1. The bond markets, rearmament and the global assault on social spending
International finance capital is delivering its orders as the Macron government moves to impose a dictatorship in response to the mass protests of October 17, which saw more than 550,000 people march in a national day of action against rising fuel and living costs and the crisis in the education system.
Massive cuts to social spending must be carried out, with whatever measures are necessary, to pay for spending on the military amid a deepening crisis of the finances of the French state.
The immediate ruling class agenda is budget cuts amounting to €54 billion, which will make major inroads into social spending. But this is only the start. The goal is nothing less than the destruction of the entire social security system established after World War II as a response to bitter struggles of the working class.
The dictates of finance are being delivered via the bond market, with investors selling off French debt and driving up interest rates. On Monday the yield on 10-year bonds rose from 4.80 to 4.90 percent, a major increase.
The demands of international finance were spelled out at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund held earlier this month, as it declared that cuts to public spending globally had become a matter of “urgency” because the rise in long-term interest rates was now exceeding the growth rate of GDP.
France is at the center of this financial storm. Public debt is €3.5 trillion, equivalent to 120 percent of GDP and rising. Debt servicing costs, the payment of interest, are set to rise by 25 percent this year to €65 billion. The head of the Bank of France Emmanuel Moulin has said that France risks being “strangled by interest rates” unless action is taken on public finances.
That is, the working class must be made to pay for the demands made by the wolves of finance capital. The assault on the social conditions of the working class is intimately tied to the financing of rearmament which is taking place in France and globally.
War financing requires the issuing of more debt. More debt increases interest rates, leading to intensified demands that social spending be cut to protect the finances of the national state.
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There is a feedback loop at work here. Money is borrowed to finance the military, pushing up interest rates, and then more money must be found to pay the additional interest bill through cuts in social spending.
The same mechanism is at work in every major economy. In the US where the interest bill at more than $1 trillion is fast becoming the biggest item in the budget, Trump has already stated that there is no more for social services because of war spending.
In the French crisis, as the World Socialist Web Site has explained, the ruling class is pursuing a two-track policy. On the one hand, it is moving rapidly to establish dictatorial forms of rule. On the other, it is relying on the trade union bureaucracy and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) to subordinate the working class to the capitalist state.
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Mélenchon’s latest attempt to throw dust in the eyes of the youth, the “yellow vests” and the working class and blind them to the revolutionary tasks they confront is his proposal that the Bank of France should “burn” its holdings of French debt, around €600 billion or 18 percent of the total, in order to free up resources for social spending.
In other words, according to Mélenchon, the situation in France does not derive from the ever-deepening crisis of French and global capitalism—one of the features of which is the growing debt mountain in all the major economies—but is merely a technical problem which can be solved by bookkeeping.
Mélenchon’s bankrupt proposal ignores the fact that the Bank of France is not some neutral organization which can be ordered to act in the interests of the “people,” but it is an organ of international finance capital integrated into its networks through the European Central Bank.
Moreover, the debt held by the central bank is only a fraction of the total, the vast bulk of which is held by private banks, investment funds and wealthy oligarchs.
Their reaction to such a measure would be to launch an immediate sell-off of French bonds, provoking a major escalation of interest rates and a deepening of the financial crisis in order to enforce their dictates.
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The financial crisis cannot be resolved by adjustments, tinkering and bookkeeping measures. In the first place, the debt must be repudiated. It has been incurred to meet the interests of the capitalist oligarchy, not the working class. Its further accumulation is being fueled by the demands for increased military spending, as French imperialism joins its international counterparts in the struggle to redivide the world.
Debt repudiation means that the banks, the network of financial institutions and the capitalist oligarchs which devour the resources of society and the state must be expropriated.
The resources exist in abundance for the satisfaction of all social needs and the further development of society.
The vicious reaction the fight for this program will produce from international capital poses the immediate necessity for the French working class to turn for support to the rest of the European working class—in Spain, Belgium, Germany, Italy where major struggles are erupting and beyond—to develop the European and international socialist revolution.
The International Committee of the Fourth International, the world Trotskyist movement, has explained that the fight for this program—the only viable and realistic perspective in the unfolding revolutionary situation—requires the building of a revolutionary leadership. To advance this perspective, it fights for the development of rank-and-file committees of action to develop the struggles now unfolding, to free them from the grip of the bureaucratic apparatuses, to prepare a general strike and in this way advance the fight for the working class to take political power.
2. Trump calls French protests a “full-on revolution,” demands mass deportations
Speaking for a ruling class under siege at the White House on Tuesday, President Donald Trump described the mass protests in France as a “full-on revolution” and demanded that European governments respond with mass deportations.
At the same event, ostensibly devoted to combating “fraud,” Trump threatened Representative Ilhan Omar with imprisonment as well as deportation along with his usual racist attacks targeting Somali immigrants.
Trump’s remarks expressed the fear gripping the ruling class as workers and young people enter into struggle against fascism, inequality, militarism and police repression. His response was to recast this social opposition as an invasion by foreigners and demand the expulsion of “insurrectionists.”
“If you look at what’s been going on in France, I have been doing this stuff for a long time. I have been watching other countries for a long time, I have never seen anything like that,” Trump said. “That wasn’t a little bit of a riot, that wasn’t a little bit of protest, that was a full-on revolution. And it continues, it continues.”
This was followed by a racist diatribe. “So we want to be helpful, we want to be with them and all, but you are not going to have a Europe pretty soon if they keep going. And it’s mostly immigrant.”
Trump’s screed began when a right-wing reporter asked whether the “socialist agenda” would bring the economic difficulties confronting France to the United States. The bogus framing of the question presented the austerity policies of Emmanuel Macron’s capitalist government as socialism.
Trump boasted of American growth and declared: “France has no growth. France is growing the other way and that’s because their social programs are brutal.” He then turned immediately to immigrants.
“But I still say, and some people say it’s controversial, but I don’t care, it’s an immigration problem. You have people that poured into France, and they were also unchecked, unvetted like with Biden when he was doing, we don’t do that. We got many of them out and we are getting many more out.”
Trump claimed that his administration was targeting “the worst of the worst,” a blatant lie, and described immigrants whom it was “hunting down.” He claimed further economic prosperity as long as attacks on immigrants continue: “We have tremendous growth and we have closed borders.”
