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The Assassination of Leon Trotsky: Espionage, Scandal, and the Crime of the Century,
by H. Keith Melton and Nigel West, is the second book published this
year on the monstrous crime carried out by the Stalinist secret police,
the GPU, in August 1940. In contrast to the earlier volume by Josh
Ireland, which is a typical piece of anti-Trotsky hackwork, Melton and West express a respect for Trotsky’s political genius and
his place in history that is absent from virtually all other books on
the great Marxist revolutionary produced by bourgeois journalists and
academics over the last three decades.
Book cover
of "The Assassination of Leon Trotsky: Espionage, Scandal, and the
Crime of the Century" by H. Keith Melton and Nigel West
In the Introduction to the volume, the authors acknowledge Trotsky’s immense historical role. They write:
As
Vladimir Lenin’s most brilliant lieutenant and the architect of the Red
Army, Trotsky was indispensable to the Bolshevik triumph of 1917. His
leadership during the Russian Civil War (1918–1921) and his theory of
permanent revolution established him as one of the Revolution’s most
formidable figures. Yet the same independence, intellect, and
internationalist vision that elevated him also ensured his destruction.
The
authors stress that the conflict between Trotsky and Stalin “was not
merely personal but ideological: Trotsky’s insistence on international
revolution clashed irreconcilably with Stalin’s doctrine of ‘socialism
in one country.’” Melton and West further note that “By the late 1920s, Trotsky remained
the last living embodiment of Lenin’s Revolution and the most visible
alternative to Stalin’s rule.” The Introduction concludes with the observation that “Stalin sought not
merely to silence a man but to extinguish a movement, a lineage, and a
legacy.”
The
authors are to be commended for this honest appraisal, all the more so
because their professional interests and commitments exclude the
possibility of any sympathy for the revolutionary politics of Trotsky.
*****
...Melton and West construct a superficial cover story to explain the
origins of their book, and they create a counternarrative that detaches
the August 20, 1940 assassination of Trotsky, and the investigation that
followed it, from its critical and contemporary political implications.
The results of Security and the Fourth International are appropriated
for the official historiography of espionage, while the political
history of how, by whom, and against whom those results were established
is suppressed. The pre-1940 assassination conspiracy is retold in
detail. The aftermath of the assassination—the decades-long cover-up
inside the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the continuing penetration of
the Fourth International by the GPU and the FBI, and the struggle of the
International Committee to expose both—is excised in its entirety. What
follows examines the authors’ counternarrative, what it conceals, and
what, despite itself, their book confirms.
*****
The phrase “Security and the Fourth International” appears six times
in the book, every occurrence buried in the endnotes. Chapter 2’s first
endnote cites “Security and the Fourth International: How the GPU
Murdered Trotsky [London: Labor Publications, 1976]”; note 68 of the same chapter attributes the work to the International Committee of the Fourth International; other chapter notes cite the same investigation and identify Eric
London’s Sylvia Ageloff articles as part of the “Security and the Fourth
International” series on the World Socialist Web Site. The bibliography also lists How the GPU Murdered Trotsky, In Defence of Trotskyism, The Gelfand Case, Volume 1, The Sylvia Franklin Dossier, Eric London’s Agents: The FBI and GPU Infiltration of the Trotskyist Movement, the four-part WSWS Ageloff series, and David North’s “A Tribute to Harold Robins: Captain of Trotsky’s Guard.” In all, 42 endnotes across 12 chapters and the introduction rest on
ICFI publications, the Gelfand case record, and North’s and London’s
work; How the GPU Murdered Trotsky alone is cited in 12 endnotes and listed in the bibliography.
Yet
the investigation that produced and assembled these materials is never
identified, described or explained in the narrative. A reader who does
not already know what Security and the Fourth International was will
finish the book without learning that it existed....
*****
The International Committee appears only once in the main narrative, in the following passage:
In
1975, the International Committee of the Fourth International revealed
that Hansen had been in contact with the FBI through the American consul
in Mexico City and had allegedly “played along with the GPU” when they
attempted to recruit him earlier. Robins and others concluded from this
that Hansen had been a GPU agent, though some historians maintain that
he remained loyal to Trotsky until the end.
The
passage is immediately hedged with “allegedly” and “some historians
maintain,” without explaining what documents the 1975 revelation rested
on or how they were obtained.
*****
That the omission of Security and the Fourth International was not the
product of ignorance has since been confirmed by Melton himself. At the
International Spy Museum event in Washington on August 6, 2026, Eric
London asked Melton about his reliance on Security and the Fourth
International. Melton replied: “Many of their contentions were
absolutely right.” He added: “As a researcher, that’s one of the
indispensable resources… I use that, and I thought it was an excellent
source.”
*****
Whatever ambiguity of tone the authors permit themselves on this or that
question, their book nowhere challenges the legitimacy of the ICFI’s
allegations and findings. Across 456 pages and nearly a thousand
endnotes, written by two historians of espionage with access to Moscow
sources and every motive to correct the record, the findings of Security
and the Fourth International are never challenged, let alone refuted.
They are incorporated, though without acknowledgment, into the authors’
presentation of the conspiracy. This is now a matter of record,
established by authors who share none of the ICFI’s politics, and it is
the fact from which any assessment of the book must proceed.
*****
In a preface titled “Why This Book, Why Now, Why These Authors,”
Melton and West state: “This book is the result of more than five
decades of investigation into one of the twentieth century’s most
consequential political assassinations: the murder of Leon Trotsky.” The characterization deserves attention, because it is not the
conventional one. The prevailing verdict of the contemporary
anti-Marxist literature is that Trotsky was merely a politically
isolated exile by 1940 and that his murder, however tragic, was of
little consequence. The insistence on the assassination’s historic and
political significance has been, for 50 years, the position of the
International Committee. In an article posted on October 16, 2015, the World Socialist Web Site wrote:
“The
assassination of Leon Trotsky ranks among the most politically
consequential crimes of the twentieth century, with far-reaching
implications for the international working class and the world socialist
movement.”
In
the Introduction to his comprehensive and ground breaking analysis of
“Sylvia Ageloff and the assassination of Leon Trotsky,” posted on the
WSWS on February 5, 2021, Eric London stated: “The murder of Leon
Trotsky is the most consequential political assassination of the 20th
century.”
That
Melton and West open their book by adopting this assessment, virtually
verbatim, is the first indication of an influence that runs through the
entire volume and is nowhere acknowledged. What has been borrowed is not
a random phrase but a political judgment. Of the investigation from
which that judgment derives, however, the preface says nothing. It
offers instead an account of the book’s origins that is remarkably
trivial.
*****
Before 1975, the popular narrative centered heavily on Mercader and
Ageloff, even though evidence of a much wider GPU conspiracy already
existed in the public record. US Senate investigations in the 1950s and
the prosecutions of Jack Soble and Mark Zborowski placed sworn testimony
about GPU operations inside the Trotskyist movement into official
transcripts. The SWP and its political allies among the Pabloite
tendencies almost entirely ignored the investigations and prosecutions.
The trial and conviction of Mark
GPU agent, Mark Zborowski in San Francisco, August 1975 (photo by David North)
Zborowski in a New York City courtroom
on charges of perjury related to his role as a GPU agent went unreported
in The Militant. It was the ICFI that first examined the
official records systematically and made them the starting point for a
deeper investigation into state penetration of the Trotskyist movement,
historical and contemporary.
The questions of how the GPU
penetrated the Fourth International and the SWP, who its agents inside
the movement were, and how the security of Trotsky’s household was
compromised from within were thereby placed on the historical and
contemporary political agenda—and those are the questions that structure
Melton and West’s book. The entire text closely tracks the ICFI’s
investigation.
Melton, the senior of the two authors, has by his
own account been focused on the subject since the very years in which
the ICFI investigation began. He would have been aware of it and
followed it through every stage of its development: the initial reports
of 1975, the publication of How the GPU Murdered Trotsky, the exposure of Sylvia Callen in 1977, the Gelfand litigation of 1979–1983, and the continuation of the investigation on the World Socialist Web Site, from which his own book quotes.
Even if one accepts that Sánchez Salazar’s book sparked his interest
in Trotsky’s assassination, that very interest would have made him aware
of the investigation that was initiated by the International Committee
in May 1975. This is not speculation. The footnotes and bibliography
cite extensively, as we have already stressed, from the Security and the
Fourth International publications.
The ICFI investigation did not
arise from antiquarian interest or the chance discovery of a book. Its
immediate background was a security crisis in the Workers League in 1974
involving Tim Wohlforth, then national secretary, and his companion
Nancy Fields, a provocateur whose family connections to a senior CIA
official had not been disclosed to the party. The Workers League’s
decision to suspend Fields from membership pending an investigation into
her family background was denounced as “paranoia” by Joseph Hansen, a
long-time leader of the US Socialist Workers Party.
This response was extraordinary given that Hansen had witnessed
Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, and was thoroughly familiar with the
terrible price the Fourth International had paid for negligence in
matters of security.
The initial purpose of the investigation was
to educate the cadre of the Trotskyist movement by studying and drawing
the appropriate political lessons of the security failures that made the
1940 assassination possible.
*****
The authors claim that the discovery of Sánchez Salazar’s book “ignited a
pursuit that would span decades, carrying the authors across
continents, deep into archives, and into the homes of those who
inherited the secrets of Stalin’s most carefully concealed war.” Remarkably, however, neither Melton nor West, in the course of their
decades-long and world-wide investigation, made any attempt to contact
the International Committee of the Fourth International, which was
engaged in an unprecedented and exhaustive public investigation of the
assassination.
*****
The authors quote Trotsky’s chilling anticipation of his own murder,
delivered to journalist Téllez Vargas on August 17, 1940: “I will be
killed either by one of them in here or by one of my friends from the
outside, by someone who has access to the house. Because Stalin cannot
spare my life.” The source given in their endnote is “Leon Trotsky, quoted in Isaac
Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940 [New York: Oxford
University Press, 1963], 503.” No such interview appears in Deutscher’s biography. The attribution to
Deutscher’s biography is entirely fabricated. The quotation is
reproduced exactly from Téllez Vargas’s own account, given in his
interview with North for the Security and the Fourth International
investigation.
*****
There is no innocent explanation for the false attribution of Téllez
Vargas’s statement to Deutscher’s volume, where no reference to Téllez
Vargas or his statement is to be found. This is a case of deliberate
concealment. Citing its actual source would have required naming the
investigation. The result is a false provenance for one of the most
important pieces of testimony in the historical record, and a small but
exact illustration of the book’s method: the findings of the
investigation are used, and their origin is erased.
Finally, there is the omission that is hardest to explain. Although
Melton and West traveled the globe to speak to Russian intelligence
officials and tracked down descendants of individuals who served on
Trotsky’s guard in Coyoacán, they never approached the International
Committee or David North—publicly active, easily reached, and the
chairman of the International Editorial Board of the publication from
which the authors quote.
*****
The book’s account of the political conspiracy effectively closes
with the assassination of Trotsky. The chapters that follow focus on
Mercader’s imprisonment, identification, possible escape schemes and
later life, along with biographical codas and the provenance of the
murder weapon.
