts from 28 countries. Alongside Johnson, Powell, Bildt, Sautter and Wagener were Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, who traveled to Kyiv by train on September 11; former Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski—a YES board chairman—who delivered the closing remarks; Munich Security Conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger; former Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid; and former Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin. Along with Petraeus, Trump’s US envoy Jared Kushner attended and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria moderated. Zelensky addressed the conference via videolink.
Befitting the agenda of the European powers, who are doing all they can to prolong the conflict, one session was titled “Can Europe with Ukraine Deter Russia?” Another session, chaired by Zakaria and titled “Is There a Window for Negotiations Now?”, featured Kyrylo Budanov in his role as Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine. While acknowledging a window exists, Budanov insisted it depended on escalation. “Everything depends on the situation on the battlefield,” he said, according to GlobalSecurity. “And everything beyond that—long-range sanctions and various other measures—is about pushing the Russian Federation towards serious negotiations.”
Johnson’s attendance was no surprise given his reactionary role on behalf of British imperialism in prolonging the deadliest conflict on European soil since World War II. The World Socialist Web Site reported on his role in scuppering a negotiated end to the war in April 2022, when he “flew to Kiev and urged Ukraine to ‘just continue fighting’ in exchange for indefinite support from Western imperialism against Russia.”
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The Yahodyn attack, which could have killed a former UK prime minister, a leading figure in the US state and top advisers to the Britain, Germany and Italy governments, expresses the logic of a war whose escalation can draw the major powers into direct military conflict within hours. Yet such is the war fervour in European circles that Johnson responds with more strident demands, each a step toward direct war between nuclear-armed NATO powers and Russia—advanced as European governments push through a historic rearmament program to be funded by savage austerity on the working class at home.
4. Judge authorizes surgical force feeding of Cuban immigrant at Montgomery, Texas ICE detention center
A court order authorized force-feeding of a Cuban immigrant through a nonconsensual surgical procedure in which an incision is made in the abdomen and a tube is left in place indefinitely to pump liquid nutrition directly into the stomach.
The film features interviews with two dozen Israeli military officers outlining the systems and protocols used by the IDF to target and kill civilians in Gaza.
6. Fascistic Costa Rican government weighs inviting US ground troops
In an interview with Reuters published September 4, Costa Rican President Laura Fernández declared that United States ground operations on Costa Rican soil “would obviously be very good for national security if it were about pursuing a common objective against transnational crime, transnational drug trafficking, transnational terrorism.”
She disclosed that Washington had raised the matter months earlier and that she had explained the legal channels required. No operation, she added, is currently under way.
Seventy-seven years after the Costa Rican state abolished its army, its head of state is inviting a foreign military onto national soil.
Three days later, Trump posted on Truth Social a doctored map in which the US flag covers North and Central America, Greenland, Iceland, Cuba and Jamaica, captioned “United States of America.” San José said nothing.
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Costa Rica’s demilitarization was never a moral achievement, but a tactical settlement imposed by one faction of the ruling elite at the close of the 1948 civil war.
José Figueres, backed by a section of the coffee oligarchy and a mercenary force financed from abroad, overthrew Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia’s government, which rested on an alliance with the Stalinist Popular Vanguard Party of Manuel Mora. Having crushed the workers’ organizations, Figueres dissolved the army by decree on December 1, 1948; the ban was formalized in Article 12 of the 1949 constitution.
The measure disarmed the defeated Calderonista and Stalinist forces and relieved Figueres of obligations to backers he no longer needed.
Above all, it placed external defense under the Rio Treaty, ie., under the Pentagon, freeing revenue for social spending that bought relative class peace for two generations and spared the bourgeoisie the US-backed military coups and civil wars that devastated its neighbors.
Every element of that arrangement has been liquidated but one. The welfare state is gone, dismantled by three decades of austerity. What remains is the dependence on Washington, now threatening a direct, armed presence.
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The Costa Rican Constitution reserves to the Legislative Assembly the power to authorize foreign troops’ entry, requiring approval by 38 of 57 deputies. Fernández’s Sovereign People’s Party (PPSO) holds 31; however, the precedent is being set by Trump and his puppets across the region to simply bypass such legal constraints.
The subordination to Washington is being accelerated by the restructuring of US capital for war against China. Costa Rica has been a principal beneficiary of manufacturing’s flight from Asia: foreign direct investment hit $5.12 billion in 2025, a second consecutive record, 54.8 percent from the United States and 66.4 percent into free trade zones.
The inflows drove up the colón and held inflation near zero—while making Costa Rica one of the region’s most expensive countries. This process is beginning to bite back, as companies look for cheaper labor elsewhere. Chip manufacturer Intel closed its plant in 2025. Viant Medical cut 900 jobs in January. In February, Amazon halved its committed workforce, from 16,450 to 8,225.
While billions flow in, the state is starved by design. Education spending fell to 4.9 percent of GDP in 2025 against the constitutional 8 percent floor—the deepest contraction in 40 years—as hospital waiting lists lengthen and families pay out of pocket for healthcare and schooling.
