The New York Times, which functions as a house organ of the
Democratic Party, has led the campaign. In the first half of October
alone it published at least 20 reports, analyses and columns built
around supposed Russian threats to Europe, Ukrainian battlefield
successes and the danger of easing pressure on Moscow.
Unproven allegations are presented as established fact. On October 2,
the newspaper featured a purported intercepted Russian plan to destroy
Ukraine’s energy grid, while conceding that it could not authenticate
the document. On October 9, Steven Erlanger treated a Russian “shadow
war” of sabotage in Europe as settled, acknowledged that many of the
incidents are difficult to attribute to Moscow, and then aired proposals
for cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure.
Then, on October 15, the Times published
two columns that sum up the campaign. Under the headline “Trump’s Democracy-for-Diesel Deal Shames Us All,” Thomas Friedman wrote, “Donald
Trump, meet Neville Chamberlain,” comparing him to the British prime
minister who appeased Hitler at Munich in 1938. David French wrote that
Trump “is throwing Vladimir Putin a lifeline.”
*****
Both columns fraudulently present the Ukrainian regime as a
democracy, Ukraine is, in fact, governed under martial law. In August a
Ukrainian court sentenced Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old socialist, to
15 years in prison for high treason, convicting him of opposing the war
and calling on Ukrainian and Russian workers to unite against it.
The
media campaign is aimed at the upper middle class, the social base of
the Democratic Party. Its purpose is to divert mass opposition to Trump
behind the pro-war agenda of the Democrats, so that the political
establishment can claim every vote cast against the Republicans is an
endorsement of a wider war. The hostility of millions of workers and
young people to Trump’s wars and his drive to dictatorship cannot find
expression through a party preparing to escalate the war against Russia.
The
cost of the escalation of war being prepared after the election will
fall on the working class. With the federal debt soaring, every dollar
for war will come from Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and public
education.
The fight against war, austerity and attacks on
democratic rights cannot be waged through either party of American
imperialism. It requires the independent mobilization of the working
class, armed with a socialist program.
Safety in the air and at airports is incompatible with the private
ownership of the airline industry. The answer is not re-regulation but
the building of independent rank-and-file committees of aviation
workers, organized across company and union lines, fighting for safety
as a class question and for the expropriation of the airlines from the
capitalists who run them for profit.
It is this fight that the
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is
organizing across the air travel industry. No worker should ever accept
being just a line expense in a corporation’s budget. Instead, they
should organize to fight to place workplace safety under workers’
control and for political power to run the aviation industry and all key
economic sectors in the interests of social need, not private profit.
The administration is using the persecution of Omar as a battering ram
against citizenship itself. Its political objective is to make the right
to remain in the country contingent on loyalty and submission to the
president. A sitting congresswoman who arrived in the United States as a
child refugee and became a citizen more than a quarter-century ago is
being threatened with expulsion for opposing Trump.
*****
No immigration fraud charges against Omar have been announced. The
government has not publicly established that either she or her father
falsified the information now under scrutiny. Yet the administration is
openly discussing the punishment it wants to impose while investigators
search for a basis to carry it out.
Trump has spent years
directing racist and dehumanizing attacks against Omar and Somali
Americans. At his Ohio rally on Monday evening, hours after the raid,
the audience chanted “deport” as he attacked Omar and other Somalis.
“They cheat on everything,” Trump declared. “We’re not going to stand
for it.”
The same president who incessantly denounced the
prosecution over his January 6 coup attempt as political persecution is
deploying federal police against his opponents on the basis of unproven
allegations concerning decades-old paperwork. Whether Omar was 17 or 18
when her father became a citizen cannot justify this campaign of
political banishment.
Socialists defend the right of workers and
their children to live and work in the country of their choice, with
full democratic rights. Modern society depends on the coordinated labor
of workers across the world, linked through international production and
transportation networks. While capital moves across borders in pursuit
of profit, workers are confined, detained and deported by the rival
nation-states that defend capitalist property. The struggle for workers’
freedom of movement is inseparable from the struggle to abolish the
capitalist nation-state system and establish world socialism.
The threatened deportation of Omar takes place amid the campaign by
the Trump administration to greatly accelerate the pace of deportations,
which exposes its victims to imprisonment, persecution and death. This
summer, deportation flights to Haiti increased from monthly to weekly
despite the country’s violence and humanitarian crisis. Human Rights
Watch documented five consecutive weekly flights between August 20 and
September 17 carrying a total of 474 people.
The administration
has also expanded renditions to third countries, sending people to
places where they have no ties or legal status. On September 29, the
Supreme Court lifted restrictions on these removals while litigation
continues. Deportees have faced arbitrary detention, beatings and
disappearance.
Monday’s raid came just 22 days before the November
3 midterm elections, in which Omar is heavily favored to retain her
Minneapolis-based seat. The attack coincides with Trump administration
demands to exclude the ballots of supposedly ineligible voters in
California and a wider campaign against the election itself. The
investigation could provide a pretext for Trump and his congressional
allies to challenge Omar’s legitimacy and attempt to block her taking
her seat if she wins.
*****
As the Trump administration moves to strip a Democratic congresswoman
of her citizenship and deport her on bogus pretexts, leading figures in
her own party have responded with silence or empty denunciations.
As
of Thursday, no public statements could be found from Senate Democratic
leader Chuck Schumer condemning the attack on Omar, while House Speaker
Hakeem Jeffries has uttered only platitudes. This response was
accompanied by other Democrats’ milquetoast denunciations unaccompanied
by concrete action. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, for example, accused
Trump of “abusing his power to go after political opponents weeks before
an election,” but proposed nothing to stop him.
Walz explained
the political outlook behind this inaction at Georgetown University on
Thursday: “I am a product of the institutions, I defend the status quo.”
He coupled this declaration with the claim that he was under no
obligation to meet fascism “halfway.” Yet during Operation Metro Surge,
his deployment of the National Guard and Minnesota police forces in
support of the immigration Gestapo, together with the trade union
bureaucracies’ containment of opposition within one-day protests,
blocked the development of the mass movement building in response to the
murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
Such actions actively
defend the institutions through which fascism develops. One-day protests
and appeals to “remember in November” have brought no justice to the
families of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, murdered in Minneapolis by
federal agents, or the thousands of other families whose lives have been
shattered by the mass deportation operation. As the attack on Ilhan
Omar demonstrates, that operation is being expanded into a weapon
against all political opposition.
The capitalist status quo
defended by Walz and the Democrats has produced staggering
concentrations of wealth and power and nurtured the fascist forces now
attacking citizenship itself. Defending democratic rights and holding
Trump and his accomplices accountable requires the independent
mobilization of the working class, armed with the lessons of history and
a Marxist program, against both parties of the capitalist ruling class.
More than 90 percent of the United Auto Workers (UAW) membership
boycotted the 2026 election of union officers. Shawn Fain was
reinstalled with the votes of just 6 percent of the members.