But the central discovery of Security and the
Fourth International was that the conspiracy against the Fourth
International did not end on August 20, 1940. There is an unbroken line
of continuity from the penetration of the 1930s, through the
assassination in August 1940, into the decades that followed, and the
book’s periodization severs it. The agents remained in place. Callen sat
in Cannon’s office until 1947. Zborowski, brought to the United States
through the extraordinary efforts of Lola Dallin and George Novack,
operated there into the 1950s. Hansen rose to the head of the party and
engineered the SWP’s break with the International Committee in 1963. As a
major leader of the “United Secretariat” and editor of Intercontinental Press, he was able to infiltrate agents into Pabloite organizations throughout the world.
The high value placed by the US government on Hansen’s services inside
the SWP is visible as early as 1941, in an episode the book never
mentions. In that year the leadership of the SWP and of Teamsters Local
544 was indicted under the Smith Act in the Minneapolis trial; 18
defendants were convicted and imprisoned, in the American government’s
first peacetime prosecution of its kind. Joseph Hansen, Trotsky’s former secretary and one of the party’s most
prominent figures, was not among the indicted. Eric London’s Agents
devotes extensive, carefully documented analysis to this extraordinary
exclusion, and demonstrates that Hansen’s absence from the indictment
was necessary because he was already working as an FBI informant inside
the SWP. Melton and West cite Agents repeatedly in their chapter on Callen and praise London’s work on Ageloff. But they pass over his findings on the Minneapolis trial in complete silence.
The line continues. In 1947 came the SWP’s whitewash of Callen, which
the party maintained after Budenz publicly identified her in 1950. For
nearly three decades thereafter, the party that had been penetrated
conducted no investigation of its own penetration. When the
International Committee opened Security and the Fourth International in
May 1975, undertaking for the first time to establish the truth, “warts
and all,” in the words of the Workers Revolutionary Party’s 1975
statement, the response of the SWP and its international allies was an organized
counterattack. Members who sought answers were threatened.
In
January 1977 a London rally attended by roughly 1,500 members of
Pabloite organizations denounced the investigation, echoing the
“Verdict” that had branded it a “shameless frame-up,” and defended
Hansen and Novack.It was presided over by Tariq Ali, an unprincipled
middle-class demagogue and a leader of the British section of the
Pabloite movement, who subsequently abandoned any association with
Trotskyism. The gathering was justly denounced by the International
Committee as the “Platform of Shame”. For two hours, the speakers hurled
vile abuse at Gerry Healy, who was seated in the audience. When at the
conclusion of the tirades Healy rose to request that he be allowed to
answer, Tariq Ali denied him that right and shut down the meeting.
The event was reported in the mainstream press. Melton and West claim an investigation reaching back to that very period; they cannot have been unaware of it.
Four
months after the rally came the confrontation of North and Mitchell
with Callen-Doxsee in Wheaton, Illinois. Hansen responded to her
exposure by warning of “deadly consequences” for the International
Committee. In October 1977, Tom Henehan, a 26-year-old member of the Workers League Political Committee, was murdered in New York City.
Tom Henehan
When Alan Gelfand wrote to the SWP national committee in March 1978,
reviewing the documents and demanding that Sylvia Franklin be repudiated
as a GPU agent and that Hansen give a full accounting of his dealings
with the GPU and FBI, the reply came from Larry Seigle on behalf of the
Political Committee: “The Party cannot and will not allow agent-baiting
within its ranks. Any further repetition by you of the Healyite slanders
will not be tolerated.” In December 1978 Gelfand filed a
friend-of-the-court brief demanding that the US attorney general
disclose the names of all government informants in the SWP, past and
present. One month later, the SWP expelled him. In 1979 Gelfand began the litigation that ultimately brought Sylvia
Callen’s grand jury testimony into public view and placed Zborowski
under subpoena.
And the investigation’s discoveries reached into
the SWP’s contemporary leadership: virtually the entire post-Cannon and
post-Dobbs leadership of the party had been drawn in the 1960s from a
single small institution, Carleton College in Minnesota, and the
college’s former dean, Richard C. Gilman, told the International
Committee that the Carleton graduates had been “plugged into” the SWP
through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee—an organization manipulated by
the CIA and the FBI. Among that Carleton cohort was Jack Barnes, who
became the SWP’s national secretary.
None of this appears in Melton and West’s narrative: not the 1941
Minneapolis trial, the SWP’s 1947 whitewash of Callen, the 1977 Platform
of Shame travesty, the assassination of Henehan, Gelfand’s lawsuit, the
infiltration of the SWP leadership by Carleton College students. The
post-1940 cover-up and the ongoing infiltration of the Fourth
International by the GPU and the FBI form an essential and politically
critical element of the story of the assassination and its consequences.
The cover-up was the continuation of the conspiracy. To tell the story
of Trotsky’s assassination while excluding the struggle waged by the
International Committee against the defense of GPU and FBI agents inside
the Trotskyist movement is to stage Hamlet without the prince.
*****
Why do authors omit an investigation whose findings they accept? Consider what the omission accomplishes.
*****
A counternarrative requires a scholarly authority, and the authors’
choice reveals its character. The book anoints Susan Weissman—“scholar
Susan Weissman, whose research on Mark Zborowski remains foundational”—and cites her in 26 endnotes, more than any source connected to the actual investigation of Zborowski.
Weissman
was a member of the SWP. There is nothing “foundational” about her work
on Zborowski. Her work consists largely of diluting the facts uncovered
by Security and the Fourth International with evasions and lies.
*****
In her published work she has described the Gelfand case as “frivolous and groundless.” Her account of Zborowski is riddled with factual errors; the book
itself has to correct her in its endnotes (“Weissman, 607, incorrectly
states that ‘it was at this meeting that Sylvia Ageloff met Ramón…’”). David North answered her willfully deceptive articles in a 2015 open
letter, “Security and the Fourth International, the Gelfand Case and the
Deposition of Mark Zborowski,” in which he exposed Weissman as a liar. North has never retracted this charge and Weissman has never answered it.
The
most important fact about Weissman’s account of Zborowski is what she
concealed: the alliance of the SWP with Zborowski and the United States
government to block the questioning of the GPU’s chief agent inside the
Fourth International.
*****
The book’s unwillingness to engage with Security and the Fourth
International produces, in the end, an untenable conclusion. In a
chapter titled “The Revolutionary Who Forgot to Fight Back,” the authors
assert that Trotsky “fatally underestimated the one adversary he should
have understood best”
and open the chapter with an epigraph, attributed to the CIA analyst
Rita T. Kronenbitter, declaring that Trotsky died “from a failure to
believe in betrayal.” The chapter treats Kronenbitter’s 1972 article in the CIA’s in-house journal Studies in Intelligence, “Leon Trotsky, Dupe of the NKVD,” as “among the most penetrating” assessments of Trotsky’s failure.
This
is false, and Melton and West, of all people, are in a position to know
it. No serious student of intelligence holds the target of an
assassination responsible for his own security; that responsibility
rests with the apparatus charged with protecting him. It is also
contradicted by the historical record. Trotsky, who built the Red Army
and led it through the Civil War, was an expert on questions of
security, and the last years of his life were consumed by the fight to
expose the Stalinist secret police and to arm the workers’ movement
against it.
*****
The book is not without certain strengths. The material gathered in
Moscow and the Spanish-language sources fill in operational details of
the conspiracy; the pre-1940 planning is retold effectively. What the
book does not do is alter the structure of the conspiracy, which
Security and the Fourth International laid bare 50 years earlier. Even
its physical reconstruction of the Coyoacán villa—the location of the
alarm panel, the arrangement of the beds during the May 24 raid—adds
little to the description provided by North in “Trotsky’s Assassin At
Large.” The fate of the ice axe with which Trotsky was murdered—the
subject of the book’s afterword and the prize exhibit of the museum
Melton co-founded—is peripheral to the conspiracy. The weapon’s passage
through police lockers, private collections and auction rooms belongs to
the history of collecting, not to the history of the crime.
*****
To the extent that it deals with facts, Melton and West’s book
substantiates the Security and the Fourth International investigation,
and it stands, despite itself, as a devastating exposure of the
decades-long campaign to discredit this investigation. Their book
confirms the central findings the Trotskyist movement established half a
century ago: that the GPU penetrated the Socialist Workers Party at the
highest level; that Hansen maintained undisclosed relations with the
GPU and the FBI; that Harte opened the gate; that Callen delivered the
movement’s secrets to Stalin’s police for a decade; that Ageloff was the
indispensable enabler of the assassin; that Estrin’s every intervention
sustained the GPU’s principal agent in Europe. And by the manner of its
confirmation—the erasure of the investigators, the fabricated citation,
the canonization of the cover-up’s defenders, the amputation of
everything after 1940—it testifies to what remains at stake.
What
was and is at issue is the political and physical independence of the
workers’ movement from the capitalist state. The questions raised by
Security and the Fourth International retain their burning contemporary
relevance, because the practices it exposed—the penetration of the
Socialist Workers Party by the agencies of both Stalinism and
imperialism—did not end in 1940, or in 1979, or in 1983, when a federal
court, with the support of the SWP’s attorneys, ruled that the GPU’s
chief agent could not be made to identify the government’s agents inside
the party. Almost 50 years after the Pabloites gathered in London on
the Platform of Shame to slander the ICFI’s investigation, its
conclusions are recognized as fact even by state-aligned historians who
share none of its politics, one of whom now concedes, on the record,
that the investigation was “indispensable” and “absolutely right.”
Melton and West’s book should be read alongside the investigation it
confirms.
Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Sumar government fell this morning,
after explosive nationwide protests over housing on Saturday. Hundreds
of thousands of workers and youth took to the streets to protest the
housing crisis, after parliament rejected two proposed government
decrees banning evictions. Protests unfolded in more than 50 cities,
dominated by the call: “Towards a general strike.”
This morning,
PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called snap elections for November 29,
claiming he needed a “far broader progressive majority” in order to
rule. However, the snap election call was made in the face of explosive
opposition to the government from the left among masses of workers and
youth.
In Madrid on Saturday, four columns converged on Cibeles Square. The
Tenants’ Union, which called the protest, put attendance at 500,000
people. Slogans reflected widespread opposition to real estate
speculation, the PSOE-Sumar government and right-wing politicians.
Protesters chanted against rentiers and investment funds: “Neither empty
homes nor homeless people!”, “The invaders are the investors,” “Get
rentiers out of our neighborhoods,” and “Homes to live in, not to invest
in.” There were banners and chants of “We need a general strike now.”
There
was deep opposition to the PSOE-Sumar government and its predecessor,
the PSOE-Podemos government, which claim to be “progressive” but carry
out anti-worker policies. Protesters chanted, “Where is the progressive
government?”, “Rentier guilty, government responsible,” “PSOE and Sumar,
traitors responsible,” “Who are you governing for?” and “Eight days of
popular support have achieved more than eight years of progressive
government.”
Saturday’s mobilization was the culmination of a week
of protests centred around the occupation at Puerta del Sol in central
Madrid. The occupation began on September 26, after protests called
after Maricarmen’s eviction. This weekend, it had more than 1,200 tents.
Encampments
have spread across Spain, even as youth protests and strikes shake
France and spread across Europe. In Barcelona, the encampment in Plaça
de Catalunya had more than 500 tents. In Seville, hundreds of people
took part in the encampment, with more than 100 tents, while Málaga saw
between 150 and 170 tents. Encampments are also ongoing in Valencia,
Bilbao, Santander, Palma and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Beyond
Madrid, demonstrations took place in cities including Seville, Bilbao,
San Sebastián, Vitoria, Pamplona, Málaga, Santander, Palma, Las Palmas
de Gran Canaria, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Cádiz, Huelva, Granada,
Santiago de Compostela, León, Zaragoza, Alicante, Castellón, Girona,
Vigo, A Coruña, Lugo and Valladolid.