He also attacked Spain. “In the case of France and all of Europe, you saw what happened in Spain where they bum rushed Spain. They came in by the tens of thousands, all just poured right into Spain. And Spain’s not doing anything about it.”
*****Turning again to France, Trump, who is currently overseeing the “renovation” of the White House and the closure of the Kennedy Center, insisted that immigrants hated the countries in which they lived. “They don’t like the buildings, they don’t like the art, they don’t like anything about the country and they don’t like the people. They have no reason not to do what they did in France.”
He said he had warned his “friend President Macron” that if “you don’t stop the immigration problem you are not going to have a country left,” and had delivered the same message to Germany and Britain. After denouncing London’s mayor, he demanded: “If they don’t stop it and remove people and I’m not just talking about some, you got to remove people. Get them the hell out.”
The leader of the failed coup of January 6, 2021 added, “You are going to have to remove those people that are insurrectionists. You are going to have to get them out of the country. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, we won’t take anymore.’”
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The claim that the Democrats support immigrant rights or workers and students protesting is a fraud. Under Joe Biden, Democrats virtually eliminated asylum and attempted to pass, with Republican support, an over $20 billion border-police-state bill that would have also provided funding for Trump’s border wall. The Democrats do not oppose Trump, they are his loyal collaborators.
Trump’s attacks on immigrants included fresh threats against Rep. Ilhan Omar. The Minnesota Democrat’s Washington home was raided on October 12 by Homeland Security Investigation agents and several of her family members and friends have received subpoenas regarding immigration paperwork filed by her now-deceased father when Omar was a teenager.
Asked whether Omar could be deported if there were “a problem with her age,” Trump replied: “She could be. She could also go to jail. She could also go to jail. You know they keep talking about deportation, no she could go to jail.”
He continued: “This is just my opinion, I think she’s a sick, a very dishonest person, who hates our country. And she comes from a country that is essentially not even a country, Somalia. It’s a real shit house, ok?”
Trump claimed that Omar’s election was attributable to “Somalians” voting for her. Omar represents Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, which includes all of Minneapolis and surrounding suburbs. Approximately 58 percent of its residents are non-Hispanic white, according to the Census Reporter’s presentation of 2024 American Community Survey data. Trump’s attribution of Omar’s election to Somali American citizens’ participation is aimed at casting her, and all non-Republican victories, as illegitimate.
Earlier, Trump praised right-wing propagandist Nick Shirley for videos attacking immigrants in Minnesota. He accused “the Somali community” of “stealing billions and billions of dollars, taxpayer money through fraudulent childcare centers and scams.” He then pronounced Governor Tim Walz “100 percent guilty” and implicated Attorney General Keith Ellison and Omar.
“They all knew. That little, little Congresswoman, lovely little woman she is, she knew they all knew, scammers and thieves so bad for our country.”
Miller elaborated the same racial narrative, portraying Somali immigrants as beneficiaries of Democratic patronage who establish fraudulent businesses and live in luxury at workers’ expense. He contrasted them with “you, the American citizen who has worked their entire life” and declared: “That’s what the Democrat Party did to you.”
The purpose of this agitation is to divide the working class with racism. Just as Hitler blamed the “Judeo- Bolshevik” or “Jewish Bolshevism” in Nazi Germany, today’s oligarchs blame “Muslims,” “immigrants” and “socialism” for the destruction of living standards.
The protests in France and across Europe arise from opposition to growing inequality, the gutting of education and public services and the diversion of society’s resources into war. The ruling classes in France, the United States and internationally have no progressive answer to these grievances because they arise from the capitalist system they defend.
Scapegoating immigrants substitutes a nationalist explanation for a class crisis. Trump’s alarm over a “full-on revolution” reveals his fear that American workers and students will recognize their own conditions in the struggles unfolding in Europe. French workers, immigrant workers and American workers confront the same system of exploitation and the same turn toward dictatorship.
The answer is the international unity of the working class, organized independently of the capitalist parties and the union bureaucracies. The defense of immigrants and democratic rights must be joined to the struggle against austerity, imperialist war and the capitalist oligarchy.
3. Tensions over US operational control of South Korean military
Simmering tensions have grown between the United States and South Korea driven by Washington’s intensifying preparations for war against China. At present, in the event of conflict, the US would assume operational control (OPCON) over the huge South Korean military—a situation that has its origins in the Korean War (1950–53).On October 14, United States Forces Korea (USFK) commander General Xavier Brunson questioned whether a long-planned transfer of wartime OPCON of the South Korean military from Washington to Seoul could take place given what he called the changing conditions in the region.
Speaking at the second annual Indo-Pacific Summit hosted by the Washington-based Gold Institute for International Strategy, Brunson stated, “None of us are also able to say conditions haven’t changed.” He added, “Because the conditions have changed, because we’ve changed our plan, we have new standards which we have to uphold.”
Brunson made similar comments the previous day at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), stating that South Korea did not have adequate military capabilities in place. A week earlier, retired General Robert Adams, who led USFK from 2018 to 2021, told another CSIS event, “I think there's a lot of risk that hasn’t been properly explained to everyone about hastening this (transfer) and putting it on a timeline.”
The changed conditions refer to the unfolding world war already underway in the escalating US-NATO war on Russia in Ukraine and the expanding war in the Middle East fueled by the US war of aggression on Iran. The US is already waging economic war on China and is engaged in advanced preparations for conflict with China, in which South Korea’s involvement factors heavily in the Pentagon’s calculations.
With the onset of the Korean War in 1950, US imperialism behind the threadbare façade of a UN mandate led the international military intervention. The US-installed dictator Syngman Rhee in Seoul rapidly handed control of the South Korean military nominally to the UN forces, but, in reality, to the US. A truce was signed in 1953 but the war never formally ended and as a result the US retained full control over the South Korean military for more than four decades. Washington only handed back peacetime control to Seoul in 1994.
In 2006, the US first agreed to transfer wartime OPCON back to South Korea by 2012, though this date was repeatedly pushed back. Current President Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party has set a goal of regaining wartime OPCON by the end of his term in 2030. Defense Minister Kang Shin-chul reported that the government had protested to Washington over Brunson’s comments.