*****
Ron, a worker at the Stellantis Sterling Heights Assembly Plant
(SHAP), pointed to the contrast between the union’s indifference to its
own election and its mobilization for the Democratic Party. “I got a
ballot, but it was the same time as we got material from the UAW on the
general elections,” he said. “I would have gone out of my way to vote,
but it’s all under control. That’s the way most workers feel, that our
voice doesn’t have any effect.”
The figures bear him out. The UAW
boasted that it mobilized 800 members to knock on doors and make 145,000
phone calls to turn out 112,887 UAW voters during Michigan’s early
voting period in the Democratic primaries. That is more people than
voted in the UAW’s own election, in which only 98,029 ballots were cast.
The union apparatus can find the resources to campaign for the
Democrats but not to defend the jobs, wages and democratic rights of its
own members.
“Fain won the presidency with a very small percentage of the
members,” Ron said. “But they come out and say, ‘We’re going to do
whatever we want because the membership voted for us.’ That tells you
what they think about the workforce’s votes. They strongarm votes,
mysteriously lose votes, and they say the members voted that way. There
were even less people supporting Fain than the last time. That means the
guys that voted for him the first time got disgusted. It’s like the
people who voted for Trump.”
The election figures confirm this
assessment. Roughly 1.1 million members were eligible to vote. Only
98,029 ballots were cast, a turnout of 8.9 percent. Fain received 66,166
votes—68 percent of the votes cast for president, but only 6 percent of
the membership, about one member in 17. Even this figure includes the
votes of the thousands of officials, staff and appointees whose
positions depend on the apparatus.
*****
Ron drew the connection between the union’s betrayal and the broader
assault on democratic rights. “You can see it with the way Trump is
threatening to use ICE at the voting polls. The ICE agents are shooting
people. If autoworkers strike, will they send ICE to intimidate workers
like they do to immigrants? We have immigrant workers from Africa
working at SHAP. Are they going to come here and say to the workers,
‘You do what we want or else’? At some point, if they kill a worker,
it’s going to teeter between are we going to be intimidated or are we
going to have a civil war?
“An execution on TV is a warning of
what they want to do in the future,” he said. “It’s to show their power.
They don’t only want to exploit us, they want to shoot us like cattle
and put it on display. They already have concentration camps. The same
ICE agents you thought would be fired are now your guards.”
On the eve of the first round of the Brazilian elections, the World Socialist Web Site
warned that the pseudo-left organizations presenting “independent”
candidacies would return, in the second round, to the camp of President
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party (PT). “Nothing indicates
that 2026 will be any different,” we wrote.
The prediction has been entirely confirmed. The Morenoites of the
United Socialist Workers Party (PSTU) and the Revolutionary Workers
Movement (MRT), heirs of the tendency founded by the Argentine Nahuel
Moreno, are calling for a vote for Lula in the second round, scheduled
for October 25. The Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and Popular Unity
(UP) are doing the same.
The formulas vary. The PSTU speaks of a
“critical vote.” The MRT proclaims “not a single vote for Flávio
Bolsonaro” and insists that it gives “no political support” to the Broad
Front, Lula’s coalition with traditional parties and figures of the
bourgeoisie, epitomized by Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, former
governor of São Paulo for the PSDB. These “critical” addenda to their
support for Lula’s reelection do not serve to overcome illusions in the
policy of the Broad Front. They serve only to reinforce them, precisely
at the moment when its catastrophe is being exposed before millions.
The
first round, on October 4, was a devastating verdict on the policy of
the Broad Front. The fascist Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President
Jair Bolsonaro, finished in first place with 47 percent of the valid
votes, against 45.2 percent for Lula. His Liberal Party (PL) elected the
largest bloc in the Chamber of Deputies since 1988, and abstention was
the highest ever recorded. The strategy of “stopping fascism” through an
alliance with the “democratic” parties of the bourgeoisie has only
strengthened fascism.
It is in the face of this collapse of the
PT’s project that the pseudo-left is now performing its most important
function. The PT is mobilizing its apparatuses to win back the youth and
the millions who have turned their backs on it. These organizations
serve as a bridge between Lula’s campaign and the layers that have moved
away from it to the left. Their formulas of “class independence” are
the cover for reconstituting the authority of the government and of the
trade union and student apparatuses that sustain it.
*****
PSTU is the leading section of the International Workers League (LIT-QI,
in its Portuguese acronym) founded by Nahuel Moreno. The PSTU’s
statement on the second round of the Brazilian elections describes
Flávio Bolsonaro’s candidacy as an “authoritarian project” that brings
“serious dangers” and the “deepening of capitalist barbarism.” The
conclusion follows: “we will cast a critical vote for Lula.” This
treacherous operation is entirely in the Morenoite tradition. It
preserves the appearance of the “political independence from the
different capitalist projects” that the PSTU claims to defend, while
handing the vote to a bourgeois party. The adjective “critical” makes it
possible to say “vote for Lula” and “don’t trust Lula” at the same
time. But a vote is an objective political act, and whoever calls for it
assumes responsibility for the government it helps to elect.
The PSTU knows this. Its statement admits that “an electoral victory
for Lula does not, by itself, defeat the political strength and the
social bases of Bolsonarism.” It acknowledges that the government “not
only failed to repeal the labor reform as it had promised, but carried
out attacks on the workers,” and that “it was the very project of the PT
leadership that led the Lula government to help feed the Bolsonarist
threat.” It even asserts that “this permanent policy of voting for the
lesser evil every four years ... always leads to a strategic defeat.”
And, in the same document, it calls for a vote for Lula.
*****
To stand “side by side” with the PT, the MRT has largely suspended its criticisms of the government. On the Paulista rally, Esquerda Diário
wrote that “a crowd filled Avenida Paulista, with Lula and the entire
Broad Front government,” in a “strong show of force against Flávio
Bolsonaro.” It added: “The rally was called by the government, with the
limits of the political line of conciliation it has pursued until now.
Despite this, the contingent that was in the streets showed that there
are social forces that want to fight Bolsonarist reaction and US
imperialism in the streets.”
Behind this operation lies the
central illusion promoted by the MRT: that the rallies can be converted
into a revolutionary mobilization, and the bureaucratic apparatuses that
call them into its instruments. According to Esquerda Diário,
the demonstrations “constitute one of the most important events of the
new situation.” They are “initial mobilizations, with strong electoral
contours,” whose development “will depend ... on the capacity to
establish links with broader sectors of the working class and to develop
the perspective beyond the elections.” The character of the rallies is
reduced to a passing contour, supposedly to be overcome by their own
dynamic.
The same applies to the MRT’s cult of the student
“assemblies,” presented as a form of independent self-organization.