In Valencia, thousands of
demonstrators clashed with police at the Palau de Les Arts, where the
“Valencia Real Estate Summit 2026,” a conference on real estate
investment, was held. A group of protesters attempted to break through
the police cordon and enter the building. Police responded with baton
charges, tear gas and rubber bullets, arresting five people.
The
mobilization began after the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen, who had
lived in her home in Madrid’s Retiro district since 1956. After three
previous attempts were thwarted by popular protests, the eviction was
carried out on September 23. Maricarmen was carried out on a stretcher
and taken to the Gregorio Marañón Hospital. Her case highlighted the
unaffordability of housing for workers in Spain and internationally.
For
eight years, the PSOE, then PSOE-Podemos and finally PSOE-Sumar
governments have taken no measures to resolve the housing crisis. Rents
and house prices kept rising, while evictions and real estate
speculation mounted.
*****
While Sanchez is calling elections and asking voters to give him a
broader majority, the policy of the PSOE and its pseudo left allies like
Podemos and Sumar is not to satisfy the demands of working people.
Sanchez
is trying to create conditions to strangle and suppress the emerging
mass movement, prevent the development of a strike movement in the
workplaces, and deepen policies of austerity and war. Indeed, Sanchez
called elections even though polls indicate that, if held today, they
would return a PP-Vox government. At the same time, the PSOE-Sumar
government is working to shift the political situation to the right,
particularly by targeting migrants.
On Sunday, in Spain’s African
enclave of Ceuta, after the July 30-31 massacre of migrants coming from
Morocco, Spanish national police and military units including the
Guardia Civil began clearing a migrant camp of more than 3,000 people on
El Trampolin beach. They seized minors, taking them to police
headquarters, and transferred adults to a prison camp at El Tarajal for
deportation to Morocco.
It can be safely predicted that the
PSOE-Sumar government’s brutal repression of migrants will fuel the
xenophobic propaganda of the Spanish far right.
A confrontation is emerging between the working class and the entire
Spanish political establishment that poses critical issues of political
perspective and strategy. Broad layers of workers and youth sense that
only a general strike, that is, the full mobilization of the social
power of the working class, can resolve the social problems they face.
However, this raises the question of how to build a movement to prepare a
general strike, and what tasks would face the working class if and when
a general strike erupts.
The events of the past week leave no doubt that the Trump
administration, with the complicity of the entire US political
establishment, is preparing a major escalation of the Iran war. Having
failed to achieve its objectives through a massive bombardment and then a
blockade of the country, the White House is preparing a new and
desperate gambit, potentially involving the deployment of ground troops
or even the use of nuclear weapons.
The greatest danger is the
chasm between the scale of what is being prepared and the public’s
awareness of it. One month before the 2026 midterm elections, Trump’s
conspiracy to escalate the war is being greeted with a wall of silence
by the US media—which devoted just minutes to the war in this weekend’s
Sunday talk shows—and by the Democratic Party, which has done nothing to
alert the public to the renewed onslaught against Iran that the
administration is preparing.
*****
After seven months of war, US imperialism has failed to achieve its
aims of dominating the Strait of Hormuz, militarily defeating Iran and
overthrowing its government. The administration is improvising,
desperately seeking a way out of the political disaster the war has
produced. But its improvisation is driven by the logic of events.
American imperialism cannot accept defeat in the Persian Gulf, and each
failure becomes the basis for an ever-greater escalation.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal
and the Associated Press reported that the White House had sent a third
aircraft carrier to the Middle East. The USS Theodore Roosevelt left
San Diego on September 27, followed the next day by the amphibious
assault ship USS Makin Island with about 2,200 Marines. They will join
the carrier USS George Washington and more than 50,000 US troops
deployed across the region.
Trump “has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the November midterms,” the Journal
reported September 25. He was briefed in August on options including
“sending in ground forces to seize Iranian islands near Hormuz,” the Journal reported last month.
The
deployment of amphibious assault ships along with thousands of Marines
is particularly ominous. They are the means of seizing territory, and
the next phase of the war may include landings on the islands near
Hormuz, at the Kharg Island oil terminal or at Iran’s nuclear sites.
*****
The war against Iran is part of a broader global offensive by US
imperialism, centrally targeting Russia and China. Significantly, the
plans to expand the Iran war accompany a sharp intensification of NATO’s
war on Russia in Ukraine, which threatens at any moment to erupt into
direct warfare between nuclear-armed states.
Each president since
the 1979 Iranian revolution, Democratic and Republican, has worked to
bring Iran back under American domination. Trump’s war against Iran is
the latest stage of a 35-year offensive to subjugate the Middle East and
Central Asia: the Gulf War of 1991, the invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the proxy war in Syria and Israel’s
genocide in Gaza.
Amid overwhelming popular opposition to the war
and the ensuing surge in the cost of living, particularly of energy, the
Democratic Party is expected to make significant gains on November 3.
It is determined, however, to ensure that any electoral repudiation of
Trump does not lead to a let-up in the drive by US imperialism in the
Middle East.
*****
Opposition to the war is overwhelming, but the media, the Democratic
Party and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are working to
prevent its translation into action. The DSA plays a critical role in
demobilizing antiwar sentiment. Jacobin, the magazine aligned
with it, has not reported Trump’s plans to attack Iran after the
election, and neither Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont nor
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a DSA member, has
issued a statement on them.
*****
The struggle against war and its disastrous economic consequences cannot
be subordinated to the Democratic Party, which is fully committed to
the predatory aims of US imperialism. Ending the war against Iran and
halting the global eruption of American imperialism requires the
independent mobilization of the working class on the basis of a
socialist program, seeking to unite the struggle against war with the
defense of jobs and living standards.
With Kenya’s 2027 general election approaching, leading opposition
figures are intensifying their contacts with the US and the European
imperialist powers to present themselves as alternatives to the widely
discredited President William Ruto
*****
Behind their claims to defend democracy, Kenya’s capitalist
opposition parties are all courting the imperialist powers that played a
brutal role during colonialism, then backed post-independence Kenyan
regimes that attacked workers and peasants and are now involved in a
series of bloody wars—NATO’s against Russia in the Ukraine, Israel’s
genocide in Gaza, the US–Israeli war against Iran. For Kenyan workers,
these wars have driven up fuel, transport and food prices, compounding
the devastating impact of Ruto’s austerity.
For the millions of
workers and youth who rose up against Ruto in 2024 and 2025, none of
these forces advances a program to end IMF austerity, halt Kenya’s
participation in US-backed military and police operations across Africa
and the Caribbean, expel US and British forces from Kenyan soil, or
challenge the stranglehold of international finance capital over the
economy.
The Gen Z uprising demonstrated the enormous potential for a mass
movement cutting across the ethnic divisions cultivated by the Kenyan
bourgeoisie. But it also exposed the political bankruptcy of the
established opposition, above all ODM, which intervened to prop up Ruto.
The danger now is that the immense social anger produced by austerity,
unemployment, inequality and police repression will once again be
diverted behind one or another supposedly lesser evil in the 2027
elections.
The central lesson is the necessity of building a new,
independent revolutionary party of the working class, opposed to all
factions of the Kenyan bourgeoisie and their imperialist backers. Such a
party must unite workers and youth across tribal lines, linking the
struggle against austerity and state repression to the fight against
capitalism. This means turning to the working class throughout East
Africa and internationally, in the struggle for workers’ power and
socialism.
The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) fighters seized control
of the airports in Mekelle, Shire, and Axum, cities in Ethiopia’s
northern regional state of Tigray last Wednesday, claiming it was
responding to an offensive by the Ethiopian federal army.
Heavy
fighting between the TPLF and Ethiopian forces was reported in the neighboring regional states of Afar and Amhara, prompting fears that a
full-blown civil war has erupted. Hundreds have already been killed,
injured or detained. On Sunday, it was reported that Ethiopian forces
had retaken the regional capital Mekelle.
The fighting threatens another humanitarian catastrophe similar to
that of the 2020-22 civil war between Ethiopian federal forces and the
TPLF, compounded by the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Sudan,
where more than 33.7 million people need aid, up to 14 million are
displaced, and famine looms.
Developments in Ethiopia followed the
formation of a new rebel alliance, including the Fano militia from
Amhara, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) and groups from Somali, Afar and
Benishangul-Gumuz regions, “The Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for
Survival”. This disparate group is united only in its objective of
overthrowing Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s federal government in Addis
Ababa, which presides over 12 ethnically based regional states.
Insurgencies
in Tigray, Amhara and Oromo now threaten the break-up of Ethiopia,
which has long served as US imperialism’s anchor state in the Horn of
Africa.
*****
What is unfolding in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country, is
yet another violent contest among rival sections of the Ethiopian
ruling elite, fought along ethnic lines. Such contests have been
cultivated for decades precisely to prevent the emergence of a unified
working-class movement in a country wracked by poverty and social
inequality.
Every one of these factions is tethered to one or another imperialist
or regional power. They offer no alternative for the working class and
poor peasantry, only competing ethnic elites. The TPLF dominated the
Ethiopian state from 1991 to 2018 and presided over the same ethnic
federal structure, the same impoverishment of the masses, and the same
subordination to imperialism.
According to the World Bank,
Ethiopia’s poverty rate was set to rise to 43 percent by 2025, up from
33 percent in 2016, due to conflict, climate shocks, and economic
decline. Multidimensional poverty affects a massive 72 percent of the
country’s 130 million population, which is largely rural, despite annual
economic growth rates of 10 percent between 2004 and 2018 that largely
benefited a small urban elite.
The US-Israeli war on Iran has had a
devastating impact, with the blockage of maritime routes, fuel
shortages and price spikes of up to 80 percent, collapsing remittances
from Gulf workers, fertilizer shortages threatening food production and
flower exports upon which Ethiopia depends.
Prime Minister Abiy
Ahmed, a former military intelligence officer with close ties to
Washington, was lauded for opening up of Ethiopia’s economy to
transnational corporations and international finance in 2018 that
created wealth for a few, while creating severe hardships on the ground.
In July 2024, the government agreed to float the Ethiopian Birr to
secure a $3.4 billion IMF loan and an additional $10 billion World Bank
package. The resulting 30 percent devaluation against the US dollar
raised the cost of critical imports like medicine, fuel, and fertilizer,
passing the financial shock directly onto the working class and rural
poor through inflation and reduced public services.
Abiy’s 2018 peace deal with Eritrea, for which he received a Nobel
Peace Prize in 2019, was little more than a maneuver to isolate the
TPLF, which had been the dominant force during the war years and viewed
the ceding of Badme to Eritrea as a betrayal, asserting the dominance of
his own faction.
*****
The escalating fighting in the last week has led to widespread fears of a
renewal of the brutal civil war of 2020-2022. It drew in neighbouring
Eritrea—on Ethiopia’s side—and killed more than half a million people,
more than the number who died in the 1984-85 famine, displaced more than
a million and led to nearly 30 million needing humanitarian assistance.
Millions are still unable to access food, clean water and healthcare.
*****
With the Strait of Hormuz already closed, the US Israeli war of
aggression against Iran is spreading from the Persian Gulf to the Red
Sea and the Horn of Africa. Simultaneous conflicts in Ethiopia, Sudan
Somalia and Yemen pose the risk that these wars will merge into a
single, widening imperialist war.