Other South Korean officials have rejected US claims that Seoul has not met the conditions for the return of OPCON. “If we stick to the conditions the two sides agreed on in 2015, South Korea has already met them,” said an unnamed former senior national security official to the Hankyoreh newspaper. “The US keeps adding new requirements, and many within the Defense Ministry are frustrated that the goalposts keep moving.”
Seoul’s determination to regain control over its military is not a repudiation of Washington’s war plans. Under successive administrations, Seoul has supported Washington’s war drive and Lee’s government is no different. Instead, Seoul is seeking a greater voice when conflict erupts in East Asia.
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There are undoubtedly other calculations as the US is increasingly seen as less reliable, particularly given the disputes that have erupted with traditional European and Canadian allies. In August, Trump unilaterally announced at the last minute the scaling back of the major joint war games with South Korea—Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises—prompting Lee to declare that the “transfer of wartime OPCON must be completed within my term without disruption.”
However, Washington is not about to relinquish control over the South Korean military as it sets its eyes on war with China and plans to escalate the Middle East conflict following the US midterm elections.
The Trump administration has been particularly irked by Seoul’s reluctance to send military forces to aid in the subjugation of Iran as well as what it sees as its hesitancy to carry out investment negotiated in the $US350 billion trade deal package.
Israel goes to the polls on October 27, with no political party offering an alternative to war and authoritarianism.
Every one of the Zionist parties contesting the elections for the 120-seat Knesset, Israel’s parliament—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, the ultra-Orthodox factions, the far-right fascistic parties and the supposed opposition—is committed to the same program: the continuation and expansion of the genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and war against Lebanon, Syria and the Houthis, as part of the broader regional war being waged by US imperialism against Iran and its allies.
On Sunday, October 18, just days before the elections and after months of strained relations, US President Donald Trump sought to bolster Netanyahu’s position and secure his preferred candidate to carry out his war aims. He wrote in a letter posted on Truth Social, “If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi, America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so.”
In the same letter, Trump threatened Iran, writing that “unless they change their ways, rapidly, we will soon finish the job.” There is a buildup of US forces in the region in preparation for an assault after the US mid-term elections.
All factions of the Zionist establishment are behind Trump, pledging Israel’s services as Washington’s proxy in its bid to dominate the resource-rich region and the key transportation routes.
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Netanyahu has vowed to escalate the war against Iran. This criminal war of aggression, launched by the US and Israel on February 28, involved the assassination of Iran’s leadership and the bombing of civilians, including school children, in the very first days.
On Sunday, October 18, in a rare, two-hour long press briefing, Netanyahu vowed to bring down the Iranian regime, declaring, “The regime must fall, and I will bring it down.” In a video of a call with Trump, he said, “Donald, we have a job to finish.”
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Almost all of the leaders of the opposition bloc, framed by the media as “moderate” or “centrist,” are former military leaders and/or politicians who have served under Netanyahu, agree with him on all essential questions, to the extent Netanyahu’s government has been able to complete a full four-year term. This is the first government to serve out a full term without collapsing or dissolving early since the government headed by Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin after the 1973 election.
Political instability reflects the massive tensions roiling Israeli society, the product of a capitalist state founded upon the expulsion and expropriation of the majority of the country’s Palestinian citizens in 1948–49 and 1967, repeated wars with its Arab neighbors, and its dependence upon an external backer—US imperialism on whose behalf it functions as a garrison state.
The election is little more than a factional struggle within the Zionist ruling establishment over how best to manage the wars, how to distribute the spoils, and how to suppress the growing internal social and economic crisis produced by a society organized around permanent militarism. The wars have already cost a massive $133 billion—nearly twice the estimated cost of rebuilding Gaza—as defence spending has soared from about 4.2 percent of GDP in 2022 to nearly 8 percent in 2026, among the highest in the world. No faction offers any alternative for the working class, which must pay for these wars.
As far as the opposition is concerned, the core issue is not war but Netanyahu himself—his corruption, efforts to establish an authoritarian state, support and cultivation of religious fundamentalists and his refusal to acknowledge any responsibility for the October 7 attack.
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Under Israel’s system of proportional representation, the main opposition parties are dependent upon a high turnout from Arab voters to take seats away from Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc even though they refuse to allow them to hold cabinet office.
For this reason, Ben-Gvir sought to disqualify the country’s two main Arab-majority political blocs from the elections—Ra’am (the United Arab List) and the Joint List (an alliance comprising the Hadash, Ta’al and Balad parties). This was a naked attempt to disenfranchise Israel’s Palestinian citizens who make up about 20 percent of the population.
The ban was overturned by the Supreme Court. But while the parties were reinstated, Sami Abu Shehadeh, leader of the Balad party, was strongly pressured to withdraw his candidacy before an official ruling could be issued that would set a precedent.
Shehadeh’s forced withdrawal, the attempted bans and the refusal of the opposition parties to include Arab politicians in a coalition demonstrate the essential character of the Zionist state: founded on the exclusion of Palestinians from political life, now formalised in the electoral process itself. It demolishes Israel’s claims to be “the only democratic state in the Middle East.”
Irrespective of which faction wins the election, the essential program—militarism, occupation, the exclusion of Palestinians, repression and a deepening social crisis—will remain the same. Only the independent mobilization of the working class—Jewish, Palestinian, Arab, Turkish, Kurdish and Iranian—unified with the international working class on a socialist program can break it.
Naza, the investigative documentary by Israeli journalists and filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, was released in UK cinemas on October 15, with a livestreamed Q&A with the filmmakers.
The film shows how Israeli military violence is planned, justified and executed, exposing the Zionist state’s dehumanization of the Palestinian people and raising troubling questions about silence and complicity within Israeli society. Naza has achieved remarkable box-office success despite mainstream and major independent distributors refusing to screen it.
The title Naza refers to the words “Nezek Agavi”, the term used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for “collateral damage”, civilian casualties deemed acceptable in the IDF’s bombing and assassination operations. Filmed in secret on Tel Aviv rooftops under cover of darkness, the documentary features interviews with 24 former Israeli military personnel, including intelligence analysts, drone operators and snipers, whose identities have been concealed. Their testimony exposes the technological and bureaucratic infrastructure underpinning Israel’s targeted killings.