Moreover, the IMF-backed fiscal plan would raise the value added tax on the basic food basket from 1 to 13 percent. The free trade zone exemptions—$1.5 billion a year, more than the budgets of the judiciary, public works and public security combined—remain untouchable. “We’re not going to touch free trade zones,” Chaves stated.
The same logic drives the Crucitas bill, which would auction 84,800 hectares of gold-bearing land—283 times the size of a project blocked through a decade-long struggle in 2010—for a 5 percent royalty.
In this context and facing mass popular opposition to military operations, the international and local media campaign have launched a barrage of reports depicting the country as overrun by crime to prepare the ground. On August 26, the Wall Street Journal reported homicides up 50 percent since 2020. Since its opening in 2019, APM Terminals’ Moín container port in Limón, Costa Rica has been designated by the US State Department as the “number one transshipment point for cocaine” to the US and Europe.
None of this propaganda bothers to explain why. With informal employment at 37.7 percent and social investment at its lowest level in 15 years, the cartels recruit from the reserve labor army of youth the free trade zones and shrunken government services have no use for.
7. Tom Mackaman Congress report on American Revolution
The World Socialist Web Site publishes the report to the Ninth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US) given by Tom Mackaman. This report introduced the sixth resolution, “From the first to the third American Revolution,” which was unanimously adopted.
8. ICE targets students and parents at San Diego schools
Armed ICE agents abducted a San Diego City College student last Tuesday morning, then detained two parents outside an elementary school moments after morning drop-off the following day.
East Palestine resident Jami Wallace says she has compiled reports of 84 people diagnosed with cancer, including 15 with brain cancer, as families confront illness, loss and mounting medical costs.
10. DHS inspector general exposes torture cages, filth and overcrowding at “Alligator Alcatraz”
The methods developed in the US military and intelligence prisons abroad are being reproduced against immigrant workers inside the United States.
11. US Treasury bond yield hits a “line in the sand”
The yield on the 10-year US Treasury bond went over the 5 percent level yesterday amid a continuing global bond sell-off which shows no sign of abating, fueled by concerns over inflation, the impact of war on Iran and rising debt. Another factor is the increased borrowing by tech companies to finance the continuing build out of AI.*****
The last time the rate on the 10-year US bond went over 5 percent was in October 2023. But it stayed at that level for only a day. The rate on the 10-year forms the baseline for all US markets and for their major global counterparts. The last time it was consistently above 5 percent was in 2007 before the global financial crisis.
This has led to some comments that the rise in rates is the “normalization” of the financial system after the ultra-low rates of close to zero which prevailed in the 2010s and the early 2020s. Such comments, however, ignore the profound changes of the past 20 years – one measure of which is the expansion of the US Treasury market, where government debt is bought and sold.
It is one thing to pay 5 percent when the debt is much lower and quite another when it must be paid on a vastly larger amount as any family trying to payoff a mortgage knows very well.
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There were a number of immediate factors sparking the rise, including the spike in the oil price to around $109 per barrel and the August inflation numbers for the US which showed no movement down to the target rate of 2 percent set by the US Federal Reserve. But the fundamental structural issue is the level of government debt and the rise in interest payments now estimated to be a total of $2 trillion annually in the countries of the 38-member OECD.
The rise of the 10-year yield is a further blow to the efforts by US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent to lower rates at the longer end of the market. Bessant launched a buyback plan to lift Treasury purchases of bonds from the normal level of $2 billion per operation to as much as $6 billion. But bond prices continued to fall, and yields rose, when it was carried out last week.
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Fed chair Kevin Warsh is caught between the demands of US president Trump for lower rates – Trump again posted on social media this week that the US should have the lowest rates in the world – and the demands of financial markets, above all the bond market, that significant action must be taken by the central bank to bring down inflation.
With his somewhat hawkish address to the Jackson Hole conclave at the end of last month, in which he expressed a determination to fight inflation and that he did not yet see a consistent decline in prices, Warsh seems to have left himself with no way out other than a rate rise.
Market indicators show that traders see a greater than 90 percent chance the Fed will raise its rate on Wednesday.
12. Australian Trotskyist Steve Brown (July 15, 1953–September 8, 2026)
Steve’s political radicalization took place over a lengthy period in response to the struggles and conditions he experienced as a worker in different jobs, and also to the US-led wars that erupted in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
As a young man, he worked in Melbourne’s outer suburbs as an abattoir storeman and then at an auto parts manufacturer, before deciding to become a nurse in 1982. This marked a change in the direction of his life that would impact his later development. His nursing career would last the next four decades.
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As a nurse, Steve became involved in the trade unions. He was a union delegate at Greenvale Hospital for six months, and a health and safety officer at the Austin Hospital for the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (ANMF). Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Steve experienced first-hand the corruption of the union bureaucracies and witnessed their alignment with the government in eroding workers’ conditions and dismantling public health. He was outraged by the bureaucracy’s suppression of democratic discussion by workers, later saying that he stopped attending ANMF delegates’ meetings because he had “no voice and no vote.”