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP)
received 716 votes in the Berlin state election held September 20. That
is more than in the previous two elections, but it carries no weight in
terms of electoral arithmetic. Since the election, we have repeatedly
been asked how we assess this result, so we want to set out our position
on it in principle.
As Marxists, we know that the future of
society and the solution to society’s great problems will be decided not
in parliament, but in the class struggle. We are not a parliamentary
party, but a revolutionary party. We are building the political
leadership that the working class needs to overthrow the dictatorship of
the financial aristocracy and the entire capitalist profit system.
We
use elections and any seats we might win as a platform for the class
struggle. That is why we placed the fight against the madness of war,
social attacks and mass layoffs at the centre of our election campaign.
In our statement on the Berlin elections we wrote:
War
and militarism cannot be combated through pacifist appeals to the
warmongers but only by stripping them of their power. The policy of war
is not simply the result of wrong decisions by individual politicians.
It stems from the deep crisis of capitalism, which, as in the 20th
century, is once again leading to war and barbarism.
Workers have
nothing to gain from war but everything to lose. We therefore oppose
growing nationalism and war with the international unity of the working
class. Instead of allowing themselves to be pitted against one another
and shooting at one another, workers must unite across all borders in
the struggle against capitalism.
Right at the start of the election campaign, news came from Mykolaiv that our comrade Bogdan Syrotiuk had been sentenced to 15 years in prison for advancing precisely this perspective in articles he had written for the World Socialist Web Site,
rejecting the war and criticizing the glorification of Nazi
collaborators. We immediately linked our election campaign to the fight
for his freedom, because his case brought all the central questions of
the election into sharp focus—the reactionary character of the NATO war,
the connection between war and attacks on democratic rights and the
only viable perspective with which the madness of war can be stopped.
On
September 1, exactly 87 years after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the
German government accused Russia of an attempted terrorist attack in Leipzig, without presenting any verifiable evidence. It closed the Russian House and
the Consulate General in Bonn, severing the last cultural and
diplomatic bridges. The SGP immediately published statements and videos
and took up these questions at its central rally for Bogdan Syrotiuk’s
freedom in front of the Brandenburg Gate on September 6.
*****
The gap between response and election result expresses the objective
gap between the enormously acute situation—the ruthless escalation of
the war and the historic social attacks—and political consciousness in
the working class. Although rejection of war and of policies in the
interests of the wealthy is widespread, a political understanding of
this development and a socialist perspective are lacking. Under these
circumstances, questions of electoral tactics dominated, along with the
hope that changes could still be brought about through parliamentary
shifts. This attitude is expressed in the Left Party’s election victory
in Berlin, but also in the high results for the AfD. Open class
struggles would quickly expose the class character of these tendencies.
And these struggles are developing. In France, school students are occupying their schools,
public sector workers are on strike and mass protests against the cuts
take place daily. The ruling class is reacting extremely nervously and
is proceeding with the utmost brutality against the school students. At
the same time, it is escalating the conflict with the nuclear power Russia to
an extreme degree and is rearming on a scale not seen since the Second
World War. The German government keeps announcing new austerity packages
and, following the jobs massacre in which 75,000 positions were axed,
Volkswagen has announced massive wage cuts.
Under these
conditions, the analyses and perspectives which the SGP fought for in
the Berlin state election are of the greatest importance. We have
clarified the political questions that are decisive in the present
crisis: that war cannot be stopped by appeals to the warmongers, but
only by stripping the ruling class of its power; that the AfD cannot be
stopped by alliances with the parties that paved its way, but only by
the independent mobilization of the working class; and that the Left
Party is not an alternative to capitalism, but its left-wing prop. These
clarifications are not academic questions. They are the precondition
for the growing anger over war and social cuts to find a political
expression that genuinely threatens the ruling class, rather than being
diverted into the dead ends of the Left Party or the AfD.
The Bolsheviks, too, had a very modest number of supporters before
the revolution. In the years before 1917, the Bolshevik Party was a
small, often isolated organisation, persecuted and slandered by the
official labour movement. What was decisive was not its numerical
strength, but that Lenin and Trotsky had fought the decisive struggles
against the opportunism of the Second International, which in 1914 lined
up behind its own bourgeoisies; against the national orientation that
drove the working class into the trenches of the imperialist war; and
for the permanent revolution, which alone opened up the perspective of
the conquest of power by the working class.
Precisely because they
had waged these struggles and clarified the political questions, they
laid the foundation for winning the majority of the working class as the
revolution came to a head. The history of the Fourth International is
the continuation of precisely this struggle—the clarification of
political questions, against opportunism in all its forms, for the
international unity of the working class and for the world socialist
revolution.
Veteran World Socialist Web Site contributor, Patrick Martin, continues his description of the growing number of “CIA Democrat” candidates running for seats in the US House of
Representatives. This growth has gone unremarked by the establishment media which chooses to instead focus on a minority of "left-leaning" candidates to distract and mislead an increasingly angry public.
The death by suicide of Sahil Wakode, a second-year BTech student at
the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, on September 18, has
exposed the brutal reality behind the carefully cultivated image of
India’s elite technical institutes. Wakode took his own life hours after
he was allegedly caught using his phone during an examination. He was
the third student to die by suicide at IIT Bombay this year, and the
tenth across the IIT system in 2026.
The circumstances of Wakode’s
death reveal an institution that has abandoned even the pretence of due
process, let alone empathy towards these young students. IIT Bombay’s
own published rules for academic malpractice separate detection from
adjudication: an invigilator who discovers misconduct is required to
confiscate the material, issue a fresh answer book, allow the student to
continue writing, and prepare a report for a disciplinary committee,
which must then give the student the evidence and two working days to
respond. None of this appears to have happened.
Instead, Professor
Suryanarayana Doolla reportedly seized Wakode’s paper, escorted him
from the examination hall, and summoned security personnel. The
institute then issued a public statement claiming Wakode had uploaded
the question paper to ChatGPT—a statement it was forced to retract and
apologise for three days later.
*****
The students at IIT Bombay have responded with solidarity and
militancy, having themselves witnessed the harsh academic environment
that prevails at the IITs. A protest at the institute’s main gate in
Powai—dubbed “Justice Corner”—began in the days following Wakode’s
suicide and continued throughout last week. Students have presented an
18-point charter of demands. These include calls for an independent,
transparent investigation, the resignation of IIT Bombay Director
Shireesh Kedare, and the suspension of Professor Doolla. Students allege
that security personnel attempted to clear the protest site and
threatened one protester.
Wakode’s distraught parents, who are
staging a hunger strike at Azad Maidan, a historic 25-acre triangular
public sports ground located in the Fort district of South Mumbai, are
demanding the immediate arrest of Professor Suryanarayana Doolla and IIT
Bombay Director Shireesh Kedare, alongside an independent probe by the
CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) amid allegations of institutional
caste discrimination.
The caste dimension of the case—Wakode was a
Dalit (formerly known as “untouchables”)—has been cynically proclaimed
by the corporate media and certain “left” and lower-caste rights groups
as the central issue.
There is indeed caste discrimination, at
least in subtle form, even in India’s elite institutions. For example,
IIT Bombay’s own SC/ST Students’ Cell survey of nearly 400 students in
2022 found that roughly a quarter had been asked their surname to
ascertain their caste, and more than a third had been asked their
entrance-exam score once their caste identity became known.
Yet
the fixation on the caste allegation deflects attention from the core
issue: the fact that all educational institutions cater to the needs of
the profit system, in which everything must be done rapidly by workers,
since under capitalism “time is money”. Thus, the students at the IITs
have to learn and absorb complex subjects rapidly and perform well in
exams that are frequently made difficult, while competing with their
classmates.
*****
23 Indian Institutes of Technology (Source: Wikipedia)
The IITs are routinely described as elite institutions, and their
students as a privileged layer. There is a superficial truth to this.
Admission is extraordinarily difficult, and the families that can afford
the years of private coaching required to compete are
disproportionately drawn from the upper-middle class. But this framing
obscures more than it reveals. The students who enter the IITs are not
the ruling class; they are, overwhelmingly, the children of salaried
professionals, small businesspeople and aspirational middle-class
families who have poured their savings into a single, desperate gamble
on their children’s future. The pressure they endure is not the pressure
of privilege but the pressure of a system in which a single examination
is made to determine an entire life.
And if this is the fate of
those who have “made it”—who have secured admission to the country’s
most prestigious institutes—what is the fate of the millions who have
not? For every student who enters an IIT, more than 80 sit for the
entrance examination. The overwhelming majority are rejected; their
years of preparation for the test are rendered worthless, and they are
then cast into a labor market that offers most degree-holders gig work,
unemployment or underemployment. The Indian government’s own Labor Force Survey has found unemployment at its highest level in 45 years. Of
the more than 10 million young people entering the labour market each
year, only a tiny fraction secure formal employment.
The brutal
entrance examination system is the funnel through which this social
catastrophe is administered. More than 1.5 million students appeared for
the JEE (Main) in 2026, of whom around 250,000 qualified for the JEE
(Advanced), competing for barely 18,000 BTech degree seats. Behind these
numbers lies a vast coaching industry—the “Kota factories”—in which
children as young as 14 are separated from their families and subjected
to years of relentless drilling, rote memorization and mock
examinations. The system is rotten with corruption, as the recent NEET
scandal demonstrated, when examination questions were leaked by
politically connected coaching businesses, and at least 12 young people
took their own lives after the exam was cancelled.
*****
The IITs themselves are, as one recent graduate put it, a pressure
cooker. The academic environment is widely known for being extremely
intense, highly competitive, and mentally exhausting. Professors grade
students based on how others perform, which turns every exam into a
fierce competition. Students who have spent years as the “toppers” in
their schools are suddenly surrounded by competitive peers, and
comparison becomes constant. Failure, often experienced for the first
time, feels devastating.
The campuses are vast and isolating;
hostel cultures are fragmented; and the institutional response to mental
distress remains bureaucratic. Counselling centres exist on paper, but
students perceive them as extensions of the administration and do not
trust them. As many as 73 IIT students died by suicide or unnatural
death between September 2021 and August 2026, according to the Global
IIT Alumni Support Group—13 at IIT Kharagpur alone, and nine each at IIT
Kanpur and IIT Delhi. There have been 65 student suicides across the
IITs between 2021 and 2025. IIT Kanpur’s estimated suicide death rate of
19.8 per 100,000 students is higher even than Japan’s, the highest
among college students in the world.
These deaths are not a
problem of individual psychology. They are the product of a social
system that has made the lives of an entire generation disposable. The
suicides at the IITs are part of a larger phenomenon of youth despair
across India. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB),
student suicides have risen faster than the overall national suicide
rate, climbing from 13,892 in 2023 to 14,488 in 2024. In 2018, four
college-educated youths in Rajasthan, aged 17 to 24, threw themselves in
front of a train because they saw no escape from joblessness and
poverty.
This despair has begun to find an initial political
expression. In July, tens of thousands of students, unemployed youth and
young professionals poured into the streets of Delhi in a protest
movement that shook the Modi government. The immediate trigger was the
corruption surrounding the entrance examinations, but the movement,
initiated by the ad hoc Cockroach Janata Party, became a flashpoint for
far broader anger over the lack of jobs, endemic poverty and the chasm
between the mass of the population and a tiny layer of billionaires. The
government responded with tear gas, baton charges, mass detentions and
the deployment of paramilitary forces, and invoked the draconian
National Security Act against protesters. The contempt of the ruling
class was summed up by Chief Justice Surya Kant, who denounced the
unemployed youth as “parasites” and “cockroaches.”