Glorifying the “massive assemblies, not seen in years at the
universities,” the MRT declared that “these assemblies send a very clear
message to Flávio Bolsonaro, Nikolas Ferreira, Cleitinho, Pavanato,
Eduarda Campopiano [far-right legislators], we are not afraid! You will
not make us retreat!” The assemblies that have multiplied at the
universities to mobilize in support of Lula’s reelection are controlled
by the same student apparatuses that led the mobilization on Avenida
Paulista. To treat them as independent organs of struggle is a total
fraud.
The MRT’s policy, however, is not a Brazilian peculiarity.
The Brazilian crisis is the national expression of a single world
crisis: NATO’s war against Russia, the war against Iran, the rearmament
of the imperialist powers, the rise of fascist movements and, in
response, the radicalization of youth and the working class. In every
country where this radicalization emerges, the Morenoites play the same
role.
In France, the protests of high school students, which the MRT itself
invokes when writing about the rallies in Brazil, erupted outside the
control of the trade union confederations and turned into a
confrontation with the Macron government, with more than 6,000 young
people arrested. As the WSWS
has shown, Révolution Permanente, the CRP’s French section, is working
to lead this movement back to the apparatuses. It demands a mobilization
“plan” from the union leaderships and calls on trade unionists to
pressure them from within. It limits the goal of the struggle to forcing
the government to “back down” and is silent on the question of war. In
Brazil, the starting point is the opposite: the rallies already belong
to the apparatuses, and the MRT presents them as the embryo of an
independent movement. The method is the same. The radicalization is kept
within the organizations that exist to contain it.
In an article published on October 6 in Esquerda Diário,
the MRT formulates the general perspective behind this policy. A
“critical and reflective look” at the situation, it writes, “makes it
possible to begin to create something new, a combative, radical, class-struggle left.” [Emphasis in the original]
What
is this “new left”? It is a policy of open doors to political forces of
the most diverse traditions implicated in the historical betrayals of
the working class over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries:
Stalinism, Pabloism and their variants. This was precisely the
conception that guided the building of the PT in the 1980s: a “broad”
party, without programmatic delimitation, whose main promoters were the
Pabloite renegades from Trotskyism, with the Morenoites in the front
row. It is essentially this same operation that the MRT proposes to
repeat.
The working class does not need to “begin to create” its revolutionary
leadership. This leadership already exists. It is the Trotskyist
movement led by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), forged in the struggle against Stalinism and Pabloism. The ICFI
did not take part in building these traps: it fought them. Against the
Pabloites, it denounced the adaptation to Castroism, the PT, Chavez’s
“Bolivarianismo” and the Pink Tide as forms of subordinating the working
class to the national bourgeoisie in Latin America. Its program
synthesizes the objective historical experience of the working class.
The task is to build the ICFI as the mass revolutionary leadership of
the working class, in Brazil and internationally.
*****
The policy of the Morenoites rests on petty-bourgeois pessimism: it
treats an electoral defeat of the PT as a defeat of the working class.
We entirely reject this equation and the conclusion that electoral
support for Lula constitutes a “necessary stage” in the struggle against
fascism. What the first-round debacle represented was a defeat of the
fraudulent bourgeois policy of the PT and the pseudo-left, and this
defeat has already taken place, regardless of any “turnaround” in the
second round.
The workers have not yet had their say in response
to this crisis. The necessary condition for halting the advance of
fascism is the political mobilization of the working class as an
independent force. As long as its political intervention remains
blocked, the bourgeois regime will continue to move rapidly to the
right, whatever the result on October 25. If Lula wins, his government
will continue the policy of austerity, rearmament and rehabilitation of
the military that fed Flávio Bolsonaro. A mobilization to reelect Lula
and his Broad Front will not “buy time” for building a left-wing
alternative. It will prolong the subordination of workers and youth to
this bourgeois instrument.
The Socialist Equality Group (GSI)
rejects the illusion that the pro-Lula rallies, or the organizations
that call them, can be converted into an instrument of struggle against
fascism. To the forces that want to fight fascism and imperialism, the
GSI says that this struggle requires a break with all the political
agencies of the national bourgeoisie: the PT, the pseudo-left that
revolves around it, the corporatist trade unions and the student
apparatuses subordinated to them.
The social force capable of
defeating fascism is already in motion. It is the bank workers, postal
workers, teachers and metalworkers who are confronting the Lula
government in recent strikes and are being isolated by the same union
federations that called the rallies. This struggle must be organized
independently of and in opposition to the bureaucracy, through genuine
rank-and-file committees linked internationally through the
International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
But
the coming movement of the working class won’t develop as a trade union
struggle. The crisis of capitalism and of the imperialist system is an
objectively revolutionary crisis in development. The working class will
not enter the scene to reform the bourgeois state through a renewal of a
nationally based unionist or reformist political movement. The crisis
of the bourgeois state, manifested in the emergence of fascism and in
the crisis of parties like the PT and their bureaucratic apparatuses, is
the same crisis that summons the working class to give a revolutionary
answer: to abolish capitalism and take political power under the banner
of permanent revolution and the establishment of international
socialism.
The Albanese government last week staged a carefully choreographed
display of concern for the “Pacific family” at a preparatory meeting for
the UN Conference of the Parties (COP) 31 climate summit, which will be
next month in Türkiye.
The pre-COP meetings in Fiji and Tuvalu, from October 5 to 8, were
billed as an opportunity to bring “the world” to the Pacific and to
place the existential threat of rising seas at the center of global
climate negotiations.
In reality, the gathering exposed the fraud
at the heart of the Labor government’s climate policy, and the real
purpose of its diplomatic offensive in the region: the consolidation of
the Australian and US imperialist grip over the South Pacific in
preparation for war against China.
The event was, in the first
instance, an embarrassment for the Australian government, which had
spent months promising that a host of world leaders would travel to the
region to witness the climate emergency first-hand. In the end, just 14
government leaders made the trip, and only two—Timor-Leste’s José
Ramos-Horta and Mauritius’ Dharam Gokhool—came from beyond the Pacific.
Together they account for a negligible fraction of global emissions. The
leaders of the major imperialist powers all declined to attend.
The
gathering produced no formal COP decisions. A declaration involving
representatives of 30 countries called for “deep, rapid and sustained
emissions reductions,” but there is no legally binding obligation on any
of the signatories to carry out such measures.
*****
The Pacific island states are on the frontline of the climate
catastrophe. In Fiji, six communities have had to be relocated from
their homes due to increased floods and landslides from climate change;
another 17 communities comprising thousands of people are on a
government “red list” for urgent relocation.
Tuvalu, home to
10,000 people living mostly less than two meters above sea level, faces
annual flood damage projected to exceed its entire gross domestic
product (GDP) by the end of the century. These are not distant
projections for Pacific peoples, but the consequences of a crisis for
which they bear no responsibility.
Feigning concern for this
catastrophe, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared in Fiji
that “climate change is not a problem for the future. It is here right
now.” He warned of a summer of floods, cyclones and extreme heat, and
insisted the world could not allow the goal of limiting global warming
to 1.5°C to “slip from our grasp.”