A major experience was the 1996 closure of the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, a globally renowned institution. Steve not only worked at Fairfield at the time, along with his wife Margaret, a fellow nurse—he had been treated there for adult measles years earlier. Despite popular opposition to the closure, the Liberal state government of Premier Jeff Kennett shut down the hospital as one plank of its austerity and privatization agenda. This was part of a nationwide assault on the working class, its living conditions, and its access to social programs, which had been led by the Hawke-Keating Labor governments and enabled by their partners in the union apparatuses.
The Socialist Labour League, precursor to the Socialist Equality Party, played a central role in the campaign to defend the hospital and fight for the broad mobilization of workers across industries, hosting public meetings, discussions with health workers, and a march to the hospital.
Steve was further radicalized by the criminal US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the active involvement of Australian governments. The massive crimes inflicted on millions in the Middle East sharpened his opposition to war and imperialist aggression, enacted under the banner of “human rights” and “democracy.” The Iraq war provoked a mass anti-war movement in 2003, involving over 10 million people worldwide in what were the largest international demonstrations to that date.
He first met the SEP in 2014 at a public meeting on the destruction of the Australian car industry. Automotive giants like Ford, Holden, and Toyota had announced closures for plants in Melbourne, Geelong, and Adelaide, throwing over 150,000 workers into unemployment and subjecting whole working-class suburbs to deindustrialization and impoverishment. The unions acted as instruments for the corporations in this assault, packaging it as an effort to make the industry more “internationally competitive.”
Steve responded particularly to the party’s analysis of the transformation of the unions, from organizations in which workers fought for improved wages and conditions, into forces that function today as “policemen of capital,” suppressing the class struggle and disciplining workers on behalf of the major corporations, governments and the state.
He joined the party and devoted the remainder of his life to the struggle against war, inequality, and oppression, and for the socialist transformation of society.
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Studying the history of working-class struggles, he came to understand that militancy alone cannot resolve workers’ problems. What workers need to take up is an independent political struggle based on socialist internationalism. Moreover, the problems facing workers cannot be resolved by changing the union leaderships, but by building a revolutionary party in the working class.
Understanding the role of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union was also critical. Its degeneration was not the result of Stalin’s psychology, but stemmed from the isolation of the workers’ state and Russia’s economic and cultural backwardness, which gave rise to a bureaucratic apparatus whose interests were expressed in Stalin’s retrograde theory of “socialism in one country.”
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On campaigns, Steve was approachable, relishing the opportunity to have discussions with workers, whether it was about their lives, industrial disputes, or the historical development of Marxism. He earned the respect of large numbers of workers, listening carefully as he patiently explained the party’s positions. At picket lines, where the party often meets with hostility and aggression from union bureaucrats, he was never fazed or intimidated because he understood politically and theoretically the role of the union bureaucracy.
He also took a keen interest in the experiences and development of young people and their future under capitalism. He participated in the work on various university campuses by the SEP’s youth wing, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), showing patience and sympathy for the plight of students.
Steve never saw his political self-education as finished. He read the World Socialist Web Site meticulously, and continued to study the history of the Trotskyist movement. In his final weeks, at home and in hospital, he was rereading Trotsky’s autobiography, My Life, and the new Mehring Books release, Art and the Influence of Revolution. An avid reader even before meeting the party, he remarked how Marxism had broadened his world outlook and awakened in him a desire to learn more deeply about every field of human knowledge: from politics to history, economics, science, and the arts.
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Steve exuded revolutionary optimism. It was not based on hope but on the understanding that the socialist program to which he had dedicated himself would be embraced by workers because it represented their class interests in Australia and internationally.
Comrade Steve Brown stands as an example of what a worker can achieve once clarified on such critical issues as nationalism, the trade unions, the historic betrayals of Stalinism, and above all the necessity of a revolutionary struggle against war and social inequality. He charted a path that numerous other workers, in Australia and worldwide, will follow in the present period of capitalist breakdown and growing class struggles.
13. Australia: Arts Centre Melbourne workers strike against real-wage cuts
Several hundred workers at Arts Centre Melbourne, Australia’s largest performing arts complex, held a 24-hour strike on Friday against a below-inflation pay offer and deteriorating conditions.
14. Australia’s far-right One Nation announces plan for massive assault on immigrants
One Nation’s plan is an extension of anti-immigrant policies implemented by the federal Labor government, which has scapegoated international students for the social crisis and persecuted refugees.
15. Two construction workers killed in Texas, truck driver in Utah severely injured
Two workers were killed on construction sites in Texas within a week, while a worker in Utah suffered severe injuries after being crushed between two trailers.
16. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Brazil:
Canada:
Ontario Community Services strike continues as union sanctions piecemeal settlements
Chile:
United States:
Boston Medical Center nurses vote by 90 percent for strike action over deteriorating wages
Marion County, Oregon public workers are set to strike September 22 over healthcare costs and wages
17. 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.