The youth of India confront a stark choice. The bourgeois parties—the
BJP and the Congress Party alike—offer nothing but the continuation of
the profit system that has produced this catastrophe and a deepening of
the Indian bourgeoisie’s reactionary anti-China alliance with US
imperialism. The Stalinist “left” led by the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) (CPM) and their national trade unions has spent decades
suppressing the class struggle and channeling workers behind the
Congress and other right-wing capitalist parties in the name of opposing
the BJP. The Stalinists have been quick to hail the leaders of the
so-called Cockroach Janata Party,
who are entirely oriented to pressuring the political establishment
and have raised no demands that challenge the subordination of society
to the accumulation of ever greater wealth by the financial oligarchy.
Suicides
at the IITs, the corruption of the examination system, the mass
unemployment—all are rooted in the crisis of capitalism, and none can be
resolved within its framework. Students must turn to the working
class—the social force with the power to challenge capitalism and
communalist reaction—beginning with the workers of Noida and the
Gurgaon-Manesar industrial belt, who were criminalized
and imprisoned in April merely for demanding a living wage. Only
through the political mobilization of the working class, on a socialist
and internationalist program, can the social conditions that are
driving a generation to despair be abolished.
The rollout was accompanied by the usual sham reassurances. Health
Minister Mark Butler declared the government “absolutely committed” to
ensuring children under nine “don’t fall between two stalls.” The
reality, as the World Socialist Web Site has documented,
is that Thriving Kids is not a support program at all, but part of the
largest single cut to a social program in Australian history.
What
Labor actually launched on October 1 was a helpline, a website and a
promise. The “general supports” now on offer consist of a telephone line
operated by the autism organization Amaze, an online resource hub run
by the Raising Children Network, and a Medicare-funded developmental
check for three-year-olds, scheduled to begin in November.
There
are no therapies, no allied health professionals, no individualized plans. The “targeted supports”—playgroups and some allied health
access—are not scheduled to be fully operational until January 2028,
more than a year away. In the meantime, the government insists children
can still be enrolled in the NDIS “in the same way they have been.” The
two systems will “operate in parallel.”
The parallel operation is a
fiction designed to obscure the fact that Labor is gutting the NDIS and
delivering nothing in its place. Children are the primary targets of
this assault. Of the 241,000 participants slated for removal by 2030, 64 percent are aged 18 or under,
and 60 percent have autism or developmental delay as their primary
disability. A further estimated 105,000 people will be denied access to
the scheme, predominantly children. Thriving Kids is the name given to
their abandonment.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved a
five-year settlement that removes the principal legal obstacle to
Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Last
week California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Paramount Skydance CEO
David Ellison announced a settlement, the result of which unites two of
the six remaining major Hollywood studios under the Ellison family
fortune with an $82 billion debt attached.
According to the
conditions of the settlement, the new Paramount must release at least 30
theatrical films annually for the first two years and 32 annually for
the following three, spend an additional $1.5 billion in five years on
US film and television production, preserve the Paramount lot on Melrose
Avenue and Warner Bros.’ Burbank studio, and establish a $47.5 million
fund for workers displaced by the merger. It must also create a board
supposedly charged with protecting the editorial independence of CBS
News and CNN.
Bonta falsely presented this as a series of safeguards to “protects
workers, jobs, and Hollywood,” and that the deal “puts workers’ needs,
concerns, and futures first.” In reality, his complicity serves to
concentrate vast cultural and productive resources into a single
corporation.
The 30-film requirement does nothing to prevent
Paramount from consolidating departments, eliminating overlapping
positions, outsourcing work and intensifying speedup. Similarly, the
additional $1.5 billion in US production sets a spending floor, but does
not stop layoffs, speedups and restructuring.
Then there is the
$47.5 million worker fund. Workers’ displacement is accepted as an
inevitable consequence of the merger, and the fund is grossly
insufficient to support thousands of workers who will lose jobs. The
August analysis commissioned by Los Angeles County estimated that more than 10,000 job-years could be at risk with this merger.
The
preservation of the Melrose and Burbank lots guarantees the protection
of buildings as real estate investments, not jobs. Finally, Paramount’s
directors remain fully in charge of appointing and removing CBS News and
CNN editorial board members, raising obvious questions about
information control.
Bonta’s statement that “this settlement is
not a vote of support for this merger” does nothing to settle the anger
among tens of thousands of entertainment industry workers who understand
the implications.
*****
One revealing episode was the threat by Paramount to move its
headquarters and operations out of California, with Texas and Tennessee
as possible destinations. Immediately, Governor Gavin Newsom, Los
Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and former Attorney General Xavier Becerra
pressed Bonta toward a settlement. Newsom pushed for a deal in the name
of “protecting California’s film industry,” meaning protecting the
profits and presence of a corporate giant whose owners just held the
state hostage.
Newsom falsely postures as a scourge of corporate power, but he has bent over backwards to grant special tax advantages
for the conglomerates, producing the grotesque spectacle of Trump and
his supposed Democratic opponents basically orchestrating a large
operation of corporate welfare through tax credit programs at both federal and state level.
It must be reminded that Democrats built this corporate Leviathan. The
Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by Bill Clinton, dismantled
ownership restrictions and helped unleash today’s concentration.
*****
The notion that giant film studios and conglomerates will be bound by
various “guarantees” on paper is farcical. This is an industry notorious
for fraudulent bookkeeping, out-and-out swindling and every imaginative
means, legal and illegal, of cheating its artists.
*****
The workers’ opposition stands in sharp contrast to the union
bureaucracy. On September 21, Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien
issued a statement supporting the settlement and thanking Bonta for his
“hard work to bring together the unions, employers, and other interested
parties to craft a deal that protects American jobs.” In other words,
he endorsed the agreement that cleared the path for a merger threatening
thousands of jobs.
Nor was the Teamsters leadership alone. The Directors Guild of America and IATSE
had already intervened in the antitrust case, urging Bonta to negotiate
a settlement. They are asking workers to trust billionaire David
Ellison, the architect of a debt-laden corporate empire: nothing more
exposes the degeneration of Hollywood’s union machinery into an
instrument for policing workers on behalf of the studios.
The WGA
and SAG-AFTRA leaderships are no less compromised. They direct workers
toward regulators and the Democratic Party, the very forces that paved
the way to this merger. Whatever the tactical differences, the
bureaucracies stopped workers from organizing independently against the
merger. None challenges the domination of the industry by finance
capital.
The merger and the corporate stranglehold more generally
can be fought only by workers themselves, through independent
rank-and-file committees, against the studios, the state, the Democratic
Party and the union bureaucracy. This is not a local Hollywood
struggle. The combined company will be a global distribution machine and
will dictate terms to independent filmmakers and dissenting artists
throughout the globe.
The genuine defense of creative workers,
artistic freedom and truthful reporting requires taking the studios and
networks out of private hands and placing them under public ownership
and democratic control, a task that can be accomplished only through the
independent political mobilization of the working class, in the United
States and internationally, against capitalism itself.
Police from the Chiapas State Guard arrested a Honduran migrant on
Saturday in the town of Mapastepec, on Mexico’s southern Pacific coast,
accusing him of being one of the organizers of the migrant caravan “Fe y
Esperanza con Dios” (Faith and Hope with God). Officers seized the man,
identified only as Jason “N,” while the group was resting and drove him
away in a patrol car.
*****
The caravan left San Pedro Sula on September 20, crossed into Mexico on
September 24, and grew to more than 600 people in Tapachula as
Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Ecuadorians, Venezuelans, Cubans and Haitians
stranded for months joined it. It is the second caravan in six weeks. On
August 20, a different caravan named “Dreams Without Borders” set out
from Tapachula, Mexico’s main border city with Guatemala, with hundreds
of workers seeking jobs and papers allowing them to travel inside
Mexico. It broke up in early September in Arriaga, after more than 250
kilometers on foot, when the National Migration Institute (INM) handed
out 30-day provisional permits.
The arrest on the road, under a pretext no one has bothered to substantiate, has the sole purpose of terrorizing the migrant workers. The government of President Claudia Sheinbaum, which presents itself as “humanitarian,” democratic and a defender of Mexican sovereignty, is using the state machinery built up by Morena against the most vulnerable workers on the continent, at the command of the fascistic administration in Washington.
*****
The arrest came days after the White House ordered Mexico to
intervene. On October 1, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin
declared:
I have been very clear with my counterpart
in Mexico: if they allow them to continue to come north, when they get
to their northern border, our southern border, we’re not allowing them
to enter . . . Zero chance.
*****
Most of the current caravan is Honduran. According to Honduras’s
National Statistics Institute, 61.1 percent of households lived below
the poverty line in 2026, up from 60.1 percent a year earlier, while
extreme poverty rose from 38.3 to 39.7 percent. Local estimates put
informality at close to 78 percent of the workforce.
That
government is headed by Nasry Asfura, the Trump-endorsed candidate of
the National Party, who took office in January. On September 28, the
latest fuel hike set off road blockades and burning barricades in
Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula and Choloma, led by bus, taxi and school
transport drivers.
“Everything is very expensive: the oil, the fuel, the food,” a school bus driver told El Heraldo. Weekly protests have also targeted reforms widely seen as preparing the privatization of the state electric company.
In
Guatemala, transport workers and Indigenous communities spent much of
September blocking highways against soaring fuel and food prices.
The
El Niño climate event, aggravated by global warming, has made things
far worse. This is the driest year on record in Tegucigalpa, where water
arrives once every 12 days. In August the government placed nearly 80
percent of the country on alert, and harvests of maize and beans have
been lost. Asfura admitted that “this crisis will last until March or
April of next year.”
These conditions are the result of more than a
century of imperialist oppression at the service of American banks and
corporations. Today, they are worsening rapidly amid a further political
offensive by Washington. The US invasion of Venezuela in January and
the imposition of a protectorate over its oil, together with the
installation of a string of far-right governments, from Javier Milei in
Argentina and José Antonio Kast in Chile, to Daniel Noboa in Ecuador,
Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Asfura in Honduras, have brought cuts to
social programs and intensified exploitation. Nearly half of the
region’s workers are in the informal economy, where extortion and gang
violence feed on poverty.
Migrants have begun calling their march
“Pan y Esperanza” (Bread and Hope) in thanks to the Mexican workers and
residents who have fed them along the road.
The scene recalls October 2018, when a caravan left the same city of
San Pedro Sula, swelled to 7,000 people and was greeted across southern
Mexico by residents carrying food and water. Facing Trump’s threats and
police attacks, the marchers chanted, “Migrants are not criminals, we
are international workers!”
The World Socialist Web Sitewrote at the time that workers must “recognize in this caravan a friendly regiment of class allies,” and explained:
The working class is proving de facto by marching across national barriers that the de jure
division of the world into nation-states under capitalism is
incompatible with the aspirations and material needs of billions of
workers.
Eight years later, that assessment has been
confirmed. The Sheinbaum government, like the right-wing regimes to its
south, acts as the hatchet of US imperialism and its local billionaire
partners. Meanwhile, workers internationally are entering into struggle
in defense of jobs and against the cost of living, dictatorship and war,
as the blockades in Honduras and Guatemala show. The defense of
migrants must be central to these struggles.