This is from a government that
has, since taking office in 2022, exceeded its Liberal-National
Coalition predecessor in green-lighting new coal and gas projects.
Australia is the world’s third-largest exporter of fossil fuels, and
ranks second in terms of climate damage from those exports, trailing
only Russia. The emissions released when Australian coal and liquefied
natural gas are burned abroad—some 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2023
alone—dwarf the country’s domestic emissions.
Over the past
four years, the Albanese government has approved at least 31 new coal,
oil and gas developments, locking in a cumulative 6.5 billion tonnes of
CO2 equivalent, or 12.5 percent of global annual emissions. Labor’s
“Future Gas Strategy” commits to expanding gas extraction until “2050
and beyond,” and its sham 2035 emissions reduction target falls far
short of the 90 percent reduction by 2035 that scientists say a 1.5°C
pathway requires.
The hypocrisy reflects Labor’s broader agenda,
which has never been about mitigating the climate crisis. The
government’s main policy focus has been to accelerate preparations to
assist a US-led war against China, including by transforming Australia
into a base for war.
*****
The imperialist powers, including Australia, have nothing to offer
the island peoples but threats, militarization and empty promises of
climate finance that never materialize. Nor can workers and students in
the Pacific place any confidence in government treaties or talks like
the annual COP process. Year after year, these summits produce nothing
approaching the measures needed to limit warming to 1.5°C, a milestone
that the world is close to surpassing.
At
COP 30 in Brazil last year, the largest delegation outside the host
country was sent by the fossil fuel lobby, whose 1,600 representatives
occupied one in every 25 places at the summit. None of the leaders of
the world’s five largest emitters was present.
The climate crisis
cannot be resolved within the framework of the nation-state system. It
is rooted in the capitalist mode of production, which subordinates all
social needs to private profit and divides humanity into rival powers.
The working class of Australia, the Pacific nations and China have a
common interest in overturning that system.
The struggle against
climate change is inseparable from the struggle against war and for
socialism. Only on that basis—the socialist reorganization of production
on a world scale, in the interests of humanity rather than profit—can
the existential threat facing the Pacific, and the planet, be overcome.
Bowing to pressure from Washington, both Colombo and New Delhi have
refused to provide essential assistance to the crews of 20 empty Iranian
oil tankers that have been stranded off Sri Lanka’s southwestern coast
for weeks. The tankers had delivered Iranian crude oil, mainly to China,
before becoming stranded as a result of the US naval blockade of Iran,
imposed in July.
This has turned into a humanitarian crisis with crew members
reportedly running short of food, fresh water and fuel. These are empty
commercial oil tankers, not warships engaged in hostilities.
According to a report in the October 14 Colombo-based Island,
the Iranian Embassy in Colombo has asked the Indian High Commission
about its response to the situation. Given that the US has issued a
global warning against providing all services, including food and water,
to the Iranian vessels, sources “asserted India may not throw its
weight behind Iranian efforts to address the issue.”
India’s
far-right, Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party government and the
Indian ruling class as a whole are complicit in the US war of aggression
against Iran that began on February 28. New Delhi has not condemned the
illegal war that has killed thousands of Iranians.
The Associated
Press, on October 9, reported the Sri Lankan government as saying that
it has no immediate plans to help the Iranian ships that lie within Sri
Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)—though outside the
12-nautical-mile territorial sea. AP quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman
Thushara Rodrigo as saying that his government will put its “national
interests first before considering any help.”
This “national
interest first” argument is not a neutral position. It is the standard
ideological cover under which a bourgeois government subordinates itself
to imperialism while pretending to stand above the conflict.
*****
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has also introduced additional
sanctions against Iran and warned its trading partners to sever ties
with Tehran, as Washington seeks to pressure Iran into making
concessions amid the ongoing conflict.
The timing is not
coincidental. On September 9–11, the US Embassy conducted a three-day
workshop training more than 40 Sri Lankan officials—from the navy, coast
guard, ports and finance—to identify “suspicious vessels” and detect
alleged sanctions evasion.
US Ambassador to Sri Lanka Eric Meyer
said the country sits at a strategic crossroads for global commerce and
that, as “sanctions-evasion networks increasingly exploit commercial
shipping, the United States is taking decisive action to counter these
networks and sharing US expertise with our Sri Lankan partners to
protect legitimate trade, secure critical waters, and strengthen
regional security.”
Colombo has been integrated into the
enforcement of an imperialist blockade. President Anura Kumara
Dissanayake government’s posture of neutrality and helplessness—claiming
“such supplies are usually provided by the private sector”—is a
transparent evasion. It shifts responsibility to private companies while
ensuring, through the threat of secondary sanctions, that none will
act.
Responding to the Sri Lankan government’s refusal to provide
assistance, Iranian Ambassador Alireza Delkhosh in Colombo said that,
under the Convention on the Law of the Sea (Article 98) as well as the
SOLAS and SAR Conventions, Sri Lanka could not refrain from assisting
the Iranian vessels stranded in its EEZ.
*****
Behind its bogus claim of “neutrality,” the JVP/NPP has thoroughly tied
itself to US imperialism, shedding its pretense of anti-imperialism in
the past. Sri Lanka’s ruling class is not the innocent victim of US
pressure; it is aligned with the US-led war drive, and it has chosen
that role because its own interests—partnership with the IMF, the
suppression of the working class, and the fear of a mass movement like
that of 2022—are bound up with Washington’s. The Dissanayake government
is not being coerced into compliance against its will. It is
implementing the foreign policy of its class, the Sri Lankan
bourgeoisie.
New research has exposed the deadly consequences of chronic
understaffing in New Zealand’s public hospitals, finding that 182 deaths
per year are linked to inadequate nurse numbers on surgical wards.
A University of Auckland population-wide study by surgeons Cameron Wells and Ian Bissett, published in the ANZ Journal of Surgery
analysed more than 220,000 surgical admissions across 24 public
hospitals between 2022 and 2024. Researchers compared the number of
nurses available on each shift with the staffing levels required to care
for patients.
As reported in the Post, they found 45 percent of surgical
ward shifts had fewer nursing hours available than needed. For every
one-nurse reduction on a shift, the adjusted odds of a patient dying
within 90 days of surgery were 13 percent higher.
The study
highlighted the “failure to rescue” patients when fatal complications
such as sepsis or severe bleeding are not detected and treated
immediately. Bissett said, “When nurses are stretched with understaffing
both vital sign monitoring… and recognition of deterioration may be
delayed.”
Māori and Pacific patients from poorer regions were more likely to experience inadequate staffing.
*****
The overcrowding in hospitals is directly linked to a shortage of
general practitioners: People who cannot access or afford to see a GP
often face deteriorating conditions that force them to go to hospital
EDs.
In March, an RNZ-Reid Research poll found that one in three
people face waits of over two weeks to get a GP appointment, with more
than one in six waiting three to four weeks or more. About 320,000
people are not enrolled with a general practice.