Perhaps the most horrifying revelation concerns the military’s accepted “error rate” for civilian deaths: between 15 and 20 percent, with as many as 500 civilians regarded as an acceptable price for the assassination of a single Hamas leader. The scale of the documented slaughter is staggering. More than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed, while only 17 percent of the dead were identified by the Israeli military database as combatants.
Especially damaging for Israel is that these revelations come not from its critics, but from former members of its own military and intelligence apparatus. Their testimony lays bare the internal mechanisms of genocide.
The official response has been ferocious. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has moved to strip the filmmakers of their citizenship on grounds of “treason”, while introducing legislation aimed at criminalizing alleged “defamation” of the IDF. Far-right mobs have taken to the streets chanting, “Death penalty for traitors.”
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The directors’ account of the film’s visual language revealed much about daily life in Israel. Szor explained how their decision to film on Tel Aviv’s rooftops emerged from the maddening experience of living in a city where “you don’t see anything of what’s happening 60 kilometers from there.”
She said, “Of course you see posters of the hostages, demonstrations … but there is no sense, there is no recognition of what’s happening.”
This explains the film’s movement between the rooftop interviews and the illuminated apartments below, where residents watch television, practice yoga and go about their daily routines. The contrast raises the question: how can ordinary life coexist with industrialised killing, and what social and political conditions make such silence possible?
Abraham insisted, “This is a film about systems of mass killing. But we are also looking at the mechanisms that allow human beings to do this to other human beings.”
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The genocide has provoked the largest international protest movement in decades, involving millions of people across the world. Polling in the United States, Europe and elsewhere has registered mass popular opposition to the slaughter, while support for Zionism has been shattered, including among millions of Jews. Explaining such crimes primarily through an unchanging human propensity for dehumanization diverts attention from the social forces and political interests responsible for genocide and weakens the struggle against them.
Szor’s sober observation that No Other Land—co-directed by Abraham—had won an Academy Award while “still, in the last month, communities are still destroyed” lingered over the discussion. Recognition, she suggested, is no substitute for action.
Naza has exposed the routinized and systematic mass killing carried out by the Zionist state against the Palestinian people and, by implication, the complicity of the major imperialist powers that have armed, financed and politically defended it. That Abraham, Szor and their collaborators have courageously pursued this work despite intense vilification and being branded traitors within Israel is itself a measure of the film’s significance.
6. The Andes-Atlantic Corridor and the US neocolonial offensive in Argentina
On the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in late September, the United States and Argentina announced a sweeping strategic cooperation agreement, dubbed the Andes-Atlantic Corridor. The initiative was presented by Argentine Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno and US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau.
The Argentine Foreign Ministry describes the character and aims of the agreement as follows:
[It is a] joint initiative to strengthen and modernize the infrastructure that connects Argentina’s vital economic sectors to the main Atlantic ports and to the markets of the West. With this new economic corridor, Argentina and the United States take another step in line with their commitment to the security, protection and prosperity of the Western Hemisphere and its essential supply chains.
In the anodyne language of diplomacy, what the document describes is the subjugation of Argentina’s mineral resources to US imperialism.
The initiative aims to expand the export of American capital to Argentina—through “tied” loans intended to remake the country’s infrastructure—in exchange for guaranteed control over critical minerals and over the oil and gas of Vaca Muerta, which are crucial to the imperialist war machine.
To this end, the same document states:
Exports of minerals, oil and gas will increase through US and US-backed investment in railways, waterways, ports, pipelines and power generation and transmission infrastructure, built on trusted technology designed to ensure optimal efficiency and maximum cybersecurity.
“Trusted technology” is the label Washington has used since 2018-2019 to shut Huawei and other Chinese firms out of the networks of the US and its allies.
The significance of the Andes-Atlantic Corridor can only be understood in light of US imperialism’s historic decline. Far from fostering a harmonious new “multipolar” order, this crisis is driving Washington to try to restore its lost hegemony through escalating violence, whether in the military, economic or political sphere.
In this process, imperialism seeks to reduce Latin America to the status of a neo-colony and finds active assistance in the government of fascistic President Javier Milei. The most immediate objective of the agreement with Buenos Aires is to break China’s current monopoly on the refining of so-called critical minerals, a stage of the global production chain more than 90 percent dominated by Beijing.
7. In rebellion against “independent” union, VW workers in Puebla, Mexico reject second sellout deal
On October 15, workers at the Volkswagen assembly complex in Puebla, Mexico voted 3,135 to 2,452 to reject the contract that the Independent Union of Volkswagen Workers (SITIAVW) had negotiated with the company. They chose the “strike” option on a ballot that offered only that or acceptance. It was their second rejection in five weeks.
The union tried to sell the deal based on a promise to rehire the 611 workers laid off in late August, when VW eliminated the third shift on the Jetta and Tiguan lines. The promise is worthless, and workers effectively returned a vote of no confidence in the union apparatus.
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The vote at VW is part of a growing rebellion against the union apparatuses and the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum and her Morena party. On October 14, workers at the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) voted down a wage deal backed by their union and defended by the Sheinbaum administration, after a national march they had called independently of the union. In turn, these struggles form part of an international upsurge of the working class and youth across the Americas, Europe and beyond.
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Volkswagen workers in Puebla must instead turn to their class brothers across Mexico and internationally. They face the same struggle against the same corporations as their co-workers worldwide. In Germany, the IG Metall union and its works council representatives voted for 50,000 more job cuts at VW in September. VW has since terminated 10 of 13 collective agreements, and Blume is demanding longer hours without pay. IG Metall shop stewards at Mercedes have warned their own executive of growing resistance on the shop floor. In the United States, auto parts workers at Nexteer in Saginaw, Michigan rejected three sellout contracts from the United Auto Workers (UAW) this year.
The VW Action Committee in Germany, part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), has proposed a program to defend every job and break the control of the union apparatus. It wrote:
The fight against global corporations that pursue an international strategy cannot be won within a national framework. Every concession by the unions in one country encourages the corporations to intensify their attacks worldwide.
VW workers in Puebla should form rank-and-file committees in every department and shift, independent of the SITIAVW, the state labor authorities and every capitalist party. Their delegates should be elected in open assemblies held outside the plant. These committees should take control of the struggle and of any strike, oppose any extension or third deal imposed over the vote, and build their own strike fund through appeals to workers in Mexico and internationally.