Workers in Mexico,
Central America and the United States must answer the persecution of the
caravans by uniting as one international class against the capitalist
system that uproots them and blocks them from rebuilding their lives
where they choose.
A wave of strikes and protests is sweeping Chile as the government of
ultra-right President José Antonio Kast presses forward with a 2027
budget that dismantles public education, healthcare and culture while
showering tax breaks on the mining monopolies and finance capital. On
Thursday, October 1, more than 20,000 students and workers marched
through Santiago and other cities against the budget cuts, in the
largest national mobilization since Kast took office in March. The
demonstration was met with tear gas, water cannon and mass arrests by
the militarized Carabineros police.
The march, called by the
Confederation of Students of Chile (Confech) under the slogan “Not one
peso less for education,” was authorized by the government’s own
Presidential Delegation. It was backed by the Teachers Association and
more than 30 social organizations, including the United Workers’ Center
(CUT). Yet the Carabineros Special Forces, the same units whose record
of murder and mutilation during the 2019 social revolt remains almost
entirely unpunished, attacked the peaceful demonstration with water
cannon and tear gas at multiple points along the Alameda. The latest
reports indicate at least 31 people were detained, with numerous
injuries and people overcome by gas.
The president of the College
of Teachers, Mario Aguilar, described the repression as “brutal and
unjustified,” stating that the march had proceeded “with total normality
and order” until the police attacked without provocation. “They threw
gas at us, they left us asphyxiated, people fainted. This is brutality.
This is pure fascism,” he said.
The scale of the police violence
stands in stark contrast to the treatment of a minor skirmish outside
the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC), where a small band of
ultra-right pro-Kast students from the Gremialist Movement and
Solidaridad UC staged a counterdemonstration. A handful of hooded
individuals within the march clashed with these right-wing students. The
incident, involving a tiny fraction of the 20,000 demonstrators, has
been seized upon by the government and the corporate media to
criminalize the entire protest movement. The entire affair is being
amplified by the corporate media and the right to justify the
police-state apparatus that Kast is building with Washington’s backing.
US
Ambassador, Brandon Judd, a Trump appointee, intervened directly in
Chile’s internal affairs, applauding Kast for condemning the violence
and announcing that those involved would be barred from traveling to the
United States. “The United States works together with our allies
throughout the hemisphere to confront political violence, and those who
commit violent crimes do not have the right to travel to the United
States,” Judd declared.
*****
The student march came one day after primary healthcare workers
concluded a two-day national strike. The National Confederation of
Municipal Health Workers (Confusam) paralyzed Family Health Centers
(CESFAMs), rural posts and other primary care facilities across the
country on September 29 and 30, demanding an increase in the per capita
funding that the state provides for each registered patient. The strike,
which achieved 90 percent adherence, was met with threats from mayors
who warned of disciplinary action against mobilized workers.
The
health workers are demanding an increase of 1,000 Chilean pesos in the
per capita allocation for 2027, after two consecutive years in which the
amount was frozen. The government owes municipalities more than 37
billion pesos in transfers that have been withheld since December 2025.
As Confusam President Gabriela Flores explained, the government’s
belated payment of this debt “in no way solves the financing crisis of
primary care. We continue to drag a structural debt that affects
millions of people.”
Meanwhile, in the mining sector, the
lifeblood of the Chilean economy, workers are moving toward strike
action. On Wednesday, supervisors at the Escondida mine, the largest
copper mine in the world, operated by the Anglo-Australian giant BHP,
voted overwhelmingly—94.8 percent—to reject the company’s contract
offer, opening the path to a strike. The union declared that the offer
“demonstrated a complete disregard for the contribution made by
supervisors and staff to the production and multibillion-dollar profits
of the world’s largest copper mine.”
*****
The labor unrest in mining is unfolding against a backdrop of deadly
working conditions. Two workers died in less than a week in the
Antofagasta region. On September 23, a worker was killed in a
maintenance accident at Escondida, prompting BHP to suspend operations.
On October 1, Waldo Alexis Castillo Barraza, a 49-year-old mechanic
employed by the contractor Berliam SpA, was crushed to death while
changing a pulley on a conveyor belt at the Radomiro Tomic mine,
operated by the state-owned Codelco. He had celebrated his birthday the
day before.
These deaths are the direct product of the
profit-driven intensification of labor in the mining industry, where
maintenance is deferred, safety is sacrificed and workers are killed
with impunity. The Federation of Workers of CCU has joined the call for a
full investigation and for the immediate implementation of a National
Policy on Safety and Health in Mining, which the government has stalled.
*****
The strikes and protests are erupting amid a sharp deterioration of
the Chilean economy. The Monthly Index of Economic Activity (Imacec)
fell 1 percent in August, the second consecutive monthly contraction,
dragged down by a 17.4 percent collapse in mining output—the worst
single-month decline in 15 years. Copper production has fallen to levels
not seen since 2003, as the mining companies, having starved investment
for years amid political uncertainty, now confront declining ore
grades, water scarcity and extreme weather.
Copper exports fell
3.2 percent in August, the first decline since December 2023. Yet copper
prices remain at near record highs, driven by insufficient global
supply—a situation that Deutsche Bank projects will push prices to US$10
per pound by mid-2027. The mining monopolies are profiting enormously
from the very scarcity their own investment strike has produced, while
the Chilean state, dependent on copper revenues, is forced to borrow and
cut.
Unemployment has risen to 9.6 percent, its highest level
since 2021, with female unemployment at 10.3 percent. Inflation remains
stubbornly high, driven in part by the government’s decision to end the
fuel price stabilization mechanism (MEPCO), which has sent diesel prices
soaring by 95 pesos per liter and kerosene by 281 pesos per liter. The
diesel crisis is itself a product of the US war of aggression against
Iran and the broader militarization of the Middle East, which has
disrupted global refining and driven up energy costs worldwide.
The
crisis of the Chilean economy is a specific expression of the deepening
crisis of the world capitalist economy, in which the major imperialist
powers, led by the United States, are resorting to war, protectionism
and the militarization of trade to resolve contradictions they cannot
resolve peacefully.
*****
A measure of the government’s crisis is the extraordinary turnover in
its own ranks. In barely seven months, 41 regional authorities have
left their posts, and the total number of departing authorities has
reached 51. The government is hemorrhaging personnel even as it attempts
to impose the most radical austerity program since the Pinochet
dictatorship.
Kast’s government is closely tied to the Trump
administration, which has embraced it as a model for its “Shield of the
Americas” project of consolidating right-wing, pro-US regimes across the
hemisphere. The intervention of Ambassador Judd in the aftermath of the
October 1 march is only the latest expression of this relationship.
Washington sees in Kast a reliable ally for its war preparations and its
assault on the working class of the Americas.
*****
The radicalization bubbling to the surface in Chile is colliding with a
leadership that is determined to contain it. The task facing the working
class is to break with these organizations and build independent
rank-and-file committees, capable of uniting the struggles of miners,
health workers, teachers and students into a single movement against the
Kast government and the entire capitalist order it serves. The
resources exist to provide every Chilean with decent healthcare,
education and a secure livelihood. 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.
In an interview aired last Monday, Japanese Defense Minister Shinjiro
Koizumi once again called for the Japanese ruling class to publicly
debate the acquisition of nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered
submarines. This echoed remarks Koizumi previously made in July as part
of the vast expansion of remilitarization being pursued by the far-right
coalition government led by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.
Koizumi declared that the discussion in Japan, the only country to be
attacked with atomic bombs, should take place “without taboos.”
Referring to China, Russia, and North Korea, Koizumi declared, “Japan
must possess the capabilities to firmly counter threats directed at us.”
He justified this by claiming, “The idea that we aren’t even allowed to
have a discussion on this matter is a bit at odds with my sense of
crisis.”
Koizumi referenced other countries that are taking
similar measures. This includes France, which is expanding its nuclear
arsenal, and Finland, which has amended its laws to allow the stationing
and transporting of nuclear weapons on its territory. “The world is now
shifting toward this kind of phase, and within that context, decisions
are being made without any taboos,” Koizumi stated.
As the World Socialist Web Site
has written in recent days, the US and European governments are pushing
the globe towards nuclear war by escalating the conflict against
Russia, preparing a potential blockade of Kaliningrad and supplying
Ukraine with drones and other weaponry to expand attacks into Russia.
Moscow has stated it is ready to use nuclear weapons if Kaliningrad is
blockaded, which NATO has simply brushed aside as a bluff.
In
this regard, Koizumi’s remarks are chilling. The government is preparing
for active involvement in what is a growing third world war and its
spread into the Asia-Pacific. Nuclear war has been accepted as a real
possibility in ruling circles and rather than seek negotiations or
attempt to ease tensions with Beijing or Moscow, Tokyo is actively
planning to join the conflict.
*****
China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Guo Jiakun criticized Koizumi’s
comments, stating, “The reckless remarks by the incumbent head of
Japan’s defense sector calling to ‘discuss nuclear weapons and
nuclear-powered submarines without taboos’ constitute a serious
provocation and blatant violation of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons Treaty and the post-World War II international order.”
Tokyo
has simply brushed Beijing’s concerns aside as the ruling Liberal
Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner Nippon Ishin no Kai
rapidly accelerate Japan’s remilitarization. Nippon Ishin in particular
has based its support for the LDP on the government carrying out this
militarist program.
*****
The Trump administration is pressuring Tokyo to spend 3.5 percent of
GDP in preparation for war with China. Within the region, South Korea
has pledged to reach this benchmark by 2035. Japan has pushed back on
these demands, but not because Tokyo is opposed to higher spending.
Defense
Ministry Press Secretary Kimihito Aguin stated last month, “Japan’s
defense buildup is something we undertake based on our own independent
judgment, under the fundamental principle that we must defend our own
country ourselves.”
Other countries in the region like Australia,
serving as Washington’s attack dog, have also placed pressure on Japan.
The government-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute has
criticized Tokyo’s spending figures, stating that they are based on GDP
in 2022 when the policy was first announced, not current economic
figures.
Tokyo’s spending this year equals 1.9 percent of 2022
figures and 1.5 percent based on estimates for this year’s GDP. A budget
of 3.5 percent based on current figures would reach 24 trillion yen
($US152 billion). All of this spending must be paid for through attacks
on workers’ living and economic conditions.
Members of the Society of
Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) voted Thursday
to approve a four-year contract with Boeing. In the Professional Unit,
which represents about 13,000 engineers and scientists, 7,895 workers
voted yes and 3,780 voted no, an approval of nearly 68 percent. In the
Technical Unit, which represents about 4,000 analysts, technicians,
planners and specialists, 2,061 voted yes and 1,793 voted no, an
approval of just over 53 percent.
The vote came after an initial contract rejection in August.
The same workers rejected Boeing’s initial offer by 64 percent in the
Professional Unit and 72 percent in the Technical Unit, and authorized a
strike by 88 and 90 percent. It was the first time in nearly 14 years
that both units had held full contract negotiations. The SPEEA
negotiating team had unanimously endorsed the first offer.
The contract fight is part of a broader movement among airline and aerospace workers. In 2024, 33,000 Boeing machinists
rejected a contract endorsed by the International Association of
Machinists (IAM) by 94.6 percent, voted by 96 percent to strike and
stayed out for 53 days. In 2025, 3,200 Boeing defense workers in the St. Louis area rejected four offers and struck for 101 days before accepting a fifth. In July 2025, 71 percent of the United Airlines flight attendants who voted rejected their tentative agreement. On September 18, more than 11,000 United maintenance technicians rejected a Teamsters-backed contract by 53.5 percent to 46.5 percent. Six days later, 350 Teamsters at Safran Seats in Gainesville, Texas, struck after rejecting mandatory overtime.