Nurses, doctors,
healthcare assistants, ambulance drivers and laboratory workers have
repeatedly taken action to demand better staffing, conditions and wages.
More than 100,000 teachers and healthcare workers took part in a “mega strike” in October 2025. These strikes have repeatedly been shut down and betrayed by the trade union bureaucracy, including the NZNO.
With
less than a month until the general election on November 7, Labour has
responded by promising three free GP visits annually and says it will
guarantee jobs for all eligible nurses graduating in New Zealand. These
proposals—even if they are implemented—are a drop in the bucket that
will not resolve the crisis facing patients and staff.
Aside from
these measures, Labour does not propose to increase overall funding for
health above what National has already announced. Both parties are
promising to reduce government spending overall, while allocating
billions more to the military and keeping taxes low for the super-rich.
*****
The Socialist Equality Group (NZ), with its candidate Tom Petterson
contesting the Hutt South electorate in the coming election, advances
the only viable solution to the public healthcare crisis: the
independent political mobilization of the working class on a socialist
and internationalist program, to expropriate the billionaires and major
corporations. The working class must build its own party to fight for
the socialist transformation of society.
The last youth demonstration on October 13 confirmed the spread of
the movement of high school and university students against the police
state and austerity in France. It is developing alongside the mass
housing struggle in Spain, high school protests in Belgium, and strikes
in Portugal and Ireland. Turnout in protest marches across France marked
a clear rebound compared to October 8. More than 450,000 people
demonstrated in all of France’s largest cities.
Ahead
of the October 17 day of action, which grew out of calls on social
media for a revival of the “yellow vest” protest over purchasing power
and social inequality, blockades are intensifying. At several high
schools and universities closed by their administrations, young people
have entered the premises to carry out their own blockade of
institutions where classes are no longer being held. Beyond the
numerical scale of the movement, however, the decisive question is the
political perspective of this struggle, and how to mobilize the working
class more broadly.
A substantial layer of youth and workers is
becoming radicalized in the course of this struggle, in the wake of the
experiences of the class struggle of recent years. May 1968, and the
general strike that erupted then out of workers’ anger at the repression
of students, is on everyone’s mind. So is the bankruptcy of the
inter-union alliance, which sold out the 2023 mass strikes against
Macron’s pension reform. A broad rejection is taking shape of the
explosion of military spending, the escalation of wars, and the rise of
neo-fascism and the police state.
The conceptions of the Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES) and the WSWS are winning broader support.
This includes the call to form action committees to wage an independent
and internationalist struggle from the rank and file. So is the PES’
criticism of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s national program for electing a new,
supposedly “left-populist” capitalist government. The question of a
revolutionary mobilization of the class struggle against war, fascism
and police repression is arising in the consciousness of a growing layer
of workers and youth.
At the blockade of Paris VIII University
in Saint-Denis, Thomas told the WSWS: “We’ve reached a stage of general
politicization that very clearly goes beyond trade union issues. There’s
also the whole revolutionary imagination of May 68 that is starting to
re-emerge. People are almost talking about a new May 68 … What people
want, if we take up the imagination of May 68, is also the goals of May
68: to get rid of the government.”
Calls
for a new May 68 are linked, Thomas explained, to the need to overcome
the obstacle posed by the union leaderships, and to growing interest in
the issue of workers’ control in the factories and workers power. He
said, “The unions have lost their historic role. They don’t organize the
masses. Anyway, mass unions don’t exist anymore. And besides, they
don’t block anything anymore. I was stunned to learn that in May 68,
there were people who locked the bosses in the factories and kept the
factory shut under workers’ control. Today, there’s nothing like that.”
When the WSWS reporters raised the question of forming action
committees in France and internationally, to mobilize workers and youth
independently of the national union apparatuses, Thomas replied: “I
completely agree that the perspective must be internationalist, that it
must be about the general self-organization of students and workers.”
At the October 13 demonstration in Paris, two students, Eva and Luna,
told the WSWS: “In fact it’s an anger that has lasted for decades and
decades, it’s just that today it exploded.” They added: “Even in
prestigious universities in Paris, whose names are recognized
internationally, we have problems with teachers, we have students who
don’t have a professor.” Students, they said, are “completely neglected
by the administration.”
They denounced the bloody police repression and mass arrests of
the youth in struggle: “It’s completely scandalous. France is supposed
to be a country of human rights. Our history, after all, is marked by
many revolutions. Anyway, it’s wrong, no country should accept this kind
of violence … When you look at Macron’s government and how it treated
the yellow vests, how it also treated the farmers’ protests a few months
ago, there was just so much of this repression.”
They
stressed their agreement with the WSWS perspective of unifying the
struggles in France with those across Europe and internationally: “The
most beautiful thing about this movement is that more and more we see
European countries rising up, and we see that it’s above all a problem
not necessarily on the scale of France, but simply a global and European
problem. So maybe there’s also something to be done on the scale of
Europe and the EU, quite simply, because youth are starting to rise up.”
*****
When the WSWS raised the need for a revolutionary mobilization
of the class struggle, and argued that workers and youth cannot entrust
the struggle against neo-fascism and war to a hypothetical election of
Mélenchon in the presidential election, Pierre expressed his agreement.
He
explained: “Yesterday I was at a general assembly where they were
discussing exactly that. … What we know today is that there’s a
president, there’s a government, sure, but there are lots of
institutions that are still, and will still be after Mélenchon’s
election, run by Macronists.”
On the need to build action
committees and a rank-and-file movement independent of the national union apparatuses, Pierre pointed to the union leaderships’ attempt to
call widely spaced, leapfrogging mobilizations: “The inter-union
alliance, the CGT, etc., have called a mobilization on November 5, so we
can see they’re a bit disconnected from reality all the same … The
inter-union alliance is still a political union. So they also want to
get their piece of the pie and their share of the action in the high
school mobilizations.”
He added: “There may be an awakening in
Europe, and this awakening must be fed. These little sparks we have must
be fed. But for them to be fed, students, like what we’re doing at
Paris 8, have to turn toward the workers, toward the factory workers.
Because the revolt came from the high school students, it spread to the
university students, and now it has to spread to the world of work, to
the workers, to the factory workers.”
In the latest act of fascist terror in the United States, on Sunday,
October 11, law enforcement in suburban Chicago arrested 19-year-old
Alexandros Paporakis following an attempted mass shooting at a Hindu
temple in Aurora, Illinois.
According to charges filed by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s
Office, Paporakis drove to the temple carrying a rifle, ammunition and
tactical gear with the intention of carrying out a mass killing.
Democratic US Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi said he and his family
were at the temple that day. It is not yet known if Paporakis knew of
Krishnamoorthi’s presence or if he was an intended target.