Demands must be based on what workers need, not on what VW, the government and the union declare “possible.” They should include the immediate reinstatement of those laid off at the plant and at suppliers, no layoffs on the Taos line, wage increases well above inflation with annual reviews, and protection for every worker against reprisals. The committees should reach out directly to workers at the suppliers, at Audi in San José Chiapa, at the IMSS and at VW plants in Germany and the United States. The World Socialist Web Site urges VW workers who want to build these committees to contact us.
8 “Fighting Oligarchy” by electing Democrats: Bernie Sanders campaigns for Angie Nixon in Florida
Sanders said,“Trust me on this, after Angie wins, this is going to be a spark that is going to ignite the entire country...If we can end Republican control over the House, mobilize the American people to stand up and fight for their rights, there is nothing we can’t accomplish”
Sanders’ promise rests on the claim that electing “progressive” candidates can transform the Democratic Party into an instrument of working class struggle. But the Democrats are a capitalist party. Electing Nixon or other candidates endorsed by Sanders cannot change its class character. Promises of universal healthcare, higher wages and taxes on the wealthy serve to draw workers behind a party whose defense of capitalist ownership places it in opposition to their interests.
The record stretches across two centuries. The Democratic Party defended the slavocracy, imposed repression against socialists and militant workers under Woodrow Wilson, incarcerated Japanese Americans under Franklin Roosevelt, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki under Harry Truman and escalated the Vietnam War under Lyndon Johnson. Its contemporary support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the US-NATO war against Russia continues this record of imperialist violence.
With the federal debt exceeding $40 trillion, the ruling class is demanding that workers pay for its financial crisis while pouring resources into war. The obstacle to meeting social needs is the concentration of wealth in private hands and the subordination of society to profit and imperialism. A Democratic congressional majority would leave these foundations intact, alongside a Trump presidency determined to impose the oligarchy’s demands through authoritarian rule.
One cannot fight oligarchy by supporting a party of the oligarchy, or oppose war while remaining politically subordinate to a party of imperialism. The struggle for healthcare, decent living standards and democratic rights requires the independent mobilization of the working class against both capitalist parties. It requires a socialist program to expropriate the financial oligarchy and reorganize society to meet human needs.
BNSF Railway has begun using its proprietary scheduling software to quietly black out entire weeks of vacation for train crews. The move is the latest tightening of brutal attendance policies across the industry, leaving railroaders at the beck and call of the carriers.
The practice was revealed in an exchange with the spouse of a veteran BNSF locomotive engineer in North Texas, who provided the World Socialist Web Site with evidence from the carrier’s Workforce Hub scheduling system. Because time off is bid months in advance, the blackout dates in the 2027 vacation calendar were discovered recently, as workers began submitting requests for the coming year.
Within the vacation scheduling module, sporadic Mondays are highlighted in red and carry the administrative label “BNSF Holiday,” with the submission fields disabled and a system-enforced notice indicating that vacation allocations are unavailable.
The significance of the designation lies in the structure of time-off bidding for train, yard and engine (TY&E) personnel. Under the collective bargaining agreements, the bulk of annual leave must be taken in discrete seven-day blocks running strictly from Monday through Sunday. Single-day vacation and personal leave days remain tightly restricted, leaving the full-week block as the primary mechanism by which operating employees can secure predictable, extended rest.
“If certain Mondays are blacked out, you essentially have an entire week blacked out by just blackballing a Monday,” the engineer’s spouse explained. “This is a severely catastrophic situation.”
She calculated that the pattern of blackouts—roughly every fifth week—renders some ten weeks of the year entirely unavailable for vacation bidding. “So what it’s looking like is 10 weeks out of the year no one can request any vacation weeks,” she said.
“So, what if you are getting married one of those weeks?” she asked. “You have to reschedule it, lose deposits or just not attend your own wedding. This has actually happened. Regularly.”
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The blackouts also strike directly at the seniority system that has long been the foundation of rail work rules. Locomotive engineers and conductors spend decades on erratic on-call extra boards, enduring severe sleep disruption in exchange for the expectation that accumulating tenure will eventually yield predictable summer rest. The software-enforced blackouts nullify that expectation.
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The vacation blackouts raise once again the demands that drove railroaders into struggle in 2022: guaranteed time off, an end to punitive attendance policies and the right to strike. That struggle was suppressed through the intervention of the carriers, the union apparatus and Congress. Defending railroaders’ livelihoods requires renewing the independent fight begun in 2022, which the new contracts have left unresolved.
The Railroad Workers Rank-and-File Committee, formed during that fight, calls for committees in every yard, terminal and shop to unite workers across crafts and carriers. The opposition that forced BNSF to restore time-off allocations in 2025 must be developed into an organized struggle to remove the vacation blackouts, abolish Hi-Viz and place control over schedules and working conditions in the hands of railroaders themselves.
10. Australia: Western Sydney University students not told about block teaching plan
Students at Western Sydney University (WSU), one of the largest in Australia and with a predominantly working-class student population, have not been informed of a proposed plan to switch all WSU’s courses to modular or block teaching by 2029.
The “Western Momentum” model, revealed to academic staff last month, has serious implications for students and staff alike. For educators and professional staff, it would mean even more intensive workloads, with all assessment and marking for each subject to be completed in just four weeks, rather than a 13-week semester.
For students, it would mean completing four blocks each semester, instead of four subjects over a semester, leaving no time for deeper or reflective learning, nor for in-depth feedback.
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WSU management claims that modular learning improves subject pass rates by 10 percent to 15 percent, leading to higher student satisfaction and retention rates, “particularly among student groups like ours, in Western Sydney.”
It cites two other predominantly working-class universities, Victoria University in Melbourne, where block teaching was imposed in 2018, and Southern Cross University in northern New South Wales, where it was inflicted in 2021.
This implies that Western Sydney students and “groups like ours” should be subjected to more vocational education than students at more elite institutions.
Management claims positive shifts in student outcomes from WSU’s The College, a feeder college where block teaching was inflicted from the start of last year, accompanied by job cuts. Supposedly, student retention and completion rates increased from 56 percent to 86 percent and student satisfaction rose to 94 percent.
But educators at The College have reported onerous conditions for staff and students. Staff must teach nine hours of face-to-face classes per week and mark assessments continuously.