The
Boeing engineers’ struggle raises the question of aircraft safety at a
company where production pressure, serious design flaws, management
failures and the concealment of critical safety information contributed
to the 737 MAX 8 crashes
in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. After the first contract
rejection, SPEEA acknowledged that members’ mistrust of Boeing
management was rooted in jobs moving out of state or offshore, “quality
and safety taking a backseat to schedule,” and engineering and technical
decisions being “overruled or ignored.”
*****
The pressure to increase output is substantial. Boeing ended the
second quarter with a record $715 billion backlog, but also $45.9
billion in debt and $88.4 billion in inventories. It lost $435 million
in the first half of the year and remains under pressure to raise 737
and 787 production, deliver aircraft faster and restore cash flow. In
September, CEO Kelly Ortberg said stabilizing 737 MAX production at 47
aircraft a month was taking longer than expected, reducing expected 2026
free cash flow.
For Boeing engineers and technical workers, these
pressures cannot be separated from safety. Engineers and technical
workers design Boeing aircraft. They do the structural analysis, write
the software and approve the engineering documentation. During the
development of the MAX, Boeing employees recorded their alarm at the
conditions inside the program. One wrote, “This is a joke. This airplane
is ridiculous.” Another said, “I’ll be shocked if the FAA passes this
turd.” Management’s ability to ignore these concerns and keep the MAX on
schedule was partly enabled by a certification system that allowed
Boeing to exercise extensive delegated authority from the Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA).
The conflict between workers and
management over safety runs throughout the airline industry. The FAA has
about 11,000 certified air traffic controllers, against a staffing
target of 12,563, and acknowledges that excessive overtime contributes
to fatigue and burnout. At Montréal-Trudeau International Airport, 39-year-old ramp worker Oscar Robayo
was crushed to death during a routine pushback on August 24. Co-workers
told the WSWS that they had complained for months about unsafe
conditions and that his employer, subcontractor Samsic Assistance
Canada, failed to provide the equipment needed to keep him a safe
distance from the aircraft.
These conditions are driving repeated
rebellions against sellout contracts endorsed by the union apparatus.
United flight attendants rejected a tentative agreement despite its
advertised economic gains; United maintenance technicians rejected an
“industry-leading” Teamsters-backed deal; Boeing machinists rejected two IAM-backed agreements during their 2024 struggle. At Boeing, the Workers Rank-and-File Committee,
formed before the machinists’ strike, fought the IAM’s isolation of the
walkout and called for workers to take control of the struggle
themselves.
*****
The Boeing Workers Rank-and-File Committee,
formed on September 11, 2024, two days before the machinists’ strike
began, must now be expanded among engineers and technicians. Workers
should build committees in every workplace, demanding publication of all
bargaining communications, workers’ control over negotiations and
votes, wage increases indexed to actual prices, enforceable prohibitions
on job destruction through outsourcing or AI, and rank-and-file
authority over quality and safety.
These committees should unite
with machinists, with airline workers and with aerospace workers
internationally through the IWA-RFC and establish the complete political
independence of the working class from the union bureaucracies, both
capitalist parties and the state.
The
US Supreme Court issued a ruling on September 29 lifting lower court
orders restricting the Trump administration’s practice of deporting
immigrants to countries where they have no ties and no legal status. The
decision lets the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) resume removals
to third countries without giving the victims advance notice or a
chance to argue that they risk being persecuted or tortured.
The
ruling marked the third time the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority has
allowed the policy to continue while it is being challenged in the
courts. The administration initiated the barbaric practice early in
Trump’s second term as part of its drive to expel millions of immigrants
from the United States.
According to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) investigation published
last month, the US has deported more than 25,000 people under secretive
agreements with 35 countries that accept migrants with no ties to them.
About 20,000 of the deportees have been sent to Mexico, with the rest
dispersed to 27 other countries across Latin America, Africa and the
Pacific. Third Country Deportation Watch, a project of Refugees
International and Human Rights First, put the figure at more than 25,000
deportees sent to at least 29 countries.
The Justice Department
says thousands more are eligible for removal. No one can say how many of
them will be subjected to torture or killed. The day before the ruling,
two dozen UN human rights experts warned that the mass deportation of
migrants from the US to third countries has set off a “cascade of human
rights violations” that could have “deadly” consequences.
The
deals with third countries were negotiated behind closed doors, and some
have never been made public. AFP reported that the US offered
multimillion-dollar payments and threatened visa restrictions to
pressure governments, especially in Africa, into accepting deportees. An
investigation by Forbidden Stories found that the administration
earmarked $410 million to be paid to receiving countries or to United
Nations agencies to facilitate the removals.
*****
A report published by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on
September 15 stated that the aim of the third-country policy is “to
terrify immigrants into abandoning their cases and ‘self-deporting.’”
The ACLU noted that the administration is spending tens of millions of
dollars to fly people, at times shackled for more than 50 hours, to
countries where they have no ties. It described the plan as especially
cruel in its choice of targets: people who had already won protection in
US immigration courts after proving they were likely to be persecuted
or tortured if returned to the countries they fled.
The
administration’s response to the ruling confirmed the ACLU’s accusation.
James Percival, the top lawyer at DHS, hailed the decision as a
“victory” and declared: “A bad day for criminal illegals and open
borders activists alike.” He added: “It’s not too late to get $3,000 and
a flight home.” His statement ended with a link to DHS instructions on
how to self-deport.
*****
Deportees have been sent to South Sudan, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea,
Liberia, the Central African Republic, Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama and
other countries. The people sent to these countries come from every part
of the world. Since June alone, the US has sent three deportation
flights to the Central African Republic carrying Afghans, Russians,
Jordanians, Iranians and others.
Many of these destinations are
among the most dangerous places on earth. Cross-referencing the State
Department’s “Do Not Travel” (Level 4) advisories with reporting on the
deportation agreements shows that at least five countries on the State
Department list are either recipients of US deportees or have been
targeted as destinations: South Sudan, the Central African Republic, the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Libya. The State Department
warns that the Central African Republic is too dangerous to visit and
advises anyone who goes there to make a will and leave a DNA sample so
their body can be identified.
*****
The treatment of deportees bears out the warnings. Last month, two
men expelled by the Trump administration to Equatorial Guinea were
bound, fitted with bags over their heads, beaten and pushed down a
flight of stairs in plain view of other US deportees, according to
witnesses and human rights lawyers. The detainees said the men were
being punished for speaking to journalists and human rights experts
about the conditions of their confinement. Last year, immigrant rights
groups revealed that a group of migrants initially bound for South Sudan
were being held in Djibouti in a converted shipping container.
Advocates
say their clients sent to third countries have faced prolonged and
arbitrary detention, beatings, sexual assault and disappearance. They
point to deportations to dangerous places, including Libya, El
Salvador’s mega-prison and the Central African Republic.
Those
challenging the government policy also say that some deportees have been
unlawfully transferred by third countries back to their countries of
origin, where they face torture, disappearance or murder.
*****
The Supreme Court first intervened in the case last year, when it
blocked two earlier lower court rulings against third-country removals,
including a May 2025 order temporarily barring deportations to South
Sudan without a chance to object. Now, as the case moves toward argument
in December, the right-wing majority has again put the weight of the
court behind the administration’s dragnet.
The Democratic Party,
for its part, has done nothing to stop this practice beyond scattered,
purely verbal protests. It has not used its congressional powers,
including control over funding, to block the payments to foreign
governments or the flights. The Democrats’ posture is in line with their
record on immigration enforcement generally.
Immigrant workers
are an essential component of the working class as a whole. The sadistic
attack on immigrants is the spearhead of the ruling class assault on
the democratic rights of the entire working class and Trump’s erection
of a presidential dictatorship. It will not be stopped by the courts or
any other institution of the capitalist state apparatus. All workers
must defend their immigrant brothers and sisters through the development
of a united and independent movement of the working class against the
source of war, inequality and dictatorship—capitalism.
On October 1, truck drivers in the United States took part in a
loosely organized work stoppage to protest soaring operating costs,
depressed freight rates and deteriorating conditions across the
industry. The action, promoted largely through social media and driver
networks rather than by the official unions or trucking organizations,
reflected mounting anger among drivers who have seen already narrow
margins squeezed further by sharply rising diesel prices.
The
stoppage came in response to sharp increases in fuel costs as a
consequence of the war on Iran. Meanwhile, Mexican and immigrant drivers
have faced the mass revocation of B-1 visas and stepped-up attacks by
Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Last month, Mexican truckers
blockaded ports of entry at Mexicali, reportedly holding up an estimated
$800 million-a-day in cargo.
By acting independently, the
truckers are demonstrating their enormous social and economic power.
Their labor links together ports, factories, warehouses and retail
distribution across the continent. They are also confronting the need to
reject national and ethnic divisions promoted by the capitalist class,
in favor of uniting across North America in defense of their common
interests.
The task now is to organize that power in rank-and-file
committees across borders, and against the war, the union bureaucracies
and the capitalist system that produces the exploitation, the
deportations and the war itself.
The day after the October 1
action, a US truck driver discussed the conditions facing truckers, the
significance of the Mexican drivers’ blockade and the need for drivers
in the United States, Mexico and beyond to recognize the power they
possess when they act together. We are calling him Miguel to protect his
identity.
*****
Miguel expressed support for the building of international
rank-and-file committees, independent of the union apparatus and two
parties, to link truckers across North America. “That’s a good thing.
That’s a good idea. It would benefit both sides … If we have that power,
that authority, we would want to move it towards benefiting (the
workers of) both countries and other countries that we work with.”
“We’re
all fighting for crumbs. But do you know what exists up there? There’s
more up there, far more. How can they tell us there is not enough, when
there is more than enough? The thing is, they want to make it seem like
it’s not.”
A
recent poll shows the DSA’s Nithya Raman with a substantial lead over
incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, revealing growing hostility to
the Democratic Party establishment and a deepening generational divide
that the DSA strives to contain within the capitalist two-party system.
*****
If Raman wins, as the poll suggests, the Los Angeles working class
can expect more of the same. A Raman administration would inherit a $1
billion deficit along with ongoing obligations to the banks, developers
and police union.
The generational divide, however, expresses a
broader process. Across the United States and internationally, workers
and youth confront unaffordable rents, insecure work, the genocide in
Gaza, the threat of wider war and the Trump administration’s drive to
dictatorship. The DSA is the initial beneficiary of this radicalization,
with Zohran Mamdani lifted into the mayoralty in New York last
November.
What DSA officials do in power exposes the class
character of the organization. On September 21, Mamdani hosted Trump at
Gracie Mansion, their third meeting since his election. His police
commissioner, Jessica Tisch, directed NYPD officers to arrest protesters
opposing Netanyahu’s appearance at the United Nations. In Chicago,
DSA-backed Mayor Brandon Johnson sent SWAT teams against anti-genocide
protesters.
The DSA speaks for privileged layers of the upper
middle class who seek a secure place within the existing order rather
than its revolutionary overthrow. The DSA denies the irreconcilable
conflict between the working class and capital by promoting the illusion
that the Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street and the military, can
be pressured into serving working people. Syriza in Greece and the Left
Party in Germany traveled the same road.