According
to police sources, the shooting was averted when the weapon jammed as
he attempted to open fire. Then, Paporakis drove off the temple grounds
in his vehicle and returned to his residence in Palatine. Once home, he
called a coworker from the Taco Bell restaurant where he was employed as
a cashier. During the call and through messages, Paporakis stated that
he had attempted to carry out the shooting, explained that his rifle had
jammed, sent photographs of weapons and tactical gear and declared his
plan to fix his weapon and return to the temple.
Coworkers told
police that Paporakis had previously espoused white supremacist views in
the workplace, having told them the preceding day that Sunday would be
“special” and explicitly stating that he intended to kill Indian people.
The coworker immediately called the police informing them of the
threat, resulting in Paporakis’s arrest outside his residence on Sunday
evening by local police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
During
a subsequent search of Paporakis’s residence, investigators found a
rifle, extensive amounts of ammunition, tactical gear and a manifesto
espousing neo-Nazi ideology that called for the elimination of Indian
immigrants and described Jewish and black people as “sub-human.”
Paporakis is being held without bail and has been charged with felony
counts of making a terrorist threat and unlawful possession of weapons.
Treating
Paporakis as an isolated “lone wolf” obscures the political forces
cultivating such violence. Right-wing publications like the New York Post
have jumped on a court order to allow Paporakis to continue to receive
hormone treatment for an ongoing gender transition as well as medication
for severe depression, anxiety and attention-deficit/hyperactivity
disorder (ADHD), in a sinister attempt to associate the crime with
transgender people.
These non-explanations obscure the real social
roots of the event. The attempted shooting in Aurora is not an
inexplicable product of individual psychology, but a product of the
systematic cultivation of fascist and xenophobic politics at the heights
of American society.
Paporakis’s actions developed in a political environment where
fascist ideology is broadcast from the White House. On September 9, the
Department of Homeland Security posted racist propaganda targeting Sikh
truck drivers: “Get off our roads, you don’t know how to drive Mr.
Singh.” Trump has described Somali immigrants as “garbage” and
repeatedly claimed that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our
country,” echoing Hitler’s racial doctrines.
This agitation serves
a definite class purpose: to scapegoat immigrants for the inequality,
poverty and war produced by capitalism, divide workers across racial and
national lines, and cultivate support for presidential dictatorship.
Central
to this agitation is the fascist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory,
which claims that immigrants are being brought into the country to
displace the white population, with Jews cast as the organizers of the
supposed plot. Republican politicians and right-wing media have promoted
versions of this lie for years. In November 2023, multibillionaire Elon
Musk endorsed an antisemitic post accusing Jewish communities of
encouraging hatred of whites and the influx of minorities, replying:
“You have said the actual truth.”
This ideology has animated
massacres targeting black people, Latinos, Muslims and Jews, including
the attacks in Buffalo, El Paso, Christchurch and Pittsburgh. The
Buffalo gunman explicitly promoted replacement theory in his manifesto,
while the Pittsburgh synagogue murderer targeted Jews over their support
for refugees.
*****
While the threat of far-right violence continues to expand, the
response of the Democratic Party has been defined by political
accommodation and cover-up.
In October 2020, when members of the
fascist Wolverine Watchmen militia were arrested for plotting to kidnap
and execute Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, following Trump’s public
call to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!,” the Democratic Party treated the
conspiracy as a localized criminal matter rather than an organized
fascist network connected to the national political establishment.
Similarly,
following the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol, which sought
to overturn the certification of the presidential election, the Biden
administration and congressional Democratic leaders emphasized the need
for “unity” with their “Republican colleagues” while subordinating
opposition to the coup to the courts and congressional proceedings.
This
pattern recurred in October 2022, when David DePape forced entry into
the San Francisco residence of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
demanding her whereabouts before assaulting her husband, Paul Pelosi,
with a hammer. The Democratic leadership treated the assassination
attempt primarily as a personal tragedy, consistently avoiding any
political confrontation with the fascist networks and media operations
promoting such attacks.
The Democrats’ refusal to wage a political
struggle against the far right is rooted in their class position. As a
party representing Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus,
the Democrats fear that exposing the extent of far-right networks within
the state and mobilizing popular opposition would set into motion a
broader social movement of the working class that would threaten the
rule of both capitalist parties.
To obscure the growth of
far-right extremism and justify state repression, the political
establishment and media have promoted the claim that “left-wing
violence” constitutes the primary threat to public safety.
The record of extremist violence contradicts this narrative. A study
by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that
right-wing perpetrators accounted for 57 percent of terrorist attacks
and plots in the United States between January 1994 and May 2020. The
massacres in Charleston, Pittsburgh, El Paso, and Buffalo
demonstrate the specific character of far-right terror, which
systematically targets ethnic and religious minorities for mass
killings.
Nevertheless, the state apparatus and corporate media
routinely invert these findings to direct police measures against
left-wing, socialist and anti-war sentiment. The New York City Police
Department (NYPD) has deployed its militarized Strategic Response Group
(SRG) against demonstrations opposing the Gaza genocide and federal
immigration raids. NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and
Counterterrorism Rebecca Weiner explicitly characterized “left-wing
terrorism” as a principal security threat while Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a
member of the Democratic Socialists of America, stood nodding in
agreement.
Manhunt (2026), a new film by Canadian director Wayne
Wapeemukwa, follows two teenage friends who are attracted to violence
and the far right. At the end of their senior year of high school, they
leave their homes for the wilds of northern British Columbia, taking a
3-D printed rifle with them. Their plans are unexplained (and perhaps
only half-formed). Premiering during an international resurgence of
extreme right-wing movements, the film is timely and disturbing.
*****
Manhunt was inspired by a series of three murders
that were committed in British Columbia in 2019. Over the course of
several days that July, two young tourists and a 64-year-old man were
found dead of gunshot wounds near highways in the northern part of the
province. Evidence led police to suspect teenagers Kam McLeod and Bryer
Schmegelsky, who initially had been reported as missing, of the murders.
Investigators found a photo of Schmegelsky wearing a swastika armband
and brandishing a Hitler Youth knife. Online accounts linked to the
teenagers featured a strange mix of far-right ideology and Soviet
imagery. A manhunt ended in the discovery of the teenagers’ bodies.
McLeod and Schmegelsky had filmed a series of videos in which they
confessed to the murders without showing remorse. They also announced
their plans to commit suicide.
Joey and Kit are entirely
believable characters who, in many ways, act like other teenagers on the
brink of adulthood, trying to define themselves. What accounts for
their fascination with Hitler, their racism and their love of violence?
What drives young men and women to the far right? The answer lies in the
objective social and political conditions and historically determined
ideological problems that these young people confront.
Having
endured decades of attacks, the Canadian working class faces falling
wages, rising rents, collapsing public services and a surge in
homelessness. About 13 percent of Canada’s youth is unemployed, and many
others have insecure, low-wage jobs. Young people’s tuition and debt
are soaring. Rather than organizing the resistance to these attacks, the
putative leaders of the working class (the trade unions and “left-wing”
parties such as the New Democratic Party) have suppressed strikes,
divided workers and upheld the interests of finance capital.