The WSU management is promoting the prospect of students completing their courses more quickly or obtaining “stackable credentials,” so they are never more than 12 months away from completing a qualification.
The Albanese Labor government’s cuts to international student numbers, as part of an anti-immigrant campaign, are intensifying the financial pressure on Australia’s 39 public universities, forcing them to fight each other for enrollments, including by offering students vocational “micro-credential” courses.
The government is starving the universities of adequate funding, along with public schools, public hospitals, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and other social programs, while allocating hundreds of billions of dollars for AUKUS and other preparations for a US-led war against China.
Labor’s 2024 Universities Accord is reshaping tertiary education to satisfy the employment and research needs of big business and the military at the behest of a government that has already backed the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran, the escalating US-NATO war on Russia and the US-armed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
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To fight this agenda, university workers and students must build new genuine democratic forms of organization—rank-and-file committees, totally independent of the trade unions—to fight for first-class public education based on the needs of working people and society as a whole, not the dictates of capitalist governments, the corporate ruling class and the plunge into war.
11. National Australia Bank axes 2,500 jobs as unemployment rises
National Australia Bank (NAB) announced Tuesday that it will axe up to 2,500 jobs, around 6 percent of its workforce. Up to 1,500 workers will be sacked before the end of this year, with the remainder to be thrown on the scrapheap by June 2027.
The mass sackings are being imposed by one of Australia’s largest and most profitable corporations. In the six months to March, NAB recorded a net profit of $2.75 billion on net operating income of almost $10.9 billion.
The announcement comes just five days after Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures revealed an increase in the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate to 4.7 percent, 0.3 percentage points higher than a year ago and its highest level since October 2021.
The number of workers employed dropped by 39,300 in September, while the number of officially unemployed workers increased by 8,900 to 732,000. Underemployment increased to 6.3 percent, bringing total underutilisation to 11 percent.
The NAB sackings point to the processes underlying this broader deterioration. Major corporations are carrying out sweeping restructuring operations, using artificial intelligence (AI), automation, outsourcing and offshoring to slash labor costs and intensify the exploitation of the remaining workforce.
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The federal Labor government is spearheading this mass job destruction. Its May budget foreshadowed the elimination of around 28,000 federal public sector positions over four years, with departments imposing hiring restrictions and pushing workers into supposedly “voluntary” redundancies.
Workers are being told that jobs and essential services must be sacrificed while unlimited resources are made available for the military build-up, including the hundreds of billions of dollars committed to AUKUS and preparations for US-led war against China.
Artificial intelligence and automation are being seized upon as a means of restructuring workplaces. These technologies have the potential to enormously reduce the burden of labor. Increased productivity could allow workers to produce the necessities of life while working substantially shorter hours.
Under capitalism, the opposite takes place. Every technological advance is judged according to whether it increases profit. The capacity to perform the same work with fewer labor hours therefore becomes the basis for eliminating jobs, increasing workloads and enriching shareholders.
NAB exemplifies this contradiction. Thousands of workers are being told their positions are no longer required, not because the bank faces collapse, but amid the continued accumulation of billions of dollars in earnings.
12. Hegseth secretly meets Netanyahu as US prepares to resume attacks on Iran
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday at Ovda air base in southern Israel, which hosts US fighter jets and refueling aircraft. Hegseth’s visit, kept secret until the news site Axios reported it, took place eight days before Israel’s October 27 election and one day after US President Donald Trump endorsed Netanyahu for reelection.
The United States and Israel are preparing to resume the war against Iran after Israel’s election and the November 3 US midterm elections. The Israeli settler rampage in the occupied West Bank and the starvation of Gaza accompany the US-Israeli escalation against Iran.
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The American press has reported for two weeks on preparations to resume the war against Iran. Axios reported October 7, citing US and Israeli officials, that the Pentagon had ordered US forces in the Middle East to complete preparations for resuming major combat operations against Iran.
Trump told Time magazine in late September that it would be “possible” to step up the bombing of Iran after the elections. At the start of October the US military sent about 2,000 Marines and 7,000 sailors toward the Middle East, including the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group.
The Roosevelt carrier strike group is due to arrive by the end of November, the Jerusalem Post reported Tuesday, citing Fox News, and the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit has sailed from San Diego aboard the USS Makin Island amphibious ready group. The carriers USS George H.W. Bush and USS George Washington are already in the region with hundreds of US aircraft. The new ships raise the US force in the region to about 20,000 troops, Al Jazeera reported October 9.
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The United States and Israel began bombing Iran on February 28, and on April 13 the US military blockaded Iran’s ports. Washington signed a “ceasefire” with Iran on June 17 and broke it on July 7 and 8, when US forces struck what the US military said were about 170 Iranian military sites and boats.
Israeli ministers are calling for war in the West Bank alongside the war against Iran. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told a podcast of the Israeli news site Ynet on September 27 that Israel should “go to war in Judea and Samaria,” the official Israeli term for the West Bank, “to dismantle the Palestinian Authority.”
About 80 settlers, many of them masked, attacked Palestinian olive harvesters on Friday at Abu Falah, a village northeast of Ramallah, beating the harvesters and a Washington Post photographer, Heidi Levine, while Israeli soldiers tear-gassed the harvesters. On Saturday settlers attacked Belgian, French and Polish diplomats in Taybeh, a Palestinian Christian village northeast of Ramallah. Netanyahu called the international condemnation of the settler attacks “a huge exaggeration” on Sunday.
The Health Ministry in Gaza said Saturday that Israel has killed 1,511 Palestinians there since the “ceasefire” began on October 10, 2025. On October 14, Israel cut off all commercial deliveries into Gaza. The UN World Food Program, which has received less than half its usual funding for Gaza and the West Bank this year, said Monday that its food distributions in Gaza will reach 1.1 million people instead of 1.6 million.
Netanyahu’s coalition partners are demanding the annexation of Gaza and the expulsion of its population. Smotrich said at a Jerusalem conference on October 6: “I demand that the State of Israel permanently apply its sovereignty over the territories it currently holds, both in Gaza and in Lebanon.” On September 3, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who leads the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, presented a plan to push 1.86 million Palestinians, nearly the entire population of Gaza, out of the territory within seven years through what he calls “emigration.”