Young people drawn to
Raman out of their hatred of inequality, war and police violence must
study these experiences and learn from them. A vote for the DSA might
change a few faces at City Hall, but it will leave intact the capitalist
system that produces homelessness, austerity and war. What is required
is a complete break with the Democratic Party and its DSA appendage and
the independent political mobilization of the working class and youth on
a socialist and internationalist program.
The Trump administration has brought charges against a Michigan nurse
for the “crime” of refusing to hand over a wounded immigrant worker to
the deportation Gestapo. Chloe Renae Freeman, a registered nurse
formerly employed by Trinity Health Ann Arbor Hospital, faces federal
prosecution for “instigating or assisting escape.” She is the target of a
political prosecution aimed at intimidating any worker who seeks to
defend immigrants from state persecution.
The criminal complaint
was filed on September 28 in the US District Court for the Eastern
District of Michigan. The complaint was announced by US Attorney Jerome
Gorgon Jr. He was joined by Special Agent in Charge Jennifer Runyan of
the FBI.
The facts, as outlined in the criminal complaint, are straightforward
and damning of the government’s position. On the night of May 28, 2026,
Border Patrol agents conducted a “targeted immigration enforcement
operation” in Ann Arbor against a Mexican worker identified in the
complaint only by the initials “OBP.” At approximately 9:00 p.m., agents
approached the man near the intersection of Washtenaw Avenue and
Pittsfield Boulevard. As the man fled, he tripped over a curb, fell, and
struck his face on the pavement, suffering a laceration to the bridge
of his nose and a contusion on his forehead. Only after he was down and
bleeding did immigration agents take him into custody.
The man was
transported to Trinity Health Ann Arbor Hospital for a CT scan. There,
at approximately 11:30 p.m., Freeman entered the CT room, removed the
man’s IV and escorted him out through the ambulance bay doors. Security
footage shows him leaving the hospital shortly after Freeman retrieved
him. He has not been located since.
While Freeman admitted to her
actions during a June 18 interview with Trinity Health investigators,
she stated that she was unaware the man was in custody at the time, as
no agents were with him in the CT room. She told investigators that she
“did not agree with ICE separating people from their families” and that
she knew she “was going to set him free.”
That is the extent of
Freeman’s “crime.” A nurse, confronted with a wounded worker in her
care, chose to treat him as a human being rather than a criminal to be
delivered to his jailers. For this simple act of decency and working
class solidarity, the full weight of the American state has been brought
down upon her head. If convicted, she faces up to a year in federal
prison.
The prosecution of Freeman underscores the class character of the
American legal system. The courts, the FBI and the Department of Justice
are not neutral arbiters of justice, but instruments of class rule.
Their function in this case cannot be mistaken: the criminalization of
working class solidarity, particularly with persecuted immigrants, and
enforcement of the police state deportation machinery.
*****
Since Trump’s return to power, ICE has been transformed into a
paramilitary force. Armed agents stalk cities, seizing workers at homes,
jobs, schools, hospitals and courthouses. Some 51,000 people were
arrested in July 2026
alone. A nationwide network of concentration camps has been constructed
in which men, women and children are held without charge.
One of the first actions of the second Trump administration was to rescind the nominal protections that kept ICE out of “sensitive locations,” such as healthcare facilities. Michigan healthcare providers report that encounters with ICE have become routine.
Detainees injured by ICE are brought to emergency rooms under guard,
and medical personnel are pressured to choose between patient care and
colluding with the deportation apparatus.
The World Socialist Web Site
demands the unconditional dropping of all charges against Chloe Freeman
and calls on all workers to join in this demand. The real crime is the
existence of ICE itself, a police state apparatus that murders, detains,
and deports with impunity.
The Democratic Party will not defend
Freeman, just as it will not seriously oppose the anti-immigrant rampage
and police state methods of ICE. It assisted in constructing and funding the deportation machine and has maneuvered with Trump and the Republicans to expand funding for ICE and CBP while placing no restrictions on their operations.
This
fight must be organized through the independent mobilization of the
working class through the formation of rank-and-file committees in every
hospital, workplace and neighborhood, and the mobilization of the full
social power of the working class against the deportation apparatus.
The strike by more than 1,300 workers at Wynn Resorts’ Encore Boston
Harbor in Everett, Massachusetts entered its fifth week on Friday,
October 2. Housekeepers, cooks, bartenders, slot attendants, drivers and
warehouse workers have been on the picket line around the clock since
the morning of September 4, four days after their contract expired. The
strike was authorized by 97 percent of the workers.
There is no agreement and no new bargaining session has been announced. Strikers say they have been told nothing. Asked by the World Socialist Web Site whether they had had any word from Encore, a bartender replied, “I have not.”
Wynn’s
strategy is to starve the workers back on the job. The casino has
operated 24 hours a day throughout the strike, with scab labor provided
by managers, nonunion employees and replacement workers.
The
company is not short of money. Encore Boston Harbor took in $846.9
million in revenue in 2025 and made a profit of $236.7 million. Wynn
Resorts made a profit of $2.22 billion overall, and paid chief executive
Craig Billings $15,090,901.
The strikers, whose wages run from
$15 to $32 an hour, are demanding a $10-an-hour increase over three
years for non-tipped workers and a $5 an hour increase for tipped
workers, along with the preservation of their healthcare and guaranteed
hours. This is about what UNITE HERE Local 26 got at Boston’s hotels in
December 2024.
WSWS reporters spoke to strikers on the picket line on the 29th day of the walkout.
*****
The determination to fight is there. “This is my will to win,” Randy, the houseperson, said. “Not only mine. Our will to win.”
To carry through this fight requires a break with the union bureaucracy. The World Socialist Web Site urges
Encore workers to form a rank-and-file committee, elected from every
department and across both locals. Such a committee would take the
conduct of the strike into workers’ own hands.
It would move the
pickets to the entrances, appeal directly to Teamsters drivers and
Boston hotel workers to join the fight, demand that every proposal from
the company be put before the membership in full, and reject any
agreement that does not guarantee every striker’s job.
Only days after Russia again threatened NATO with the use of nuclear
weapons and President Vladimir Putin warned of a “fatal point of no
return,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz traveled to Kiev on Sunday to
further expand Germany’s involvement in the Ukraine war.
The visit
underscores the extreme danger of the present situation. Instead of
taking Russia’s warnings as a reason to halt the escalation and prevent a
direct war between nuclear-armed powers, the German government is
responding by expanding arms deliveries and building up Ukraine’s
capabilities to strike deep inside Russia.
Merz announced the
release of a further €1 billion in military aid, as well as €350 million
for the repair of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Germany intends to
supply thousands of interceptor drones and jointly develop and produce
drones, missiles and the corresponding software with Ukraine.
Particularly far-reaching is the planned joint development of weapons
systems with a range of more than 1,000 kilometers, enabling Ukraine to
strike targets deep inside Russian territory.
Significantly, Merz
was accompanied by Economy Minister Katherina Reiche and representatives
of major German corporations, including Siemens Energy, Hensoldt, Diehl
Defence and Quantum Systems. German government representatives
explicitly told Reuters that the expanded cooperation was intended to
ensure that money and technology flow back to Germany and strengthen the
German arms and drone industries.
This gives concrete form to the
policy that Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul formulated with remarkable
openness only a few weeks ago. Germany is now Kiev’s strongest
financial and military supporter, he declared, adding: “And naturally,
the German defense industry must benefit from this.” The government had
urged Ukraine to order more weapons from German companies.
While
Merz was in Kiev, Russian attacks on the Ukrainian capital continued. As
recently as Saturday, the Russian Foreign Ministry had explicitly
warned foreign citizens and diplomats against remaining in Kiev and
announced further attacks. Among the targets hit in the latest strikes
was a major bridge across the Dnipro River.
Merz responded with
the familiar logic of escalation. “If Russia is not stopped, its war
machine will sooner or later be directed against us,” he declared upon
arrival. Moscow, he said, understands only the “language of strength.”
Against the background of Moscow’s recent warnings in particular, Merz’s statements amount to playing with fire.
At the end of September, Moscow formally warned NATO that an attempt
to blockade or cut off the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad could lead to
the use of nuclear weapons. Putin reinforced the threat on Thursday,
declaring that an attack on Russian territory, including Kaliningrad,
would place the use of “all the weapons at our country’s disposal” on
the agenda. At the same time, he himself warned of the “logic of
escalating, increasingly harsh retaliatory measures,” which could very
quickly reach a point from which there would be no return.
The
Kremlin’s nuclear threats are not a progressive response to NATO’s
escalation. The Putin regime represents the interests of the Russian
capitalist oligarchy and responds to the pressure of the imperialist
powers with Russian nationalism and military retaliation. But for
precisely this reason, it is all the more irresponsible to simply
dismiss the warnings of a nuclear power as bluff and continue escalating
without end.
That is exactly what is happening. Every threshold crossed so far
becomes the justification for crossing the next one. At first, weapons
were supplied that were supposed to be used exclusively on Ukrainian
territory. Then attacks on Crimea and Russian border regions were
supported. This was followed by drone attacks deep inside Russia, on
refineries and military installations. Now Berlin is directly involved
in developing weapons with ranges of more than 1,000 kilometers for
strikes deep inside Russia.
*****
But the recklessness of the German government does not come out of
nowhere. It has objective economic, geopolitical and social causes.
The
business model of German capitalism over recent decades is coming under
ever greater pressure. It was based on comparatively cheap energy, a
strong industrial base and massive export surpluses—particularly in
trade with the United States and China. These conditions are breaking
down.
The US government raised tariffs on European car imports to
25 percent this year. For the German economy alone, this is projected to
result in long-term production losses running into the tens of billions
of euros. At the same time, competition with China is intensifying. In
July, German exports to China fell by 9.5 percent in a single month.
Volkswagen has announced a further 50,000 job cuts, while BMW is also
eliminating thousands of jobs.
The ruling class is increasingly
responding to the economic crisis through intensified militarization and
a shift to a war economy. Around €140 billion is earmarked for the
Bundeswehr and defense alone in 2027. More than €108 billion is already
available in 2026. Berlin intends to reach NATO’s target of 3.5 percent
of gross domestic product for direct military spending as early as 2029.
At
the same time, Germany is seeking to expand its independent role as a
European great power. The historical parallel with the world wars of the
20th century does not lie in any identity between today’s conditions
and those of 1914 or 1939. But once again, a deep crisis of world
capitalism is intensifying the struggle over markets, raw materials,
spheres of influence and strategic dominance, while German imperialism
massively increases its military weight and makes Eastern Europe the
central theater of its foreign policy.
*****
From this analysis, the Socialist Equality Party and its sister
parties in Europe and internationally draw the conclusion that
opposition to war and social cuts cannot be separated. We support the
protests of students, university students and workers and fight for the
building of independent rank-and-file committees in schools,
universities and workplaces in order to wrest these struggles from the
control of the established parties and trade union apparatuses, link
them together and unite them across national borders.
The
developments in France show with particular urgency that young people
cannot fight alone. They must turn to the working class, and workers
must make the defense of young people against state repression their own
cause. The same applies on a European scale. Struggles against cuts in
France, against the housing crisis in Spain, against job destruction and
conscription in Germany, and against militarism throughout the
continent must be unified on the basis of a common international
perspective.
The alternative to the ever more dangerous spiral of
rearmament, retaliation and nuclear threats does not lie in supporting
one or another of the competing capitalist governments but in building
an independent socialist anti-war movement of the European and
international working class.
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.