The
far right is attempting to divert the resulting social anger in a
reactionary direction. Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre and
others offer the poisons of nationalism and anti-immigrant incitement
while enacting corporate tax cuts and militarization. All Canada’s
official political parties have moved so far to the right that it has
become hard to distinguish between their programs. The standing ovations
that Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the entire Canadian
Parliament gave to Yaroslav Hunka,
a Ukrainian former member of Hitler’s Waffen SS, are an unanswerable
self-indictment. The ruling class, in Canada and worldwide, is
rehabilitating Nazism and genocide.
British Columbia in particular has historically been the arena of
sharp class struggle and home to some of the most militant workers in
North America. The “socialist” NDP was swept to power in B.C. in 1972 on
a wave of left-wing sentiment. It proceeded to betray its supporters,
producing widespread disappointment and disillusionment, and opened the
door to extreme right tendencies.
But the conditions that make possible a turn to the far right among disoriented youth are not explored in Manhunt. The
little we learn about Joey’s circumstances does not explain why, while a
school picture is being taken, he shouts, “Heil!” And Kit’s family life
remains a mystery. The film follows the two friends so closely that we
get little sense of the world that they inhabit.
It is not surprising, then, to learn that among the movies from which Wapeemukwa drew inspiration for Manhunt are Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant(2003).
Haneke’s film presents violence with disturbing realism while omitting
all the social circumstances that give rise to it. Van Sant’s film not
only provides no social context for the Columbine High School shooting
of 1999 but also refuses to offer any explanation for it. Whatever
psychological effects these films may achieve, they do not illuminate
the subject of violence—and even discourage the search for answers.
*****
Manhunt conveys something of the brutality and senselessness of
right-wing violence. The feeling of dread and wasted potential that the
movie evokes does not soon leave the viewer. Kit’s manifesto gives a
hint—but only a hint—of the confusion and social misery that foster the
pessimism, fatalism and misanthropy on which the far right thrives. But
even with the best intentions, a director cannot say anything
enlightening about far-right violence without examining the
socio-economic and historical conditions that foster it.
The results of the state elections are a clear vote against
rearmament, war and social cuts, which are at the heart of the federal
government’s policies. The planned or already agreed cuts to pensions,
healthcare, long-term care and social benefits are destroying the
livelihoods of countless people, while the escalation of the war against
Russia and support for the genocide in Gaza encounter broad rejection
among the population.
But the CDU and SPD are not responding to
the electoral debacle by making concessions to voters and scaling back
their plans for war and sweeping cuts. They are unwilling to budge a
millimetre from their political course. Instead, they are taking further
steps towards war and dictatorship.
Their reaction shows that it
is no longer possible to influence government policy by means of the
ballot paper or pressure from the streets, owing to the insoluble crisis
of global capitalism. The defense of profits and fortunes worth
billions, and the bitter international struggle for raw materials, cheap labor and markets, require that every area of society be subordinated
to the drive for profits and to preparing for war.
The
German ruling class was forced to make social concessions because of its
crimes in the Second World War and the great class struggles of the
1960s and 70s. Such concessions are no longer compatible with the
capitalist profit system. All the parties that defend capitalism bow to
this dictate—not only the CDU and SPD but also the Greens and Die Linke.
The AfD and its role model Donald Trump embody the interests of capital
in their sharpest form.
The necessary conclusions must be drawn
from this. The fight against war, mass layoffs and sweeping social cuts
requires the independent mobilization of the international working class
on the basis of a socialist program aimed at the abolition of
capitalism. All other methods are doomed to failure.
A massive wave of job cuts is looming in the German chemical industry.
Three weeks ago, Evonik CEO Claus Rettig asserted he would accelerate
the restructuring of the leading German chemical company. Sites in
Germany are being closed and relocated, and subsidiaries are being sold.
In total, Evonik plans to cut nearly 11,000 of its more than 31,000
jobs worldwide.
*****
In the East German “chemical triangle,” where over 35,000 people are
employed, DOMO Chemicals filed for bankruptcy at the turn of the year
for its Leuna site, which employs around 600 people. Dow Chemicals also
plans to partially withdraw from the region. By the end of 2027,
approximately 800 jobs are set to be cut in Böhlen and Schkopau.
The
corporations justify their cost-cutting plans to their workforces by
citing overcapacity, high energy prices and insufficient plant
utilization. Evonik speaks of a “structural and economic crisis” in the
industry.
And as with Evonik, the IG BCE, together with its works
councils, is ensuring that the job cuts proceed smoothly—through
“natural turnover,” i.e., not filling vacant positions, partial
retirement and early retirement, as well as severance payments.
Preserving
and defending jobs is not the IG BCE’s goal, as Vassiliadis and Bercht
recently wrote to the works councils at BASF and Evonik. The goal, they
argue, must be to “finally” strengthen Germany as a chemical industry
hub “once again” rather than beginning “yet another round of its
weakening.”
The events of recent years as a whole—and especially
the current layoff plans—make it necessary for workers to organize
independently of the IG BCE bureaucracy and its works councils. The
bureaucrats who sit on supervisory and works councils and are handsomely
compensated for their work in the interests of shareholders represent
their own material interests, which have nothing to do with those of the
workforce. Chemical workers must unite against this apparatus in action
committees to fend off the massive attack on their jobs and wages and
to defend their workplaces.
Thirteen workers have been killed in Chile’s mining industry so far
this year. With more than two months remaining, the death toll is fast
approaching the 20 fatalities recorded in 2025, itself the highest
figure since 2014. Seven of the dead were killed in six accidents just
between September 23 and October 14. The carnage is the direct product
of a profit drive that has intensified to the point of outright
criminality, and it has created a situation that the ruling class, the
government and the trade union apparatus all recognize as explosive.
*****
This toll follows a year in which 20 miners died, and
225 workers were killed across all industries in Chile. That is 67 more
than the 158 recorded in 2024, a rise of 42 percent. The deaths are
overwhelmingly the product of precarious working conditions, precarious
employment and precarious contracts imposed under the subcontracting
regime that the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet created. This same
regime has been preserved and deepened under the center-left governments
of the Concertación, the “progressive” administration of Gabriel Boric and now the ultra-right government of José Antonio Kast alike.
*****
Amid this carnage, the unions, the government and the ruling class
are visibly alarmed, not for the workers, but for themselves. The
statements issued in recent days are a study in the management of an
explosive situation.
Economy and Mining Minister Daniel Mas
intoned that “every life lost at a mining site affects us all.” Manuel
Viera, president of the Chilean Chamber of Mining, addressed workers
directly: “You are the last line of defense… Your family is waiting for
you tonight. Come home.”
This is feigned concern of the most
duplicitous kind. The same Chamber of Mining that now sheds tears for
the dead has spent decades demanding the subcontracting, the speed-up
and the erosion of safety that killed them. The same Kast government
that now convenes “safety roundtables” has introduced a 2027 budget that
dismantles public services while showering tax breaks on the mining
monopolies.