More than 9,000 workers across Stellantis’ operations in Canada have voted by 97.3 percent for strike action to fight layoffs and the automaker’s plan to sell off the Brampton Assembly Plant to a producer of military vehicles.
Pictures and worker reports confirmed a massive turnout at Caesars Colosseum in Windsor, where the 6,400 workers employed at the Windsor Assembly Plant got a negotiations update before casting their strike-vote ballots. Workers at the shuttered Brampton Assembly Plant and the casting plant in Etobicoke also voted last weekend to give Unifor a strike mandate.
Given the opportunity to express their determination to fight job cuts and eroding living standards, autoworkers filled the 5,000-seat auditorium to near capacity and cast an almost unanimous vote to strike. The huge turnout of rank-and-file workers stands in sharp contrast to the boycott of the United Auto Workers election across the border in the US where nine out of 10 workers abstained from the vote.
UAW President Shawn Fain, a vocal advocate of Trump’s “America First” tariffs, was “re-elected” with the votes of just 6 percent of the membership. This was not due to “apathy” but the broad hostility of rank-and-file workers to the UAW apparatus, which has colluded with the attack on their jobs and living standards. Opposed to a common fight by workers across the borders, the UAW has not informed workers in the US about the strike vote in Canada.
Like its counterparts in the UAW, the Unifor bureaucracy is committed to blocking any industrial action at all costs. In announcing the results of the vote, Unifor officials declared that a strike would only be the “last resort” and that outstanding issues with Stellantis could be resolved at the “bargaining table.”
Even though the three-year contract for Stellantis workers expired a month ago on September 21, Unifor has yet to file a request for a “no board” report, a government-imposed requirement before any legal strike action can be taken. It would take 17 days after a conciliator issues such a report before Stellantis workers would be legally entitled to strike, meaning that the earliest they could walk off the job would be the second week of November.
None of the issues that motivated Stellantis workers to vote for a strike can be resolved within the framework of a collective bargaining struggle. That requires the waging of an industrial and political counteroffensive against the global restructuring of the auto industry being carried out by the Detroit Three and their competitors, and the class war agenda of the ruling elites across North America. The push to boost corporate profits amid the transition to electric vehicles and to convert vast swathes of civilian production to manufacturing armaments for war confront autoworkers with the prospect of job losses, real wage cuts and worsening conditions in the plants. Opposing this requires mobilizing autoworkers in the US, Canada and Mexico—as well as other manufacturing workers in steel and related industries—in a common fight against the global corporations and the capitalist governments that defend them.
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Unifor’s determination to prevent a strike flows from its Canadian nationalism and corporatism. The bureaucracy’s main concern is to retain its “partnership” with the auto bosses, and the federal Liberal and Ontario Progressive Conservative governments, with which it works closely to protect the interests of Canadian big business. Payne sits on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada-US trade war Advisory Council and heads a union that is one of the loudest champions of the corporatist “Team Canada” alliance that suppresses the class struggle in the interests of corporate Canada.
This nationalist propaganda aims to subordinate the working class to the interests of Canadian capital by convincing workers that they are “in it together” in a “common struggle” with their capitalist exploiters in opposing Trump. In reality, Canada’s corporate elite has broad agreement with Trump’s social policies, including attacks on workers’ rights, massive cuts to public services and the redirection of society’s resources to waging war around the world. They merely complain that Trump’s “America First” agenda, summed up in his repeated threats to annex Canada, cuts Canadian capitalism out of profits at home and abroad.
For over four decades, Unifor has worked tirelessly to split autoworkers in Canada from their class brothers and sisters in the US. The nationalist split by the Canadian division of the UAW in 1985 to form the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), Unifor’s predecessor, was an integral element in the union bureaucracy’s trampling on all the militant traditions forged by North American autoworkers in the mass organizing struggles of the 1930s and 1940s. It set in motion a decades-long race to the bottom that was facilitated by the whipsawing of wages, benefits and jobs back and forth across the border with the complicity of both the UAW and CAW/Unifor.
In the last round of contract talks in 2023, Unifor deliberately opted for a three-year contract with the Detroit Three rather than the traditional four-year agreement to ensure that the contracts for Canadian workers would not expire simultaneously with those of their US colleagues in 2027. Three years ago, they displayed their bitter hostility to any joint action by US and Canadian autoworkers, with Payne infamously declaring that Unifor was determined to pursue its “own, Canadian course.”
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Rank-and-file autoworkers have consistently spoken out against this foul nationalism when given the chance. Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president Will Lehman’s recent statement calling for a joint struggle of US and Canadian autoworkers to stop the job cuts at Brampton Assembly was warmly received by Stellantis workers in Windsor. When a campaign team visited Windsor Assembly earlier this month to discuss Lehman’s program of abolishing the union apparatus, returning power to the shop floor, and uniting American, Canadian and Mexican autoworkers, one Stellantis worker responded, “The whole industry in North America has always been integrated. Now, throwing tariffs on, like they are a ‘Canadian product,’ it’s not fair. It’s better to be always united together, like as one supply chain and one auto manufacturer.”
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No genuine struggle in defense of jobs will take place unless Stellantis workers build rank-and-file committees in Windsor, Brampton and Etobicoke to seize control of the fight from the pro-corporate, nationalist Unifor apparatus. These committees must coordinate strike action and construct a joint movement with autoworkers in the US, Mexico and internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
Resistance is spreading across North America. Twelve hundred workers at National Steel Car in Hamilton, North America’s principal rail car manufacturer, are now in their third month of strike action, fighting to put an end to a murderous piece-rate pay regime. Some 500 steelworkers at Stelco in Hamilton and Nanticoke face layoff, while some 23,000 workers at US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs, which owns Stelco and is throwing the Canadian workers out of their jobs, are being forced to continue on the job on contract extensions—now more than six weeks old—agreed to by the United Steelworkers to block a strike.
The task is to mobilize workers internationally to defend all jobs, and link this to the fight for workers’ control over production and political power. Only then can society’s vast resources be deployed to obtain secure, well-paid modern industrial jobs for all, rather than to fill the pockets of the oligarchs and big shareholders.