The real reaction of the ruling class is not one of
grief, but of fear. The concern is genuine only insofar as it reflects a
deteriorating economic situation in Chile and on a world scale. US
imperialism’s criminal war against Iran, launched in February, has
deepened the global crisis, sent energy prices soaring and destabilized
the entire world economy. Imperialism’s war budget and the assault on
social programs are a single class policy, and its consequences are
being felt in every working-class household.
Within this global
crisis, the crisis of copper production in Chile has a specific and
terrifying significance for the bourgeoisie. The country is failing to
produce copper at the highest price in history....
*****
The historic importance of Will Lehman’s challenge to the United Auto
Workers (UAW) in the United States lies here. Lehman, a Mack Trucks
worker and a Trotskyist, has waged a rank-and-file campaign for the
presidency of one of the richest, most powerful and most state-shielded
bureaucracies in the world. One Trotskyist worker, against the entire
machinery of the capitalist state and the union apparatus that serves
it. What do they fear? They fear the idea that a worker can stand for
the political independence of the working class, for the abolition of
the union bureaucracy, for power to the rank and file. They fear the
revival of the genuine socialist idea: workers’ control over production,
distribution, safety, conditions and wages, in accordance with the
needs of the working class and society as a whole.
That is the
perspective the Chilean miners need. The resources exist to provide
every Chilean with a decent life. The copper barons—BHP, the Luksic
family, whose matriarch Iris Fontbona saw her fortune rise 91 percent in
a single year to US$55.6 billion—are extracting enormous profits from
the very scarcity their own investment strike has produced. What is
lacking is not money, but the political independence of the working
class from the parties and unions that serve as instruments of
capitalist rule.
The miners at Centinela and Escondida, the
contract workers who are dying in the mines, and the entire Chilean
working class must build independent, democratic and militant
rank-and-file committees that unite direct employees and contract
workers, that take the struggle out of the hands of the union
bureaucracy, and that link the fight for safety and wages to the
political fight against the Kast government and the entire capitalist
order. The struggle against the deaths in the mines is inseparable from
the struggle against imperialist war, against the assault on living
standards, and for the socialist reorganization of society. The lives of
the workers are worth more than copper—and only the working class,
organized independently and internationally, can make that truth a
reality.
A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) social inequality
charity has revealed families struggling ever harder with the
cost-of-living crisis—including households not previously considered
poor.
Record numbers cannot afford the essentials: JRF’s cost of living tracker, summer 2026, estimates
that 7.4 million low-income households were unable to afford at least
one essential item in the six months to May/June 2026:
“These are
items that are necessary for an acceptable standard of living”—clothing,
shoes, soap, shampoo, even a toothbrush or sanitary items, furniture,
household appliances, dental treatment, over-the-counter pain relief and
food.
This is the highest number since the tracker began in 2021, up from
7.1 million a year earlier. The JRF extrapolated its figures from a
survey of 4,121 adults from the poorest 40 percent of households.
Of
the most deprived households—those receiving Universal Credit (UC),
younger families, from a black or mixed ethnic background or non-UK
citizens, with three or more children or lone-parent families—more than
80 percent reported being unable to afford an essential item in the last
six months.
Although households receiving UC were hit hardest,
the fastest growth in hardship was among groups traditionally not
experiencing deprivation.
Among households not receiving
means-tested benefits, 53 percent were struggling, compared with 47
percent two years ago. The increase was fastest among mortgage-free
homeowners, childless households, families without disabilities or
health conditions and households with someone aged 65 or over.
The
report found “Food increasingly unaffordable for millions of low-income
households.” 47 percent of low-income families went hungry, reduced
meal sizes or skipped meals the previous month. This represents 5.6
million households, up from 5.5 million in May 2025.
Food
inflation averaged 4.1 percent between May 2025 and May 2026, compared
with 3.6 percent overall inflation. According to the British Retail
Consortium, global factors pushed goods inflation up by 1.5 percent in
the year to August and food by 2.8 percent. Food inflation jumped from
2.2 percent to 2.8 percent in a month.
This disproportionately
affects poorer households. 1.5 million households used a foodbank in the
previous six months, while half surveyed bought less fresh and more
processed food.
The rising cost-of-living is forcing families into
debt. 3.8 million households borrowed money to pay for essentials,
while 1.3 million used high-cost lenders such as payday lenders, loan
sharks, or pawnbrokers in May 2026 to pay for food, housing or bills.
The number of households in arrears on bills or debt repayments rose
over the last two years to 4.5 million or 40 percent of those on low
income.
Many families have made cutbacks for years—inadequately
heating their homes, cutting baths or showers, reducing socializing,
stopping pension contributions.
According to government figures published under Prime Minister Andy
Burnham’s predecessor Keir Starmer in March 2026, 13.4 million people in
the UK were living in relative poverty after housing costs in 2024/25.
This represented 20 percent of the population, including 4 million
children. Relative poverty is defined as household income below 60
percent of the national median, adjusted for household composition. This
was an increase from the revised 2023/24 figure of 12.93 million.
*****
When Burnham replaced Starmer, he announced his government would “do
something to make life more affordable, to put more money in people’s
pockets… so that they can have a better life”.
His record shows he
will do nothing to alleviate social misery. His speech to the Labour
conference offered only his token £2 cap on (single trip) bus fares in
England and no VAT on electricity bills for six months—a pitiful annual
saving of £45 per household already wiped out in the increase in energy
bills. Burnham also announced he would end the triple-lock pension
increase—meaning any subsequent rise under a new formula would be cut by
at least £170 a year from 2030.
His commitment to meeting the
NATO-demanded target of spending 5 percent of GDP on the military and
related infrastructure by 2035 means the diversion of tens and hundreds
of billions. To fund this, he declared as he prepared to take office
that he would not be “squeamish” about cutting welfare.
Burnham’s
public-private partnership, “Manchesterism”, to be rolled out nationally
will only enrich private companies and impoverish the working class
further.
As Mayor of Greater Manchester (2017–2026), he provided cheap loans
to property billionaires to build glitzy skyscrapers offering luxury
accommodation while homelessness soared. The economic growth he boasts
of in Manchester only benefited an affluent minority.
This month
it was revealed that the Burnham-controlled Greater Manchester Housing
Investment Loans Fund handed over £55 million in taxpayer-funded loans
for Manchester Life housing developments. Manchester Life is a joint
venture between Labour-run Manchester City Council and the billionaire Abu Dhabi owners of Manchester City football club—estimated by Bloomberg as the second-richest family in the world with $335.9 billion.
Burnham
pledged to end rough sleeping in Greater Manchester by 2020. By the
time he left office it was worse than ever. Six of Greater Manchester’s
local wards are among the 60 most deprived in the UK, with children
particularly affected. In ethnically diverse Cheetham Hill, government
figures for 2024/25 put 51 percent of children living in poverty.
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.