14. Lawful permanent resident dies in ICE concentration camp
Andrade-Covarrubias is at least the seventh person confirmed to have died while detained by ICE in Texas this year and the second to die at the detention center in Laredo. Other deaths include:
- Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, 42, passed away from a heart-related medical emergency on January 5, 2026, at HCA Houston Healthcare in Conroe, Texas, following his transfer to the ICU from the Joe Corley Processing Center.
- Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, died on January 14, 2026 at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas. ICE claimed the death was due to suicide, but his family maintains it was medical distress suffered during early-year tent facility surges.
- Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez, 63, died of cardiovascular failure on June 19, 2026, after being found unresponsive in his cell at the Webb County Detention Center in Laredo, Texas (the same facility Andrade-Covarrubias died in) and rushed to a local hospital.
- Adrian Andreas Florian, 85, died on June 24, 2026, from medical complications at Valley Baptist Medical Center in Harlingen, Texas, after being transferred there from the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos.
- Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, died on January 3, 2026, at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, from homicide via asphyxia, according to the El Paso County Medical Examiner. Witnesses described seeing guards choking him before he died.
After learning of the tragedy, US Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Laredo, told the Tribune that he visited the detention center to investigate the quality of the facility’s medical care. Cuellar said he could not get any details about Andrade-Covarrubias’ case because it was still under investigation. In a statement, he said that he has written to DHS officials to demand more transparency.
“Any death in federal custody is a serious matter, and we need to know what happened,” Cuellar said on Monday.
It must be stated, however, that the Democratic Party offers no progressive solution to the escalating war against immigrants and the broader working class. In fact, workers and immigrants have not forgotten that Joe Biden continued the immigration policies of Barack Obama, who was dubbed the “deporter-in-chief.”
While opposing the most egregious examples of how immigrants are being treated, the Democrats still support the apparatus that terrorizes immigrants, rounds them up, and has no regard for their contributions as members of the working class. This includes the Texas Democratic candidate for US Senate James Talarico, who recently stated during a CNN town hall that ICE is “necessary.”
The defense of the rights of immigrants, which are the rights of the whole working class by extension, can only be obtained through a concerted campaign of all workers in the United States, regardless of race, nationality, gender, immigration status or any other forms of identity.
15. Over 100,000 join protests and strikes in Italy
Following France, youth protests and unrest also broke out in Italy last weekend. Around 100,000 people in more than 40 cities took part in the “No Meloni Day” on Friday, a reference to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of the neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia party (Brothers of Italy).
School student organizations had called for protests against dilapidating conditions in schools at a time of rising military spending. Thousands poured into the streets in Rome, Bologna, Milan, Turin and elsewhere, in some cases supported by parents and teachers. They sang songs and carried red banners, Palestinian flags and hand-painted placards bearing slogans such as “Fund schools, not wars,” “More schools, fewer bombs” and “You’ve picked on the wrong generation.”
The German and Northern European media have completely ignored these largely peaceful protests, which continued on Saturday, when 10,000 people rallied in Rome against the rising cost of living. By contrast, the media have played up the riots and clashes with police that took place in Milan, Turin and Rome. Police detained 271 young people, 220 of them minors, the youngest not yet 12.
The school strike had itself been preceded by a whole week of strikes in the south, which barely any non-Italian newspaper has noted either. In Apulia, steelworkers in Taranto have been fighting for months against the closure of the Ilva steelworks, which will mean up to 20,000 redundancies. Last week the steelworkers were supported by hauliers (truck drivers) and farmers, who helped to blockade the port with articulated lorries and tractors, preventing tankers from entering and leaving the Eni refinery. The struggle against the impending closure of Ilva is combined with anger over high fuel prices and the threat to farmers’ livelihoods.
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Rising fuel prices as a result of the Iran war are having a devastating effect. Energy prices have risen by 22 to 26 percent since February, diesel alone by 31 percent to €2.25 a litre. Inflation has climbed to 4.2 percent, while wages have officially risen by only 2.5 percent.
Real wages have fallen by 9.4 percent since 2021. And that affects only those with reasonably secure jobs; the situation is even worse for the unemployed and those in precarious work. Italy officially has 5.4 million people living in absolute poverty, including 1.1 million children. Very many young people can barely find a decent job even with a good university degree.
Meanwhile, the government is ramping up rearmament, as in every European country. It has committed to spending 3.2 percent of GDP on arms by 2028 and 5 percent by 2035. Italy has applied to the EU for a special loan of €14.4 billion, half of which is to go to the military. By 2025, military spending had risen to €42.7 billion, almost 90 percent more than in 2013. Spending on social security, health and education, by contrast, has been in decline for years.
After the weekend’s disturbances, Prime Minister Meloni convened a crisis meeting of her cabinet on Monday. She demanded that the so-called opposition, the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement (M5S), immediately “distance themselves from the violence.”
Yet these parties, “left” in name only, had already done so. Elly Schlein, the Democratic Party leader, condemned the violence immediately on Saturday, and Maurizio Landini, head of the General Confederation of Italian Labour (CGIL), called the looting “criminal” and had his union confederation’s support conveyed to the police. Meanwhile, the Meloni government had already introduced new security laws (DDL Sicurezza) in the summer to outlaw strikes and protest actions.
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As in France, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere, the inability of young people to find decent work after school and university coincides in Italy with the growing resistance of the working class. The needs of the masses can no longer be met under capitalism. Workers’ strikes are merging with farmers’ protests, lorry blockades and unrest among school students, university students and young people, and the mood for a general strike against the Meloni government is growing.
One worker told the newspaper L’Espresso, “I am ashamed of my colleagues in the north, because those in the south have organized a standstill. They are losing money; they are losing their dignity. … We should shut everything down, from first to last.” A young second-generation migrant to Italy told the daily La Repubblica in Turin, “We were born and raised here, we pay taxes like everyone else.”
A student said, “Our protest is becoming a permanent mobilisation. If you steal our future, we will block your present.” Luna, 17, told the website juorno.it, “This is only the beginning of a very hot autumn, not just in Italy but across Europe.”
The extreme polarization between rich and poor is giving rise to a social movement that the trade unions can no longer control. At the same time, the bourgeois parties are preparing for war and dictatorship. What is needed is the building of a leadership that fights not only the Meloni government but capitalism, and fights for socialism and internationalism. This means building the Italian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
16. 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.
